The Second Spy: The Books of Elsewhere: Volume 3 (9 page)

Olive dragged these angry thoughts through every hour of the school day, until at last she was hauling both them
and
her backpack up the gritty stone staircase to the art room.

“Attention, everyone!” Ms. Teedlebaum called, attempting to blow on her dangling whistle necklace and blowing on a ballpoint pen necklace instead. “Settle down and take out the photographs I asked you to bring.”

While the students obeyed, Ms. Teedlebaum, who was barefoot that day for one reason or another, taped a large photograph to the chalkboard. A hush fell over the room as, one by one, the students noticed the picture. Olive, sensing the sudden silence, stopped scowling down at her tabletop and looked up at the photograph.

It was a family portrait. Judging by the kinky red hair on everyone’s head, it was a
Teedlebaum
family portrait. Six family members—a mother and father, two boys and two girls, one of whom must have been the
young Ms. Teedlebaum—posed in front of a large fireplace. All six of them were in costume. The mother and four children were dressed as logs, their arms and faces poking out of holes cut in painted cardboard tubes. The father, on the other hand, was dressed as an axe.

No one in the class spoke, but as everyone looked at the photograph, a palpable air of unease filled the room. Behind the smiling Teedlebaum faces lay the implication that Father Axe was going to
chop up
the rest of his family—chop them up, and then perhaps toss them on the fire that flared cheerily behind them.

A boy near the front of the room tentatively raised his hand. “That’s your family, right?”

“Yes,” said Ms. Teedlebaum. She glanced up from the pencil she was twisting in the sharpener around her neck. “That’s us, about twenty years ago.”

“Why—why are you…” stammered a boy in a much-too-large sweater who sat to Olive’s left. “Why—”

“Why are you all dressed like that?” The girl in eyeliner took over.

“My father ran a lumberyard,” said Ms. Teedlebaum, setting up a giant sketchpad next to the photo.

“Was it Halloween?” asked the girl.

“No,” said Ms. Teedlebaum. “All right, everyone. When you start sketching from a photograph, you want to look at the big picture. Get a sense of scale.” Ms. Teedlebaum turned toward the giant sketchbook and began to draw. “See how I’m sketching six ovals
for the faces? You can tell that I’m planning to fill the whole page. Now I’ll make a very simple outline of the bodies.” Ms. Teedlebaum drew the shapes of five logs and one axe, her pencil making soft hissing noises against the paper. “You can always erase any lines you don’t need later. Once you’ve got those outlines, you can start adding the details.” Ms. Teedlebaum tossed her pencil into the chalkboard tray. It sent up a little puff of powdery white dust. “We’ll be painting these eventually, but we’re going to sketch before we paint. Just like you have to learn to roller skate before you can ski. As for materials,” Ms. Teedlebaum went on as the students blinked at each other, “if you need another pencil or eraser or a new sheet of paper, just look around the room. They’re scattered everywhere. You should be able to find what you need if you look under enough other things.” With a smile that seemed to suggest she’d just said something very wise, Ms. Teedlebaum clinked and jangled across the room to her desk.

Olive looked back down at the photograph of Morton’s family. Then she picked up her pencil and slowly made two large circles on her sheet of paper. Morton was already in a painting; he didn’t need to be in another one. And creating another portrait of Lucinda Nivens could mean a whole houseful of trouble, as Olive was well aware. Her portrait was going to contain just two people.

Frowning at the photo, Olive settled down to work. As she drew, a teeny bit of her fury and fear seemed to trail out through the tip of her pencil, and Olive wondered if she might finally be able to turn all of this trouble into something worthwhile.

Olive tried to keep her mind on her project as she boarded the bus that afternoon. Rutherford was sitting in their usual seat near the front, but Olive marched right past him, plunking down in a seat several rows farther back. From the corner of her eye, she saw his head poke into the aisle, his smudged glasses swiveling in her direction. She turned toward the window.

When the bus ground to a stop at the foot of Linden Street, Olive bolted up the aisle and hit the sidewalk at a run before Rutherford could make it to the steps.

“Olive!” she heard him shouting after her. “Olive, wait! You’re making a mistake!”

But Olive didn’t even give him a glance.

She
wasn’t making a mistake about Rutherford.
He
was the one making a mistake if he thought she’d listen to him now.

Blinking away a few irritating tears, Olive slammed through the house’s heavy front door and locked it behind her.

The silence within the old stone walls flooded over her like water. Her breath seemed suddenly, shockingly loud. For a moment, she thought she’d caught the
sound of muffled footsteps, running across the floorboards above—but then she realized that this was just her own speeding heartbeat. Clutching the spectacles with one hand and her backpack with the other, Olive rushed up the stairs to her bedroom.

With the jars of ingredients in her arms, she craned back out into the hall. Open doorways gaped at her. Picture frames gleamed in the afternoon light. Keeping watch for any glimmering green eyes, Olive darted back down the stairs and along the hallway to the kitchen.

She arranged her materials on the scarred wooden countertop. Five mixing bowls. Five spoons. Five dusty jars. By a beam of sunlight that flickered with the shadows of windblown leaves, she skimmed the writing on the reassembled pages, matching recipes to ingredients.

Black and white were easy to identify. According to what Olive had learned from the labels on crayons (and Olive could have earned a degree in crayons, with a minor in colored pencils), the shade of blue in the jar standing before her was
Indigo
. The yellow was plain old
Yellow.
The red in the jar must be
Crimson.
Olive bent down to study the thorny script.

Crimson,
it read.
Two spoonfuls of dried and powdered blood (goat or cattle), mixed with the ground wings of ladybugs and the petals of one red rose, once the blossom has opened but not a single petal has fallen. Sprinkle with the herb Angel’s Tongue. Stir in a stream of fresh blood.

Olive moved the red jar into a beam of sunlight, turning it around and around. As far as she could tell, its contents
could
be powdered blood and ladybug’s wings. Maybe the rose petals were already mixed in too. She unscrewed the crusty lid and took a cautious sniff. She smelled rust and dirt…and, underneath, something faintly sweet. She would just assume the petals
were
there—it made everything simpler. As for
Angel’s Tongue…
Olive had no idea what that would look like, so it could easily be in the jar as well. Besides, the instructions said it was an herb, so it couldn’t be too important. Mr. Dunwoody always added rosemary to his roast potatoes, but in Olive’s opinion, potatoes were just as delicious all by themselves.

Stir in a stream of fresh blood…

Where could she get fresh blood? Olive looked down at her own arms. The faint blue lines of her veins seemed to grow even fainter. Was she brave enough to take a knife from the drawer and—

No. She definitely wasn’t.

Olive let out a frustrated growl. She couldn’t afford to waste any more time. The cats could appear at any second. And if she didn’t want to lose her last human—or sort-of human—friend, she had to think of something…

And then, in her mind, a wish collided with a memory like a firework touching a match. Olive skidded across the kitchen and yanked open the refrigerator door. A slab of beef, wrapped in grocery store plastic, sat there on its little foam tray. And the tray was pooled with blood. She scooped some red powder from the jar into the first mixing bowl, poured the blood from the meat over the powder, and stirred. Perfect.

She moved on to the next recipe.
Yellow
called for the yolk of a robin’s egg. Olive didn’t have any robin’s eggs, so she used a regular egg from the refrigerator instead. A chicken’s egg yolk would be bigger than a robin’s egg yolk, anyway, which meant even more yellow paint. It couldn’t have worked out better if she’d planned it.

She was still stirring the thick yellow concoction when a chilly feeling, like a fragment of melting ice, trickled slowly down her spine. The hairs on her neck began to prickle. Olive whipped around, looking in all directions.

She was alone in the kitchen.

But in the window above the old stone sink, where tendrils of ivy made a leafy curtain, she thought she caught the flash of movement. Had someone been watching her?

Olive edged closer to the window. If someone had been there—a man or a woman, a painting, a cat, or
a traitor in dirty glasses—that someone wasn’t there anymore. The ivy leaves twitched softly in the breeze.

Racing now, Olive spun back to the counter. The white paint’s instructions called for milk from a black sheep. Well, Olive reasoned, milk from a black sheep couldn’t be too different from milk from a black-and-white cow. She grabbed the jug of two percent from the fridge and sloshed it into the bowl. She hustled along the row, making clever substitutions wherever necessary.
Salt dried from a child’s tears?
The salt that came in little paper packets at drive-thru restaurants should be fine.
Water that hasn’t run through any pipe?
The bottle in the refrigerator said “Spring Water.” That should be good enough.

There. She was finished.

Hands shaking, Olive piled the bowls of paint, the jars, and the instructions onto a big metal cookie sheet. With a last wary glance at the window, she hustled out of the kitchen, carrying her materials with her.

Upstairs, Olive closed her bedroom door and double-checked to make sure that the latch had caught. Then she sat down on the bed, laying out her tools: the photograph of Morton’s family, a blank canvas from her art supply drawer, a handful of brushes, and the tray covered with fresh-made paints. As she picked up a pointed brush, she was struck by a new thought. If the painting of Morton’s parents turned out well, then
she could use these paints to create something—or someone—else. And if that someone happened to be
Rutherford…

Then he wouldn’t leave her. He would stay here in this house forever, waiting for her, never changing, only able to come out of his painting when Olive felt like releasing him, just like—

Morton’s round, pale face flashed across Olive’s mind.

Olive’s stomach performed a sickening little twirl.
No.
She wasn’t going to use these paints as Aldous McMartin had used them. She was going to
help
people. That was all. With a steadying breath, Olive dipped her brush into the bowl of black paint and got to work.

More than an hour had passed before her concentration was broken by a slamming door.

“Hello!” called her father’s cheery voice from the bottom of the stairs. “Is there a sixth-grade student in this house who would like to request specific toppings on her third of a delivery pizza?”

“Yes!” Olive shouted back. Covering the bowls of paint with a damp washcloth and setting her gummy brushes on the cookie sheet, Olive galloped down the stairs.

“How was school today?” asked her mother, turning away from the cupboard as Olive skidded along the hall and through the kitchen door.

“Okay,” said Olive, surreptitiously brushing a trail
of salt off of the countertop and onto the floor. “But I have a lot of homework.”

Mrs. Dunwoody’s face lit up. “Homework?” she repeated, setting three plates on the counter.

“Anything we can help with?” asked Mr. Dunwoody eagerly.

“It’s for art class,” said Olive.

Her parents’ faces fell.

“Well, sometimes art requires math too,” Mr. Dunwoody soldiered on. “There are issues of perspective and vanishing points and parallel lines…”

“It’s a portrait, so there aren’t really any straight lines,” said Olive as her parents’ faces fell again. “And I can do it on my own. But thank you.” Then, before her mother could ask her to, Olive picked up the plates and a stack of napkins and went into the dining room to set the table.

Mrs. Dunwoody smiled after her. “Who would have hypothesized that
we
would produce an artist?” she asked Mr. Dunwoody, under her breath.

“It must have been a recessive trait.” Mr. Dunwoody smiled back. “I would classify it as a pleasant surprise.”

But both Mr. and Mrs. Dunwoody would have been far more surprised if they had known just what kind of artwork was waiting on their daughter’s bed, its streaks and spots of paint already beginning to dry.

10

O
LIVE WOKE UP the next morning feeling fine. In fact, she felt better than fine. She felt as if her whole body had been filled with helium, and if she had jumped out of her bedroom window just then, she could have soared out over Linden Street, looking down at the tops of the green and golden trees while the soft autumn wind whipped through her hair.

Under her breath, she practiced her best sickly moan. “Oooooh,” she groaned. “Oooooow.”

Across the room, leaning against her vanity mirror, stood the half-finished portrait of Morton’s parents. Last night, Olive had wolfed down her third of the pizza and barreled back up the stairs before her parents had finished their first slice. She had labored over the painting for the rest of the evening, filling in the
lines of old-fashioned clothes, shading arms and hands and necks and fingers until her father had tapped at her door and told her that it was fifty-three minutes past her bedtime. She had been so absorbed that she had nearly forgotten about her troubles with Rutherford. Even Annabelle had started to seem unimportant, like a hornet stuck safely on the other side of a closed screen door.