The Keep of Ages (The Vault of Dreamers #3)

“Do I know you?” I ask.

“I’m Lavinia Jacobs,” she says. “I once taught at the Forge School of the Arts. I believe you’ve seen my portrait in the dean’s office.”

Yes. I did see that portrait, only Lavinia didn’t wear glasses in it, and she was a good twenty years younger. Lavinia Jacobs was the film teacher who first arranged to have her students filmed around the clock. Her experiments laid the foundation for the current Forge School and The Forge Show. The full magnitude of who she is hits me. She’s an icon. I try to recall when she started the show. In the early 2040s, I think. She wasn’t young then. She must be over eighty now.

But she’s here, alive, and my sister sent me to this address.

“I don’t get this,” I say.

“You thought I was dead, no doubt,” Lavinia says. “You wouldn’t be the first.”

“No,” I say. “I’m just surprised. What do you have to do with my family?”

“Nothing, as far as I know.”

“But then why did my sister give me your address?”

“That is what we need to divine. I’m not exactly in the phone book, so to speak.” She glances toward a clock on her nightstand and shakes her head. “Four-thirty already? Gracious. What is this world coming to? Get Tiny some food, will you? Down in the kitchen? One scoop’s fine.” She straightens again, sets the Mace on her dresser, and slides open the top drawer. “And start some water for tea. I’ll be down in a minute. On your way!” She dismisses me with a wave of her silvery fingers.

I’m more puzzled than ever. This makes no sense, but I do what she says and head downstairs, alert for any clues to explain why Dubbs connected me with Lavinia. A grandfather clock ticks on the lower landing, and a living room is separated from a kitchen in the back by a wide, arching doorway. Old, dark furniture and a worn carpet give the place a hushed stillness, and I don’t see a TV or computer screen anywhere. She must watch The Forge Show somehow, though, since she knows me.

A distant flushing noise comes from above.

In the kitchen, the cat sits expectantly by a couple of tin bowls. I slide my backpack to the floor. Then I fill one bowl with water and, feeling a bit intrusive, I open cabinets and heavy wooden drawers until I find a smelly bag of dry cat food. I scoop some into the dish, and Tiny digs in with a light tinking noise.

I check for camera lenses and find none. It’s a Spartan kitchen, with one blue plate, one soup bowl, and one set of silverware. A pot. A pan. Just enough for a solitary old soul. Plastic measuring cups nest inside a mixing bowl. I fill the metal teakettle, turn on the gas flame with a whoosh, and set the water to boil.

No toaster. No coffee machine. No microwave. Everything’s clean and tidy, including a pile of letters under a glass paperweight on the windowsill. It’s not at all what I would expect from a woman who was such an innovator in her day. An oval rag rug rests before the sink. The ceiling is the shiny blue of a battleship. Another landline phone with a long, coiling cord is attached to the wall. It could be that she’s just into simplicity, Thoreau-like, but it feels more like she’s living in another time.

I glance at the pile of letters and notice they’re all the size of greeting cards. Since I’ve been nosy already, I sort through the pile. The faded envelopes are all addressed in the same small handwriting to Lavinia, all from the same S. Schur in Downers Grove, Illinois, all unopened. The postmarks date back over ten years. I set them back carefully under the paperweight, puzzled.

It isn’t just that the apartment has the feel of another time, I realize. It’s more like I’ve entered an apartment that’s under a spell, where everything’s dormant, including the aging princess I now hear coming down the stairs. Yet there has to be a good reason why Dubbs left me this address. Out the window, a breeze stirs the item on the clothesline, and I realize it’s a child’s faded smock, the plastic kind often worn while finger painting.

Lavinia moves gracefully into the kitchen and heads for a dish of lemon drops. She’s dressed in gray slacks, black ballet flats, and a tailored beige shirt that fits neatly on her spare figure. Her braid is coiled at the back of her head, and she’s put on coral earrings and a dash of lipstick. She pops a lemon drop in her mouth, pursing her lips while she clicks it around her teeth.

“Now,” she says as she eases herself into a chair. She gestures me toward the chair opposite hers. “It’s time to decipher this enigma. Where is your sister now?”

A dose of caution makes me modify the truth. “I don’t know. She and my parents are missing.”

“Missing,” Lavinia repeats flatly. She lifts an eyebrow. “Well, that’s a start. Does Berg know you’re here?” she asks.

“I hope not.”

“The man’s a fiend. An absolute fiend,” she says. “Smart as can be and rotten to the core.”

I agree with her there.

“Who else knows you’re here?” she asks.

“No one,” I say. Thea doesn’t really count. “Do you still watch The Forge Show?” I ask.

She grimaces briefly. She reaches for a teacup and a short glass, and then fishes tea bags out of a tin. “It pains me. It’s a travesty of what I first imagined,” she says. “You students never get to see the night and the stars. That alone is downright treachery of the high seas. Still, if you take any school and give it the top talent in the country, it’ll be a success. It’s the students who make the school, not the other way around.”

“So you do still watch it,” I say.

She shrugs. “Strictly speaking, I don’t watch it. I’m still tapped directly into the cameras at Forge. I can watch the students directly, without the obnoxious interference of idiots like Bones. You recall Bones.”

“My techie,” I say, startled.

“Yes. I can watch through all the cameras of the show, all the time,” she says. She reaches down to stroke Tiny’s ears. “Like a techie, but I don’t have to log out at night and go home. As you can imagine, it gives me a different perspective.”

Amazed, I stare at her. “But you don’t even have a TV,” I say.

“My dear Rosie. Don’t be obtuse. Clearly, I do,” she says. “I suppose you’re asking for proof. Let’s see. You climbed out on the roof in the rain the night before fifty cuts. You got soaked, but you looked happy for once. That’s the first time I paid any attention to you.”

“Berg showed that same clip to the trustees,” I say. “You could have intercepted it then.”

“Quite right,” she says, straightening. The cat pads away into the living room. “Okay, the night you went down the pit of the clock tower, you waited until the moment that Berg and Otis and Linus were all focused on Parker, Otis’s partner, before you ran across the quad. That’s how you made it to the rose garden and the clock tower without being seen. Am I right?”

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