The Secret of the Key

by Marianne Malone

  “It returns! The thing with almost a human brain: Elektro the Robot!”

  A door behind the man opened and out came a tall, silvery metal man-like robot. It glided smoothly but very slowly to the center of the balcony, staring straight ahead, its legs hardly moving. To Ruthie it looked an awful lot like the Tin Woodsman from the Wizard of Oz, minus the pointy hat. People down below gazed up, oohing and aahing. Then it spoke.

  “I. Am. Elektro. Mightiest. Of. All. Robots. I. Am. Seven. Feet. Six. Inches. Tall. My. Brain. Is. Bigger. Than. Yours. It. Weighs. Sixty. Pounds.”

  Then another man—this one in a lab coat—appeared and put a balloon in Elektro’s mouth, saying, “Elektro, I command you to blow up the balloon and break it.”

  The balloon expanded and burst, and the audience erupted in applause and cheering.

  “You’ve gotta be kidding me!” Jack said in a low voice. “That’s it?”

  “Not even as good as the early Star Wars movies.”

  Jack checked his watch. “We should go anyway.”

  The walkways outside were even more crowded now. A large family took up most of the space in front of them—the mom was pushing a stroller, the dad was carrying a toddler, and there were another five kids holding hands and walking. The youngest of those was crying about something. Suddenly, while Ruthie watched, he yanked free from his older sister’s hand and darted away—straight into the path of an oncoming tram!

  “Jack—look!” Ruthie screamed.

  Jack had seen it too and before she finished the words he had dashed in front of the child, scooped him up in his arms, and carried him out of the way, tumbling to the ground with him. The tram screeched to a halt. Stunned, the boy, who looked to be about four years old, temporarily quieted.

  “Billy!” the mother cried out, and ran to them.

  The tram driver turned off the motor and stepped off, shaking. “Are you all right? The little guy came out of nowhere and I couldn’t stop fast enough. I could’ve killed him. Thank you, son!” He reached down to help Jack up.

  The mother hugged her child tightly and then Jack. The commotion grew, with more and more people gathering.

  Ruthie made her way into the cluster in time to hear the father say, “This boy saved my son’s life!”

  Jack looked at Ruthie, somewhat dumbstruck. A few people with cameras came up, some wanting to know Jack’s name. A police officer arrived. Ruthie started to feel uneasy, especially when she heard someone say, “He should be on the front page of the paper!”

  “Where are your parents?” the father asked. “I’d like to tell them what a swell son they have!”

  “That’s right!” the mother said, hugging Jack again.

  Jack reluctantly gave his name before Ruthie jumped in, saying, “We have to go. Our parents are waiting for us. Sorry!” She grabbed Jack by the hand and tore him away. People called after them, but Ruthie and Jack didn’t turn around. They ran all the way back to the fair entrance and didn’t stop until they saw the taxi stand. They were panting hard.

  “You saved that kid’s life,” Ruthie finally said.

  “I guess I did. Pretty wild, huh?”

  “Just think. If we hadn’t by chance ended up in New York …” The consequences of what had happened were coming into sharper focus—along with the words a most serious and dangerous matter from Mrs. Thorne’s letter. “There was nothing we did that made that little kid run into the path of the tram. That was going to happen whether we were there or not. But you stopped it from happening! You changed his history.”

  “I know. By chance.”

  BY THE TIME THEY ARRIVED back at the museum, they had to rush in order to be at Jack’s house by five o’clock. The Art Institute no longer felt like a maze to them, but here in the Metropolitan, they had to ask directions to the room from the Thomas Hart House twice.

  While Jack worried about the time, Ruthie worried silently about the portal. Arriving in New York City in 1939 when they thought they’d be in eighteenth-century New Hampshire introduced a pesky uncertainty to her understanding of how the time travel worked. Winding through the museum, she thought, What if the portal is invisible now and we’re stuck in New York the way I was stuck in England? Could this be what Mrs. Thorne’s warning referred to? And then she heard Mrs. McVittie’s voice in her head, saying, Question assumptions.

  “Here we are,” Jack said as they turned the corner and saw the impressive red canopy bed. “Through there.”

  They backtracked to the Thomas Hart room and then the Wentworth room and the stairwell that led up to the door to A2, which would—hopefully, Ruthie thought—bring them back to Mrs. Thorne’s version of the room. The velvet rope still hung across the staircase. They slipped under it and darted up the stairs. Ruthie exhaled when she saw the door.

  She turned the heavy knob and cracked the door. But then she remembered something. “The clothes—we left them in the cabinet downstairs.”

  “Here, hold these. I’ll go get them.” Jack handed her his comics.

  Ruthie didn’t like having him out of her sight while she waited in the dark stairwell. She tried to think what she could use from the room to carry the comics through the portal and across time.

  “Is it all clear?” Jack asked when he reappeared with the clothes in his arms.

  Ruthie opened the door an inch. She didn’t see anyone but put her finger to her lips and listened. “I think so. I’ll see what I can find to put the comics in.”

  Ruthie stacked the comics on top of the clothes and slipped back into room A2. Taking a quick inventory, she decided there just weren’t many items in this sparsely decorated room that might work. The only book was a Bible, but it was prominently placed right in the center of the room and was something museum visitors always marveled over. Taking it out even temporarily seemed risky. And most likely it had been made by one of Mrs. Thorne’s craftsmen, so it wouldn’t work, because the item needed to be a real antique. Or did it? Since this room had been created at the same time as the era it was a portal to, would that make it old enough? The complexity of this time twist tangled up like a knot in her head.

  Then she noticed a box. It was about as big as an oversized jewelry box, made of dark stained wood. She picked it up and headed back toward the stairwell where Jack was waiting. But she paused for a second. What if this was the animator? She didn’t want to make the same mistake that Jack had made.

  “Jack?” she said in a loud whisper at the door.

  “What?”

  Whew! It’s not the animator. Ruthie opened the door.

  “We can try this,” she said as she met him on the other side. No sooner had she spoken than the color of the wood softened. It was a subtle change but noticeable. “It just got about seventy-five years younger.”

  “But it still looks old,” Jack said.

  The light was dim in the stairwell. Lifting the hinged top, Jack’s sharp eyes spied something on the bottom. He reached in and pulled out not one item but two.

  In his open palm Jack held two rings, completely different in style. One was ornate, made of what looked like real, shining gold. They saw an enameled image of a lion and a unicorn on either side of a crowned sphere surrounded by vines, all encircled with tiny rubies and emeralds. The other was a cheap mood ring, the kind that can be found in dollar stores and junk shops.

  “What are these doing in here?” Jack asked.

  “There’s no way either of these were made by Mrs. Thorne; I’m pretty sure she didn’t make any jewelry for the rooms. Rings are way too small!” Ruthie inspected the gold ring, trying to see any markings on the inside of the band. “I think it’s old.”

  “But this one can’t be very old,” Jack said, still holding the mood ring. “Do you think Dr. Bell might’ve left them in here?”

  “She’ll be at your house; we can ask her before dinner,” Ruthie replied. “Let’s put everything in the box and go.”

  They placed the two rings and the three comics in the box, closed
the lid, and waited until they heard no voices from Gallery 11; then they stepped into the room. Jack returned the clothes to the closet while Ruthie set the box back where it belonged. She waited for Jack before opening it.

  Jack grinned as soon as they lifted the lid. “Ha! It worked again!” The three comic books looked much older than they had moments ago but were still in excellent condition, as if they’d been sitting in that box aging undisturbed for three-quarters of a century.

  Ruthie took out the two rings, which looked almost unchanged. She opened her messenger bag and saw Freddy’s toad just as she had left it. She added the rings and Jack carefully slid in the comics. “Let’s go,” she said, and Jack followed, still smiling.

  Out on the ledge Jack looked at his watch. “It’s after four o’clock. We’d better move fast.”

  They stayed small and made their way back to the European Corridor. Once there, to save time, Ruthie tossed the key and leapt to the ground, expanding in midair. If there was one thing about the magic that she wished she could carry into her regular life, it was this; in those few seconds of weightlessness, she felt as free as a bird gliding to the ground.

  Jack sat, still small, on the ledge, dangling his feet like he didn’t have a care in the world. Ruthie retrieved the crochet chain and then lifted her tiny friend to the floor. Then she shrank once again so they could scoot under the access door together.

  As they came up the stairs to the main floor of the museum—full size—Ruthie thought about how happy she was that they were going to see the Bells. She hadn’t seen either one of them for a while. Meeting Edmund Bell when he still worked as a guard in the museum was possibly the most important meeting she’d ever had. He was the person who had let Jack sneak a peek in the dark corridor behind the rooms, where Jack caught the first glimpse of the magic key. When it turned out his daughter, Dr. Caroline Bell, had magically visited the rooms as a little girl (which Ruthie and Jack were pretty sure Mr. Bell didn’t know about), they’d found a helpful ally when they needed to protect the rooms from a thief.

  Approaching the big glass doors that opened onto Michigan Avenue, Ruthie said, “I hope we’ll have a chance to show Dr. Bell—” She stopped in midsentence and grabbed her messenger bag.

  “What?” Jack asked when he saw the look on her face.

  “I think it just got lighter,” she responded, not wanting to open the canvas bag and verify what she was afraid had just happened. But she looked in anyway.

  Crestfallen, she held it out for Jack. His shoulders slumped.

  The comic books were gone, as was Freddy’s carved toad. At the doors to the museum, the magic had ceased working and the past had reclaimed the four treasures.

  “I guess it was too good to be true,” Ruthie admitted. “We can’t bring the stuff from the past to our time.”

  “It’s kind of like what happened when we tried to take my shrunken bento box out of the museum still small, remember? We already knew the magic doesn’t hold far from the rooms. We should have figured.”

  “I know, but I thought this would be different.” Ruthie sighed deeply. “Because Freddy gave me the toad. And you bought the comics. Because we were able to get them across the portals.”

  “But my knife—the one from Jack Norfleet? Why do I still have that?” Jack wondered, thinking about the whale-tooth knife made by his pirate ancestor.

  “Because Jack Norfleet put it in his desk centuries ago. And remember, Mrs. Thorne got that desk as an antique and magically shrank it. The knife is a true antique—it was already in the desk when Mrs. Thorne got it. We didn’t try to make it skip over all those years. That’s what the magic won’t let us do.”

  “Right. It gets so confusing. I should add all that to the list of rules I made a while back,” Jack said. “The rings—they must still be in your bag. The mood ring can’t even be as old as the Thorne Rooms.”

  “And the letter!” Ruthie said, plunging her hand to the bottom of her bag. “Here it is,” she exhaled.

  She fished around in the bag again, her fingers finding the mood ring first. The antique ring seemed so old and otherworldly, Ruthie was half expecting it to have vanished. But she pulled it from her bag looking exactly as it had when she put it in. “This proves someone from our time put both rings in that box.”

  “How?”

  “If someone had gone into the past and brought this old ring back—like we did with the comics and the toad—it would have disappeared. It has to be a true antique that someone left in that box.”

  They trudged through the doors and down the steps to the bus stop. The heat of the day was at its worst, rays of hot sunlight smacking them hard from the west. On the bus, all the riders, crammed shoulder to shoulder, made the sweltering air even warmer. They got off a few blocks early and walked to Jack’s loft.

  “You know,” Ruthie began while Jack unlocked the building’s door, “I wasn’t really sure it was a good idea to bring things back from the past.”

  “Why not?”

  “I can’t really explain it. But somehow it seemed like we were sneaking around the rules of the magic.”

  Jack shrugged as they got on the elevator. “So you don’t think rules are made to be broken?”

  “All I know is that when I got stuck in the eighteenth century this morning, I didn’t like it. We shouldn’t assume that everything will turn out okay if we don’t respect the magic.”

  “You’re probably right. Especially since we have no idea how we ended up in 1939 New York today!”

  Ruthie felt her taut nerves turn like a rubber band of a toy plane. “You don’t think,” she began, an idea forming as she spoke, “that we were—I don’t know—meant to go back to the World’s Fair? You know, so you could save Billy?”

  Jack looked at her. “Anything’s possible.” He slid the elevator gate to the side and opened the door. “Hello!” Jack hollered into the spacious loft.

  “We’re back here,” his mom called from her studio.

  Ruthie and Jack headed to the studio, where Edmund and Caroline Bell were viewing Lydia’s latest paintings.

  “Isn’t this nice to see you both!” Edmund Bell greeted them.

  “Did you two have a good day? Did you stay cool out there?” Lydia asked.

  “We spent most of it in the Art Institute,” Jack answered.

  “Really?” Dr. Bell said with a knowing look and a smile. “Anything special going on there?”

  “The usual,” Ruthie replied, smiling too and waiting for the right moment to tell her about what had happened today.

  While Mr. Bell and Lydia talked about their work, Ruthie, Jack, and Dr. Bell drifted out of the studio and into Jack’s house within the house, where they wouldn’t be overheard. First they showed her the letter and asked her if she had ever come across anything like it in the rooms when she was a girl.

  Dr. Bell read the letter. “This is remarkable. No, I never saw anything like this.”

  Then they told her about their time travel surprise.

  “We can’t explain it; we entered in the New Hampshire room from the 1700s, but we ended up in New York City in 1939,” Ruthie said.

  “Yeah,” Jack added, “we were smack in the middle of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.”

  “Do you have a catalogue of the rooms, Jack? Maybe there’s a clue,” Dr. Bell suggested.

  “Yep,” he said, going to a stack of books on his bookshelf. “Right here.”

  Jack handed the catalogue to Ruthie. She opened to the page for A2 and she and Dr. Bell scanned the text. Dr. Bell pointed to a few lines. “I think that’s your answer.”

  “What?” Jack asked.

  “It says here that the Wentworth room came from a real house in New Hampshire,” Dr. Bell said. “It was dismantled and reinstalled in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Mrs. Thorne copied that room in miniature. It doesn’t say when. Why don’t you check the Met’s website?”

  Jack went to his computer and found the site, typing “Wentw
orth room” in the search bar. Immediately an image of the room appeared. “There it is. Just like we saw.”

  “See that?” Dr. Bell pointed at the screen. “ ‘Sage Fund, 1926.’ That tells you the name of the donor who paid for the room, and the year the museum acquired it.”

  In a few more clicks Jack had found an article about the opening of the new American period rooms at the Met. “It says they opened in December 1937.”

  “I get it!” Ruthie said. “Mrs. Thorne must have known about that and decided to make a miniature version. And since she made the American rooms in the late 1930s—”

  “How do you know that?” Jack interrupted.

  “I read it in the catalogue. That’s why we ended up in that time.”

  “So it was a real, full-size eighteenth-century room but had been moved from New Hampshire to the Metropolitan Museum of Art,” Jack said, sorting it out.

  “Exactly. But because Mrs. Thorne was copying the museum room, it became a portal to New York City instead of New Hampshire.”

  “You must have been so surprised!” Dr. Bell added.

  “I almost forgot.” Ruthie grabbed her messenger bag and took out the two rings. “We were also surprised by these. We found them in a box in Mrs. Thorne’s Wentworth room. I was wondering if you ever saw them when you were in the rooms, or if you put them there.”

  Dr. Bell studied them. “It was a long time ago, but no, these aren’t familiar.”

  “If you didn’t,” Ruthie said, “who did?”

  “Maybe whoever took the key in the first place,” Jack suggested.

  Dr. Bell held up the gem-encrusted one. In the light of Jack’s room they saw wear and scratches on the gold that they hadn’t been able to see before, making it look even older. “This one looks valuable. I think that’s a family crest,” she said, pointing to the carved lion and unicorn in the center of the ring.