The Jewel and the Key (31 page)

Addie actually took a step back, as if dodging a slap. “What? How—how could that be?”

But even as the words were leaving her lips, she knew Meg was right. She should have realized! Those were all Meg's things in the crates, weren't they? The costumes. The props. The papers. Even—she glanced down at herself in dismay—even the dress she was wearing.

A dull heat spread across her face. Meg must think she was a thief! “I had no idea it was yours! I found it in an old crate in my dad's bookstore—”

“Well, I don't know how it turned up there...
if
it did.”

“I didn't
steal
it, if that's what you're saying.” Addie's head was pounding. She pressed her fingers to her forehead, wishing just once she could blurt out the truth. “I think...” she began unhappily. Oh, how to explain it? “I think its both of ours. I think it's a very weird, creepy mirror, and it belongs to both of us at the same time.”

Meg threw herself into Emma Mae's leather chair and put the mirror down on the desk. “I don't know what you mean,” she said shortly. “But it's certainly ridiculous to say you discovered it in some bookstore when I'm the one who had it made in the first place! How is that even possible?”

Addie stared. “You ... had it made?”

“Of course I did. Which is why I have trouble believing—”

“Oh, pl ease don't be so angry!” Addie burst out. She felt near tears. “Please, please believe me. I would never steal anything from you. I don't understand at all,” she went on softly, “but—please just tell me about it. About how you had the mirror made. Maybe I can figure it out then.”

Meg examined her warily. ‘All right,” she said. “But only because up to this point, I've had a good impression of you, Miss McNeal.” Addie's heart sank.
Up to this point...
But to her relief, Meg went on. “I designed the mirror specially. And I paid a silversmith to make it.”

“Why?”

Meg smiled a thin, sardonic smile. “Because I had no luck,” she said flatly.

“What do you mean?”

“Have you never been down on your luck? Have you never thought other people lived charmed lives and why didn't you? That it's all so hopeless that you need
something,
some kind of lucky amulet or wishing ring to help you change your life?” She raised her eyebrows in self-mockery. “Sad, yes? But that was how I felt once, long ago. And since no fairy godmother seemed likely to swoop down and give me anything like that, I custom-ordered it.”

Addie dropped onto the love seat like a marionette whose strings had been cut. Meg had “custom-ordered” the mirror, the way Dad had custom-ordered the windows for the bookshop? How was that possible? To custom order something so magical? “Do you...” she began.

“Do I what?” Meg's voice was still unfriendly.

“Do you know what the mirror ... how it works?”

“What do you mean?” Meg clicked her nails against the desk. “It works like any other mirror.”

“But is that
all?”
Addie was starting to feel desperate. “Because—” She stopped herself. “Because I think—it
does
things.”

Meg leaned forward, focusing intently on Addie, scanning her face for signs of something. Insanity? Disingenuousness? Addie forced herself to meet her eyes directly. Finally, Megs gaze dropped to the mirror on the desk, and she ran a finger over the embossed dancers, the laurel and olive trees. “All right. I suppose there is something to this mirror. I'll tell you honestly, I've always had a superstition about it.” She paused. “Tell me what it does, Miss McNeal.”

“When I look in it, things ... change.” Addie tried not to let Meg's tone intimidate her. “I don't think I can explain it more than that. It brought me here, that's the only thing I know for sure, and—”

“It led me here, too,” Meg said unexpectedly.

The two of them looked at each other in surprise.

“How?”

“Through a dream.” Addie watched with sharpened interest as the director picked up the mirror and turned it slowly in her hands so that it caught the light from the hallway. “When I was your age, Addie, I was a lot like you. I was bright, though with little experience. I had energy and talent—oh, yes, you do too, you know—but in one way, I was very different. I worked in a factory. Every day but Sunday. Rolling cigars, as I'd been doing since I was ten years old.”

“Ten!”

Meg made a sour face. “Which is why I don't smoke. I had to run to my shift at the factory after school every day. And then I'd force myself to stay awake past midnight to finish my schoolwork. And in the morning, it would all start again.” For a moment, she looked out into space, remembering. Then her gaze snapped back to Addie. “Can you see why it seemed only some sort of magic could transport me from that life to this?”

Addie nodded. She thought of hanging out with Almaz after school, going to secondhand stores, listening to Whaley practice his guitar. Sure, she helped out in the bookstore, but not if she had homework or some after-school activity. “Go on,” she said.

“My parents had been on the stage, back in Prague, and they told me stories of the theaters where they'd performed, the great actors they had worked with. I vowed I would follow in their footsteps, no matter what. But the years passed, and I started to feel it was an impossible dream.”

Addie looked more closely at Meg. She really was young, but there were tight lines at the corners of her eyes. It must have been a struggle to get where she was now. “But you made it come true, didn't you?”

“Yes. I worked double shifts in the factory and then at different little theaters around town. Vaudeville, too. If you had told me I would one day be the director at a place like the Jewel, though, I would have laughed in your face.”

“But what did the mirror have to do with it?”

“Nothing!” Meg Turner laughed, and then looked serious. “Or rather, nothing I can prove. When the Powells advertised for a director, I
knew
it was too much to wish for. But...” She paused. “But then, I had a dream. I dreamed I was leading a production here, that I was a grand lady in charge of creating ... enchantment. There's nothing strange in that, is there? I'll bet you've had dreams like that.” She looked straight into Addie's eyes, and Addie felt as if she were staring right into her soul. “Except that when I came to the Jewel for my interview, it was the exact same theater as the theater in my dream.” She settled back in Emma Mae's chair. ‘And no, I'd never been here before. But when I walked in, I knew instantly that I
belonged
here. That this was my future. Does that sound crazy?”

“No,” Addie said, and then added softly, “And you're right. I have had a dream like that.”

“In my dream, I was holding a mirror, a silver mirror with gorgeous embossing on its back.” She shook her head. “I try not to be superstitious. I'll shout the name
Macbeth
from the rafters if I feel like it. But this dream was something I couldn't ignore. So while I waited to hear whether Emma Mae and her husband would allow me to have the future I was burning to have, I took all my savings—and the little twisted handkerchief of money my grandmother left me when she died—and I went to the best silversmith in town, Sven Taggerud. I ordered this mirror from him. I told him I was going to work at the Jewel, and I would pay the balance with my salary, though for all I knew, it was money I might never have.” She picked up the mirror by its handle and held it out to Addie. “He did a beautiful job, don't you think?”

“Yes,” Addie said softly, taking it and glancing from the lithe flowing forms of the dancers to Meg Turner, all of them draped in scarves and sparking with life. She smiled. “It's like you.”

“I'm no lovely dancer.” Meg snorted. “I'm a raging Medusa. Ask any actor. But it's like my imagination, you can say that. It's like what I bring to life here at the Jewel.” She smiled. “They gave me the job. And I never put on a production without that mirror. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” Addie said slowly. “I've thought about the mirror a lot, and what it has to do with the Jewel. But all I can think of is”—she looked up at Meg, a bit uncertain—“that the theater's sort of a mirror itself, isn't it?”

“Some people think so. A mirror in which the world is made magically clearer, brighter, less confusing. Complete, in a way our jagged, messy world can never be.” Meg stood up. “Now, maybe I'm a fool, but suddenly I don't think you stole this at all. Though I still don't understand how we've come to have the same mirror.” She wrinkled her brow. “How do you explain
that,
my apprentice?”

Addie drew in her breath and looked steadily at Meg Turner.
I'll tell her,
she decided.
I never thought it would be her, of all people, but now I see it has to be.

But suddenly the door to the office opened, and Emma Mae Powell stuck in her head. “Meg,” she said, “I've just got a letter. For Reg. Can you come out here a moment?”

“Yes, of course, Emma,” Meg said, quick worry in her voice. She went over to her friend and put a hand on her arm. Emma Mae squeezed it.

“Are you all right, Mrs. Powell?” Addie asked.

Emma Mae looked stricken. “I'm fine,” she said. “Excuse us a moment, Miss McNeal. We'll join you at supper.” She linked her arm through Meg's and the door closed after them.

Addie went over to the desk and sank down shakily into the wooden chair. What did it mean that the mirror had once been Meg's?

She turned it over and caught her reflection in the glass. And though she knew what the consequences would be, she couldn't tear her eyes away. It was as if some force were pulling her out of the past, out of Reg's world and Meg's, and back to her own, whether she wanted to go or not.

When she finally tore her gaze away, there were no troll masks, no inkwells and pens on the desk in front of her. The walls of the cabinet were still scraped where Whaley had used the crowbar to force them open. The costumes that had accumulated over the many years since she had sat here with Meg Turner were piled up around the room.

Slowly, Addie raised herself out of Emma Mae's chair and stood perfectly still, catching her breath as the new century settled around her like dust particles drifting in the beam of a spotlight.

The battlefield was silent. Not because everyone was dead, but because everyone was waiting. She was waiting, too. She felt the same watery sickness in her stomach that she'd felt when she'd tried out for
Peer Gynt,
but none of the elation. She was in the dark, in a trench, walls shored up with sandbags. Ladders climbed to the lip of the ground above. Wreaths of mist curled around her. When she tipped up her head, she saw washes of gray clouds across the sky, heard the lonely caw of a crow. Slick brown mud squelched under her feet, and the smell in her nostrils was clay and worms and something like wet dog.

There were many others with her, pressed against the ladders and sandbags. An occasional cough broke the stillness. The soldier beside her was so close that her sleeve brushed his. She had one foot on a ladder—she knew already they were heading to the surface. Her weight made it tip to one side and sink deeper in the mud. She climbed to the top and lifted her head over the edge of the earthworks.

Trenches zigzagged to the horizon, guarded by forests of barbed wire. Beyond the wire stretched an endless field of churned mud and torn-up grass. Huge craters dotted the landscape. What trees remained were leafless, bulletridden.

Forms thrust up through the mud. Arms, feet. Even faces. All caked in mud and the same color as the earth into which they had been driven, as if pounded in by hammer blows.

A soldier grabbed her arm and jerked her down. “What are you doing? They haven't signaled, you idiot.” It was Whaley.

“But we need to look!” She inched back up the ladder. “Don't you want to know what we're getting ourselves into?”

“You wait for your orders. That's what the officers are for.”

“But then how can we protect ourselves?”

He pulled her down again and she saw that she'd been mistaken. The soldier wasn't Whaley.

“We're not here to protect ourselves,” he said. “Why can't you understand that?”

A high-pitched whistle shrilled, and the darkness of the trench suddenly swarmed with life. Uniforms brushed against one another, boots squelched, bayonets were fastened with a clink. Sharp, pungent sweat broke out on unwashed bodies.

The soldier leaned in toward Addie, and his eyes were blue-black, like clouds blowing in on an ocean front, bringing a storm. His hair was black and straight. And on his head, instead of a helmet, he wore a battered tin circlet: Macbeth's crown.

“No jest, lady,” he said.

A second whistle blew. “Go! Go! Go!” The ladders swarmed with bodies. Addie managed to get her hand on a rung and climbed up while others jostled and pushed.

They breached the top and started running.

A whining shriek arced across the sky toward them, like a mosquito coming closer and closer and getting louder and louder, until above their heads the air split apart. A body flew back, knocking Addie to the ground—

She jerked up, gasping.

The hands on the clock beside her bed pointed to four thirty. She was in the civilian world of quilts and alarm clocks and pillows. But the chill of the underworld was damp on her arms. And her body ached, as if she really had slammed against the hard, frozen ground. She had a feeling that the dream had opened a door, and if she wasn't careful, she could slip back through it into that unprotected place where you had no choice but to rise and face the enemy.

And then she was fully awake.

What had brought
that
on?