AFTER BEING BANISHED downstairs by Horatio, Olive shuffled unhappily through the empty rooms, making a dive for the living room couch when she heard her mother’s cheery voice call out, “I’m home!” from the front door.
For the next few hours, Olive was stuck under several blankets and Mrs. Dunwoody’s close supervision, pretending that her stomach hurt and that her scraped palms didn’t. She was too worried about Horatio’s anger and Morton’s terror to concentrate on a book. Instead, she watched TV until she could feel her brain beginning to melt, and all the storylines ran together, and soon she couldn’t remember who had won what talent contest or stolen whose boyfriend or insulted whose family and had to fight in a magical duel.
But sometime in the midafternoon, when the soap operas and talk shows had finally given way to cartoons, there was a sharp tap at the front door.
“I’ll get it,” said Mrs. Dunwoody, setting down the stack of math tests she was grading. “Don’t get up, Olive.” She patted Olive on the head on her way out.
Olive craned over the arm of the sofa, leaning as far as she could toward the hallway without toppling straight onto the floor. Her first thought was that it must be Rutherford, and a part of her—a small, mostly hidden part—hoped that it was. Her second thought was that it might be Annabelle herself, perhaps in disguise as a delivery person, hiding her face behind a huge bouquet of flowers. “These are for you,” Annabelle would say, and Mrs. Dunwoody would invite her inside, and then the floodgates of real trouble would break open…
But the voice that came from the front door wasn’t Rutherford’s or Annabelle’s.
“Hello,” said a voice that was accompanied by the jingling sound of many keys and pens and whistles. “I’m Florence Teedlebaum, the art teacher at the junior high. I noticed that Olive left her project at school, and after I learned your address from the school office, I thought I would drop it off so that she could finish it in time for its due date on Monday.”
Olive, still wrapped in blankets, wriggled off the couch and sidled along the walls toward the entryway, keeping out of sight.
“How nice of you,” Mrs. Dunwoody was saying. “I’m Alice Dunwoody, Olive’s mother. I know Olive has always enjoyed art class.”
“As have I,” said Ms. Teedlebaum as Olive slipped across the hall and flattened herself against the staircase so she could peek through the banister. “And what do you do, Olive?”
“Alice,” said Mrs. Dunwoody.
“Florence,” said Ms. Teedlebaum correctively.
“Florence,” Mrs. Dunwoody repeated, after a brief pause. “I’m a mathematician.”
“Really!” exclaimed Ms. Teedlebaum. “I’ve never understood much about math. I just couldn’t see the point of adding up the same numbers over and over again when the answers almost always come out just the same, anyway.”
“Yes…” said Mrs. Dunwoody slowly. “Well, it was so nice of you to come all this way to bring Olive her homework.”
Ms. Teedlebaum flapped her hands. Even muffled by the sleeves of her jacket, her bracelets jangled loudly enough for Olive to hear. “Not at all. It was no trouble. I’ve been to this house before. As a matter of fact, I had a bit of an ulterior motive in driving over here.”
“Oh?” said Mrs. Dunwoody.
OH?! echoed a voice in Olive’s head.
“Your collection of Aldous McMartin’s art,” said Ms. Teedlebaum. “It’s practically legendary in this town.”
Olive’s heart rocketed up into her trachea.
“Oh,” said Mrs. Dunwoody, “I hardly think of that as ours. I’m not sure a person can truly own a work of art, anyway. I really think of it as belonging to the house.”
Olive swallowed. Her heart slipped a tiny bit lower in her throat.
“Where are my manners?” Mrs. Dunwoody asked. “Come in, please. I’m a rusty hostess. I could count the number of visitors we’ve had in this house on one hand.”
Olive listened with mounting dread as Ms. Teedlebaum’s shoes tapped into the foyer. “But I bet you wouldn’t need to use your hand, being a mathematician.”
Mrs. Dunwoody laughed. “That’s very true.”
“I’ve always thought it would be handy to have more fingers, just so you could keep count of more things,” said Ms. Teedlebaum.
“I suppose that would be hand-y, yes,” said Mrs. Dunwoody.
Both women giggled. Olive thought she might be sick.
“Would you like a short tour?” Mrs. Dunwoody asked.
No! No! NO!! chanted the voice in Olive’s head.
“Yes!” said Ms. Teedlebaum.
“Let’s start in the library.” Mrs. Dunwoody ushered her guest toward the heavy double doors. “This is one of my favorite paintings in the house…”
The sound of voices and footsteps and jangling keys faded as the two women walked into the room. Olive remained crouched against the staircase, knowing that they were gazing up at the painting of the dancing girls in the flowery meadow. When they moved into the parlor to look at the French street scene, Olive wriggled across the hall, pressing close to the doorway.
“Lovely,” she could hear Ms. Teedlebaum saying. “Don’t those pigeons look as though they might take flight at any moment?”
They drifted through the dining room and the kitchen, Ms. Teedlebaum gasping and oohing and exclaiming, Olive shuffling surreptitiously behind in her wrapping of blankets. When the women moved toward the stairs, Olive had to hop backward through the parlor doors, hiding in the corner until she heard Ms. Teedlebaum comment on the beautiful light reflected in the silver lake and the details of the bare branches in the moonlit forest.
“There are more down this part of the hall, in the guest bedrooms,” she heard Mrs. Dunwoody saying. The women stepped into the blue bedroom, and Olive waddled as quickly as she could up the staircase, still wrapped like a pupa in her quilted cocoon.
A moment later, Mrs. Dunwoody and Ms. Teedlebaum reemerged, and Olive leaped through her own bedroom door in time to avoid being seen. Even while she eavesdropped on the conversation in the hallway, Olive couldn’t help but notice that her room had already been stripped of every trace of her ill-fated artwork. The paints, the jars, the handwritten instructions, and even her paintbrushes had vanished. For someone without opposable thumbs, Horatio had certainly been thorough.
“Look at the colors in this still life,” Ms. Teedlebaum was observing. “And what strange fruits. I’m not sure I’ve seen any of these before.”
“I’ve noticed that too,” said Mrs. Dunwoody. “Perhaps they are Victorian varieties that just aren’t cultivated anymore.”
“Or perhaps they’re all mutants,” said Ms. Teedlebaum, as if this was a more reasonable explanation.
“Hmm,” said Mrs. Dunwoody.
The art teacher jingled into the lavender bedroom, where Annabelle’s empty portrait waited. Olive zigged out of her room and into the blue bedroom, crouching behind the door.
“This is interesting,” she could hear Ms. Teedlebaum say. “There’s a painting in this frame, but there’s nothing in the painting. It looks like the background was painted, but the foreground was never completed.”
“That’s strange,” Mrs. Dunwoody agreed. “I never noticed that.”
“Perhaps the artist was trying to make some sort of statement…Something about how what isn’t there when we expect it to be can be even more powerful than what is there.”
Olive clutched the doorknob with both hands. Even wrapped in the blankets, her body shuddered with a wave of sudden cold.
The floor creaked as the women stepped back into the hall.
“Is there a third floor?” Ms. Teedlebaum asked. “The house looks so tall, from the outside…”
If she hadn’t been holding on to the doorknob, Olive might have collapsed completely.
“It’s funny you should mention that,” said Mrs. Dunwoody. “From the height of the house, it’s clear that there was a third floor, but its entrance has been walled up or sealed over entirely. We haven’t even found the spot where the entrance used to be.”
Olive let out the breath she’d been holding. It came through her nose in short, shaky puffs.
“Well, thank you so much for letting me look around. This has been a real pleasure,” said Ms. Teedlebaum, clanking and jingling past the door where Olive hid. Olive watched the puff of kinky red hair descend the staircase, followed by her mother’s much-less-puffy head. She waited until she heard two sets of footsteps on the hallway floor below. Then she waddled out into the hall and down the staircase, clutching her blankets, trying to look as though she’d been up in her room being innocently sick the whole time.
Mrs. Dunwoody glanced up as Olive came down the steps.
“Olive, your teacher brought over an art project for you to finish. Wasn’t that nice of her?”
“Yes,” said Olive, in a sickly croak. “Thank you, Ms. Teedlebaum.”
Ms. Teedlebaum smiled and flapped her hands again. “It was nothing. I hope you feel better soon.”
“I hope you—” said Olive, in knee-jerk fashion, before catching herself. “Um—feel good too.”
Ms. Teedlebaum didn’t seem to find this odd. She just went on smiling. Then she wrapped one of her three scarves back around her neck, setting the cords of keys and trinkets clinking, said “Good-bye!” and jangled out the door.
“What a nice woman,” said Mrs. Dunwoody, closing it behind her.
Leaning her forehead against the front windows, Olive watched the art teacher’s rusted station wagon bump out of the drive and pull away. Her heartbeat was finally slowing back to its normal rate, but her mind was still whirring along at high speed.
How had Ms. Teedlebaum known about Aldous McMartin’s paintings? Was she only interested in them as art…or was she looking for something more? Olive felt the hairs on the back of her neck rise as a new thought shot across her mind: Did Ms. Teedlebaum have something to do with the note from Annabelle that had been planted in the art classroom?
Olive pressed her face to the cool glass, feeling genuinely sick once again. It was just as Annabelle had written—it was hard to know whom to trust. These days, Olive wondered if it was safe to trust anyone at all.