The Jewel and the Key (36 page)

The memory of
Peer Gynt
on Meg Turner's stage came back to her, almost unbearably. She felt Reg's hand on her waist, heard her own voice telling the actors how to dance, how to play the scene.
Someday,
Meg Turner had said,
you'll be sitting in my spot.

Addie closed her eyes and wished hard that someday she really would be in Meg's place. At the Jewel. And she wanted Whaley there, too. Playing his guitar here in Seattle, with her and Dad and Zack and Almaz and all the people they both loved, not across the world in the middle of a war. She tilted her head back, looked up into the sky with its skeins of gray clouds, speckled with stars like sequins in a thin black scarf. And in the blackness, time seemed to melt away, the different layers to merge into one.

Her feet had automatically taken the familiar route back across the park. She was walking like someone in a dream, her steps muffled by the grass. It could be any time at all in here. The twenty-first century. The twentieth. Even earlier.

As if following some long set-out path, she turned toward the yew hedge.

The angel and the soldier were waiting for her, strangely unfamiliar in the patches of shadow and light, where the street lamps speckled them through the tree branches. The moon was reflected in the waters of the fountain at their feet, like a silver fish in a black, black sea.

Addie crouched down in front of them, balancing herself with a hand on the pedestal, and read the words:
DEDICATED TO THE MEMORY OF THOSE SEATTLE NATIVES WHO GAVE THEIR LIVES IN THE GREAT WAR
. She leaned back thoughtfully, keeping a hand on the base, near the angel's foot.

It was cold all of a sudden. She huddled into the light sweater she had thrown on earlier in the evening and let her eyes rest on the list of names on the base, wandering from
A
down the alphabet, as if reading a poem.

And then her blood went cold and sluggish in her veins.

There, carved in the marble, was the name R. Powell.

Addie didn't know how long she stayed in the garden. She lay on the frigid white marble bench and cried until the stinging in her eyelids was as bad as the tear gas.

Time had been her friend. She'd crossed its borders and found the Jewel, the living, breathing home of her heart. She'd found Reg and Meg. She'd found her calling.

But now she'd found out too much.

So time was her enemy, and it was an enemy no one could fight. Not with a Lewis gun or an A4 or a hundred yards of microfiche.

When she got back home, Dad was furious at her for disappearing without a word. Whaley was worried, but she didn't even want to talk to him. She raced upstairs, locked her door, and pulled the photo of the
Peer Gynt
performance out of the frame of her dresser mirror where she'd stuck it. Once again, she read the faint, pointy script:
R. before the mob.

And the realization hit her:
R.
was certainly Reg. But
the mob
didn't mean the audience.

It meant “the mobilization.”

Someone had written that after he'd left for the war.

She got into bed, but the clock dragged its hands around like a ball and chain. Sleep fled from her as thoughts looped through her brain.
He died in 1918.... But maybe it isn't him.... His name is right there on the monument.... But R could be Robert. Or Ron. Or Ross.... How did he die? Artillery fire? Or gas? Or ... no, he couldn't have ... he couldn't have.... But its right there. On the monument....

The words dissolved and she was sitting on the marble bench beside the cenotaph. The stone angel looked down at her. The feathers on her wings stirred.

The earth was hurtling around on its axis under an electric blue sky. She could actually feel it spinning. Mountains, plains, and oceans flashed by like time-lapse photography, a film speeding over time zones, flashing over longitudes. The air sizzled above a desert landscape. Far away, the sound of women wailing. A fighter jet swooped in at unbelievable speed. Monuments to ancient kings exploded and were gone.

Then the world was spinning faster, and a vast snowy steppe spread out before her, tanks and trucks bogged down in the drifts. Horses hitched to big guns frozen where they'd fallen. Across a frigid river stood a city of factories and brick apartment buildings. Frightened eyes were peering out, watching, as the army slowly advanced, leaving behind their dead animals, their frozen jeeps, pushing on toward the river.

The snow melted into a lush field of poppies, flaming orange in tall grass, farmhouses in the distance. The poppies dissolved into churned mud, and Addie saw gashes in the earth where men writhed like worms, packs on their backs and guns useless in their hands. Gas hung in the thick, choking air.

She couldn't look. She jerked her head up to see a sky lashed with white tongues of cloud. The sun burned through them, showering the muddy fields with gold. A biplane dived like a hawk, wings rattling with speed. A second plane rose to meet it. Sprays of bullets flew from beneath the wings, and the first plane spiraled down in a swirl of black smoke and the reek of gasoline.

The angel's wings beat, powerful eagle wings churning the air. But she couldn't rise. She strained and sweated, holding the soldier's motionless form, and Addie understood that he was as heavy as wet earth and clay, while the angel was frail flesh and bone. She hovered over the pedestal, struggling, wings thrashing. The tip of her foot barely left the ground.

Addie grabbed the angel's foot, tried to fling her up into the heavens. The winged girl tripped into the sky, but still hovered low. Addie climbed up onto the empty pedestal, banging her knees and scraping her hands. She grabbed the heel of the soldier's boot, to push him up, too. Cold bit her hand like a serpent.

The angel shook her head. “I can only raise them one at a time,” she whispered, “while they cut down thousands.”

Addie jerked out of bed, ran to the bathroom, and threw up.

Her next days were leaden. She could barely push herself through the hours. Almaz kept asking what was wrong, what had happened the night of the party. Nothing, Addie said. Nothing. What could she say? She couldn't confide in her or Whaley, and that hurt, but it wasn't anything compared to what she was feeling about Reg.

She passed her Algebra II test. She helped Dad and Whaley in the bookstore. She found herself crying at odd moments. Was there any way to stop it from happening? How could she? It seemed impossible. His name was already listed among the dead. She'd searched and searched for evidence of the past, evidence of its breathing life, and instead this was all she'd found: blunt proof of a life cut short. And yet she couldn't help wishing, hoping...

But all I can do,
she thought,
is try to change what happens now.

No matter what, she would find those photos. And wait. Wait impatiently to get back to the Jewel.

Why
was there no Monday edition of the paper on microfiche? If it existed at all, she was sure the library would have had it somewhere. After all, Reg's article was about the Everett massacre. That had to have historic value. You'd think it would have been preserved.

She kept plowing through books about Pacific Northwest history and the IWW and Seattle theaters. Fearfully, she searched for references to a soldier named R. Powell who had died in World War I.

But she found nothing.

When Whaley listened to war news on the radio, she left the room. She didn't ask him if he'd taken the army's test, passed the physical. She only asked him to wait until Friday before he submitted his enlistment forms, until she had a chance to look for the photos at the theater. And she knew he wouldn't have agreed at all, except that he was worried about her and probably thought it would make her feel better.

Friday finally came. When the last bell rang, she slammed her locker shut and rushed home, wanting to leave immediately for the Jewel. But she got held up by Zack, who needed help with a science project. Then Dad wanted her to run a late bill to the post office.... To her frustration, it was nearly five when she finally got to the bus stop.

At Third and Pine she jumped off the bus and raced around the corner to the Jewel. She bounded up the back steps, found the key, unlocked the door, and dashed along the hall to Meg Turner's office.

With single-minded determination, she flung open the wooden cabinets. They were thick with dust and speckled with black mold. She stuck her head inside, swept her hands along the wood.

Nothing.

She'd hoped there would be a desk, like in Emma Mae's office. But someone must have gotten rid of it. The only piece of furniture was a rocking chair. Card tables were folded in the corner. Empty cardboard boxes were piled up beside them. Moldering scripts and ancient bills lay in messy piles on the bookshelves. Addie flipped through all of them, but no newspaper clippings or photographs fell out.

She opened a closet and found a mangy fur coat hanging on one of the knobs on the wall. But that was all, aside from rusty hangers. She even stepped inside to check the pockets of the coat and stubbed her toe against a loose floorboard in the process.

“Ow!” Annoyed, she sat down on the floor, pulled off her thin shoe, and rubbed her toe. Then she noticed that the loose floorboard stuck up about a quarter of an inch from the others. The one next to it did, too.

Wait a second.
With a rush of excitement, she shifted onto her knees and started prying the board up. It lifted fairly easily. Nothing was underneath it, but—was the next one loose as well? A splinter ran into her finger as she jammed her fingertips under it. She didn't know why she suddenly felt like she was onto something, but she did. Despite herself, she was murmuring, “Oh, please, please, please...”

But there was nothing under the second board, either.

Just cobwebs and two spiders frantically spinning.

This was getting ridiculous! Who would store photos under a floorboard? What was she thinking? She stormed out of the office, banging the door as she went. “Damn it!” She kicked her foot against the cold radiator, making her toe throb even more. Then she sank down onto the floor and drew her knees to her chest.

She'd failed in every conceivable way. Like the poor struggling angel, unable to save even one soldier, she couldn't manage to find even a scrap of an old newspaper to save the Jewel.

She put her head down on her knees, closed her eyes, and the dream was with her again—bombs and guns and gas, and the soldiers running straight into the machine-gun fire.

A chill breeze, wafting in from a crack in the doorway, touched her neck with icy fingers.

She lifted her head and opened her eyes. “Reg?”

Of course not! She shivered, and suddenly her teeth were chattering. How stupid. As if he were a ghost. How could he be?

But there was a small, cold fragment of her heart where she knew that a ghost was exactly what he was.

Hesitantly, she reached into her handbag and pulled out the mirror.

It was the only thing to do. But she was afraid. Afraid to step into a stream of time whose current she couldn't slow, couldn't divert or redirect. Or could she? It all sounded so simple—stop Reg from dying. Stop Whaley from going to war. But life was messy. A million impulses led in different directions. A million decisions, mistakes, and just plain accidents guided where it all ended up. And she knew already where Reg's life ended. How could she know what it would take to change that?

She ran her finger over the forms of the three Fates.
Fates?
Did they have to be Fates? Couldn't they be Graces? Wasn't that possible?

Why had this thing come into her hands?

She thought of her dream, of all the misery she'd seen. And she was trying to push it away, to hold off the terrible meaninglessness she'd felt in all that suffering. In Reg's name chiseled in stone. Was life just like that? Did terrible things just happen for no reason?

Of course they did. She'd known that since her mother died.

But there had to be another side to it, didn't there? What she'd seen in the dream was real. The cruelty and the horror were beyond reason. And yet, the world was bigger than that. In the long run, in the bigger picture, everything
had
to have meaning. It had to. Even in putting on a play, every word, every gesture has to carry meaning, even if the audience can't at first see what it is. If she ever, ever became a director, she would hold to that like iron. Why should the world be any different?

But what if there's no director, and everything is hurtling madly through the universe in absolute chaos?

Addie shook her head. Slowly, she turned the mirror over and gazed at herself in the glass, feeling a conscious power at work.

And it wasn't fate or angels. She was sure of that. The power was in her.

The power that takes people on a stage and turns them into a mirror of the world. The power that holds up a glass to every person in the audience. That's what I've got. That's why I have Meg Turner's mirror. I'm meant to use it.

No. Not yet. Suddenly she leaped up, her heart thumping. Dropping the mirror into her bag, she darted down the hall to Emma Mae's office. She tore through the boxes and found a dress, boots, and a scarf like those she'd seen Meg wearing.
She glanced at her vintage bag, which seemed timeless-looking enough to blend in. And after she changed, she ran back out into the hall and snatched up the mirror again.

Then she stared into the glass, straining her eyes, willing herself back.

For the longest time, there was nothing. Just cold and dark, and dust. But she held on. She didn't break her gaze. No matter what, she wasn't going to let there be nothing but all this ruin.

She stared until her eyesight blurred. Until her head spun.

And gradually, the light around her became brighter, the colors richer. The air warmed, and she could suddenly tell that the back door was open.