The Secret of the Key

by Marianne Malone

  They all took turns, even Rose, whose arrows hit the target because she was allowed to stand several feet closer.

  While the arrows flew, Ruthie thought about the ring and what they should do with it: leave it here or take it with them. She felt that nagging notion about unintended consequences again. Would bringing this ring back in time cause history to change? Somehow the ring had arrived in the twenty-first century as a true antique. It had been carried through the centuries one year at a time and didn’t appear to be a treasured valuable that the Brownlow family had been missing. They didn’t seem to care about it one way or the other. And if they left the ring here, Ruthie mulled, it would be that much harder to find out what it had been doing in a box in the Wentworth room. She was deep in thought when she heard Jack talking to her.

  “Don’t you think it’s time to go? It’s getting late.”

  “Oh, right. We should. And, Jack,” she said in a low voice, “I think we should keep the ring. I’ll explain later.”

  “Won’t you dine with us?” Rose implored when they said they must leave.

  “I’m sorry. We really can’t stay,” Ruthie answered.

  They said their goodbyes and the Brownlow children graciously invited them to make a return visit.

  They began to walk back in the direction of the patio portal. Halfway there, Ruthie stopped.

  “My messenger bag! I left it inside. The key and the ring are in it!”

  They hurried back to the house. The children had already gone indoors. They knocked repeatedly but no one came. Jack tried the door. It was unlocked.

  Feeling sneaky—but needing the bag—they tiptoed into the room. Ruthie went directly to the chair she’d been sitting on. It wasn’t there!

  They scanned the room. Just then one of the interior doors opened and the governess entered. She caught her breath when she saw them.

  “You must be looking for your bag—I’ll fetch it straightaway. Please wait here.”

  In a few minutes she returned carrying the bag. “Here it is. I found it and put it in a safe place.”

  Relief washed over Ruthie. “Thank you!”

  “Safe travels,” the woman said, and gave them a long look. “Perhaps we’ll meet again.”

  On the way back to the patio, Ruthie told Jack about her thoughts on keeping the ring after all.

  They passed through the portal and reentered the drawing room, seamlessly crossing the ocean of time to the miniature museum version in twenty-first-century Chicago. They didn’t have enough time to take the clothes back to the Wentworth room, so they hid them behind the folding screen.

  Out on the ledge, just before Ruthie tossed the key to the floor and jumped, Jack paused.

  “Something’s bugging me.”

  “What?” Ruthie asked.

  “We thought we were in 1687, right?”

  “That was the date on the fireplace grate and the catalogue said that Belton House was finished about that time,” Ruthie answered.

  “Gulliver’s Travels was published in 1726!”

  RUTHIE COULD ALWAYS COUNT ON waking up at dawn—or before—whenever something was bothering her. She tried to stay asleep, burrowing her head into her pillow, but it was no use. She sat up in bed. The clock flashed 4:30.

  Why couldn’t she let these exciting adventures be just that? Why must she always overthink it? she asked herself. Ruthie was confident that Jack was snoring away at home, even though he’d done the very same things she’d done.

  Time. Ruthie was preoccupied by time. Twice now the rooms had opened to a different era than they had expected. Jack had double-checked the publication date of Gulliver’s Travels and found he was correct—1726. That was nearly forty years later than the period of the room. Why? And what was the three-hundred-year-old Brownlow ring doing in the box in the Wentworth room? How long had it been there? And who had put it there?

  It was as though she were watching a movie and images—hints—had flashed across the screen so fast she hadn’t consciously noticed them, but she’d seen them nevertheless. Those hints kept her awake.

  And now they had the letter written by Narcissa Thorne herself, containing an ominous warning about the magic. The key belonged not with Ruthie, Jack, Mrs. McVittie, or anyone else, but in a box in a vault in California. In 1939!

  Ruthie got up, took her messenger bag, and tiptoed into the living room, curling up in her dad’s favorite reading chair. She turned on the lamp next to it and took the letter from her bag to read it again. These words prickled her nerves:

  This is a most serious—dare I say dangerous—matter, as the key must be returned to its proper place in the looking-glass box. Do not try to search for the box; I have taken it with me to Santa Barbara, where it is secure in my vault.

  She put the letter back and fished out the two rings. The incandescent light hit the gold and gemstones of the Brownlow ring, showing its age again. Yesterday—for a few hours—it had been brand-new.

  She looked at the mood ring now. Its cheap metal was dull and lifeless. How had two rings of such contrasting value become paired? Under the light, she saw the color of the man-made gem change in her hand, from pale blue to a mucky yellowish gray. She had a hunch what mood that indicated.

  She heard a noise and quickly threw the rings back in her bag. She snatched a magazine from the coffee table and flipped to the middle. But the sound was just a far-off garbage truck starting the day. No need to be so jumpy, she told herself.

  Her toss had propelled the rings deep into the bag. Rummaging for them again, she saw something.

  Not the rings. Not the letter. Something else.

  It was a tattered piece of paper about one inch wide by three inches long. The printing was faded and difficult to read because it had worn off in the creased places. She saw the logo for the Field Museum of Chicago on the top and below that the words

  A ticket stub from 1977? Ruthie rubbed her eyes. Was she dreaming? How did this get in my bag? she wondered.

  She took her phone out and texted Jack: Did u put smthng in my mssnger bag?

  In a few minutes her phone buzzed: ASLEEP!!! Y rnt u?

  She sighed heavily and put her phone away. Her thoughts were foggy. Looking at the ticket stub, she felt a shiver down the back of her neck. Why am I not asleep? This is why.

  • • •

  Ruthie was on her third caramel of the morning, hoping the sugar would give her a burst of energy. When they took a break at lunchtime, she brought out the ticket stub to show Jack and Mrs. McVittie.

  “I remember the exhibition—the first big museum blockbuster, they called it,” Mrs. McVittie reminisced.

  Jack examined the stub. “Remember the ad we saw in the old newspaper? Weird!”

  “I know. Weird is right,” Ruthie said. “My bag was in my room all day yesterday. I had it with me the whole time on Saturday except for twice: once when we snuck into the American corridor through the information booth, and …” She stopped talking and stared at Jack, who was already staring at her.

  “What is it?” Mrs. McVittie asked.

  They began to recount their visit to Belton House and meeting the Brownlow children and their governess. They jumped on each other’s words and jumbled up the order, they were speaking in such a frenzy. But Mrs. McVittie got the point.

  “So the only time your bag was out of your possession was when you were shooting arrows in the garden?”

  Ruthie nodded. “And then the governess brought it back for me when we went to look for it.”

  “What year did you say that was?” Mrs. McVittie asked.

  “That’s the other thing,” Jack said. “We thought it was 1687, but it had to be at least 1726, the year that Gulliver’s Travels was published. One of the brothers—Peter—was reading it and said it had just come out.”

  “That’s much later than the catalogue dates the room,” Ruthie added.

  The three fell silent.

  Finally Ruthie spoke. “This could be too crazy, but … s
uppose the governess put it in my bag because someone before us went back to that time and gave it to her? And she had some feeling that we were like that earlier visitor and wanted to test us? You know, give us a signal.”

  “And she didn’t want to come right out and tell us that she’d met someone from the future because that would sound nuts,” Jack added.

  “Right!”

  “It’s possible,” Mrs. McVittie said.

  “There’s another possibility,” Jack said slowly. “But it’s even crazier.”

  “What?”

  “Hang on.” He jumped up and ran to the storeroom. He came back with one of the pages of interesting articles that he’d been saving from the packing newspapers. He didn’t say anything, but held the item out for them to see.

  “The King Tut exhibition,” Ruthie said.

  “I was saving this for the ad, but look what’s on the other side!”

  Ruthie remembered the story and the chill it had produced.

  “ ‘The case of the missing teen has reached a dead end, police investigators said Friday,’ ” Mrs. McVittie read aloud. “ ‘Two weeks have passed since the disappearance of Becky Brown, and officials in Cook County are baffled. “There is scant evidence to go on,” Detective Riley said at a news conference. “The only witness is the girl’s seven-year-old brother, Oliver Brown. His testimony has been deemed unreliable due to his age. There is no evidence of an abduction. We are going to treat this as a runaway.” Authorities insist the public should not be concerned that there is a criminal on the loose.’ ” When she finished she sat back in her chair and put her glasses down.

  Ruthie put her hand to her mouth. “You don’t think … could the governess know something about the missing girl?”

  Bright and early the next morning they rushed to the museum to take another trip back in time to Belton House. The first thing they saw in Gallery 11 was a maintenance man chatting with the docent at the information booth.

  “There were at least two of them, I’m certain,” the woman replied.

  “We’ll check next week and see if the traps caught the little varmints,” the man told her. “Have a good one.”

  Ruthie and Jack understood that they were the little varmints!

  They took their time, blending into the crowd, before drifting to the alcove to use the magic key. When a family group went up to the booth, blocking the docent’s view of the alcove, Jack retrieved the key from his pocket and let it work.

  Usually the feeling of the magic flooding into Ruthie’s hand was an overpowering sensation. But today was different. Her head was filled with questions—questions so pressing they seemed to have a physical presence—and as the magic breeze blew around them, these questions swirled around her. She and Jack shrank to the floor, but the questions loomed large.

  Inside the small, dark section of corridor, they set up the toothpick ladder and made the climb. On the way up, Ruthie pondered what they should say to the governess. How would they ask her about a girl from the future who’d gone missing? Could this woman be connected to the key? Their theory was so far-fetched they might have it all wrong. Perhaps someone had bumped into Ruthie or brushed by her—in the museum, on a crowded bus—and the ticket stub could have fallen into her bag. Or maybe it had been stuck to something else that had made its way into her bag, such as a library book, for instance. And it had been a while since she’d cleaned out the bag—there was all kinds of junk at the bottom. It could have been there for weeks. Was she just trying to create a mystery where none existed?

  Ruthie and Jack reached the top and made their way into E4. They found the eighteenth-century outfits where they’d left them in a heap behind the folding screen. They slipped them over their own clothes and went out to the patio. From the position of the sun it appeared to be midmorning. Ruthie briefly thought about the ring dial and Freddy and smiled.

  “It’s weird to think we could maybe find Freddy through this room. It takes us to almost the same time as his room,” Ruthie observed.

  “Buckinghamshire would probably be a three- or four-day trip from here on horseback,” Jack pointed out.

  “How do you know that?”

  “I was thinking the same thing last night. I looked up the distance,” he answered. “It’s cool to think about. I wonder if you could do that in any of the other rooms.”

  “Go in one room, come out another,” Ruthie mused, and fell silent.

  Halfway up the road to Belton House she turned to Jack and said, “We’d better plan what we’re going to say. We can’t just ask her about the missing girl.”

  “We’ll ask her if she’s ever heard of King Tut. You know, like it’s an interesting story from history that we’ve studied. If she has something she wants to tell us, that’ll be a signal.”

  “But what if she doesn’t pick up on it?”

  “Then probably we’re on a wild-goose chase.”

  Ruthie considered that possibility. But her gut told her they were on the right track.

  Approaching the house, they saw no one outside. This time they walked up to the front door, not the side garden door that they had used before. A heavy brass ring served as a door knocker, and Ruthie gave it a few strong raps. When no one opened it, Jack reached up and repeated the knock. He had barely taken his hand off the ring when the door opened. A towering, stern-looking man in dress clothes stood looking down at them over his long and angular nose.

  “Yes?”

  “We’re here to see the governess,” Ruthie said.

  The man said nothing and closed the door.

  “Does that mean we just wait?” Jack wondered.

  Ruthie shrugged. “I guess so.”

  It wasn’t too long until the door opened again. This time the governess stood before them. She smiled and asked them in.

  “I’m sorry, but the children are out riding this morning. You’re welcome to stay until their return.”

  “Actually …,” Ruthie began, but then thought better of saying they had come to see her. “That would be nice, Ms.…”

  “Please, call me Rivy, as the children do.”

  They followed her down a marble-floored hallway into the drawing room. Along the way, Rivy asked a maid to bring them some tea.

  “So,” Jack asked when the three had sat down, “what do you teach?”

  “I teach the basics of reading, writing, and arithmetic. A tutor comes for Peter, who is now advanced.”

  “How about history?” Ruthie asked.

  “Yes. We study ancient Greece and Rome,” she replied.

  “Do you teach about ancient Egypt?” Jack prodded.

  A storm of worry glazed Rivy’s eyes, and Ruthie knew they had hit on something. The governess got up and stared out the window for a few long moments. The maid entered with a tray, set it on a nearby table, and left. Everything was very quiet.

  Rivy breathed deeply. “Let me tell you a story,” she began. “Once there was a young girl, a little older than the two of you. She had a nice enough life, but she didn’t like it. She wanted excitement and adventure. She wanted to feel appreciated, and she wanted, above all, her very own parents.”

  The part about wanting adventure sounded familiar to Ruthie; her urge to explore had brought them here.

  Rivy turned to them. “Do you want to hear more?”

  They nodded.

  “You see, her parents had died when she was young and she was raised by an aunt and uncle. Her brother was only a baby at the time, and as he grew up he was very attached to her. So attached that she found it tiresome. Although she loved him, she wasn’t always very nice to him. And then … he disappeared.”

  Rivy stopped talking, her lips pursed. “Tea?” she finally managed to say.

  “Sure,” Ruthie answered. This was not what they had been expecting at all. They had thought they might be hearing the story of a missing girl, not a disappearing brother.

  The woman poured three cups and then said something even more perplexing. “Did so
meone send you here?”

  “No,” Jack said.

  “Why did you want to tell us that story?” Ruthie asked.

  “It’s a story that has been in my head for almost as long as I can remember. When you asked me about Egypt …” She swallowed hard.

  “I asked you because of this.” Ruthie took the ticket stub from her bag.

  The woman nodded. “When you visited the other day—travelers out of the blue in your very strange shoes—something told me I should give it to you, so I dropped it into your bag. I’ve carried that around for so many years. I remember where it came from … but I’m afraid you’ll think I’m not quite sane.”

  “I think we can help you with that,” Jack offered. “You asked if someone sent us here. We were going to ask you if someone, maybe a girl, visited you a long time ago and gave the ticket stub to you.”

  Rivy shook her head. She opened her mouth to speak but closed it before saying anything. Ruthie saw something close to fear in her eyes.

  “But it has something to do with the story you just told us?” Ruthie proposed.

  “Yes. They are parts of the same unanswerable riddle that haunts me.”

  And then Jack’s great memory for details came into play. “Was the little brother in your story named Oliver?”

  At first Ruthie wasn’t sure where Jack was heading. But then she too remembered the name of the brother in the newspaper article—the boy who was too young to be a reliable witness.

  Rivy looked as though lightning had flashed in her face. “Yes! That is my brother’s name!”

  “Your brother?” Ruthie asked. “We thought his sister was Becky Brown!”

  “I am Becky Brown. My full name is Rebecca Brown. ‘Rivy’ is a British nickname for Rebecca given to me by the children.”

  It took a moment for Ruthie and Jack to catch up after this astonishing revelation. They thought Rivy might know something about the missing girl; instead, it turned out she was that missing girl.

  “How did you know my brother’s name?” Rivy asked.