Turning back toward the attic, Olive glanced around at the dentist’s chair, the mirrors, the miniature cannon, the boxes . . . and the stack of painted canvases. Her mind swirled downward through the house, like a leaf blowing down from the very top of a tree, rushing faster and faster through the hallways, the bedrooms, the main floor, the basement, past the ranks of waiting paintings, and all at once, a sense of how huge and how impossible this search was came over her. The book could be anywhere in this gigantic house—and not just in the house, but Elsewhere. It would take weeks, months, maybe years to find it again. If she ever found it at all.
Panic and defeat whirled together in Olive’s stomach. She staggered back toward the attic steps, remembering the sensation of being pulled across this floor by invisible strings, and wishing that she felt it now.
Where is the book? Olive asked the house. Please . . . I need a sign, a clue, anything. Just help me find it.
The tugging, when it started, was so faint that Olive wasn’t sure she felt it at all. She could very well have been imagining it, just like she’d once imagined that she was growing a third eye on her shoulder, which actually turned out to be part of her collarbone (the doctor was very nice about explaining this). She stood at the top of the attic steps, trying to feel which direction the house was pulling her—if it was in fact pulling her at all. She was quite sure that it was pulling her downward, but that might have been gravity. Still, Olive followed the feeling down the attic steps and back through the painting into the pink bedroom.
Once she got there, however, the tugging sensation stopped, leaving her feeling confused and lost and quite a bit heavier than usual. Olive dragged herself along the upstairs hall, looking carefully into the paintings through the spectacles, hoping to see something that sparkled like embossed leather, or a carefully arranged pile of leaves that seemed suspiciously out of place.
She studied the painting of Linden Street, remembering that she could finally climb in on her own again. But she didn’t want to. The problem of Morton seemed distant and unpleasant now, like a mass of gray rain clouds on the horizon, which will eventually drift closer and spoil the whole day. The spellbook was much more important. Once she got it back, maybe she would think about helping Morton. Maybe.
Olive was still looking so hard at the paintings on the walls that she almost missed what was waiting for her on the floor. (This was especially bad because she had wandered to the top of the staircase, and with one more step she would have sledded down into the foyer face-first.) But at just the right moment, she glanced down and spotted the edge of the first stair . . . and the lilac leaf on the carpet.
Olive halted. Three steps below was another leaf, and below that, there lay a little cluster of grass clippings, along with a splotch of mud. Olive climbed down the stairs, pulling off the spectacles and putting them into her pocket.
A few crumbs of dirt waited on the hallway floor. Olive crouched down, frowning, and felt a soft, warm breeze ripple over her arms. She glanced up.
The front door of the big stone house was standing open.
17
OLIVE STARED AT the door. It wasn’t wide open, but a few inches—just enough that someone could have slipped in or out without making a sound.
She looked over both shoulders, making sure she was alone. Then she darted to the doorway. The porch was empty: no spellbook, no cats, no intruders. Her parents wouldn’t have gone out by the front door; they would have gone out the side door, heading toward the garage. And Olive hadn’t opened it herself—she hadn’t even noticed that it was open until just now. She put her hand on the doorknob, looking out onto the shady porch. Was this the sign she’d been asking for?
The porch swing creaked softly on its chains. Baskets of thick ferns nodded in the breeze. Olive shuffled along the floorboards, looking in every corner. Nothing seemed out of place. She trailed down the steps onto the lawn, searching the grass just as she had done only a few days ago, following Harvey’s paw prints. So much had happened since then that it felt like years, not days, had passed. A short, sharp ache squeezed Olive’s heart. She wished she had something to follow now.
The house loomed over her, its windows dark and empty in the hot midday sun. Olive scanned the front yard—deserted, but for her—and then hurried along the side of the house, toward the back. Remembering the lilac leaf on the stairs, she checked the length of the hedge carefully. Nothing: no book, no broken branches, no telltale scraps of fabric. Olive let out an aggravated breath and turned back toward the yard. The garden looked just as she’d left it—an overgrown tangle of shoots and shrubs. The garden shed leaned crookedly in one corner of the yard. Olive walked toward it, dodging the weedy flowerbeds. She took a deep breath, bracing herself, and tugged open the creaky wooden door.
No one was there.
Olive stepped into the shed, inhaling the smell of moss and soil and rotten wood, glancing up at the old hammock from which she’d rescued Harvey, aka Captain Blackpaw. The memory made her smile, but it was quickly swept away by a new wave of anger. She couldn’t trust the cats anymore. Who did they think they were, anyway? (Well, Harvey thought he was Sir Walter Raleigh, or Lancelot, or Agent 1-800, depending on his mood, but that wasn’t really what Olive meant.) This was her house, the cats belonged to the house, and therefore they belonged to her. They were here to do her bidding. How dare they refuse to obey her!
Olive halted, startled by her own thoughts. This didn’t sound like her. This didn’t sound like her at all.
Something outside made a rustling sound. Olive lunged out of the shed and whipped around, inspecting the yard. She stopped beside the compost heap, where she’d buried the painting of the forest with Annabelle McMartin trapped inside it. The ground looked the same as before; here was the slight mound of dirt where she and the cats had filled in the hole. As far as Olive could tell, no one had buried anything else here . . . but just in case, she dropped down onto her knees to take a closer look.
“What are you doing?” said a rapid, slightly nasal voice.
Olive let out a little shriek. She flopped over onto her backside and found herself staring up into the smudgy glasses of Rutherford Dewey. Olive scowled. This was the second time this week that he’d startled her this way, and it had been irritating enough the first time.
“What are you doing?” she shot back. “Were you spying on me again?”
“Just because you didn’t see me coming doesn’t mean I was spying on you,” said Rutherford. “I simply walked across your backyard because it provided the quickest route.”
“Hmmph,” said Olive. “Why are you hanging around my house so much, anyway?”
Rutherford avoided the question. “Was the experiment a success?” he asked, beginning to jiggle enthusiastically from foot to foot. The wrinkled T-shirt he wore today was emblazoned with a picture of two knights jousting, just above the words Camelot Renaissance Festival: Faire and Balanced.
Olive scowled at him. “I—” she began, but Rutherford was too excited to let her finish.
“I was thinking about the grimoire itself,” he zoomed on. “Obviously, it’s quite old, but the fact that it’s written in modern English—and I mean very modern English, not Shakespeare’s version of modern English—means that it definitely postdates the Renaissance, so perhaps it was translated, so to speak, by later generations of the family and recopied into a new volume, which would explain—”
“It’s gone,” said Olive.
Rutherford’s words crashed to a stop. He paused, his whole body tilted onto one foot. “The grimoire?”
“I think—” Olive started. “I think it was stolen. It was in my room last night, and when I woke up, it was gone.”
“Interesting,” said Rutherford. “Do you have any theories about who would have taken it?”
“Almost nobody knew about it, except me. And your grandmother. And you.” Olive gave Rutherford a close, careful look. He met her eyes, waiting for her to go on.
Olive s
truggled to her feet, brushing dirt and compost off the seat of her pants. “I think it might have been the cats.”
“Oh—like the cat who stole my figurines?” Rutherford started jiggling again. “I suppose that makes sense. Although most common housecats would probably find it difficult to move a large, heavy book.”
Olive was tempted to say They aren’t common housecats, but she stopped herself. “I thought they probably hid it somewhere close by. But then I noticed that the front door was open, and I thought they might have taken it outside.”
“I see,” said Rutherford. “I could help you look for it.”
Olive paused. She took a long look at Rutherford: his messy brown curls, his smudged glasses, his wideeyed expression. Maybe she should let him help. He already knew about the spellbook anyway, the cats were working against her, and Morton hadn’t wanted to help her find it in the first place. And, in spite of his straightforward gaze, she still got the feeling that Rutherford knew more about spellbooks than he was telling her. Perhaps if she let him stick around, he would drop a few more hints—and she would be waiting to pick them up.
“Okay,” she said slowly. “That’s very . . . nice of you.”
Rutherford gave her a small bow. “It’s part of the code of chivalry, as described by the Duke of Burgundy, to display the virtues of charity, justice, and hope, among other things.”
Olive glanced through the shade-spattered yard at the tall stone house, and tried to hear—or feel—what it was telling her. “I don’t think it’s inside,” she said at last. “Let’s keep looking out here.”
Rutherford gave her another bow and turned toward the cluster of dogwood bushes.
They searched the whole yard, as well as the shed and the garage and the spiderwebby space beneath the porch, but they found nothing. (Well, not quite nothing. Rutherford found something that he thought might be a fragment of a fossil from the cretaceous era, but to Olive it looked more like a bit of broken cement that had had a bottle cap pressed into it.) When they had finished with Olive’s yard, they took a brief, sneaky look at Mrs. Nivens’s, which didn’t take long. Mrs. Nivens’s yard was so neat, one out-of-place book would have stood out like a chocolate stain on a wedding dress.
“I don’t see anything. Do you?” Olive asked as they leaned side by side into the lilac bushes.
“No. Nothing that seems suspicious.” Rutherford pulled back from the bushes and blinked at Olive rapidly behind his smudgy lenses. “What should we try next?”
“I don’t know,” said Olive. She ripped off a handful of lilac leaves, crushing them in her fist before letting them fall to the ground.
“You should come to my grandmother’s house for lunch,” said Rutherford. “That way we could formulate a search plan, and we can continue our quest as soon as we’re done.”
Olive hesitated, chewing on the inside of her lip. Her instinctive answer would have been a quick no. She didn’t want to have lunch in a strange boy’s house, with his nosy grandmother trotting around, listening to everything they said . . . But then again, Rutherford was the only person left who she could talk to about the book. He had been very patient about helping her search—and, as odd as it felt to admit it, even to herself, it was kind of interesting to have him around. She never knew what he was going to say next. Besides, there wasn’t anything to eat in her own house except for leftover tuna casserole.
“I guess I could,” she said at last. “If you’re sure it would be okay with Mrs. Dewey.”
“I’m sure. She’s always saying I need to take an interest in things that happened within the last six hundred years.” Rutherford plunged between the lilac bushes into Mrs. Nivens’s backyard. “Let’s take the shortcut.”
Rutherford walked in a straight, rapid line across Mrs. Nivens’s perfect backyard, and Olive followed him more furtively, ducking behind trees or bushes when she could and keeping an eye on Mrs. Nivens’s dark windows.
As they wound around the cluster of birch trees, Rutherford kept up a long, rapid-fire lecture about calligraphy before and after the invention of the printing press. Olive wasn’t listening. She was looking up at the birches’ papery white trunks, trying to see if any traces of green paint remained, and feeling an empty spot in her heart where Harvey used to be. Then the memory of the book flared up, so clear and real that she could almost feel its weight in her arms. Clenching her jaw, Olive turned away from the birch trees and followed Rutherford toward the house.
But they never got there.
“. . . For example, stories of King Arthur and the Round Table would have been spread largely by word of mouth, even after Geoffrey of Monmouth began writing them down around 1130, because each copy was handwritten. Then, of course, Thomas Malory’s retelling of the legends, published in 1485, became one of the first printed books in England.” Rutherford, seeming suddenly to remember that he was talking to another person, turned around to make sure that his audience was listening.
She wasn’t. Olive had stopped beside the picnic table. On the table’s weathered wooden surface, surrounded by a few flecks of Rutherford’s model paint, its embossed leather cover sparkling in the patches of sun that fell through the birch leaves, was the McMartins’ book of spells.
Rutherford moved closer to her, craning his head as though trying to get a better look at what lay on the table. It was all Olive could do not to knock him down.
“Is that—” he began.
Olive dove at the table, wrapping the book safely in her arms. “You stole it,” she hissed.
Rutherford blinked at her. “What?”
“It’s mine.” Olive took a step backward. “You wanted it for yourself, but you can’t have it. It isn’t meant for you. It belongs to me.”
Rutherford was watching her, his brown eyebrows drawn together. “I didn’t take it,” he said calmly. “I didn’t even know it was here.”
“How did it get here, then?” Olive demanded, glaring at him over the edge of the book. “How did it end up in your backyard? Did it get up and walk on its own?”
“I don’t know how it got here, but the idea that it moved here on its own doesn’t seem very likely.”
Olive stomped her foot. “I was being sarcastic,” she growled. “And if you didn’t take it, and it didn’t walk, then how did it get here? Are you saying your grandmother stole it?”
Rutherford tilted his head thoughtfully. “That doesn’t seem very likely either, but I don’t think we have enough of the facts to draw any sort of conclusion at this point.”
“Well, I know one thing,” said Olive, pressing the book so hard against her chest that its corners stabbed her in the ribs. “I don’t want you in my house, or in my yard, or anywhere near me ever again.”
Olive whirled around and ran. She ran across Mrs. Nivens’s yard, past her own garden, up the steps of the back porch, and into the cool, quiet shade of the big stone house. Still holding the book tight in one arm, she locked each door and closed every curtain, until the house was as solid as a fortress, where no one could get in or out.
18
FOR THE NEXT few days, Olive didn’t leave the house. She didn’t even leave her room if she could help it. In the mornings, she burrowed down in bed with the spellbook until her parents left for campus, barely mumbling an answer when her mom and dad called their good-byes through her bedroom door. Then she would run downstairs with the book tucked under her arm, grab whatever fruit or cookies she could carry, and scurry back up to her bedroom.
One morning, as a sort of joke, Mr. Dunwoody slipped a fancy invitation to breakfast under Olive’s door. The little card read:
Mr. Alec and Mrs. Alice Dunwoody (aka Dad and Mom) would like the pleasure of Miss Olive Dunwoody ’s company at the breakfast table at 7:30 a.m. Eggs, toast, fruit, and a selection of beverages to be served. RS UP. (Respond by Showing Up, Please.)
But Olive slept so late that day, she woke up closer to lunch than breakfast. Her parents had left for their office long ago. A plate of
very stale toast and very cold eggs was waiting for Olive on the table. She took it with her when she ran back upstairs to study the spellbook again.
While the sun moved from one side of the sky to the other, Olive would lie on her bed, flipping through the pages, and think about attempting another spell. There were several spells that interested her and that didn’t sound too difficult. Some were harmless little things—like changing a flower’s color from pink to blue—while quite a few others would have ended up with Rutherford running toward a bathroom, making sounds like a whoopee cushion. But every time she came close to trying one, an echo of Horatio’s words floated through her brain.
Don’t you see what’s going on? You’re becoming one of them.
And, slowly, Olive would close the book again.
But she never let it out of her sight.
The book sat on the bathroom countertop while she took her bath and brushed her teeth, when she remembered to do these things. (Often, she didn’t.) At dinnertime, when her parents called her to the table and Olive couldn’t excuse herself without making them suspicious, she would put the book in her backpack and bring it downstairs, setting the bag on the empty chair next to her own, so that it was always within reach.
When her parents noticed this new habit and asked about it—which wasn’t until the third evening—Olive explained that she was practicing keeping track of her backpack before school began. The Dunwoodys nodded happily at this. (Olive had lost at least one book bag a year since kindergarten.) Her mind was too full of the spellbook to realize it, but her parents hadn’t nodded happily at her in quite a while. Now they gave each other wistful, slightly worried looks as Olive grabbed her backpack, darted away from the table, and thundered up the stairs to her room yet again.