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

against her body. The papers in her shirt made a muffled crackle.
    Horatio stepped through the doorway of the pink bedroom, gazing up at her. His tail flicked back and forth like a fuzzy metronome. “What are you up to?” he asked.
    “Just…just checking things,” Olive stammered. “Making sure everything is safe.”
    Horatio’s sharp eyes moved across her face. “You look…How shall I put this?” He gave her a little smile. “The expression ‘like the cat who ate the canary’ comes to mind, but I’ve always found it rather prejudiced. No, you look like the girl who ate the forbidden cake, and ended up with a streak of chocolate across her chin.”
    “I got a bad grade on a math quiz today,” Olive improvised quite honestly, standing as still as she could in hopes that the papers wouldn’t crinkle again. “I was thinking about hiding it in there.”
    Horatio’s eyes flicked from Olive’s face to the painting. “In there? ” The cat seemed to hesitate. “I wouldn’t suggest that. In fact, I would suggest avoiding that painting altogether.” With a swish of his tail, Horatio glided abruptly past her.
    “What?” said Olive, gazing after him. “But why?”
    Horatio ignored her.
    “ Why? You can tell me, Horatio. You can trust me.”
    At this, Horatio paused. He turned to meet her eyes. “Olive, why don’t you go wash up,” he said dryly. “You’ve got some guilt on your face.”
    Then, with another tail-swish, Horatio disappeared through a darkened doorway.

9
    A S IT TURNED out, Olive didn’t find a clever place to hide the paint-making papers that night. Unless you think your own backpack is a clever place to hide things. And Olive didn’t.
    Having the papers inside her backpack meant that Olive had to carry the backpack with her everywhere: to the dinner table, to the bathroom, to bed—and the next day, through the crowded halls of junior high, where the effort of avoiding Rutherford would have been trouble enough. It meant that she felt paranoid and preoccupied and even-more-than-usually jumpy. It also meant that she had to keep at least a part of her mind on the safety of the backpack, rather than devoting all of it to imaginary screaming matches with Rutherford. But there was plenty of room left over.
    Why had she let herself start to count on an outsider like Rutherford Dewey? Olive fumed as she slammed her locked door. What was the point of making friends if they were just going to zoom away to schools in Sweden as soon as you were sure they were your friends in the first place? She was just glad she hadn’t told him about the paints or the papers. It would be enough bother weeding him out of her life as it was.
    Olive dragged these angry thoughts through every hour of the school day, until at last she was hauling both them and her backpack up the gritty stone staircase to the art room.
    “Attention, everyone!” Ms. Teedlebaum called, attempting to blow on her dangling whistle necklace and blowing on a ballpoint pen necklace instead. “Settle down and take out the photographs I asked you to bring.”
    While the students obeyed, Ms. Teedlebaum, who was barefoot that day for one reason or another, taped a large photograph to the chalkboard. A hush fell over the room as, one by one, the students noticed the picture. Olive, sensing the sudden silence, stopped scowling down at her tabletop and looked up at the photograph.
    It was a family portrait. Judging by the kinky red hair on everyone’s head, it was a Teedlebaum family portrait. Six family members—a mother and father, two boys and two girls, one of whom must have been theyoung Ms. Teedlebaum—posed in front of a large fireplace. All six of them were in costume. The mother and four children were dressed as logs, their arms and faces poking out of holes cut in painted cardboard tubes. The father, on the other hand, was dressed as an axe.
    No one in the class spoke, but as everyone looked at the photograph, a palpable air of