Spellbound: The Books of Elsewhere, Page 2

  Leopold caught himself. “Simply impossible, miss,” he announced, jerking back into his soldierly pose. “I am prepared to do a great deal for you, but I will not allow you to go underground. And I’m afraid I cannot go AWOL.”

  “Go A wall?”

  “Absent Without Leave,” Leopold enunciated, obviously pleased to have to explain. “If you’d like, at fifteen hundred hours we could engage in a game of Clue here at my base of operations. As long as I get to be Colonel Mustard,” he added.

  “Fifteen hundred hours?” repeated Olive. “Noon is twelve, plus one is thirteen, plus two is . . .”

  “Three o’clock,” Leopold whispered helpfully.

  “And we’d have to play down here?”

  “I’m afraid I can’t leave my station, miss. Not while you’re home alone.”

  Olive glanced around at the stone walls pooling with darkness in the corners. A small carved skull in the stonework gazed back at her from the vicinity of the washing machine. “No offense, Leopold, but I don’t like it down here.”

  “No offense taken,” said Leopold. He appeared to think for a moment. “Where is Harvey?”

  It was a good question. Olive hadn’t seen Harvey all morning, and this was generally a bad sign. The last time Harvey hadn’t been seen for two days, Olive and Horatio had finally found him in the garden shed, wearing a dented pirate’s hat and helplessly tangled in an old hammock, which Harvey insisted was ship’s rigging. “Captain Blackpaw will never surrender!” he had yowled as Olive extracted him.

  Now Olive clumped up the basement stairs, feeling frustrated and a bit mopey, and looked around the empty kitchen. “Harvey?” she called. “Harvey?” But Harvey wasn’t there, or in the dining room, or the parlor, or sleeping on the cool tile in the upstairs bathroom.

  Olive walked along the hall into the pink bedroom, where the air smelled like dust and mothballs, and where the entrance to the attic was hidden by a painting of an ancient stone archway. It had taken Olive ages to find the attic’s entrance, even with the spectacles. Without the spectacles, she couldn’t get in at all. With a huff of frustration, she put her lips as close to the canvas as she could without actually touching it, and yelled, “Harvey!” at the top of her lungs. There was no answer.

  Olive trailed back down the staircase and stepped out onto the front porch. The warm, dewy air felt almost stifling, like a stranger’s breath on the back of her neck. She glanced around the overgrown lawn. The thick ferns swayed in their hanging baskets, releasing their spicy scent into the air. The old porch swing shifted lightly on its chains. Nothing else moved. Frowning, Olive turned back toward the door. And that was when she spotted it.

  On the scuffed gray boards of the porch, the green print of a cat’s paw stood out like a traffic light. Olive knelt down and touched the paw print. It was made of paint—paint that was still fresh enough to smear on her fingers. She stood up and took a careful look around. At the bottom of the porch steps, her box of birthday paints was spilled in a pile. The tube of green paint was open and oozing a trail that wound through the long grass toward the backyard.

  Curiosity bumped the boredom and frustration right out of Olive’s mind. As far as she knew, the cats never went far from the house. Even when Olive brought them outside, they zoomed back toward the doors like furry magnets. If Harvey had wandered away, there was no telling what sort of trouble he would find. The only thing that was certain was that he would find it.

  “Harvey?” Olive called.

  No one answered.

  It was difficult to find traces of green paint on a green lawn. Olive had to get down on her hands and knees and squint, but here and there, she spotted a green splotch on a dandelion, or half of a paw print on a dry leaf.

  The trail of clues led to the end of the Dunwoodys’ backyard, where the ancient maple trees layered their thick shadows over the mossy ground. Still crawling, Olive noticed a streak of bright green on the leaves of the lilac hedge that separated the Dunwoodys’ property from Mrs. Nivens’s. Olive peered between the leaves, making sure that Mrs. Nivens’s sunhat-topped figure was nowhere to be seen, and wriggled through the branches.

  “Harvey?” she called, under her breath. But there was no cat to be seen on Mrs. Nivens’s perfect lawn, or in her flowerbeds, or in the branches of her neatly pruned trees.

  Olive skulked across Mrs. Nivens’s yard, where tall shrubs and a fence divided the lawn from the alley. Mrs. Nivens, clipping coupons in her living room, noticed a pale blur moving through her hydrangeas, but reached the window too late to see anything but a telltale tremor from the borderline of Mrs. Dewey’s birch trees next door.

  Olive crouched in the knot of papery birch trunks, looking around for the next clue. If mystery books had taught her anything (and they had taught Olive much of what she knew), there was always another clue to find, if the detective knew how to look. And, as it happened, the next clue was hanging right in front of Olive’s face.

  A long green tail, with blotches of many-colored fur peeping through, twitched in the leaves above her. Olive looked up. Perched in the branches was the rest of a green-painted cat.

  “Harvey!” Olive exclaimed. “What are you doing?”

  The cat glanced over his shoulder. “Shh,” he hissed. “Don’t blow my cover. Call me by my code name: Agent 1-800.”

  Olive lowered her voice. “What’s going on, Agent 1-800?”

  “Climb up, and I’ll give you a quick briefing.”

  Olive pulled herself onto the lowest branch of the birch tree. Harvey moved aside to give her room and left a few more streaks of green on the tree’s white bark.

  “It’s going to take forever to get that paint out of your fur,” Olive whispered.

  “Camouflage was necessary,” Harvey replied in an accent that was faintly British, turning his streaky green face toward Mrs. Dewey’s backyard. “Sometimes a secret agent must do unpleasant things in the line of duty.” He ran one paw across his nose, smearing away a drip of paint. “Here’s the info. Top secret. Classified. For your ears only.”

  “Understood,” whispered Olive.

  “A foreign element has infiltrated the home territory.”

  Olive thought of the table of elements that hung in the science classroom at her last school. Were any of them foreign? She supposed a lot of them came from other countries. “What do you mean?” she asked. “Like Lithuanium?”

  “Like this,” said Harvey, pushing aside a leafy branch so that Olive could peek through.

  Below them, in Mrs. Dewey’s shady backyard, a boy sat at a wooden picnic table. Both the picnic table and the boy looked rather tired and dirty. The boy was smallish, thin, and long-limbed, with dark brown hair that curled and stuck up in various directions. He wore wire-frame glasses and a gray T-shirt with a picture of a dragon on the front of it. He was painting a model castle with a miniature brush, and frowning a little, the way people frown when they’re trying to thread a needle.

  “Who is that?” Olive asked.

  “That’s the foreign element. The infiltrator. The spy.”

  The boy put down the first paintbrush and picked up an even tinier one. He dabbed carefully at the edge of the castle. Olive noticed that both the boy and the picnic table were spattered with dots of paint, but the castle was immaculate.

  “What makes you think he’s a spy, Agent 1-800?” she whispered into the cat’s ear.

  “Just look at him!” hissed Harvey. “The devious smile. The shifty eyes.”

  Olive leaned forward, trying to get a better look at the boy. And, at that moment, the boy realized he was being watched. He stopped dabbing at the castle. Slowly he looked up into the green-gold leaves of the birch tree, where Olive and Harvey sat, staring straight back at him.

  “Rutherford!” hooted a voice.

  Mrs. Dewey’s round body, looking extra snowmanlike in a snug white sundress, came trotting quickly across the lawn.

  “Rutherford Dewey,” Mrs. Dewey huffed, “just look what you�
��re doing to my picnic table! And to your shirt!” Mrs. Dewey tugged the tiny paintbrush out of the boy’s hand. “What did I tell you about spreading newspapers on the table? Now go rinse your shirt before the paint sets in.”

  The boy took one last, silent look at the tree. His eyes met Olive’s. For what seemed like a long time, they stared at each other, each trying not to be the one who blinked. Then Mrs. Dewey grabbed the boy by the shoulder and hustled him toward the house.

  Harvey let out a breath. “That was close, Olive,” he said. “Next time, you’d better paint yourself before going undercover.”

  3

  HARVEY, STILL GREEN and forbidden to come inside until he wasn’t, spent the night on the porch steps. The next morning he was nowhere to be found.

  Olive knew he was probably hiding nearby, postponing a bath for as long as possible, so she lay on the back porch trying to read a Sherlock Holmes book while Horatio dozed on a windowsill and Leopold patrolled the basement. She would rather have been exploring than reading, but once again, both nongreen cats had made excuses when she asked them to take her Elsewhere.

  She didn’t like having to ask them in the first place. Olive was the type of girl who would rather climb a teetering stack of chairs up to a high shelf than ask for help, perhaps because she had a lot more practice at falling down than she did at talking to people. Back when she had the spectacles, she could go wherever she wanted, whenever she wanted, without having to ask anyone’s permission. Now she had to beg three moody cats for the favor. It made her whole body itch just to think about it.

  It was another humid, lazy day. Linden Street was soaked with sun, its green lawns sparkling and gardens blooming. Behind the big stone house, however, the yard was dim and murky. Towering trees cast a net of shadows over the jumbled garden. In one far corner, near the compost heap, a patch of bare dirt marked the spot where Olive had buried the painting of the forest, with a howling Annabelle McMartin still trapped inside. It looked like a fresh grave. And no matter where Olive moved to try to find a patch of light, the shadow of the house seemed to follow her. Once or twice, she nodded off in the sun and woke up in the humid shade, with her face stuck to the book’s pages.

  She was just peeling her cheek off of A Study in Scarlet for the third time when she noticed a flurry of movement across the backyard. She crawled to the edge of the porch. At the back of the lawn, deep in the overgrown dogwood shrubs, a branch rustled.

  Olive left her book on the steps and tiptoed across the grass.

  “What do you have to say for yourselves now?” a voice hissed from the dogwoods—a voice with a faintly British accent. Olive crouched down next to the shrubs.

  “So, you refuse to talk, do you?” she heard Harvey say. “Well, we have ways of encouraging you. Perhaps we will chip your lovely paint—like this!” There was a little tink sound of a claw hitting metal. “Still not talking? Oh, you’re a stubborn bunch, aren’t you? But we have a few more tricks up our sleeves—”

  “Aha!” shouted Olive, thrusting the dogwood branches apart with both arms. “Found you!”

  “Gah!” shouted Harvey, so startled that he toppled over backward.

  “What on earth are you doing, Harvey?”

  “Agent 1-800!” the cat spluttered, struggling back to his feet. His paint-splotched fur had dried so that it stuck up in some directions and was smooshed flat in others. Little leaves and twigs clung to it like Christmas ornaments. “I was interrogating these enemy spies, but they refuse to give up their secrets.” Harvey turned back to his captives with a burning glare.

  Olive followed Harvey’s eyes. Among the dogwood twigs stood a row of little metal figurines. They were models of knights, some on horseback, others holding raised swords. The models had been carefully painted, right down to the teeniest details. Harvey was right about one thing: They weren’t talking.

  “Where did you get these?” Olive asked, although she already had a pretty good idea.

  “They were captured on enemy territory,” said Harvey. He inched closer to Olive, his eyes wide. “Who knows what dangerous secrets they are keeping?”

  Olive looked down at the figurines. They stared back at her innocently.

  “Excuse me,” said a voice.

  Now it was Olive’s turn to topple over backward. Harvey leaped out of the dogwoods and caromed toward the branches of a nearby maple tree.

  Olive looked up. Beside her stood the boy from Mrs. Dewey’s backyard. He was slightly cleaner than yesterday, but he still looked as if he’d been hustled out of bed a few hours too early. His brown hair stuck up in confused, curly tufts. He was wearing a different T-shirt. This one had a dragon on it too.

  “I think your cat took my models,” said the boy in a rapid, slightly nasal voice.

  “I guess . . . I mean . . . you mean these?” Olive scooped up the figurines and held them out to the boy between her fingertips, being careful not to actually touch him. “Sorry.”

  “I’m an expert on the Middle Ages,” the boy blurted. “Well, on the Middle Ages in Western Europe, primarily Britain and France. I’m a semi-expert on dinosaurs. My favorite right now is the plesiosaur. I used to like the brachiosaurus—that was the largest of the sauropods—but now I’m more interested in aquatic dinosaurs. Have you ever heard of the coelacanth?”

  Those were the words the boy said. He said them so quickly, they sounded more like this to Olive: “Iusedtolikethebrakiosoristhatwasthelargestofthesoreopods–butnowI’mmoreinterestedinaquaticdinosaurshaveyoueverheardofthesealocanth?”

  “The seal what?” said Olive.

  “Coelacanth,” the boy repeated. He jiggled back and forth on his feet while he spoke. “A living fossil. A coelacanth was caught by a fisherman near South Africa in 1938, when everybody thought they’d been extinct for millions of years. I have a theory that there are lots of other surviving species of dinosaurs, still living deep in the ocean, and we just haven’t found them yet.”

  “Okay,” said Olive very slowly.

  “What about you?” said the boy. “What are your interests?” Behind their smudgy lenses, his wide brown eyes blinked at Olive expectantly.

  Olive thought fast. She liked to read scary stories while eating Tang straight from the can. She liked to collect bottles from kinds of pop no one had tasted in forty years. She liked to decorate smooth rocks with fingernail polish. But all of these things sounded strange, somehow, when she said them aloud. So, instead, because the boy was still staring straight down at her, she said, “My house used to be owned by witches.”

  Immediately, she couldn’t believe she had said those words. Aloud. Out of all the words in the world. If the universe had had a rewind button, Olive would have definitely pushed it. In fact, she would really, really have liked to rewind past the point when the boy had said “excuse me” and she had fallen over onto her behind.

  The boy straightened his smudgy glasses. “Interesting,” he said. “What kind of witches?”

  “What kind?”

  “White witches, green witches, dark witches . . .”

  “Dark,” said Olive with certainty.

  “How did you find out about them? Were there record books or journals? Did you have an expert occultist examine the house?”

  “No . . .” said Olive. “They left all their stuff here.”

  The boy stopped jiggling. He looked hard at Olive, and his eyes were large and very dark brown. “Interesting,” he said again, but more quietly. “Have you found their grimoire?”

  “Grimoire?” Olive repeated.

  “Their book of spells.”

  Olive blinked. “No.”

  “You should look for it,” said the boy. “Every witch has one. It might provide some very important information.”

  “Maybe,” said Olive, feeling a bit angry that she hadn’t thought of this before.

  Meanwhile, the voice in her brain was shouting, OF COURSE! If she knew the McMartins’ spells, maybe she could find a new way into Elsewhere! Maybe she coul
d even make her own magic spectacles. Maybe there would be some hint about how to help Morton. Olive’s heart began to pound.

  The boy held up a knight figurine, turning it in the patchy sunlight. “This one seems to be chipped,” he said. “I’d better go repair it.” Abruptly, he turned and headed toward the lilac hedge. Then he stopped and looked back at Olive. “My name is Rutherford,” he said.

  “Like the president?” Olive asked. Olive had memorized all the presidents when she was six, after her parents had bought her a placemat with the presidents’ names and pictures printed on it. Rutherford B. Hayes (number 19) had a bristly beard, and he was right next to Ulysses S. Grant (number 18), who had a slightly less bristly beard.

  “No. Like Ernest Rutherford. The father of nuclear physics. He won the Nobel Prize in 1908. My parents are scientists. They’re in Sweden, doing research.”

  Something in Olive’s mind flashed with recognition. “My parents are mathematicians,” she said. And before she could stop herself, she smiled at the boy. It was a crooked, slow, grimace-y sort of smile, but it was a smile nonetheless. “My name is Olive.”

  The boy smiled back. “I know,” he said. Then he pushed through the lilacs and disappeared.

  “TRAITOR!” shrieked a voice from the maple tree. Harvey’s greenish head popped through the leaves. “Traitor! Turncoat! Benedict Arnold!!”

  Olive stood up and brushed off the seat of her shorts. “Harvey—”

  “AGENT 1-800!!” the cat yowled. He stormed along the branch above Olive’s head. “How could you betray us to the enemy like that? How could you turn your back on your own countrymen?!”

  “Harvey—I mean, Agent 1-800—come down. We can talk about this, but not out here. What if someone hears you?”

  “What if someone hears me?” Harvey’s eyes boggled. “What if someone hears you? You could be courtmartialed! Exiled! Imprisoned for life!”

  “For giving model knights back to the boy you stole them from?”

  “Back to the master spy, you mean.” Harvey hunkered down on the branch and stared at Olive intently. “Listen to me. Do not trust him. Don’t believe anything he tells you. And don’t trust that woman he is staying with, either.”