The Jewel and the Key (14 page)

“Of course it is.”

“Well then, can't the city declare it a historic landmark?”

“I'm not sure how that would help,” Mrs. Powell said.

But Mrs. T. gave Addie an encouraging look. “What are you thinking about?”

“Remember that church on Queen Anne? The one the congregation had to sell to a developer because they couldn't afford to fix it, but then they saved it? You took the pictures for the article, Mrs. T. The city helped fund the renovation because they proved it was a historic building.”

“The city?” Mrs. Powell frowned. “I doubt it. They don't have any money. Maybe a foundation or something.”

Mrs. T. snapped her fingers. “That's right! If the city decides it's a landmark, then it's eligible for foundation money. Addie's right. The deal is, you have to show you can restore the building to its original state. Do we know what that was?”

Mrs. Powell looked skeptical. “There's been a lot of remodeling. And a lot of damage. I'm not sure.”

“I can find out for you!” Addie offered. “I could do a little research. I'm not bad at that.”

“Well, there
are
some records somewhere, I'm sure. Some photos maybe. And”—she leaned over and touched the top of one of the crates—“was it only costumes you found in these?”

“No. There were papers, too. And books and boxes. We haven't really gone through them. But we could.” Addie paused. “I could. If it would help.”

Mrs. Powell gave Addie a faint smile. “You're starting to win me over.”

Addie smiled back, thinking of the grand theater she'd imagined when she'd stepped onstage. “I could come back tomorrow after school.” She looked at Whaley. “D'you want to meet me here?”

“Maybe. But there's some things I got to do....”

“Pleeease, Whaley?” Addie slapped on a sappy, pleading expression.

Despite himself, he gave a small grunt of laughter. “Oh, all right.”

A bit of animation had come back into Becky Powells face. “If you're really serious, I can leave the key here for the two of you.” She hesitated. “But you'd better let me show you around first. I don't want you to be under any illusions about the wreck I've got on my hands. Want to come along, Margie?”

“Nope. I'd better get moving.” She patted Addie's shoulder. “Thanks, you two.”

After Addie and Whaley said their goodbyes and Mrs. Turner had left, they followed Mrs. Powell back out into the hall. Though she still moved slowly, she seemed a bit more energetic now. “The dressing rooms were there,” she told them, pointing at the first two rooms by the back door. ‘And the manager's apartment. The costume shop and the mechanical room were down at the other end of the hall.” She thought for a moment. “But the auditorium and the lobby will be the most important for renovation. Come on. I'll take you out there.”

She led them back up to the stage, pointing out the damage, speculating on how it might have looked in its heyday. “But it's just so hard to tell.” As they walked, Whaley ran his hand along the walls, peering into corners, pressing on squeaky stairs. Addie smiled—he was such a fixer-upper.

Down in the orchestra pit, Mrs. Powell stopped suddenly. “Now,
that's
definitely original.” She pointed. “Do you see that piano back there?”

Half hidden in the shadows behind a big trash can was a black upright. Its keys were yellow and cracked, and cobwebs drooped from it. A white marble bust rested on the top.

Whaley went over and blew the dust off the keys. “Do you mind?” he asked Mrs. Powell. She shook her head and he sat down and started to play, pulling faces at the sound of the out-of-tune keys. Addie came up behind him to get a closer look at the bust.

Then she froze.

It was, without question, Becky Powell.

Not the Becky Powell who stood leaning on her cane nearby, but the other Mrs. Powell. Reg's mother. The beautiful woman Addie had met the day of the earthquake, whom she had expected to see here today.

Her carved head was demurely bent to hide an irrepressible smile, and her hair was rolled into an elaborate up-do, the same way she'd had it arranged on Sunday. All her liveliness and grace shone through the curves of the marble. The only thing the sculptor couldn't do justice to were her eyes. They were cast down. When Addie bent to see their expression, they were as blank as the stone they were carved from.

Whaley was still hammering away on the keys, but Addie hardly heard.

She closed her eyes, as if doing so would shut out the fear that was washing over her like a cold tide.

“That's the stride piece Cam was showing me,” Whaley said, lifting his fingers from the keys. Addie forced herself to open her eyes, to try to act normal. “Oh,” she said faintly.

Whaley swung around on the piano bench to face her. “Hey, what's up?”

“Nothing. Just ... that statue...”

“Emma Mae?” Becky Powell stretched out a hand to touch the marble. “Isn't she lovely?”

Addie said, “Who is Emma Mae?” Her voice was shaky.

“Emma Mae Powell. Her husband built the Jewel. But he died in a boating accident after the first season, so she took over and ran the theater. Really an amazing woman.”

“But I thought you said the Jewel had been closed a long time.”

Becky Powell leaned against the piano. “Of course. What's that got to do with it?”

“I'm confused. You just said that Emma Mae was the manager,” Addie pressed.

“Owner and manager,” Becky Powell said thoughtfully. “Now
she'd
be the ideal person to renovate this old wreck.”

Addie hesitated, almost dreading to hear the answer to her next question. But she had to find out. “Why don't you just ask her, then?”

Mrs. Powell threw back her head and laughed. “What a terrific idea! I only wish I could, Addie. You don't know how much I'd love her help. There's just one problem.”

“What?”

“Look at the base of the statue, the year it was carved.”

Addie looked down where she pointed, to the numbers etched in the stone: 1919.

That couldn't be right.
Her head swam. Her heart was racing. And yet somewhere deep inside, she realized she'd already known.

“Too bad, eh?” said Mrs. Powell. “If we really wanted Emma Mae Powell to bring the Jewel back to life, I'm afraid we'd have to bring Emma Mae back to life as well.”

It was a blow straight to the chest.

Her head filled with echoing darkness, and for a moment she was the only passenger in an elevator that was plummeting down. 1919!

“That's impossible....”

“Yes, unfortunately,” Becky Powell agreed. She sat down on the piano bench next to Whaley. “Time has a way of depriving you of great companions. I would love to talk theater with Emma Mae Powell. But then, I'd love to have tea with Igor Stravinsky and catch a dance performance of Isadora Duncan's, too!”

Isadora Duncan.
The floor seemed to pitch beneath Addie's feet.

“I'd—I'd better go,” she choked out, and was happy that these were the words that actually came from her lips. Because the words in her brain were
I'm not crazy. I'm not.

“Hey! What's up with you?”

But she hardly registered Whaley's question.

“Are you feeling all right?” Mrs. Powell asked. “You've gone pale.”

“I'm fine.” She mustered a faint smile. “I just ... I think maybe I'd better get going.”

“Wait a second. Don't you want to see the rest of the place?” Whaley asked.

“You can tell me about it later.” She had to get out. Now. “I just remembered I—I told Almaz I'd get to her game. I'm late already.”

Whaley looked at Mrs. Powell and shrugged.

“Nice to meet you, Mrs. Powell,” she managed as she made her way to the stage. “I'll come back tomorrow.” It was all she could do not to sprint into the wings cackling like a madwoman.

Once out in the rain again, she had to wrap her arms around herself to stop trembling. She
wouldn't
run. She would walk, slowly, in control, like any other sane person, to the bus stop. She would find an explanation for this.

 

That night, Addie huddled in her bed with the patchwork quilt pulled tight around her. She wanted to talk to Whaley, but he must have gone straight to Enrique's from the Jewel and he hadn't come home yet. A few times she picked up her phone to call Almaz, but each time she hadn't even pressed the button. It had been hard enough to talk about all this with Whaley. How could she bring it up with calm, logical Almaz?

Again and again she tried to close her mind to what had happened, to the marble bust of Emma Mae Powell gazing down serenely from the piano, where it had no doubt rested since it had been carved, nearly a hundred years ago. But she couldn't do it anymore. It was like the moment in
Peer Gynt
where he's wandering on the moor and he runs into the Boyg—the thing that is shapeless and inexplicable and can't be seen no matter how keen your eyesight. You can't go around it. You can't go through it. It won't budge; it demands you recognize its presence and resists any attempt to be reasoned away.

Well, if she couldn't bury the thought, at least she could take her mind off it. She picked up a collection of Shaw's plays and started reading an old, familiar one—
Saint Joan.
She loved Joan with her shining sword and her certainty and her good common sense. So reassuring.

But the image of the marble bust wouldn't leave her alone.

The idea that the people she had visited the day of the earthquake had been alive so long ago was impossible, she knew. But once she suspended her disbelief, it did make some of the pieces fit. For example, why Mrs. Powell and Reg hadn't met her at the Jewel. Why Reg hadn't believed her about the earthquake. The way they were dressed—strange how relatively normal it had seemed; she must have willfully ignored it. And what war was it, exactly, that Reg was so eager to go fight? If she had somehow stepped into the early twentieth century it must have been ... the First World War? And—the red, white, and blue bunting—
America had just entered the war. So it must have been—oh, my God—1917.

She let
Saint Joan
slip from her hands. No. She didn't want it to make sense. Because if it did, then Emma Mae was dead. And then Reg was dead too, and Frida, and the doctor, and the people they were having over for dinner, and the guy who sold them the chicken they were going to roast, and ... a shudder jerked down her spine:
And I just spent a whole afternoon visiting them.

“No! No, no, no, no!” She jammed the pillow over her head, shaking from head to foot.

Then, with every ounce of control she could muster, she threw the pillow across the room and forced herself to sit up again. Furiously, she swept off her covers and jumped out of bed. She strode out of her room, went downstairs into the kitchen, and grabbed the keys to the bookstore from the table.

Whaley and Dad had been steadily cleaning, but the store was still a mess. Addie picked her way through the piles of books waiting to be reshelved and went to the drama section. The bookcase still hadn't been pushed back against the wall, so she had no trouble getting into the closet and picking up
A History of the Theater
from where she'd left it on the bench for safekeeping.

Back in her bedroom, she plopped down and opened the book. Her fingers were so cold she could hardly turn the pages.

But the reading lamp cast a circle of warm light onto her bed. The quilt was thick and comforting. She heard a little creak and saw the flick of a white tail through the crack of the door.

“Magnesium!” she called, making the tutting noises that the cat liked. Magnesium leaped onto the bed and turned three times before settling in a furry circle next to Addie's leg. He was always friendliest when you had a book on your lap. Especially if it was an old one with that musty used-book smell to it. Addie flipped through to the index, found the page number, and, with a quick intake of breath, turned to it.

The photograph of Isadora Duncan took up a third of the page. Addie examined the dark-haired dancer standing in an arbor wearing a diaphanous gown that hung in folds straight to her ankles. She looked like a Greek nymph or a goddess. A thin band circled her head, and laurel leaves were wreathed in her hair. Her hands were raised like a ballet dancer's. But the pose was more relaxed than a ballet pose, and she had a full, glowing smile on her face.

Slowly, Addie got up and lifted the silver mirror from her dresser. She brought it over to the bed and laid it down beside the photograph.

The dresses of the three dancers on its back matched the dress of the woman in the photograph, stitch for stitch.

Addie's skin crawled, but she just gathered the quilt more tightly around her shoulders.

So
what?
she told herself.
A Greek robe is a Greek robe is a Greek robe.
It didn't necessarily mean anything.

Except—except that Mrs. Powell had mentioned Isadora Duncan as if she was someone she knew. She shoved the mirror away and forced herself to look at the words on the page.

The heading read:
IsadoraDun can: 1878–1927.

She exhaled slowly.

Both she and Emma Mae had been right.

Isadora Duncan had died when her scarf caught in the wheel of a car. But in 1917, she was still alive and dancing.

Addie was back on the loading dock behind the Jewel the next day after dropping off her backpack at home. She'd told Mrs. Powell she would help look through the theater's old records, and she felt guilty about leaving so abruptly yesterday. Plus, she hadn't been able to stop thinking about this place, about whether she'd find evidence of the Jewel as it had been in Emma Mae's time.