Spellbound: The Books of Elsewhere (9 page)

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Authors: Jacqueline West

BOOK: Spellbound: The Books of Elsewhere
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Morton just stared at the picture.
Olive edged around him, trying to get a look at his face. “Do you know what happened to them, Morton? To the rest of your family?”
Morton shook his head, not meeting Olive’s eyes.
“What about their names? Do you remember their names?”
“Mama and Papa,” Morton whispered.
“I mean their
real
names,” Olive pushed. “What other people called them. If you can remember, maybe—maybe I can find out what happened.” Morton’s frown twisted and wriggled as he thought. One by one, unhappy lines appeared in his face, pulling his eyebrows into a frown, tugging his mouth downward, wrinkling up the corners of his eyes. The lines deepened until his whole face seemed to crumple, like a plant withering in fast motion. He hung his head.
 
“I want to go home,” he said into his sternum.
“I know you do,” said Olive. “That’s why I need to find this book. If I find the book, and we find out what happened to your family, then we can—”
“No,” said Morton, still speaking directly to his chest. “I just mean, back to my house.”
“Oh,” said Olive. “Okay.” She backed away, trying not to show her disappointment.
“Can I take this with me?” Morton held up the photograph, although he kept staring directly at the carpet.
“Sure,” said Olive. “Of course. Maybe—maybe it will help you remember.”
It was a quieter, slower group that trailed back down the hallway to the painting of Linden Street.
“Do you want to look with me again tomorrow?” whispered Olive as Morton took hold of Harvey’s tail. Morton shrugged and didn’t meet her eyes.
Olive watched the two of them disappear through the picture frame. Then she slumped into her bedroom and climbed between the covers. Her dreams that night were full of books that fluttered toward her, like big friendly birds, before slipping through her fingers and soaring away.
8
 
O
LIVE WOKE LATE the next morning with the urge to dive back into Elsewhere burning inside her.
Something else was burning too. She could smell it. For a moment, as she lay in the foggy place between sleeping and waking, Olive was certain that the house itself was burning—that it had lulled her into a deep sleep and left her to smother in the smoke. She sat up in bed, glancing around at her bedroom walls. But there was no fire. There wasn’t even any smoke. There was only an unpleasant burning smell . . . and it seemed to be coming from downstairs.
Olive followed her nose down to the kitchen, where Mr. and Mrs. Dunwoody were clanking and clattering through the drawers and cupboards. Four pots were boiling away on the crusty burners of the old black stove, creating the burning smell and making the kitchen even hotter and stickier than it would have been otherwise.
“Aren’t you two going to your office this morning?” Olive asked grumpily, through a mouthful of toast. If her parents were around, the cats tended to hide, which meant all her plans for exploration would be squashed.
“Not today,” said Mr. Dunwoody, who was testing the burners on the old stove to see which boiled water the fastest, carefully measuring the amount and starting temperature of the water. “Would you like to help me double-check the cooling rate of these pots?”
“Or you could be my Archimedes,” said Mrs. Dunwoody, who was sorting the contents of the drawers according to weight and density, gesturing invitingly toward a bucket full of water.
Olive shook her head.
After breakfast, Olive sat on the back porch, scowling. She had brought a green Popsicle outside with her, but she’d already sucked out all the juice. All that was left now was a water-flavored icicle in a bag, and the bag kept cutting the inside of her cheeks.
She needed that spellbook. She felt sure that she’d been close to it last night, that it was somewhere upstairs . . . But what if she was only imagining this? Olive’s imagination had the tendency to kidnap her and take her to dangerous places. What if the book wasn’t even in the house? Or—worst of all—what if it had never existed in the first place?
No. She squashed the thought down into a hard little lump. She had the lurking, lingering feeling that she
had
seen the book somewhere. But
where
?
Olive stood up and wandered toward the back of the yard. She tilted the Popsicle bag in her hand, letting a trail of droplets fall onto the strange plants in the garden, where they sparkled on purple velvety petals and spiny stems and leaves that looked like pointed fingernails. Very carefully, because you never knew what was going to sting or make you itch in this garden, she pulled up one little pink flower and held it to her nose. It smelled like a swimming pool.
A warm, wimpy breeze floated across the yard, carrying with it the sound of someone humming in a rather tuneless fashion. Olive followed the sound. It led her toward the lilac hedge that separated the Dunwoodys’ backyard from Mrs. Nivens’s. Through a fence of thick green leaves, Olive could see flashes of a broad-brimmed sunhat, a yellow dress, an apron, and prim little shoes with curved, two-inch heels.
Who gardens in high heels?
Olive wondered to herself.
And suddenly, Mrs. Nivens’s smooth, yellowish face was staring right back into hers. “Well, hello, Olive dear,” Mrs. Nivens said, bending down to peer through the leaves. “I thought I heard you over there.”
Olive jerked backward, smacking her head on a branch. She could feel her face progressing quickly from red to fuchsia. “Hello, Mrs. Nivens,” she mumbled.
“You look awfully warm, Olive,” said Mrs. Nivens. “Would you care for a glass of lemonade? I just made a pitcher. It’s waiting right over here.”
Making conversation with Mrs. Nivens over a glass of lemonade sounded about as pleasant as juggling tarantulas. But if Olive said no, Mrs. Nivens would think she was an even stranger, ruder little girl than she did already. So Olive stumbled through the lilac bushes into Mrs. Nivens’s perfectly manicured yard and followed her to a little table with a ruffled umbrella that stood in the shade near the house. Mrs. Nivens poured Olive a glass of lemonade from a pitcher beaded with condensation. She didn’t take one for herself.
Olive sipped her lemonade, feeling hot and sticky and itchy in places she couldn’t scratch in public—certainly not in front of Mrs. Nivens. Mrs. Nivens, on the other hand, appeared to be as cool as ever, as if she had been carved out of a cold stick of butter. The smooth, chilly planes of Mrs. Nivens’s body didn’t seem to want to move. Or maybe they
couldn’t
move. Maybe if Mrs. Nivens laughed or jumped or even looked surprised, she would shatter into a thousand pats of butter. Olive imagined Mrs. Nivens falling apart into a heap of small foil-wrapped rectangles. She had to bite the inside of her cheek to keep from smiling.
Today, in spite of the late summer heat, Mrs. Nivens was wearing a dress with long sleeves, and her legs—what little of them the dress’s full skirt left exposed—appeared to be covered in panty hose. The thought of wearing panty hose in this heat made Olive itch even more.
They sat for a moment in silence. Mrs. Nivens adjusted the brim of her white straw sunhat.
“How is the lemonade?” Mrs. Nivens asked at last.
Personally, Olive thought it could have used about twice as much sugar and a lot less lemon, but she wasn’t about to say so. “It’s good. Thank you, Mrs. Nivens.”
“Are you getting all settled into your new house?” Olive could feel Mrs. Nivens’s eyes on her face, even through the curtain of her hair. “It’s such a big place—there must be so much cleaning and organizing to do, so much old junk to clean out.”
“It
is
big,” said Olive. “But we haven’t been getting rid of anything.” She thought of the painting buried in the backyard and of what was stuck inside of it. “Not really.”
“Hmm,” said Mrs. Nivens. “I would think you’d want to remove some of the clutter. Have a yard sale, perhaps.”
Olive took another tiny sip of lemonade. “Um, Mrs. Nivens . . .” she began, “. . . you lived next door to Ms. McMartin for a long time, didn’t you? I mean—a long time before we moved in?”
“Yes,” said Mrs. Nivens stiffly. “Yes, I did.”
“I was wondering,” said Olive, choosing each word very carefully, but trying to sound very cool and casual at the same time, “did you ever see anybody . . .
take
things out of the house, after Ms. McMartin died?”
Mrs. Nivens let out a short, breathy laugh through her nose. “Nobody could have gotten into that house,” she said, tugging off her gardening gloves. “Even the ambulance staff barely made it through in one piece.
Those cats,
” Mrs. Nivens emphasized, her eyebrows rising just the teeniest bit. “They wouldn’t let anyone through the door. And of course, soon the house was all locked up—and many of the valuables were stowed safely away, I’m sure. Annabelle was a very cautious person when it came to family heirlooms. Even though she had no family to leave those things
to
. . .” Mrs. Nivens trailed off with a skeptical little shrug. “I’m sure whatever was in there before is still in there now.”
Olive let out a breath.
See?
she told herself. She’d felt quite sure that the spellbook was in there somewhere, just waiting to be found. Beneath the table, her feet began to tap impatiently.
 
“Why do you ask?” Mrs. Nivens’s eyes were honed on her again.
“I—I was just wondering,” Olive said, thinking fast. “There’s a whole set of encyclopedias in the library, but the one for letter
C
is missing, and I was wondering where it went, because I wanted to look up . . .
carburetors
.”
If Mrs. Nivens thought Olive’s answer was suspicious, she didn’t let on.
Olive gulped the rest of her lemonade and plunked the empty glass down on the table. “Well, I should probably get back home and help with lunch.”
Mrs. Nivens stood and reached out to pick up Olive’s empty glass. For a moment her ungloved hand passed through a beam of sunlight, and Olive, glancing down, saw that there was something funny about Mrs. Nivens’s skin. She barely had time to wonder what it was before Mrs. Nivens had jerked her hand sharply back into the shade. Her eyes pierced into Olive’s like two icicles.
“Good-bye, Olive,” said Mrs. Nivens, in a tone that made Olive hop up and back away. “Good luck finding—whatever it is you’re looking for.”
Olive was already on the other side of the lilac hedge by the time Mrs. Nivens’s words sunk in.
Whatever it is . . . ?
Maybe Mrs. Nivens hadn’t believed the story about carbuncles. Or carburetors. Or whatever it was Olive had said. There was something strange about Mrs. Nivens, that was for sure—something even stranger than gardening in high heels.
The many windows of the old stone house stared down at Olive as she crossed the shady, overgrown lawn. She stared back. She was so busy staring that she didn’t even notice the rumpled, mussy-haired boy in front of her until she’d nearly bumped into him.
“Hello,” said Rutherford calmly as Olive let out a startled squeak.
“What are you doing in my backyard?” she demanded, backing away from him until she was stopped by the lilac bushes. She and Rutherford were almost exactly the same height, so Rutherford’s eyes, which were watching her intently from behind his dirty glasses, were very hard to escape.

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