Keeper of the Keys

by Perri O'shaughnessy

  Denise said, “I’m concerned. I’m freaked, in fact. We should be going over our presentation for Antoniou. You haven’t seen half my work. What are you doing that’s so important?”

  “I have personal business. I trust you.”

  Her voice lowered to a whisper. “Ray, the police just left. They talked to Martin and me and Suzanne. Ray?”

  “I’m here.”

  “They asked about Leigh.”

  “What did you tell them?”

  “Nothing. But Suzanne is furious with Martin right now. You probably know why. Anyway, she took the cops into your office-your office, Ray! You ought to fire her! And when she came out she had a smile on her face that was as big as revenge can get. I’m sure she talked about that argument you and Martin had.”

  So the police knew about Martin and Leigh. Then they knew Ray had lied to them.

  Ray wondered how much time he had.

  “I won’t have to fire her,” he said. “Martin will.”

  “True,” Denise said. “Probably today. And then she’ll file a complaint of sex discrimination or whistle-blowing or something because of Martin. And the legal merry-go-round will start up.”

  There was a silence, phones ringing back at the office, a fragment of conversation as someone passed by. “I’m so sorry,” he told Denise.

  “It’s just-Leigh’s okay, isn’t she?”

  “She’s taking time off, that’s all. Tell everybody I’m sorry for the inconvenience.”

  “When will you really be in?” Denise said, bluntly fixed on her own concerns.

  “As soon as I can.”

  “Because I can still cancel this meeting.”

  “No, you can’t. I’ll be there.”

  He walked up to the house on Bright Street he thought might have been their cottage, again shocked by time’s changes. The block he remembered bicycling up and down now held new apartments where once old houses had led fading lives.

  Dogs barked.

  Still a few doors down from the house he thought had been his, he approached warily. He recalled the sidewalk, buckled from the eternally shifting California earth, because he remembered leapfrogging the bad spots on his skates. He walked toward the ramshackle cottage, glad to see it, remembering the monster movies, his fears, and the neighbor next door, who yelled when he or any kid happened to stumble into his dichondra.

  He hoped the people who lived in the house worked. This, after all, was a working-class street. But a woman came out onto the porch with a tablecloth, shook it vigorously, and reentered the house. He would have to wait. The woman stood in his mother’s kitchen. He went back to his car and rolled down the windows, let his head drop back, closed his eyes, and entered his memories.

  He recalled this house vividly. A twenties bungalow, it hid a fruit cellar beneath the kitchen, the only one he could remember from all his years of moving. Shelves below had harbored ancient jelly jars, jars of unidentifiable vegetables and fruits. They hadn’t lived there long enough for his mother to get around to cleaning them out. Dank dirt surrounded the shelves and webs curled around the old jars.

  After one initial exploration of the cellar, Esmé had never again opened the trapdoor, to his knowledge. But she had said, and he had remembered, “These were places where people could hide. Maybe they built it to hide from burglars.”

  Ray, then only eleven years old, knew the cellar mainly kept food cool in the days before people had refrigerators, and even then marveled at his mother’s paranoia. The fruit cellar, so unusual in his world, so hidden and inaccessible, lured him, and he spent hours down there on hot days in the darkness lying on the damp earth, digging, looking at the jars and the rusted tools. He thought of the place as a refuge. A refuge from what?

  He had enjoyed those months in uptown Whittier, with its big city library and a fountain in front where kids like him could cool off on hot days. He admired the old-fashioned downtown. On Saturday afternoons, while his mother did the grocery shopping, Ray paid a pathetically small amount of money to attend horror movies at the Whittier Village theaters on Greenleaf Avenue. His dreams were full of flesh-eaters, bats with human faces who flew at him, toxic liquid beings that seeped under doors. At this house, his bedroom had been a closed-in porch with windows on three sides that offered perfect entrances for monsters. He never told his mother how much the movies scared him and how they sabotaged his sleep at night.

  His mother had talked about settling down and found a good job at a hardware store. They lived quietly, occasionally visiting his ailing grandmother in Montebello for hurried, always brief visits. Esmé stayed close to her kitchen and collected cookbooks. She experimented on Ray, making muffins with pecans and oranges, pancakes with maple chips, omelets with zucchini. In self-defense, he stopped eating anything except cereal until she relented and got back to serving him plainer fare.

  Looking back, it was as though they really were starting a new life. Then one night in August, yes, another August night, she had presumably moved them. He woke up one morning in a new place, with no memory of leaving.

  That made this house promising.

  The summer sun played over the sidewalk, heating the stone wall he sat upon. The front door to the cottage opened, and the woman stepped out. She held an expandable leash. The big yellow Labrador walked politely to heel as they disappeared up the street.

  She might not be gone long, although a dog that size really needed a good long walk. He got out of his car, sauntered up the porch steps, and knocked. No answer. He pulled out his family of keys. Before trying a single one, he played a game with himself. Which one might fit? He picked through them lovingly, but in truth had no idea, so after a few moments, he simply tried them methodically. Not this one, not that one. This one was too old-fashioned, and the next one, too shiny for one from so many years ago.

  Twist. Turn.

  13

  F inally, one worked. He had to push hard against the door.

  The living room, once home to geometric-patterned curtains, now flowery and strange, held a level of clutter he could hardly believe. Newspapers and magazines piled up in corners, along ledges, even on the couch. He had heard of such people. They hoarded, fearful of what?

  He picked his way disdainfully past the moldering stacks, thinking, was it worse to hang on to every single thing, or better to let it all go without regard for its meaning or import?

  He checked out the master bedroom and found nothing, then moved into his old room, the one with the three high windows. He hardly recognized it. This room had turned into a repository of neurosis, a place where damp publications mildewed and died. All three walls held moldering papers stacked up to the ceiling. He could barely walk inside.

  It hurt, what they had done to his home. He was stifling. Throwing open the back door, he took a deep breath of fresh air to clear his lungs, wondering how much time he had. All the time in the world, really, because the world had come down to this mad search of his.

  He moved swiftly back into the kitchen. Scanning the scene, the dirty countertops, the sink full of filthy dishes, he couldn’t immediately spot where the trapdoor lay. A sisal area rug covered most of the floor, and he pulled it aside, examining the stained hardwood flooring below.

  Ah, yes, grimy lines that showed where the trapdoor existed. No handle stuck up anymore, however. He had to find a steak knife in a drawer and pry at the sides of it. After cleaning and picking at three sides, the door lifted open like an ancient tomb.

  He peered inside. Black. Dank. Nothing. Cold air coming at him.

  He didn’t have a flashlight. Frustrated, he left the trap open and wandered farther through the house, trying to find one. In one cupboard he found a hair cutter, shaver, curling iron, and hair dryer. In one, he discovered appliances: a bread maker, coffee grinder, blender, and sandwich grill. All these things reposed willy-nilly between oven racks, coffee mugs, and canned goods so old their labels looked quaint. In the third drawer down in the master bedroom, right next to a
n oddly shaped personal vibrator, he found a flashlight. Another ten minutes later he discovered the battery that would make it work.

  Phew.

  After placing the battery correctly in the flashlight, he poked it into the dark hole of the forgotten fruit cellar.

  Webs, the overwhelming truth of the matter. Many spiders, many critters, owned this place. He saw jars he thought he remembered from his childhood, ugh, so old even he didn’t want to deal with them. However, he had no choice.

  The rotting wooden ladder held his weight all the way to the dank floor. Waving the flashlight around, repulsed, intrigued, he dug through the dusty dank jars, watching for black widow spiders and another revelation.

  After all, Esmé had thought of the cellar as a refuge from intruders.

  Parked on the street outside, Kat watched Ray leave his car, debating whether to hop out and have a look through a window or two to see what Ray was up to.

  “ A1A Beachfront Avenue!” the boyz on her cell phone shouted.

  “Hiya. It’s me.”

  “Well, hello, Zak.”

  “A Chinese movie tomorrow night?” Zak suggested. “Not quite Crouching Tiger. More Man, Woman, Eat Tofu type of thing.”

  “Er. Never heard of that one,” she said.

  “Well, I forget the name, but it’s about a guy who doesn’t fit in with his girlfriend’s family. He’s not what they think he is. He can’t live up to their expectations.”

  “He’s gay?” She usually passed on gay movies. She went to the movies for the immature purpose of identifying with a main character, wanting to be a beautiful babe who got it all, or got what Kat wanted, anyway.

  “No, but there’s some kind of kinky sex thing. Does that bother you?”

  “I’m okay with kink in moderation.” And sure, she liked sex things. She just didn’t like subtitled films. She didn’t understand Chinese history or French humor or Swedish angst. She liked great production values and a lot of FX.

  Rollerblades and subtitles. Zak wasn’t easy to pin down, was he? One of these days, she would have to pry into his past, and get equal dirt on him.

  “Sounds great,” she said, distracted, her eyes on the house.

  “I’ll pick you up.”

  She punched off and smiled at herself, an attractive young woman in dark sunglasses, examining herself in the driver’s mirror. Just before the call she had been a loser acting peculiarly. Amazing what a phone call could do.

  Possibly she could change for Zak. She would watch Korean and Indonesian and Finnish films with him twice a week for the rest of her life and have a normal life, like Jacki’s, with him.

  Then she remembered with a wince her sister’s conversations lately, which had deteriorated into daily reports on her lack of sleep, the daily boredom of staying at home, how much she hated to clean. Maybe Jacki had been right. Kat didn’t know what would make her happy. But she was getting a definite inkling about what wouldn’t.

  She touched her car door handle, preparing to exit, then stopped, as something moved in her rearview mirror.

  She sure takes short walks, Kat thought, fear for Ray rising up in her. He was about to get busted in the worst way, by a frustrated, drooling big animal. She jumped out of the car and approached the woman, even reaching out to pet the scary guy who stood calmly by her side. She, who knew nothing about dogs, learned a lot in the next few minutes. When she couldn’t think of another thing to say, the woman said good-bye and approached her house.

  Come out, come out wherever you are! Ray! Kat shouted in her mind, but stood indecisively beside her car, wondering what else to do.

  The fruit cellar was creepy, even with the square of light above that led back to the kitchen and the day. Ray began to feel claustrophobic, and his movements got larger. He knocked jars off their shelves. Something splattered on the ground and a sickly-sweet fruit smell came up. He ran his hand high along the right wall. Nothing. Kneeling, he flashed the light along the webs and detritus of fifty years of winters and springs.

  And there he found it, a filthy zipped vinyl bank envelope, lying against the wall under the lowest shelf, right on the ground. He recognized it instantly, even in this light. His mother had kept her papers in it. He seemed to remember her looking through it for some money to give him one morning when he was late for school, pulling it out of her underwear drawer.

  She had put it down here for a reason. He held it, the flashlight trembling so that moving shadows were cast over the walls.

  He heard a faint bang up there and his heart fluttered. Pushing the envelope into his pants pocket, he waited in the dark, cursing his stupidity in not shutting the trapdoor when he went down, just to have a little light.

  Then he heard growling, then the most horrendous, cavernous barking and scrabbling of feet above his head.

  The light through the trapdoor was cut off. “Who’s down there?” a woman’s voice demanded, muffled through the floor, and spiked by shrieks from her mad dog. He should have said something, “Utility man,” anything, but his tongue wouldn’t operate.

  The trapdoor was pushed over the hole. He barely breathed in the blackness, but the sounds above were incoherent as bedlam.

  He could guess what she was doing. He didn’t have much time. He climbed up the ladder and tried to push up on it, but she seemed to be sitting on it. It didn’t budge.

  “Ma’am, please let me out,” he said. “Please hold back your dog. I’m with the water company.”

  “The hell you are,” came her muffled voice. “Tell it to 911.” The dog, maddened by their interaction, howled afresh.

  “Hush, Kobe,” the woman said. “You hush.”

  Amazingly, the dog obeyed.

  Well-trained. Not good, Ray thought. “Your neighbor called. A water main broke. You have severe flooding down here.” Then he switched to being a gas man, crying out, “Ma’am, listen. We have to evacuate right away. There’s going to be an explosion!” He pounded upward on the trapdoor, and he wasn’t playacting the terror in his voice. To be found like this-he would be put in jail! Or eaten alive by that monstrous animal.

  No answer at first. Then the door opened a crack.

  “Ma’am, please let me out. It’s dangerous.”

  “Show me your badge.”

  “I don’t have a badge!”

  “Well, you better have something, or you’re not-” With a titanic effort he gave the trapdoor a sharp push upward. It fell away and he saw brown legs in rubber flip-flops recede. He burst out into the kitchen and landed in a crouch. The woman stood in the corner by the stove holding a butcher knife. “Don’t come near me!” she screeched. “ Kobe, get him!” The dog racing after him, Ray turned and ran for the front door.

  Once outside, he ran across the lawn toward the street, wishing he had parked closer, aware that he could not outrun the hellhound who wanted him dead.

  A green Echo cruised up, window down. “Get in!” The side door flew open.

  He jumped in and Kat floored it. The dog hurtled up the street behind them, barking, until he finally couldn’t keep up and dropped behind.

  “You stink,” Kat said, cornering onto the boulevard with one light hand. “No offense.”

  Ray looked at himself. His pant leg was covered in a slimy goo. Jelly from an eon ago, most likely.

  “Oh my God,” he said. “Thank you, Kat.” He breathed hard for a few minutes, the most elegantly dressed burglar she had ever seen.

  “Wait. Stop,” he said finally.

  She parked in a liquor store parking lot on Whittier Boulevard and folded her arms.

  “I have to go back and get my car.”

  He had stashed it by the library and walked to the house. By then, Kat, intrigued, didn’t want him to know she had been following him. She had kept her distance. “I want to know if you hurt anybody at that house.”

  “No. I swear.”

  “Did you steal anything?”

  “No.”

  “Why were you there?”


  “Why are you spying on me?”

  “Listen, you-you know what? I’m taking you right back to Bright Street. I never should have done this.” She kicked the little car up to speed and made a hard right out of the lot.

  “No, please don’t.” The look on his face showed real terror. “Just take me to my car. I promise I’ll answer all of your questions.”

  “When?”

  “Just not right now. I have a big meeting at work. I’ll lose my business if I don’t make it.” As if preparing for it, he worked a handkerchief over the jelly on his trousers. Kat drove up behind his Porsche and gave him a business card.

  “Pick me up at that address at nine-thirty,” she said. “I’m working late to make up for this.”

  “Jacki, pick up the phone. It’s me. Jacki?”

  No answer. Driving back on the Santa Monica freeway, Kat hung up without leaving a message. She needed Jacki to help interpret the peculiar events of the day so naturally, Jacki, always there when you didn’t need her, wasn’t there, or wasn’t answering.

  She called again. “Where are you?” she asked Jacki’s voicemail. She didn’t like the plaintive tone of her voice but out it came. “Jacki, I need you to call me right away.”

  Where could she be? Jacki always kept her cell phone one inch from her ear. Kat called Raoul’s cell phone, but he didn’t answer. Then she called Raoul at UCLA.

  Raoul’s assistant answered. “Can I help you?” asked a calm voice.

  “I need to speak with Raoul urgently. It’s his sister-in-law, Kat,” she added, just in case he had what Kat’s boss called a jiggle list, a list where some people got through and some remained forever banned from access. Family generally made the cut, although not always. Everyone had an uncle Gerald, someone you never, ever wanted to speak with.

  “Raoul’s out,” the voice said automatically. Then, “You’re his wife’s sister?”

  Under the circumstances, the frightening change of the voice on the other end of the phone from calm to solicitous, made Kat want to waffle. “Yes,” she finally admitted.