Olive felt several cold, paint-smooth hands pushing her back toward the frame. She toppled clumsily out of the painting, bumping her head on a bookshelf as she landed. The spectacles slipped off her nose and thumped against her chest on their long chain. Olive looked back up at the painting. The dancing girls had gone back to their formation, although now their smiles looked strained and insincere. Olive rubbed her sore head. Morton had been scared of something watching him too, but at least he hadn’t pushed her out of a painting.
Olive’s footsteps echoed in the dusty library.
She trailed along the hall to the kitchen. Just beside the kitchen door hung a small painting of three men building a wall out of stones. The men wore old-fashioned caps and jackets. They looked a bit dirty, but sociable, like they wouldn’t mind having company. Then again, she’d been very wrong about the dancing girls.
Olive hesitated. For a moment, the things she wanted to know wrestled with the things she hated to do. But finally, she put on the spectacles, stood on her toes, and put one arm into the painting, clamping it over the bottom edge of the frame. Then with great effort, she pulled herself sideways onto the patchy ground of the building site.
The three men stopped working and stared at her. Their mouths fell open. One of them dropped the rock he was holding, and had to jump aside before it rolled onto his toes.
Olive swallowed the giant lump in her throat. “Hello,” she whispered.
“Well, hello!” said one of the men.
“It’s a young lady!” said another man, the way most people would say “It’s a flying saucer!”
“Bless my boots!” said the third man. Olive had never heard anybody say “Bless my boots!” aloud before, but it made her smile, and suddenly she felt much less afraid of these three men.
“How on earth did you get in here?” asked the first man, removing his cap and scratching his head. Olive opened her mouth to explain, but the man went on. “Nothing ever changes here,” he said doubtfully.
“Sometimes I think I’ve been laying the same stone over and over,” said the second man. “Seems this wall will never get finished.”
The first man nodded in agreement. Olive hadn’t seen him put his cap back on, but there it was, perched on his head.
The third man was still staring at Olive. “Well, I’ll be a monkey’s uncle,” he whispered.
Olive thought it best to ignore their questions. “What are you building?” she asked instead.
The three men looked at one another. There was a long pause.
“A wall,” the second man said at last.
“Yes, a wall.” The third man nodded, relieved.
“But a wall of what?” asked Olive.
The three men looked at one another again.
“You know, I can’t rightly say,” said the first man.
“Weren’t we building a house?” asked the third man, frowning so hard that his eyebrows formed one fuzzy caterpillar across his forehead.
“A house. That’s it! A house,” said the second man.
“There was something funny about the house, though,” said the third man slowly. He looked up at the hazy white sky. “What was it?”
“Special stones,” muttered the second man to himself. “Crazy demands. That giant cat always in the way. I’d never work for that old geezer again.”
“For who? Who do you mean?” asked Olive, her thoughts reeling, but the second man was slowly hoisting the fallen rock back into place.
“Shhh!” the first man hissed at the others, glancing over both his shoulders. “Don’t you say that name aloud.”
“Something funny,” said the third man, still staring straight up into the air. “Something funny about the basement.”
“The basement?” said Olive. Something plummeted in her stomach, like an elevator whose cable had snapped. Not the basement. Anywhere but the basement. Olive cleared her throat. “You did say the basement, right?” she asked, trying to push the tremor out of her voice.
The three men stared at her, mildly confused. One of them nodded.
“All right, boys, back to work,” Olive heard the first man say as she turned back toward the frame.
“Come and see us again, young lady!” shouted the third man with a wave as Olive clambered out of the painting and back into the empty kitchen.
Her heart was pounding. A stone house. A cat.
The basement.
9
OLIVE RUSHED THROUGH the house, gathering supplies. The more she thought about the basement, the less she wanted to go down there, but the faster she moved, the less time she had to think. It was like jumping into a chilly swimming pool—the moments she spent with her toes curled over the end of the diving board were always worse than the moment when she finally hit the water.
Besides, if she hurried, she might have just enough time to explore the basement before her parents got home and started asking inconvenient questions about what she was doing in her least favorite part of the house. What would Mr. and Mrs. Dunwoody say if they knew that their daughter thought she could talk to a cat and climb in and out of paintings? They would probably yank a strand of her hair and take it in for DNA testing.
In her bedroom, Olive dug through the closet looking for a pair of slippers to wear for protection against the chilly stone floor. But there were no slippers to be found. Olive owned six pairs of slippers, but none of them were ever where they belonged. This was because Olive’s body often did things without consulting Olive’s brain, which was usually busy with something much more interesting than putting things away in the right place. A second pair of socks would have to do.
Downstairs, Olive rummaged through the kitchen drawers, finding packets of soy sauce, a doll’s leg, several used toothbrushes, a few flashlights with batteries that weren’t dead yet, and something that looked like a rusty eggbeater but might have come from the inside of a clock. Olive wedged two working flashlights into her pockets.
She paused at the top of the rickety basement steps. A cold, dusty draft blew up through the doorway. Olive tensed and listened. The basement was quiet. She took a deep breath, flicked on the first flashlight, and ventured down, following the beam that sliced a little hole through the dark.
At the bottom of the steps, Olive groped for the chain of a hanging lightbulb. Its weak yellow glow pushed the shadows into a circle. Olive could feel the chill of the damp stone floor even through the double layer of socks. She shivered, held the flashlight up high, and started her search of the basement’s twisty corners, where the electric light couldn’t reach.
She started with the shelves built into the wall under the stairs. There was nothing there but a few sealed mason jars covered in dust. Olive pulled one down, half expecting to see that it was full of dead frogs or eyeballs in formaldehyde. She found something almost as disgusting: “Pickled beets” said the spidery handwriting on the label. Obviously, it was weird that anyone would like pickled beets, but this probably wasn’t the strange thing that the builders had mentioned. Olive sighed, pushing the jar back onto the shelf. She found a few gummy paint cans in a corner, an empty box or two beside the washing machine, and a pack of replacement lightbulbs.
She looked around at the mottled stone walls, at the dust floating softly through the flashlight beam. What on earth had the builders been talking about? What was wrong with this place? Olive ran her free hand up and down her arm, trying to erase the goose bumps. Yes, there was something funny about the basement—not about the way it looked, but about how it felt. If the paintings upstairs were hiding something, the basement was hiding something uglier. There were certainly no paintings down here, and yet, as she sliced her little blade of light across one cobwebby corner, Olive had the sensation, again, of someone watching her.
Olive edged cautiously back toward the stairs, keeping the flashlight raised. Just as her foot reached the bottom step, in the farthest, darkest corner, she caught a familiar glimmer of green.
“Horatio? Is that you?” she whispered.
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There was no answer.
Steeling herself, Olive tiptoed into the darkness, following the green glimmer.
“Hello?” she squeaked.
Still no answer.
A feeling of panic pounded its way out from her heart through her whole body. All the tiny hairs on her arms stood up. In her hand, the flashlight quivered. What was in the corner? And how long had it been there, watching, waiting . . . ?
Olive took another teensy step. The pool of gold light from her flashlight washed over the form of a cat. It was black from nose to tail, green-eyed, and sleek. It was gigantic—even bigger than Horatio. In fact, it looked less like a cat and more like a small domestic panther. It sat, sharply erect, with its tail wrapped around its feet. It didn’t even blink as Olive approached. Olive was starting to wonder if Ms. McMartin had had a habit of stuffing her dead pets, when the cat gave a sharp, soldierly bow. Olive jumped. Her stifled shriek bounced off the stone walls.
“Good morning, miss,” the cat said, and returned to its position.
“G—good morning,” stammered Olive, feeling slightly less surprised than someone who had never conversed with a cat before. “I thought—I thought you might be Horatio.”
“No,” said the huge black cat. “I’ve never been Horatio.”
“I suppose not,” said Olive.
“You have her spectacles,” said the cat, with its eyes on the chain that hung around Olive’s neck.
“Whose spectacles?”
“Hers.”
“Who hers?”
“Ms. McMartin’s.”
“Oh,” said Olive, touching the spectacles gently. “I wasn’t sure whose they were.”
“Now they’re yours,” said the cat.
“I suppose so,” said Olive.
The cat regarded her calmly.
“My name is Olive Dunwoody,” she said at last. “I live here now.”
“Leopold,” said the cat. Olive got the feeling that if he had hands, the cat would have saluted. “How do you do?”
“Do you live down here?”
“This is my station, miss,” said the cat with another sharp bow.
“Your station? Are you—guarding something?”
“I’m afraid that is classified information,” said the cat, puffing out a chest that was clearly covered with imaginary medals.
“I see,” said Olive.
She glanced around the empty basement again, wondering what on earth this cat believed himself to be guarding. Then she noticed that he was not sitting on the floor. What the cat was sitting on was made of wood. It was flat and rectangular, and it had a handle made of an iron loop.
“Is that a—” said Olive.
“No,” said the cat.
“I mean, is that—”
“No, it isn’t.”
“Is that a trapdoor?” asked Olive.
“Is what a trapdoor?”
“That. Under you.”
The cat glanced down. “No, it’s not.”
“What’s in it?”
“That is not for me to say, miss,” said the cat. “Besides, you are safer not knowing.”
Olive put her head to one side and considered this for a moment. “What if I want to know anyway?”
The cat blinked. “Look,” he said, dropping his military pose. “If I tell you what’s in there, then we’re in trouble. And I don’t mean just you and me. I mean everybody in this house.”
Olive crouched down on the floor in front of the cat. “Is there anything I can do to help?”
The cat tilted his head. “There might be, someday. But for now . . .” The cat paused, then said sheepishly, “If you wanted to, you could aid the effort by boosting troop morale . . .”
“I would be happy to,” said Olive.
“Oh, good,” said the cat. “Then would you scratch between my ears?”
Olive scratched Leopold’s glossy black head gamely. The cat began to purr, caught himself, and jerked back into his military position. “Your contribution is appreciated, miss,” he said.
From above there came the sound of two car doors slamming.
“My mom and dad are home,” said Olive. “I have to go.”
“Good day, miss.”
“Bye, Leopold.”
Olive watched the glimmer of the cat’s green eyes grow fainter and fainter as she climbed the stairs. Perhaps the trapdoor was what the builders in the painting had meant about “something funny.” But where did the trapdoor go? And if Leopold was guarding it, how would she ever find out? On the top step, Olive switched off the flashlight. The green glimmer disappeared, but Olive knew Leopold was still there, standing guard.
10
FOR A FEW days, things went on as normal—that is to say, as was normal for the Dunwoody family.
Mr. Dunwoody put the finishing touches on an algorithm he called The Chandelier Conundrum, named after the dusty brass monstrosity that hung over his desk in the library. Mrs. Dunwoody refilled an old prescription for allergy medication, wondering why on earth her cat dander allergies were acting up.
Olive, who would normally have been content painting in a sunny spot in the kitchen, or reading in the library, or digging for buried treasure in the old garden, couldn’t sit still long enough to do anything. She was wary of climbing into the paintings, and she had to be extra careful with her parents around anyway. She wondered what was hidden in the basement, but she still had no way to get Leopold away from the trapdoor. She hadn’t seen Horatio in days, even though she kept hoping for him to turn up. And, worst of all, she still had no idea what to do about Morton. She was stuck.
So Olive flopped around the house. She flopped on couches, she flopped in easy chairs, she flopped on the porch swing, and she flopped on empty beds. She thought and thought and thought until she could feel the neurons in her brain sizzling out like Fourth of July sparklers. But nothing new came to her. If she was trying to put a puzzle together, Olive realized, she was still missing most of the pieces.
“When you want to do something well, proceed methodically,” Mr. Dunwoody always said. That meant: “Take it one step at a time, and don’t skip around just because you feel like it.” Mr. Dunwoody proceeded methodically whether he was fixing the dishwasher or eating a piece of chocolate cake, and things usually turned out all right. Olive decided to try it.
Methodically, she went to the far end of the upstairs hall and proceeded to search every bedroom. She found one of her missing slippers under the bed in the pink room. There were two buttons, a penny, and a bit of gold string on the closet floor in the blue room. There was an old safety pin in the hall, which she found because it poked her in the foot.
She went back to the violet room and rifled through the drawers, looking at the lacy handkerchiefs and buttoned gloves. But this time, when she reached her arm all the way to the back of the narrow drawer, she touched something that didn’t feel at all like a handkerchief or a glove. Olive pulled it into the light. It was a small, worn leather folder, slightly larger than a post-card, with little gold scrolls embossed on the corners.
Olive opened it. Inside, two old black-and-white photographs were stuck to the leather with gold paper tabs. On the left side was a photograph of a youngish couple with round, slightly stupid faces. The woman’s eyes looked like they were slowly taking over her forehead. The man was smirking goofily, like he had just seen someone get hit on the head. On the other side of the folder was a portrait of an older man. He had white hair, and a face carved in ridges that looked like they had grown hard with time. He was thin and rigid, with square shoulders, a square jaw, a sharp nose, and long arms; Olive could see them posed stiffly on the photographer’s chair. The man wasn’t smiling.
Olive had often wondered why people from a long time ago didn’t smile for photographs. These days, everybody knows you’re supposed to smile, or at least say “cheese.” Were people from a hundred years ago all crabby? She had once asked her father about this, but when Mr. Dunwoody started to explain
about convex and concave lenses and their properties of reflection, Olive’s mind had run away.
It wasn’t the man’s stern mouth that made him look unfriendly. There was something about his eyes, shadowed by the sharp ledge of his eyebrows. They made him look not just stern, but menacing. Olive felt an uncomfortable little twinge shoot down her spine, like a finger running down a row of piano keys. She stuffed the photographs back into the drawer and slammed it.
Olive stared up at the portrait of the dark-haired woman. She looked the same as ever: big-eyed, soft-haired, and pretty, in an understated way. To Olive’s relief, she hadn’t seemed to notice Olive’s silly panic over an antique photograph.
Olive put the spectacles on and looked at the portrait. The dark-haired woman didn’t move. Olive took the spectacles off and looked at it some more. She tilted the spectacles so that they went over just one eye. Nothing. She wiped the spectacles on her T-shirt and put them back on. Still nothing happened.
Olive sighed and leaned on the chest of drawers. It didn’t make sense. She had first noticed Morton flitting through the forest before she had even found the spectacles. But the rest of the painting hadn’t moved—the trees hadn’t shifted in the breeze, dry leaves hadn’t blown across the path—until she had put on the spectacles. Without the spectacles, the other paintings seemed like ordinary, motionless pictures. And here was a painting that had moved once before but that now refused to move at all, with or without the spectacles. “I don’t get it,” she mumbled.
“What don’t you get?”
Olive looked up at the portrait through the spectacles. The woman in the painting had turned her head and was looking down at Olive with an expression of kind concern.
“Did you just talk?” Olive whispered.
“Yes, I did,” said the woman. She gave Olive a sympathetic little smile. “I’m sorry if I’m intruding, but you look so unhappy.”
“I’m not really unhappy,” said Olive slowly. “I’m just trying to figure something out. But I can’t tell my parents, because they would think I’m making it all up.”