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

unease filled the room. Behind the smiling Teedlebaum faces lay the implication that Father Axe was going to chop up the rest of his family—chop them up, and then perhaps toss them on the fire that flared cheerily behind them.
    A boy near the front of the room tentatively raised his hand. “That’s your family, right?”
    “Yes,” said Ms. Teedlebaum. She glanced up from the pencil she was twisting in the sharpener around her neck. “That’s us, about twenty years ago.”
    “Why—why are you…” stammered a boy in a much-too-large sweater who sat to Olive’s left. “Why—”
    “Why are you all dressed like that?” The girl in eyeliner took over.
    “My father ran a lumberyard,” said Ms. Teedlebaum, setting up a giant sketchpad next to the photo.
    “Was it Halloween?” asked the girl.
    “No,” said Ms. Teedlebaum. “All right, everyone. When you start sketching from a photograph, you want to look at the big picture. Get a sense of scale.” Ms. Teedlebaum turned toward the giant sketchbook and began to draw. “See how I’m sketching six ovalsfor the faces? You can tell that I’m planning to fill the whole page. Now I’ll make a very simple outline of the bodies.” Ms. Teedlebaum drew the shapes of five logs and one axe, her pencil making soft hissing noises against the paper. “You can always erase any lines you don’t need later. Once you’ve got those outlines, you can start adding the details.” Ms. Teedlebaum tossed her pencil into the chalkboard tray. It sent up a little puff of powdery white dust. “We’ll be painting these eventually, but we’re going to sketch before we paint. Just like you have to learn to roller skate before you can ski. As for materials,” Ms. Teedlebaum went on as the students blinked at each other, “if you need another pencil or eraser or a new sheet of paper, just look around the room. They’re scattered everywhere. You should be able to find what you need if you look under enough other things.” With a smile that seemed to suggest she’d just said something very wise, Ms. Teedlebaum clinked and jangled across the room to her desk.
    Olive looked back down at the photograph of Morton’s family. Then she picked up her pencil and slowly made two large circles on her sheet of paper. Morton was already in a painting; he didn’t need to be in another one. And creating another portrait of Lucinda Nivens could mean a whole houseful of trouble, as Olive was well aware. Her portrait was going to contain just two people.
    Frowning at the photo, Olive settled down to work. As she drew, a teeny bit of her fury and fear seemed to trail out through the tip of her pencil, and Olive wondered if she might finally be able to turn all of this trouble into something worthwhile.
    Olive tried to keep her mind on her project as she boarded the bus that afternoon. Rutherford was sitting in their usual seat near the front, but Olive marched right past him, plunking down in a seat several rows farther back. From the corner of her eye, she saw his head poke into the aisle, his smudged glasses swiveling in her direction. She turned toward the window.
    When the bus ground to a stop at the foot of Linden Street, Olive bolted up the aisle and hit the sidewalk at a run before Rutherford could make it to the steps.
    “Olive!” she heard him shouting after her. “Olive, wait! You’re making a mistake!”
    But Olive didn’t even give him a glance.
    She wasn’t making a mistake about Rutherford. He was the one making a mistake if he thought she’d listen to him now.
    Blinking away a few irritating tears, Olive slammed through the house’s heavy front door and locked it behind her.
    The silence within the old stone walls flooded over her like water. Her breath seemed suddenly, shockingly loud. For a moment, she thought she’d caught thesound of muffled footsteps, running across the floorboards above—but then she realized that this was just her own speeding heartbeat. Clutching the