Free The Second Spy: The Books of Elsewhere: Volume 3 by Jacqueline West

back through the frame into the hall, pinning the sheaf of precious papers to her chest with one arm and trying to catch herself with the other. Instead, she landed with a loud “ Ooof! ” on her stomach. She hadn’t even had time to roll over before a voice hissed, “Freeze! Present identification!”
    Olive tilted her head and looked up into a pair of manic green eyes. The reassembled papers and the photograph were trapped underneath her body. She was quite sure that they were safe from Harvey’s sight, but her heart started thumping like a bass drum anyway.
    “It’s—it’s just me,” she stammered.
    “Ah. Agent Olive.” Harvey sat down beside her head and spoke into his imaginary transistor watch. “Suspect intercepted. She’s one of ours.” His eyes zinged back to Olive’s face. “All clear in the yard, under and above ground. However,” he went on, lowering his voice, “it is my obligation to inform you that Agent 411 has ascertained that some of the jars are indeed missing.”
    “Agent 411? Do you mean Leopold?”
    Harvey glanced over both of his yellow-painted shoulders before giving a short nod. “Our current objective is to prevent the loss of any more materials.”
    “Good,” said Olive. “But shouldn’t you be…um…monitoring the…parameters?” Olive wasn’t sure that this was quite the right word, but it appeared to be close enough for Harvey.
    “Absolutely correct, Agent Olive. I’ll complete another survey of the territory. Over and under. In and out.” With another nod, Harvey bolted down the stairs.
    Olive rolled over. She pulled the spectacles off her nose and tucked them carefully down the frontof her shirt. Then she slid the photograph into her pocket. The house was quiet, but she didn’t want to be startled again with the pile of papers in her hands. She needed a place to hide them—someplace safe, someplace Annabelle couldn’t get at them—where they could wait until she had time to experiment. Just in case Agent 1-800 surprised her again, Olive tucked the papers inside her shirt, where they scratched and tickled softly against her skin. Then she glanced around the hallway.
    She wasn’t going to hide the pages inside the painting of the moonlit forest. No way. Even the thought of that place made her shudder. She wasn’t going to hide them beside the silvery lake either. She couldn’t leave them in the painting of the bowl of weird fruit; that would be like playing hide-and-seek in a room with only one piece of furniture. Olive shuffled past the bowl of fruit and neared the craggy hillside with its tiny, distant church.
    Before she’d reached the edge of the frame, something in the air seemed to change. Olive sniffed. The air in this part of the hall usually smelled like dust and old wood, with the faint scents of potpourri and mothballs from the guest rooms woven in. But what Olive smelled now was smoke.
    Wood smoke. The smell of a cozy log fire in an old fireplace.
    She turned toward the painting. A single golden leaf was dancing along the hillside, twirling and leaping, looking absolutely delighted with itself and its world. And Olive wasn’t wearing the spectacles.
    She stepped closer to the canvas, inhaling the spicy, smoky scent that was drifting from inside. At the edges of the painting, a furze of trees could be seen, their golden leaves as soft as feathers. And today, the bracken that covered the hillside didn’t look thorny and brown—it had blossomed into an ocean of tiny pink and white flowers. How had she never noticed how beautiful this place was?
    Olive put on the spectacles. This time, instead of a flock of birds, a rich swirl of golden leaves blew across the hillside, whirling and tumbling through the air. A sense of certainty filled her. This wasn’t just a perfect place to hide things. This was where she was meant to hide things. Olive wrapped her hands around the bottom of the frame and—
    “Olive?”
    Olive clapped her arms protectively