The stone of the walls was dry and cool, and whispers from her clothing ran up and down the stairwell. The ceiling seemed to become lower as she approached the bottom, although she could not be certain that it was not just an intrusion of her nightmare.
At the bottom, she was again faced with the three blank doors with their sturdy locks, the damp tiles of the floor, and behind her, Jonas's lair. The only sounds were from upstairs, and even those were more the sense of movement than actual noises. It was a sturdy building. Anne stepped softly around the stairs to Jonas's room, and found that too empty of life. She was alone, with the outside world there at the touch of an electronic finger. She would not get a second chance.
The whine the computer made when she switched it on seemed loud enough to be heard in the kitchen, and the click of the scanner was not far behind. She looked at the door as if expecting Jonas to lumber through with his paws outstretched, then took a deep breath and committed herself.
She called up the computer's e-mail program without opening up the line, and with excruciating slowness transferred the written journal pages from the sole of her shoe into the electronic file, laying two pages at a time on the scanner's glass screen. She wished she had written smaller, wished Jonas had updated his hardware in the last two years and gone for speed, even wished she had rallied her students on that long-ago afternoon in the lecture hall and let them throw Glen out the doors.
Her polo shirt was wet by the time the last page had been read, and she rapidly created an attachment of the scanned pages, typed in Uncle Abner's e-mail address, and hit the SEND button. The screen blinked and it was gone.
She then had to remove it from the records, so Jonas wouldn't happen across this curious document, a process that took more time on this unfamiliar setup than sending it had. At last she had to assume it was as deleted as she could make it. She turned off both machines, checked again to be sure she had not forgotten any sheets of paper on the scanner, rolled the pages back up, and feverishly stuffed them back into her shoe, which she then jammed onto her foot and tied.
She dropped into Jonas's big leather chair and stared at the dark screen in astonishment. She had actually done it. God, how rare it was, the sense of completion that hitting the SEND bar had given her. She could not know that Glen would be too preoccupied to check the Abner e-mail until it was too late to make a difference, but that did not matter. She had done her job, she had finally fulfilled her duty to Glen. That small movement of her finger had somehow cleared all past debts. She was free to deal on her own with the problem of a courageous, loyal, great-hearted, quixotic boy too old for his years who had, she knew in her bones, submitted for the second time to the alembic of a Change leader. Glen would never approve, but she no longer belonged to Glen. Now her only responsibility was to Jason Delgado and his curly-haired sister.
She scooted the chair back a few inches and began to open the desk drawers, looking for keys. The locks on the three doors outside Jonas's study were all new enough to retain their brass shine, and she thought it highly unlikely that an amateur like her could pick all three without being discovered. She didn't even know if English locks differed from the American brands she had learned on. She had a brief image of herself reduced to battering down the doors with a fire ax, and shook her head. Another thing Glen had left her unprepared for.
Instead, she searched for a key. Possibly a set of keys, but since all three locks looked identical from the outside, there was a good chance Jonas would have asked for one key rather than fumbling to choose the right one.
In the bottom left drawer she found a wooden cigar box containing a rich cache of keys; unfortunately, most of them were of the long-shanked skeleton type gone black with age, obviously original to the building. There were half a dozen newer keys, but when she went to look at the doors, none of the keys matched the brand names on the locks. She pulled out two or three likely candidates, but none of them fit.
They were all labeled, cardboard circles with metal edges tied on with loops of string, but the words written down bore no resemblance to locations. The one in her hand, for example, had a Greek phrase written in a neat hand that she thought might be that of Jonas Seraph. She puzzled over it for a moment and decided it said, "All men have one entrance into life," which she thought was from The Apocrypha—given the language, probably from The Wisdom of Solomon. Then she realized what the key was: to the front door. A similar key bore simply the word "anus", which seemed peculiar until she came up with its euphemism of "back passage": This would be the key to the outside door near the kitchen. Jonas had his own sense of humor, inconvenient and juvenile, but clever.
She put the keys back and closed the desk drawer on them. It was, of course, all too possible that he had only one key and he kept it with him at all times, in which case this entire enterprise was about to trickle off into farce. Still, she was not finished yet. She pushed herself away from the desk, returning the chair to its original position, and turned to the shelves.
A painstaking half-circuit of the room, beginning with the door and working her way along the left side of the room, left her with filthy hands, a heightened respect for the man's depth of scholarship, and no key. She sorted through the wild assortment of objects covering the windows—the only windows in this level of the house, she had discovered—but there was no key, even though it would have been his style. She did find, hanging among the display of dry bones that covered the third window, a silver necklace, a worn lump of silver similar to the golden shape Steven wore, only slightly elongated and curved inward at the ends. It looked, actually, a bit like a crescent moon, and she thumbed it, wondering briefly whose Work this had been, before her growing apprehension and sense of time running out drove her back to the room's entrance to start the sweep of the other half of the room.
Three shelves down from the top, at fingertip reach for a man of six feet four but needing a ladder for her, a title jumped out at her: Mary Baker Eddy's book that formed the basis for Christian Science interpretation of the Bible. Its name was The Key to the Scriptures, and Anne knew instantly why it was there among a group of geology textbooks. She carried over the library ladder, pulled down the book, and opened it at the red ribbon: a key.
She slid the book back, put the ladder away, and took the beribboned key into the hallway. The house had fallen silent above her, which meant only that it was not yet time to begin the preparations for lunch. No time to waste.
She began with the left-hand door. The key turned, but the door did not open. Her heart sank, then speeded up. If her key did not open it, that was not because it did not work; there must be another lock, turned from the inside. Someone was behind this door. Very gently, she rotated the key the other way to remove it, and when she withdrew her hand from the knob, it turned, and the door came open. She stumbled backward, and then felt like smacking herself on the forehead: the door had been unlocked to begin with.
Looking inside, she could see why. This was Jonas's private rest room, and the only reason he might lock it at all was the extensive collection of oversized books on erotica that took up most of one wall. She dosed the door and tried the other two knobs. Both of those were locked.
The right-hand door proved to be a closet, with nothing more exciting than an elderly computer sitting among the reams of paper and printer cartridges. She locked the door without even entering the small room, and turned to the middle door, where she found a web of scratches around the keyhole. The key turned, the door opened, she put her head inside, and for the first time she heard noises—a slow, rhythmical thump punctuated by the indistinguishable rumble of male voices. She contemplated the sounds for a minute, and then she withdrew her head, went back to the study, and replaced the key inside Mary Baker Eddy. This time when she came out she walked directly over to the middle door and went through, closing it behind her but not turning the latch. I found it open, Jonas, she would say innocently. You must have forgotten to lock it, she would add with a blink of her big blue eyes.