The Second Spy: The Books of Elsewhere: Volume 3 (14 page)

Olive tried to smile back. “Hello,” she mumbled.

“Saw you in here not too long ago,” said the man. “You were leading those two”—he paused, as though searching for a word—“
people
up the street.”

“Oh,” said Olive nervously. “Yes.” Suddenly she felt dangerously close to crying. She swallowed. “I was just…” she began. “I was just trying to make Morton’s parents.” Olive shrugged, looking down at her feet. “But it went wrong. And I got rid of everything. The paints and the papers and everything.”

The old man studied her. Then he nodded. “I think I’ll go check on the boy. Maybe stay with him for a while.”

“Thank you,” said Olive. She looked into the man’s painted blue eyes. “
You
don’t have any guesses about what might have happened to Morton’s real parents, do you?”

The man let out a slow, sad sigh that twitched the whiskers of his beard. “It’s been a long, long time,” he said at last. “A very long time. And when there’s nothing new to remember…” He trailed off, gesturing at the sleepy street beneath its changeless canopy of twilight. “The memory shuts down.” He shook his head.
“I don’t remember if they disappeared before or after those cats trapped me here. I don’t remember the last time I saw them. But I remember that they were good people. Truly
good
.” His painted blue eyes got a bit dreamy. “Mary had a way of looking at you that made you tell her the truth. Even if you hadn’t planned on telling it.” He chuckled. “It could be pretty risky talking to her if you had anything to hide. Maybe that was why the Old Man hated her so much. He couldn’t lie to her.”

“Mary?”
Olive repeated, in a breathless whisper. “That was her name?”

The old man’s bushy eyebrows rose. “Well, how about that! I remembered something. Mary Nivens. That was it. Mary and…
Harold.
” The eyebrows went up even higher. The old man beamed.

Olive beamed back at him. “Mary and Harold.”

Still smiling, the old man turned toward Morton’s house. Olive turned the other way, wiping her eyes on her sleeve and grinning at the same time.

The next day, after leaving a deck of cards and the puzzle of a picture of puzzle pieces on Morton’s empty porch, Olive set off to find the other friends who hadn’t betrayed her.

But the cats apparently did not want to be found. Olive tiptoed around the first floor, peering into
the shadows beneath the furniture, while inside the library, Mr. and Mrs. Dunwoody performed a cheerful duet on their computer keyboards. There was no trace of Horatio anywhere. She went down to the basement and stared at Leopold’s deserted station for several long, chilly minutes, willing him to appear from the tunnel below. He didn’t.

When her feet were too cold to wait any longer, Olive wound her way up to the second floor. With every empty room and gaping doorway, Olive’s sense of loneliness grew. By the time she’d searched the last guest-less guest room, she felt as hollow as the house itself. She shuffled back down the hall to her own bedroom and pressed her forehead to the cool windowpane, staring down into the backyard. Far below, she could see the jumbled garden, the filled and hidden hole, the crumbling shed…and, just inside the line of lilac bushes, a boy with messy brown hair and a yellow dragon on his shirt.

Her heart gave an involuntary little leap.

Almost as though he had sensed her eyes on him, Rutherford leaped up too, and the thick book he’d been reading flopped out of his lap and onto the ground. He waved both arms in a beckoning way. His lips were moving—moving more slowly than usual, fortunately, or Olive wouldn’t have been able to read them at all.
Come outside!
he was calling.
Come out!

Olive froze for a moment, fingers gripping the windowsill. Then she pulled her curtains shut.

She marched along the upstairs hall, away from her own room, away from the backyard and Rutherford standing in it. She turned into to the pink bedroom, putting on the spectacles and pushing through the painting that led to the attic.

Olive climbed the bug-strewn steps and glanced around the room, with its crooked stacks of boxes and dusty, half-covered furniture. The ruddy light of afternoon threaded through the attic’s window, glinting on the ring of mirrors and buffing the metal of the small, battered cannon. Olive peeped out the window. Rutherford still stood in the backyard, frowning up at the house, waiting. He was far enough away that she couldn’t be sure, but she thought she saw his eyes travel upward to the attic window. His body seemed to deflate slightly, like a week-old party balloon. Then he stooped down, picked up his book, and disappeared into the withering lilac hedge.

Olive felt an unexpected twinge of disappointment. But before the twinge could become an ache, she was startled by the soft clink of glass against wood, somewhere in the shadows to her right.

“Hello?” she called. “Harvey?”

Winding between an old hat rack and an armchair that looked like it was spitting out its stuffing, Olive
tiptoed across the room, trying to trace the source of the sound.

There was another, closer, rattle. “Yes. I’m watching you. I know what you’ve been up to,” muttered a voice with a faint British accent.

Olive craned around the side of a musty sewing dummy. There, just a few feet away, was Harvey. He was perched on the edge of Aldous’s cloth-covered easel, looking down at something Olive couldn’t see.

“Agent 1-800?” she called.

Harvey whirled around. He leaped off of the easel, positioning himself between it and Olive. “Agent Olive,” he replied, with a brusque little nod.

“I haven’t seen you in days,” said Olive. “Where have you been?”

“I’m on the job,” said Harvey. “Surveillance. Surreptitious security. Surgical…surceasance.”

“Oh,” said Olive. “Have you seen anything new?”

Harvey squinted one eye. “Perhaps,” he said. “But what I
haven’t
seen may pose an even greater threat. If you catch my drift.”

“I don’t,” said Olive. She plopped down on the floor, facing the cat.

Harvey maintained his distance. “The work of a secret agent isn’t easy,” he said softly. “Keeping your ears peeled, your lips open, your eyes sealed.”

“I’m sure,” said Olive.

“And then there’s the issue of trust,” Harvey went on. He gazed up into the rafters, eyes sparkling glassily. “Who can trust a cat who doesn’t exist? Who can believe the word of a cat whose entire life is a secret?”

“Hmm,” said Olive, who could tell that Harvey didn’t really want an answer.

“And who can
we
trust, if no one knows
us?
” Harvey’s eyes flicked back to Olive. “Imagine a game of chess in which all the pieces are the same color.” The eyes began to sparkle wildly. “You cannot be sure which side anyone is on. Double agents. Triple agents.
Quadruple
agents.” The eyes widened slightly with each word. “
Dodecahedral agents.
”

“I can see that you’re really enjoying this,” said Olive.

For a split second, Harvey looked startled. “I—” he began. His whole body seemed to stiffen. “That is—you will have to excuse me, Agent Olive. I must return to my duties.”

Olive got reluctantly to her feet. “I suppose I should get out of your way. If you’re busy.”

“In fact,” said Harvey, backing toward the easel once again, “if you visit this area in the future, you may not see me.”

Olive frowned. “Why not? Where will you be?”

“Ah,” said Harvey. One whiskered eyebrow rose. “Where
will
I be? That is the question. I shall be
everywhere and nowhere. Invisible and indivisible. No
double agent
will be a match for me.”

“Oh,” said Olive. “Then…I guess…good-bye.”

“Good-bye,” said Harvey softly.

Olive slumped back down the stairs and out of the attic, feeling more alone than ever.

That was the last she saw of any of the cats until very late that night. And what she saw then didn’t make her feel any less alone.

16

S
OMETIME AFTER MIDNIGHT, when the rest of the house was asleep, Olive woke from a bad dream about a huge chessboard where all the pieces were carved out of purple crayons. The shadows of the ash tree’s branches rippled and unfurled across her ceiling. One twig tapped softly at her window. At first, Olive wondered if this sound had woken her. But as she lay there, listening, she heard another sound.

It sounded like a voice. But it wasn’t her mother’s voice, or her father’s voice. It was a voice that she couldn’t quite place.

Olive slipped both legs out of bed and pushed back the covers with as little crinkling as she could manage. Holding her breath, she leaped off of the mattress and tiptoed toward her bedroom door. The hinges gave a
creak as she pulled it open. Olive moved the door as slowly as she could, forming a gap just big enough for her to peep through.

The hallway angled away from her in two directions. One branch led to the staircase, and beyond that, to her parents’ closed bedroom door. The other dwindled off toward the lavender, blue, and pink bedrooms, where Olive couldn’t see. Faint silver moonlight glanced off of the banisters, turning the staircase railing into a cage of shadows. The picture frames glimmered like treasure sunk to the ocean floor.

The sound had seemed to come from her left, inside one of the empty guest rooms. There was a dull creak from the floorboards as someone moved out into the hallway. Olive couldn’t have seen whoever that someone was without sticking her whole head through the door, so instead, she stayed frozen in place, watching and listening with every nerve in her body. Again, she thought she heard the murmur of a low voice, but she couldn’t make out the words.

There was a soft whimper. “Shh,” someone hissed.

Olive wished that she could press a pause button on her heart. Its pounding in her ears had grown so loud that very little could squeeze past it. Nevertheless, she managed to catch a muffled thump and a creak, as though someone had jumped on the old floorboards. And then everything was still.

Olive stood as if she were frozen, with both hands clutching the doorknob and one wide eye staring through the gap. She stood there for so long, hearing nothing, that she almost managed to convince herself that she had imagined it all. Perhaps what she’d heard had been the house settling, or the TV from her parents’ room. This house had ways of tricking you, as Olive knew—of sending sounds echoing through empty rooms until you couldn’t tell what had come from where, what was nearby and what was far away, what was real and what was only the trick of your own fear.

But then, as Olive watched, a shadow slipped silently into view. It was stretched and blurred, as moon-shadows are, but it was clearly the shadow of a cat. It darkened as the cat came closer. Its black outline could have belonged to anyone—to any
cat,
that is—but, as Olive waited, one very specific cat’s head appeared.

Its orange fur was washed by the moonlight. Its luxuriant whiskers glinted. It trotted nearer, and soon Olive could make out its tufted paws, its sleek coat, and its long, twitching tail, as big around as a baseball bat.

Horatio.

The cat padded soundlessly past her open door. He turned at the staircase, vanishing down the steps into the darkness.

It took a few minutes before Olive’s heart and lungs remembered how to work normally again.
We didn’t see anything strange,
Olive reminded them.
It isn’t unusual for Horatio to be patrolling the house at night. Maybe he was talking to Harvey, or to someone in a painting, or to himself. Maybe no one was talking at all.

Gently, Olive closed her bedroom door, checked under her bed, and climbed back between the covers. Then she pulled the blankets up to her chin and tried to figure out why she’d felt compelled to hide from Horatio, her
friend
…and why the sight of him slipping along the dark hall had filled her with a strange, low thrum of terror.

17

M
ONDAY MORNING ARRIVED like a skillet falling on a toe.

Olive wasn’t ready for it. Half of her brain still refused to return from that strange, dreamy scene in the darkened hallway, when for a time she’d felt sure that she was witnessing something important—something that needed to be figured out. The other half bumbled through the school day, too dazed to notice the hours sliding by.

She didn’t hear anything but the bell in math or English class. At lunch time, she hurried past the cafeteria, where she knew Rutherford would be waiting, and ducked into the nurse’s office instead, saying that she had a terrible headache and needed to lie down (which wasn’t too far from the truth). Science class
passed in a gummy blur. Finally, after a lecture in history that made both her brain and her backside fall asleep, Olive let the flood of students carry her along the halls to the art room.

Ms. Teedlebaum stood at the front of the classroom, covered from neck to ankles in something that looked like a paint-spattered doctor’s coat. If the doctor who wore it had been a giant. A giant who got dressed backward. The teacher went on arranging several jugs of paint, pouring colorful streams from one jug into another, as the students trickled in. After the bell rang and a few more anticipatory seconds had passed, she finally looked up.

“Okay. You’ve transferred your sketches to canvas board at this point,” said Ms. Teedlebaum, brushing a hank of kinky red hair away from her cheek and leaving a wide blue paint streak in its place. “Today, we’ll start painting. First, you’ll get your sketches and your canvas board. No—scratch that. Get your paints from the front table first. But before you get your paints, you’ll need a palette.” Here Ms. Teedlebaum held up something that looked like an egg carton for some very flat eggs. “So, get the palette first. But remember, before you get the palette, you need to cover your work surface. So, first, cover, then palette, then…Wait,” Ms. Teedlebaum interrupted herself. “Did I say to put on a smock first? No? So,
first,
put on a
smock. Second, cover your table. Third, get your palette. Fourth…” Ms. Teedlebaum’s eyes seemed to glaze over. She gazed down at the huge jugs of tempera paint directly in front of her. “
Paint
. That’s it. Get your paint. Then your canvas boards. Did I mention brushes?” she asked the class, blinking around at the sea of baffled faces. “Never mind. I’ll pass out the brushes while you…” Ms. Teedlebaum paused, then appeared to give up. “While you do all those other things I said. Get started.”