The Jewel and the Key (33 page)

“What's with you, McNeal? You sound very sure of yourself. Another revealing dream?” Whaley teased. “Did it point you in the direction of the photographs we need?”

“You could say that.” She looked up at her father. “All right, all right. I'm going.”

Addie sat in the back row in every one of her morning classes, reading the local history and theater books she'd brought from home under her desk. Except in AP Biology. Ms. Rosenthal caught her immediately and told her to put the books away. No one messed with Ms. Rosenthal.

When the bell rang, she made a beeline to the chem lab. The door was open, and Addie could see Almaz hanging up her lab coat and grabbing her bag off the floor.

“Almaz! Come with me. I need to get my Algebra II book.” She grabbed her friend's elbow and linked her arm through hers. “I got your text. Sure you have time tonight?”

“I'm sure. You know how I love a treasure hunt. Where do we look?”

“The U. We've got to check the
Daily.
Dad said we'd have to go to their morgue.”

“Their
morgue?
Have you been reading too much of that vampire crap?”

Addie laughed, pulling her along past the crowd by the open door of the cafeteria. The smell of greasy pizza and burned hamburger meat followed them down the hallway. “It's where newspapers go to die. Where they store back issues if they're not online.”

Almaz looked at her curiously, pulling a container of blueberry yogurt out of her bag and ripping the aluminum top off. “Last I heard, you'd looked everywhere. What makes you so certain there's something out there waiting for you to find it?”

“Just trust me on this!”

Almaz offered her the plastic spoon she'd rummaged out of her bag, and Addie scooped up some yogurt. “Mm. Thanks. I hardly got any of Whaley's omelet.”

“That's probably lucky.” Almaz grinned. “So I'll meet you—”

Her words were drowned out by raucous voices. A bunch of students from the drama club were pushing past them, yelling lines at one another, falling over with laughter. The divas and their entourage—no one Addie was friends with, like Sun or Jake. Addie had to fold her biology textbook against her chest and flatten herself against the wall. Almaz stepped into the alcove between the rows of lockers. The drama crew was so full of their own noise and hilarity that they didn't even notice her. Only Taylor, who'd gotten the part of the troll princess, saw Addie. She whispered something to Keira. Keira smirked.

When they'd passed, Almaz stepped out from between the lockers and made a show of dusting herself off, as if they'd clattered by her on a dirt road. “Oh, my God, Addie, how can you stand them? They're so
annoying!
” She scowled. “That was so unfair you didn't get that part.”

“You know what?” Addie straightened her back and snapped her fingers, just like Meg had the last time she saw her. “I—don't—care.” She gave Almaz a radiant smile. “I don't care about their little world.”

Almaz did a double take. “You—really?”

“Really.” And it was true. The horror of the audition seemed much farther in the past than the
Peer Gynt
read-through at the Jewel. She'd forget the humiliation of that audition someday, she knew, but she'd always remember dancing with Reg in the hall of the Dovrë king.

They reached Addie's locker, at the end of the hall near the band room. “You want to know why?”

“Why?”

Addie stretched, smiling and reaching for the ceiling. She inclined her head from one side to another, cracking her neck luxuriously. It was her favorite warm-up exercise. “Because I'm going to work at the Jewel when Mrs. Powell gets it fixed up.”

“Really?” Almaz looked delighted, though doubtful. “What are they going to pay you to do?”

“I don't need to be paid. I'll do anything.” As she turned the dial on her locker, she saw the Jewel rebuilt, buzzing with energy just like Emma Mae's theater had been. Maybe someday she could assist the director Becky Powell would hire. Though she wouldn't say this to Almaz—she knew how outrageous it would sound. “Maybe they'll start a youth program. I'd definitely try out for that. Or I could even help set it up.” Excitement bubbled inside her. Props. Makeup. Publicity—suddenly the desire was pounding inside her for the theater to come to life again. Not for Whaley or Mrs. Powell this time. For herself. “I mean, you never know what'll happen in the future.”

“If the Jewel has a future,” Almaz said.

“Sometimes you really are a poop.” Addie poked her in the ribs and dialed in the last number of her combination. The lock clicked, and she opened her locker and pulled out her math book.

“That's why I'll make the big bucks. Someone will hire me to be head poop at their big research lab someday, you just wait.”

Addie laughed, feeling lighter and more full of purpose than she had all day. She shut the locker and headed off to class.

“See you after practice!” Almaz called after her.

In sixth period, they were supposed to be working on an essay, so it was easy to keep reading her book with the computer screen blocking her from the teacher's view. By then, she'd skimmed through all but one of the books she'd brought. And it was there that she found the only reference to the Jewel. It was in an interview with Katharine Cornell, the actress who'd been photographed in the theater bar in 1933. Floods had delayed her train in eastern Washington, and the whole troupe had to transfer to some trunk line that ran into Tacoma and then catch a train up the Sound. “I've never been so happy to see any place as I was to see that grand playhouse,” Cornell told the interviewer, “with the lights shining through the windows, and the radiators—thank goodness!—hissing away merrily. Emma Mae Powell, the manager, bustled us into dressing rooms without once letting us feel our delay had inconvenienced her. It was already midnight, but the audience had waited, and we drew the curtains and let them watch us set up the scenery. The play started at one in the morning!”

A great story, Addie thought. But no photos, and no reference to where photos might be found.

And no mention of Reg.

She knew better than to expect it, but she was disappointed nonetheless. She'd hoped to find that he'd finally accepted his talent and become part of the troupe.

The hands on the wall clock seemed to have come to a standstill. She groaned. Why couldn't she have been like Whaley for once and skipped school?

She logged on and did a quick search for the
Daily
but found that the paper was only archived back fifteen years. She'd Googled the Jewel many times over the past few days and didn't find anything new as she repeated the search. The Powells, she knew, had never posted their family or professional history on a genealogy page. Nor had Meg Turner. She cast another agonized glance at the clock and wondered once again why she hadn't walked over to the U. first thing that morning instead of torturing herself all day.

When the last bell rang, she tore out of the classroom, dumped everything but her math text in her locker, and rushed to the bus stop. If the 44 hadn't come immediately, she would have run all the way. As it was, she leaped off the bus at the north end of the campus and sprinted to the building she'd visited with Reg. The tinted green windows had been replaced with clear ones, but otherwise it looked exactly the same.

Except that the
Daily
office wasn't there anymore.

After a long, frustrating search, she finally found it in another building. Inside, students were working on computers, surrounded by a mess of coffee cups and Styrofoam boxes exuding teriyaki smells. They were friendly, and Addie felt hopeful as they led her to the archives. The room that housed them was dank, cold, and dark—
morgue
was definitely the right word for it! Nonetheless, she dove into the work with alacrity. But she was disappointed when she found hard copies of the newspaper went back only twenty years.

“It'll be on microfiche, bet you anything,” the editor, a girl with a blond buzzcut, told her. “At Suzzallo. You know where that is?”

Addie nodded. It was the huge Gothic library in Red Square with buttresses and gargoyles and stained-glass windows. She and Zack often had to dig Dad out of his gradstudent cubicle there on weekends so they could go eat pho in one of the cheap Vietnamese restaurants on the Ave.

A librarian in a brilliant gold and red sari showed her how to set up the microfiche. “A database would be easier, of course,” she told her, “but there are so many of these small papers that haven't been digitalized yet. You'll just have to suffer with our Stone Age technology.”

Images of cavemen bashing clubs into microfiche machines flashed in Addie's mind as she settled herself in front of the ungainly contraption.

It took a few moments to get the hang of it, cranking the knob to straighten the picture, pressing the button forward and back to move the film. But once she did, the years spun by in a blur of black typescript, which she stopped now and then to hunt out the dates in the thick-crammed pages.

Finally, she reached the spring of 1917 and began turning the knob more slowly. What day had it been when she went to the campus with Reg? A Saturday. And the following Friday would have been May 4, the opening night for
Macbeth.

She found Friday, April 27, and inched the next newssheet up onto the screen. This had to be Monday's paper, since the
Daily
wasn't published on weekends. It was hard to read the old type. Addie leaned in so close that she actually squashed her nose against the screen and jogged the machine. The image went fuzzy.

But once she managed to get it in focus again, she felt triumphant. Under the masthead, the page was thin on text and heavy on photos, just as she'd suggested to Reg, centered around a large picture of an imposing building. Ha! Who would have thought it would be so easy?

Reg's article about the Wobblies must be tucked away on the second page. She smiled to herself, thinking of him pulling that trick on the provost. It would be fun to see what he had written.

She put her hand on the knob and was about to roll the film forward when she realized she'd made a mistake.

The building in the photo under the masthead wasn't the Jewel at all.

It was Denny Hall, one of the buildings on campus. Dad had told her the name a million times when they walked by it. How could she have confused it with the Powells' theater?

She looked more closely at the rest of the pictures. They weren't the ones Tom had taken, either. There was the big open quad with spindly cherry trees in bloom, crowded with girls in white dresses wearing caps on their heads and bending over people stretched out on the pavement. The caption read:
Red Cross training.
Another shot showed an ambulance drill down by the canoe dock.

So where were the pictures of the Jewel? What had Reg and Tom done with them?

She made an exasperated noise. Boys! They were useless! Why had they left the theater without letting her know they hadn't taken the shots?

To be fair, though, it wouldn't have mattered to them what was on the front page. As long as the article about the Wobbly trial made it into readers' hands. But to her, it was a disaster.

Addie groaned. “What am I going to do now?” she muttered.

An old man with a bluish five o'clock shadow who was being helped by the librarian glared at her from a neighboring microfiche machine.

Think. Don't panic.
Maybe they had run the pictures and the article on another day?

Addie spun the film forward into the week, to check.

Nothing ... nothing ... wait a second.

She stopped turning the knob, puzzled. Was it a fourday week?

There wasn't a holiday she'd forgotten about, was there? Memorial Day? No, that was the end of May, not the beginning. And was it even a holiday back then? May Day? No. Well, it didn't matter. Maybe they'd held off until the day
Macbeth
opened. Friday, right? Where was it? Oh, yes, she saw it. But even on
Macbeth
's opening night, there was nothing about the Jewel at all. What had happened to the photos, then? And why was this week so short?

She counted back. Friday was here. Thursday, Wednesday.

Addie looked more closely at the edition with the pictures of the Red Cross nurses in the quad. The lights above her head buzzed like irritated bees.

The date on the masthead was Tuesday, May 1, 1917.

She flopped back into the grainy plastic curve of her chair, folded her arms, and took a deep breath. There was no Monday edition.

She needed help. Thankfully, the creepy old man seemed to have released the librarian. “Um, excuse me?”

“Yes.” The librarian turned and walked over to Addie. The silk of her sari fluttered.

“Why would an edition of the
Daily
be missing from the microfiche? Could it be lost?”

“I hope not!” The librarian bent down to look at the screen. “What are you looking at, 1917? Wow. That long ago, anything is possible. Isn't there a note? We usually flag it when a day is missing.”

Addie scanned through. “No note,” she said.

“Let me check.” Frowning, the librarian pulled up a chair and settled her glasses on her nose. “Mmm.” The frown deepened. “I transferred these images myself, a few months ago. You know—this is May, right?” She paused and tapped her pencil in a light rhythm. “I had a few copies of the
Daily
from that week, but none of them had the date you're looking for. I remember thinking it was strange. There wasn't any notice explaining why in the paper.” She shook her head. “No, I don't think the issue was lost. I think it just wasn't published in the first place. It
would
be the one you're looking for, wouldn't it?”

Numbly, Addie thanked her. She removed the microfiche, handed it back, and stumbled out of Suzzallo in a daze. Only vaguely aware of the crowds of students, the skateboarders, and the last lonely blossoms on the cherry trees, she slowly circled the library, trying to figure out what to do.