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.
23. No Jest
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 shore
d 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?
She thought a moment. She’d still been angry with herself for losing track of Tom and Reg. She’d left—again!—without determining if the photos had been developed, without making sure she had them. But how could that have caused such a vivid and terrifying nightmare? Well, dreams didn’t have to mean anything, did they? But even as she thought it, she didn’t believe it. She’d believed Meg’s story about her dream. A dream had introduced both of them to the Jewel before they’d even set foot there.... No. The dream was telling her something.
She shuddered and threw back the quilt. The cold seeped through the wood floor into the soles of her feet. Quickly, she pulled on a shirt, a sweater, and a pair of jeans, went to her chest of drawers, and picked up her brush. Mechanically she yanked through the tangles in her hair. Why was it Reg’s war, not the one Whaley was so eager to join, that she was dreaming about?
Suddenly she remembered something Reg had said to Tom, something she’d barely even noticed at the time: Who knows where we’ll all be next year?
She frowned. What did he mean? She was pretty sure he wasn’t graduating. He was too young to be finished with college.
Then something else clicked. The letter that had arrived for him. That had upset Emma Mae...
A draft notice?
She flew down the hall, past the closed doors of the bedrooms where Dad and Zack were still asleep. She took the steps two and three at a time, stopping just long enough by the coat stand to dip her hand into Dad’s jacket pocket and pull out the bookstore keys. This time, she ignored the drama section and headed right toward the military history shelves.
No jest, lady ...
She gathered every book on World War I that she could carry and headed back up to the living room. Then she went back down for more.
Two hours later, she was still sitting at the big oak table, hunched over an open book, when Whaley wandered in, his hair standing up like a rooster’s comb. He ran his hand through it and yawned loudly to get her attention.
“That’s a good chunk of Mike’s inventory you’ve got there. Grand reopening’s tomorrow, you know. Better put it back before then.”
Addie's eyes didn’t leave the page in front of her. “There’s coffee in the pot.”
“Ow!” Whaley banged his leg on the table as he went back to the kitchen, then returned a few minutes later holding a steaming mug. “Want an omelet?”
“As long as it isn’t tomato and sauerkraut.”
“Which was delicious, by the way. You need to expand your horizons.” He put down his mug and leaned over her shoulder. “What battle is that?” Of course he was interested. He loved military history. Addie was past feeling interested; she just felt sick. Whaley pointed at the photo. “There’s an arm sticking out of the mud there.” He brought up his own arm, pretending to snap his fingers like a crab’s claw at her. “Rising out of the trenches, the ghosts of the fallen battalion, coming to take their revenge.”
“Shut up, Whaley.”
“What is it, then?”
Addie read part of the caption out loud. “‘Hand-to-hand fighting. American troops at the Meuse-Argonne.’” She saw his blank look and explained, “World War One. Remember that war memorial in the park when we were walking to the Jewel?”
Whaley nodded.
“A lot of those guys died in that battle.”
Whaley examined her face with puzzled concern. “Why is that bothering you?” He looked at the caption under the photo. “It says here it was a victory. One of the final offensives of the war.”
“It also says a quarter of the American force was wiped out. Twenty-six thousand men were killed.” The sick feeling churned inside her again. She turned the page to a photo of a line of soldiers in greatcoats, their eyes wrapped in dirty linen, each with his hand on the shoulder of the man in front of him, the blind men following their injured leader to a casualty clearing station. “They used chemical weapons. The gas burned their eyes. A hundred times worse than what happened to Zack. And these guys were the lucky ones. It says here that mustard gas ate through lung tissue. Men would suffocate. And—”
Whaley shrugged. “Yeah, I know. We lost lots of people back then.” He looked at her more closely. “You’re kidding, Addie. You’re not about to cry, are you?”
“No.” She blinked hard.
“Come on, it’s different now. We’ve got air superiority. Our weapons are more accurate. And if you’re on the ground, you’ve got body armor.” He paused. “You’re thinking about our war, aren’t you? Not World War One.”
“I’m thinking about both.”
“What’s World War One got to do with anything?”
She wished she could tell Whaley. Maybe then he’d understand how she felt about his joining up. She wanted to tell him about Reg, about how he could be sent to a battle where one out of four American boys ended up dead. But
what was so real to her would just be craziness to him. So what if a huge number of guys died so long ago?
“Whaley? Have you ever had a dream that was so real it was like it actually happened?”
“Hasn’t everyone?”
“But I mean dreams that really did happen. Last night I dreamed this.” She pointed at the photo. “The men were jammed down in these trenches—the Germans on one side of the field, and the Allies on the other. They’d lob grenades or poisoned gas or there’d be huge artillery bombardments. And the officers would blow whistles and everyone would climb out and attack the trench on the other side while people fired machine guns at them.”
Whaley stretched and picked up his mug. “You had a dream like that?”
“Sort of. I was in a trench.... They were ordering us to attack.”
“C’mon, though. You studied it in American history, didn’t you? The Lusitania and whatever.”
“Mrs. Reich skipped it. She liked the twenties better.” She gave him a wan smile. “Flappers, you know? Cute dresses?”
“Mrs. Reich!” Whaley pretended to stick his finger down his throat. “C’mon. If you want that omelet, I’d better get cooking.”
Addie closed and stacked the books, then followed Whaley to the kitchen. A weak morning light was coming in through the window over the sink.
Whaley opened the refrigerator and after a contemplative moment pulled out a jar of capers, wilted collard greens, and a sad-looking onion in a sandwich bag. He got a knife and started chopping with neat, decisive movements. “Maybe you saw a movie about it.”
“I’ve never seen those images before! How could my mind just dredge them up out of nowhere?” She glanced at the clock over the sink. “Oh, geez, it’s almost six thirty. We’d better hurry.” She slid a knife out of the wooden block on the counter and began slicing the fibrous greens.
The Jewel and the Key Page 24