Still Life

  “I’ll walk with you to the hedge,” said Mary. “But this time, I’ll hurry back indoors!”

  Trudging across the yard toward the street, Olive waited until she’d reached the misty halo of a streetlight before glancing back at Morton’s mother. Mary Nivens gave her a little wave. Olive waved back.

  She had just veered to the right, heading around the barren hedge toward her own front door, when something across the street caught her eye.

  In one upstairs window of the Butler house—a house that was usually darkened and sleeping by nine o’clock—a dim light was burning. Olive squinted up at it. Inside the faintly glowing window, she thought she could see the outline of someone gazing back out at her. As soon as her eyes locked on it, the light vanished. Olive blinked up at the dark window, holding her breath. Whoever it was, it didn’t reappear.

  Looking over her shoulder at the Butlers’ house, Olive crept up the steps of the front porch and slipped inside, locking the door behind her.

  OLIVE HAD DONE a very bad job of being an object at rest. She woke up with a sniffly nose and cramps in her calves, feeling as if she’d hardly slept at all. She lay under the rumpled quilts, staring foggily across the room, while her mind crawled straight back to its pre-bed problem.

  The puzzle she’d been assembling for months—ever since she had moved to Linden Street—scattered its broken pieces through her head. Now Mary’s story and the hooded figure in the yard added themselves to the mess, holes filling, edges matching with edges. But one piece still didn’t fit. It dangled just above the rest, sparkling and spinning like a gold locket on a chain. And there was one person in the house—one big orange furry person—who might know where it belonged.

  Olive flopped out of bed and pulled on jeans and a sweater. From the doorway, she could hear her parents at work in the library, their computer keys performing a brisk percussion routine.

  “Horatio?” she called, edging out into the hall. “Horatio!”

  A cat’s head popped through the bathroom doorway. Even from a distance, Olive could tell that it wasn’t Horatio’s. When it said, “Agent Olive! Enter the safe zone for debriefing! Quick!” in a faintly British accent, Olive knew just whose it was.

  By the time she slipped into the bathroom and closed the door behind her, Harvey was hopping around the toilet in a frenzy of anticipation.

  “Agent Olive! You received my transmission.” The cat lowered his voice. “The game is growing risky. We’re close. Very close.”

  “Close to what, Harvey?”

  “Agent 1-800,” the cat reminded her in an urgent whisper. “Do you want to breeze my blanket?”

  “You mean, ‘Blow your cover’?”

  “I am speaking in code,” said Harvey, eyes widening. “Listen: This is for your ears only. The ant has entered the picnic basket.”

  Olive blinked. “What?”

  Harvey’s eyes got even wider. “The raccoon jumped into the pool,” he hissed. “The BEANS are in the CAN!”

  “What can?”

  Harvey let out an aggravated sigh. “I have managed to trap an intruding intelligence officer,” he said, under his breath.

  Olive’s body tensed. “Really?” she whispered back. “Where?”

  “In there.” Harvey gestured to the cabinet beneath the bathroom sink.

  Olive pictured the living portrait of Aldous McMartin curled up inside that cabinet like a dollar bill in a wallet. That couldn’t be what Harvey meant. But maybe there was something else that Aldous had sent in his place—something small, and vicious, with lots of crawling legs . . .

  A muted rustling came from behind the cabinet door.

  Olive swallowed. “Is it safe to open it?”

  Harvey gave a nod. “The enemy agent is contained.”

  Carefully, Olive reached out and tugged on the cabinet’s brass handle. Inside was the wastebasket where Olive threw strings of used dental floss, when she remembered to floss in the first place. Next to the basket, a stack of toilet paper rolls had been arranged into a small, quilted staircase. Olive pulled out the basket and peeped over its edge. Inside, hopping through a few strands of dental floss, was one tiny, frantic mouse.

  “He had managed to infiltrate the most private of properties!” said Harvey, glancing around the bathroom. “Who can tell what he’s overheard?”

  This thought did make Olive a bit uncomfortable.

  “What do we do with him?” she asked the cat.

  “I had assumed you would know,” said Harvey.

  Olive watched the mouse hop against the basket’s walls. “Aren’t cats supposed to eat mice?”

  “Eat the counterspy?” Harvey’s eyebrows rose. “I’m not sure that follows agency protocol.”

  “It would be mean to put him outside when it’s so cold,” said Olive as the mouse’s miniscule paws scrabbled for a foothold. “I don’t want to hurt him.”

  “Off the record, Agent Olive,” Harvey whispered, “neither do I.”

  “So . . . should we let him go?”

  Harvey paused, considering. “I believe it is our only valid option,” he said at last.

  Olive tipped the basket onto its side. The mouse shot across the floor and disappeared into a crack in the wall.

  “We will meet again, my friend!” Harvey called after it. “Live to die another day!”

  “Harvey,” said Olive, pulling her thoughts away from undercover mice and back to the present, “do you know if there was a woman who Aldous kept prisoner in this house? Someone with long red hair and a silk robe?”

  Harvey stared at her. “. . . A female prisoner in her nightclothes?” he said very slowly. “You have visited Elsewhere, haven’t you?”

  “No, I don’t mean the neighbors on Linden Street,” said Olive. “I mean—a woman who was here before any of them, even Morton. She might have been sick, and she wore a gold pendant, and . . .”

  Harvey’s body stiffened. Strands of splotchily colored fur rose along his back. When he looked at Olive again, his eyes were fragile and scattered, like the shards of a broken window about to fall from their frame.

  “No,” he said, in a voice that was also strange and fragile. “No. Aurelia is gone.” He sidled past Olive, keeping both eyes on her face. “Long gone.”

  “Aurelia?” Olive repeated. “Was that her name?”

  With his backside, Harvey bumped open the bathroom door. “Agent 1-800 out,” he said shortly, before shooting off down the hall. By the time Olive stepped through the door, he had vanished.

  Olive stood in the hallway for several seconds, chewing the inside of her cheek. Aurelia. Why had Olive’s description made Harvey behave so oddly? Was this another secret the cats had been forced to keep?

  Olive crossed her arms across her chest, feeling the spectacles dig softly into her collarbone. She gazed along the hall at the softly glimmering pictures. This was where Aldous had kept his other prisoners. He might have trapped Aurelia there too, concealing her in some well-hidden spot that Olive had never even noticed.

  She scanned the nearest paintings. She had spent more time inside the misty picture of Linden Street than in any other painting in the house, and she hadn’t seen anyone there who fit Mary’s description of Aurelia. There were certainly no thin, sad-faced women in the painting of the bowl of strange fruit, or in Annabelle’s deserted portrait.

  With a tremor in her stomach, Olive strode back toward the painting of the moonlit forest and put the spectacles on. The painted trees shivered. The moon gleamed on the winding white path. Olive thrust her head and shoulders through the frame. A hard, cold wind whipped through her hair.

  “Aurelia?” she shouted into the darkness. “Aurelia, are you here?”

  She listened, her breath tight in her lungs. The wind seemed to still. The trees stopped their bony clattering. But no one answered.

  O
live proceeded toward the other end of the hall. Just as she’d expected, there were no delicate, long-haired women to be found with the grumpy bird on his fencepost, or in the painting on her parents’ bedroom wall, where the fake Olive waved eerily back at her from the deck of the ship on its purplish sea. There were no fluffy orange cats, either. In fact, the more Olive looked, the more cat-less the rooms seemed to be.

  Well, thought Olive, raising her chin, if Horatio was hiding from her, then she would just finish her search on her own.

  In the painting of the gazebo, things were quite a bit friendlier.

  “Hello!” called the dapper man in the black suit, getting up from his seat in the shade. “Back to witness another feat of magic?” With a flourish, he pulled a skein of colorful handkerchiefs out of one breast pocket.

  “Hi, Roberto,” said Olive as the handkerchiefs snapped rapidly pocketward again. “Actually, I’m looking for someone. Have you ever heard of a woman named Aurelia, here, in Elsewhere?”

  “I’m afraid not,” said the magician. “I performed with an Astonisha once,” he added, tapping his chin. “But she was a trained seal.”

  “Oh,” said Olive. “Probably not the same person then.”

  “Come back anytime!” Roberto called as Olive turned back toward the frame. “All shows are free! Matinees are half price!”

  Back in her parents’ room, Olive paused, staring at the miniature image on the deck of the ship again. That small, blurry portrait was only the bait in a failed trap, Olive knew, but the sight of it still made her want to scratch it away, like an ugly bug bite. She would have liked to cram the whole canvas into the parlor fireplace and watch it go up in a warm, cheery burst. If the painting wasn’t magically stuck to the wall—and Olive pried on the frame, just to be sure—she would already have gotten rid of it for good.

  But that was the way Elsewhere worked. Everything stayed the same, day after day, year after year. Like objects in a museum. Or a prison.

  Aldous’s words to Mary echoed in Olive’s head: She is safe. She is comfortable. It might not be what she would choose, but it is still life. This certainly sounded like existence in Elsewhere. But there were parts of Elsewhere that weren’t especially safe or comfortable—like the silvery lake, and the snowy village in the attic, and the moldy ruins of the castle hidden in the blue bedroom.

  Safe . . . and comfortable.

  It might not be especially comfortable to be stuck holding an instrument for eternity, but Olive decided to check the painting of the ballroom anyway.

  “Olive!” shouted the musicians in the orchestra, blatting out a few last notes.

  “Olive!” chorused the dancers, stepping on each other’s toes.

  “Hello,” said Olive, feeling a bit warm and prickly with so many eyes on her at once. “I was wondering . . . Do any of you happen to be named Aurelia?”

  There was a beat of silence, as if everything in this already changeless world had frozen for a split second.

  The musicians and dancers blinked at each other.

  “I don’t think that’s my name,” said the man with the tuba.

  “You know, I’m not sure I have a name,” the flautist spoke up.

  “Me neither,” said the man at the piano.

  “Let’s make up names for each other!” squealed a woman in a pink ball gown.

  The throng of people, who had only the vaguest idea of what names should sound like, began shouting suggestions.

  “Fredegar!” someone yelled as Olive scurried away again. “Eurasia! Pootis!”

  Olive lingered for just a few moments in the painting of the Scottish hillside. Where Rutherford and the cats had destroyed the image of a young Aldous McMartin with a gush of paint thinner, a blurred, muddy spot remained amid the bracken. Olive stood beside it, feeling the gorse scratch against her ankles. Even without searching the hills or the wood beyond, she felt sure that there was no one here. Not anymore. But several yards away, among the blowing heather, Olive spotted a solid black lump.

  She ventured closer.

  Lying in the painted bracken was an old leather bag with rusty clasps. Olive recognized it immediately: The last place she had seen it had been in the young Aldous McMartins’s hands. It must have been hidden here among the grasses ever since. Olive pried the clasps apart. Inside were several jars of Aldous’s paint, a few stained brushes, and the yellowing sheets of paper scrawled with his paint-making recipes. The sight of them—and the memory of Aldous trying to use them to trap Olive and Horatio in a pit for all eternity—made her body twitch. She would have to find a safer place for this. Lifting the bag under one arm, Olive climbed carefully back out of the frame.

  After stuffing the bag temporarily under her bed, Olive crept back down the stairs.

  There were certainly no sickly women in the painting of the stonemasons, or with the towel-wrapped lady dipping her toe in a bathtub.

  The soft whoosh of the coffee machine floated out from the kitchen. Before her mother and father could come back down the hall, Olive darted into the living room and plunged into the painting of the Parisian street.

  Tubby pigeons clucked and hustled around her shoes. Red geraniums in window boxes bounced softly in the breeze of a passing carriage. The woman holding up a glass of champagne tossed it into her escort’s face and flounced away.

  “Um . . .” said Olive, who felt shy around strangers even when she could speak their language. “Excuse me?”

  A few people at the café tables glanced up. Most of them didn’t.

  “Is anyone here named Aurelia?” Olive struggled on. “Aurelia?”

  As one, everybody in the café froze. The geraniums in their window box stopped bouncing. The hooves of the carriage horse went still.

  Still, no one answered her. A moment later, the café resumed its bustle. A pigeon pecked at the tip of Olive’s shoelace.

  She was close to something big, Olive could sense it—something that brought all of Elsewhere to a halt. Her heart thudding, Olive climbed out of the Parisian painting and rushed into the library.

  Several dancing girls in gauzy dresses smiled down at her from their large canvas. They stopped smiling the instant Olive hauled herself through their frame.

  “You again?” said the one with reddish hair, backing away.

  “Get out of here,” whispered the blond girl. “You’ll get us into trouble!”

  The knot of girls looked up at the painted sky. Olive followed their eyes. She wasn’t certain, but it could have been growing darker.

  “I won’t stay,” she promised, shrinking under the girls’ unfriendly frowns. “I just—I just need to know if one of you is Aurelia.”

  The name fell like a blanket of ice. The flowery meadow went still. Painted birds froze in midair. The dancing girls stared at Olive with wide, horrified eyes. Everything—the grass, the sky, the air itself—seemed to be listening.

  “We’re not anyone,” snapped the tallest girl at last. “Now go away!”

  “But do any of you know who—”

  “No,” said the girl. “Get out of here, before he comes!”

  Her cold, painted hand gave Olive a shove.

  Olive tottered backward, stepped on her own heel, plunged through the frame, and landed on her behind on the library rug.

  Straightening the spectacles and rubbing her tailbone, Olive stalked out into the hall. She flumped down at the bottom of the staircase.

  There was something hidden here. Something important. Something very close.

  But Aurelia didn’t seem to be Elsewhere at all. Maybe in the end Aldous had done something far worse with her. Maybe she’d been locked in a bedroom, or kept in a closet, or walled up behind the basement’s chilly stones. This thought made Olive shudder.

  But she was out of less gruesome ideas. There was no painting left in the house where a sick woman wo
uld be safe and comfortable and perfectly hidden. Therefore, there was no place in Elsewhere where Aurelia could be.

  But there was someone else Olive could ask. And, Olive realized with a little flash, she had the perfect excuse for visiting him.

  • • •

  “Leopold?” Olive called, tugging at the chain of the basement’s light bulb.

  “Correct as usual, miss,” said a voice from the shadows.

  “Leopold, I was just passing the painting of Scotland, and I noticed that we left Aldous’s paints and instructions in there.” She crouched down in front of the trapdoor, setting the leather bag beside the big cat. “It’s probably not the most secure place for such valuable items.”

  “Indeed, miss,” said Leopold, wide-eyed. “I apologize for our oversight.”

  “And I thought: Who better to guard them than the one who guarded them in the first place? So I brought them back to you.”

  Leopold’s chin rose. “Your trust is not misplaced, miss. I shall return these objects to their original location, and continue to guard them with my life.”

  “Perfect,” said Olive. “And speaking of guarding secrets, I need to ask you something important.”

  The black cat straightened up at the word important. His chest inflated like a furry beach ball. “I will answer to the best of my abilities,” he said puffily.

  “Thank you.” Olive met Leopold’s sparkling green eyes. “Do you know anything about a woman named Aurelia?”

  Leopold started. “Oh. Her.” The cat blinked rapidly. “That is to say, she was—or rather—she is—or, perhaps I should say—she isn’t someone of whom I know nothing at all.”

  “Really?” asked Olive. “Because it seems like you might know something.”

  “A soldier tries to give the impression of competence,” said Leopold.

  “I’m worried about what might have happened to her.” Olive shifted her feet on the freezing stone floor. “Can you tell me where she might have gone? Give me a hint? Anything?”

  “I would not know where to begin, miss. It’s a long and unpleasant story.”