The Key to the Indian. Lynne Banks Reid

You must take care of her now.” Maybe she even did say it. And then suddenly she wasn’t there any more.

      Omri’s father was talking. He was describing the scene just as Omri saw it in his head. Which came first – what Omri saw, or what his dad said?

      When his dad finished, there was a silence, and then Omri said in a choked voice, “Mum must have felt awful.”

      “About seeing the ghost?”

      “No! About all the times she hadn’t taken her gran to the cemetery. About the ghost needing to come and – and remind her to take care of Maria.”

      “Do you think the ghost – was Jessica Charlotte?”

      “Of course it was,” said Omri simply.

      “You sound sure.”

      “I am.”

      “Omri – how can you know that?”

      “Well it’s not because I’m magic. It’s just – I’ve got a very good imagination, and sometimes it just tells me things.”

      His father looked at him, and Omri heard what he had just said, heard it as his father must have, as proof that Omri had a bit of Jessica Charlotte’s gift.

      

      They talked it all over very carefully before anyone else in the house woke up. The sun was well clear of ‘Peacock Hill’ and streaming into the room before they first heard the others beginning to stir, and had to stop.

      Omri, though of course he wanted to see Jessica Charlotte again, and thought it very probable that she would have the ability to make them another magic key, one that would work in the car, was very doubtful just the same about his dad’s plan.

      There was nothing in the Account about her making a second time-journey. The first one – when she visited Omri and Patrick and sang them a music-hall song – was hinted at in her diary, but nothing after that. Surely if she had been brought a second time, and asked to make another key, she would have remembered it, especially so close after the first time.

      Omri’s father was very interested in the time question. “Does it work the same at both ends?”

      “Yes.”

      “That’s to say, if a week has passed here, a week has passed for the people in the past?”

      “That’s right. I know because when Little Bull came this last time, his baby was about a year old, and it was a year here since he was born. Anyway, I knew it before.”

      “Okay, so let’s work it out. How many days is it since Jessica Charlotte came?”

      Omri thought about it. A week had passed between seeing her, and the day his dad had found the figures and discovered the secret, and three days more had passed since then.

      “Ten days.”

      “Ten days…” His dad was looking at the notebook. “So. Right after she came here – no, it wasn’t. Let me see. She made the key. That was the day of the victory parade, the day she said goodbye to Lottie, Armistice Day – November the eleventh, nineteen-eighteen. The next day she went back to Maria’s to ‘say goodbye’, pretending she was going abroad. And that was the day she stole the earrings. So that’s one day.

      “Then, she writes, a week went by. And at the end of that week, she got the news that little Lottie had been accused of stealing the earrings, and had run out of the house, and her father, Matthew, ran after her and got run over and killed. And that’s where her part of the Account ends.”

      “Well, there is a bit more…”

      “Not that you can read. When she got to writing that part, all those years later when she was on her deathbed…” he looked up, and looked around. “Maybe in this very room, Omri!”

      “No, it was Gillon’s room.”

      “How do you know?”

      “I just—” He stopped suddenly. He was beginning to feel creepy about this. He did ‘just know’, he was certain. But how?

      His father took a deep breath, and went on. “Okay. Anyway, when she was trying to write the last of the Account, she became too ill and weak, and had to call in her son Frederick to finish it. This last page of her writing…” He pointed to faded, scrawly words that you could hardly make out. “… indicate to me that she was not only very ill by the time she came to write it, but that she was writing about a time when she was almost crazy. She felt Matthew had died because of her, that Lottie had been falsely accused, that more terrible things were going to happen because of what she’d done.

      “Now, Omri, if you’ve got a bit of her ‘gift’, use it. Imagine her as she was – is – at this moment. Ten days after the theft of the earrings. Three days after she found out about Matthew’s death.”

      Omri didn’t have to imagine very hard. He’d been through this already, when he had read this part of the Account. He had almost seemed to be suffering with Jessica Charlotte in this awful crisis in her life. He had felt her guilt, her horror, her remorse. He didn’t want to experience that again, or even a shadow of it. It was a terrible thought that, down through the layers of time, she might still be going through that; that if they brought her, they would have to see her going through it.

      “She’s right in the middle of it, Dad. Her – her – awful time.” A new, appalling throught struck him. He took the notebook away from his father and peered closely at the semi-legible words. “Alone… wandering… despair… river… coward… never…” He suddenly and shockingly understood the meaning behind the word ‘river’ and the word that followed it.

      “Dad! She – she tried to drown herself!”

      “What!”

      “I’m sure of it! Why didn’t I notice before? I was so disappointed that the Account had stopped, thinking I’d never learn the secret of the magic now, I didn’t read into it like I did the rest. ‘Alone – wandering – river – coward’. Don’t you see? She was in such a state she wanted to throw herself into the Thames, and maybe she couldn’t because she was too afraid. Or maybe she was too much of a coward to go on living… And that’s what’s going on right now, back in her time! Oh, Dad!” he exclaimed, forgetting to be quiet, staring at his father across the notebook. “We’re not going to bring her now are we?”

      “If we want her to make us a key, to go back and help Little Bull,” said his father slowly, “we’ll have to.”

       4“River… Coward… Never.”

      It was a school day. Omri whispered to his father as the house woke up that he might pretend to be ill so he could stay home and they could talk more. But his dad said no way.

      So there was a normal breakfast and Gillon and Omri set off for school on their bikes. Adiel was having a long weekend exeat from his boarding school. Omri envied him. But no, that was absurd. If he, Omri, were incarcerated in a boarding school, there’d be no question of any adventure.

      Actually it turned out that having to be in school was a good thing. It gave his mind a sort of rest. When school was finished, and he went back to thinking about it on the bike ride home, he came to it fresh, and at once an interesting thought occurred to him.

      Bringing Jessica Charlotte might be a kind of relief to her. She’d enjoyed being with him and Patrick, it had lifted her out of her sorrow about Lottie. Perhaps it would be like that again. However terrible she was feeling, she might feel a little less