Keeper of the Keys

by Perri O'shaughnessy

  “C’mon, Ray, let’s do something about this goddamn mess! You say she’s out there somewhere, so, okay. Let’s find Leigh. Talk to her. Give her a chance to explain, redeem herself. No more running around after phantoms when there’s a real woman out there who is waiting to be found!”

  He seemed stunned by her shouting.

  She sat down. “If we find her and she rejects you totally, I’ll buy you another noose, okay? I’ll even hang it up there and kick the stool away for you, if you want. I’ll sing you a good-bye hymn or recite a Buddhist chant, your choice.”

  “It was expensive rope.” An unhappy curve played along the side of his mouth. “But listen, no need. I stood on that stool for a long time staring at that thing before I realized that I’m not quite ready.”

  “Suicide casts a blight on a lot of other lives. Don’t even think about it!”

  “Okay, okay!”

  “Okay what?”

  “Let’s find her. How do we start?”

  Kat got up and opened the closet door again. “Help me get this thing down.” She climbed on the stool but couldn’t reach the hook in the ceiling, and climbed back down. Ray took her place and unhooked the cut rope.

  “This goes in my car trunk with the broken subwoofer. I’ll get rid of both of them while I’m at it. Tomorrow’s Saturday. I’ll be back in the morning. Let’s give this place a real search.”

  “Okay.”

  “You’re ready to find her?”

  “I have to, don’t I?”

  “You have to.”

  “Okay,” he said again.

  18

  R ay answered the door on the first ring. The eucalyptus waved its seared brown frilly silhouettes in the canyon below. “You shaved,” Kat noted, entering the perfect, air-filtered climate of the house. “Thank goodness.”

  “Well, if I’m forced to live, I need to be able to stand myself.”

  “I need to be able to stand you, too.”

  “I assume you have a plan,” Ray said. “You would.”

  “We go through Leigh’s journals and papers. We invade her computer files.”

  “Her computer’s at her office. Later.”

  “Her mail. Her cell phone bill.”

  “On the counter.”

  “Has she used the credit cards?”

  “I called last night after you left. No. Let’s go upstairs first and rip the place apart.”

  They sat across from each other on the expansive, nubby carpet in the master bedroom. The contents of Leigh’s dresser and closet, clothes and scarves and bags and underwear, lay in stacks around them. “What did Leigh wear that last night when you fought?”

  “I don’t remember,” Ray said. “I made up things when I talked to the cops.” He thought. “Shorts. Her purple shirt? A favorite, with a V-neck.”

  “Is it here?”

  Ray rummaged around and Kat began to help him.

  He said, “It isn’t here.”

  “She was wearing it?”

  “Yes. I think so. Her Rykas-the shoes she wore to run in-I don’t see them, either. She went upstairs before she left, I remember now. Maybe she took the time to change. I was too upset to notice how long she was up here.”

  You’re not making this up as we go, are you? Kat wanted to ask. She managed to keep her mouth shut. Ray was on a roll. “What else did she take with her?”

  “My guess,” he said, “as I told the police, although I was stretching the truth, I’d say she probably took her overnight bag with some shirts, a fresh pair of jeans, and underwear. Nothing I would notice was missing.”

  As he had told the cops. “Did she keep cash at hand?” Kat asked, frustrated.

  “She carried cash with her, kept an eye out for unique things for her furniture designs from vendors at flea markets, the kind of places where it’s handy. Oh, the Tibetan chest. I didn’t think about that.” He jumped up and went to the wall side of the bed, where a small wooden chest just the height of the bed held an industrial-looking metal lamp and a couple of paperbacks. Kat heard him laughing to himself.

  “What’s funny?” He had opened the little chest and was doing something with the shelf. “Come here,” he said. “She saw an antique Tibetan chest at a warehouse about a year ago. In the old days the Tibetans made these things with secret shelves. They used really simple mechanisms to unlock the shelves that must not have fooled very many Tibetan thieves. But in this country, we use safes. You know? We don’t use tricks, we try to just make big strong impregnable obvious things. But I can’t quite remember the secret.”

  “Is this the antique?” Kat stood by his side. He peered in, pulling at the side walls, poking around. Kat saw immediately that the chest was clearly one of Leigh’s, red, hand-painted with a pair of cockatiels that looked like the pair Leigh’s mother had kept when Leigh was in eighth grade.

  “No, she saw wood shavings inside the old chest that she said meant there was still insect activity. But she couldn’t get it out of her mind. It delighted her, the idea of this secret shelf. So she built one for herself. She showed me how it works but I can’t-it’s not a mechanism, it’s something stupid-”

  “Let me try,” Kat said. “My hands are smaller.”

  She prodded and pulled. Nothing. She fell back onto the carpet. “No secrets here.”

  Ray shook his head and stuck his arm back in. He smiled. “I just remembered.” He showed Kat the piece of wood that caused the door to close without continuing all the way inside. “Watch this.” He lifted it. It rose about an inch. Ray reached below to the painted panels and pulled.

  They popped open. He pulled out a jewelry case, a notebook, and a passport case with some papers inside. Kat thrust out her lower lip, raising her eyebrows.

  “She’s a furniture maker. A throwback to simpler, more devious times.” He grinned.

  They smiled at each other, and it seemed to Kat that she was doing the right thing, coming straight here to the lion’s den.

  “I’ll take the notebook-” Kat said.

  “No,” said Ray. “Let me look things over first.”

  While Ray examined the Tibetan cache, Kat checked in with her sister. “How you doin’, Jacki?” she asked, waiting for the usual invasive questions. Instead, Jacki treated her to a storybook full of baby, how he made the ahhh sound, how much he cried, how puckered up his face got when he felt disturbed or constipated. She listened, saying “Uh-huh,” looking out the window. Her ears were glazing over, would soon harden like rocks.

  “Are you listening to me? I have the feeling you’re not listening at all!”

  “I am. I swear.”

  “So how many poops did I just tell you Beau does on a given day?”

  “You’re the one who’s good at tests. Remember how I had to take the state exams twice even though I know more than anyone else in the office?”

  “Three to five,” Jacki said.

  “Oops, gotta go, take care. Kiss the baby for me.” Kat pushed “end.”

  Ray had looked through the small contents of the chest. “Leigh exposed herself to you when she showed you the Tibetan chest she made, Ray. She didn’t want to hide from you.”

  “She knew I wouldn’t look in there no matter what.”

  “She showed you its secret,” Kat said. Why was he so dense? “She tried to let you inside her life.”

  He shook his head sadly.

  Impatiently, Kat asked, “Okay. What is this?”

  “She wrote poetry,” Ray said. “She had a little Chinese notebook-”

  “A diary?”

  He blushed. “Love notes. Little poems.”

  “Hmm.”

  “These are drawings. Furniture designs, visionary, nothing she ever built that I know about. Here are some mementoes-news clippings about your brother, some notes he wrote her. Her gold earrings from her mother aren’t here. Her passport’s gone, and our marriage certificate. And her will. She took all that. I know she kept her checkbook and cards in her purse. She took all that.�
�

  Sitting down on the bed, Kat picked up the silk-covered notebook. She flipped through. Ray hung nervously beside her.

  Leigh loved her husband, oh, she sure did, that much Kat gleaned, even though she whipped quickly past certain pages that made Ray bite his nails.

  Some other, sadder poems featured Tom. Kat felt her self-possession beginning to melt away. Leigh hadn’t recovered from Tom’s death any more than Kat had.

  Picking through what was left, Kat found a gold chain with a small star pendant, a rhinestone pin from some other century, and gold earrings, small hoops that Kat remembered Leigh wearing.

  A new longing to see her old friend welled up in Kat’s heart.

  “There’s nothing to help us here,” Ray said, sitting down on the other side of the bed. “Unless it’s useful to know that, like you said, Leigh wasn’t trying to keep secrets and wanted to tell me things. She wanted me to know how she felt.”

  It was useful to Kat, who now had a glimmer of understanding about the depths of Leigh’s love for Ray.

  “I quit wanting to know because I was afraid to hear.”

  “Nothing here will help us,” Kat said, giving in to her frustration. “Let’s go down and check all the mail.”

  “Feel free. I’ll come with you. But I opened it all as it came in.”

  “Today’s?”

  “I went out and got it just before you came.”

  In the living room, Ray leaned in the metal chair, arms looped on the back of it, wearing his usual tense, troubled expression. She sat across from him patiently, hand cupping her chin.

  “I feel like telling you a few things now,” he said finally.

  “About time.”

  “My mother has always been my best friend. We’re very close. Lately, we argue. She’s cutting herself off from me.”

  When he finished telling her about that, Kat nodded, saying, “That’s rough.”

  “Yeah. Rough. Now let me tell you a few things about my partner. My former friend.” He began to speak, and once he started, it shot out like rain through a downspout. He talked and talked until he had told her about the affair, the office politics, Antoniou’s dungeon. “I didn’t really understand before how good it feels to just give in and hate someone,” he said. “It’s an exciting feeling. It’s also addictive and corrosive. I now understand people who say they wake up in the morning hating themselves.”

  “What are you going to do about your firm?”

  “I can’t stand working with Martin anymore. I see him so differently. I had a girlfriend years before I met Leigh who I thought was great. Over time, I couldn’t ignore the real her: she shoplifted, lied to avoid confrontations, and backstabbed. It’s that way with Martin, like a love affair gone sour. He looks like his own evil twin to me now.”

  “Have you considered that Martin might have something to do with Leigh’s disappearance? Maybe she tried to leave him and he got angry.” This story about the partner and Leigh-was it true? Kat wasn’t surprised Leigh had had a relationship with somebody else-it happens-though she felt a disappointment she would deal with later. What mattered was that Martin was married, and an amoral opportunist, according to Ray, and Leigh was gone.

  “I put it to him and he denied it. If I go that way I have to think about Martin’s wife. I think she knew about the affair. And Suzanne, my secretary at work. She was in love with Martin.”

  “We need to explore all possibilities.”

  He sighed heavily. “I have a feeling the police are already doing that.” Out of the blue, he went on, “I’ve thought about killing Martin. Maybe I almost did.”

  Shocked, Kat kept her cool, and said, “I almost got a college degree. I almost won the lottery. I almost got eaten by a shark when I drank too much and went for a midnight swim at Huntington Beach. I almost smacked my sister right in the kisser for saying something really rude to me.”

  “Martin used to know me better than anyone. Know how he pegged me? As a paralyzed veteran. Yeah, not of wars, but of a disturbed childhood. He used to say I played a good game, had a good face for it, but in fact, lacked a strong sense of self. Well, he was right. I feel like seaweed, bobbing along, no idea where I’ll end up.

  “Up to a month ago I could hide it pretty well. People envied me. Imagine that? They thought I had a good life. Now all I have is a nightmare and a hard-nosed appraiser who doesn’t trust me.”

  “I have a feeling you’re going to rise to the occasion,” Kat said. “Okay, Ray, I’m going to tell you why I expected there was something there. As a hard-nosed appraiser, I spend all my time snooping around other people’s houses. Complete strangers. When I walk into a house, people expect me. I have an appointment.”

  “What does that matter?”

  “It matters that they know I’m coming. What they leave for me to see has meaning. And they leave out things that would straighten your short and curlies. That’s the secret. They expose themselves by what they choose to leave for me to see.”

  “Like what?”

  “Underwear. Women’s clothes in the man’s closet. Guns, knives, clubs. Checkbooks, bank statements showing their balances. We see a lot of sex toys,” she said. Some resembled male members, some resembled alien members. “Leather straps, clothing with strategic bits missing, if you get my drift.” She shoved her own experiments in such directions out of her mind. She was good at that. Somehow her own peccadilloes were acceptable and other people’s were frightening. “I know more about people in Los Angeles than I ever wanted to know.”

  Ray spoke quietly. “You think whatever is left, she meant to leave.”

  “Yes, I do.”

  Silent for a moment, in his ironed slacks and silk shirt, he crossed his legs, then crossed them again.

  “Can I ask you something?”

  “Sure.”

  “When you come into my house, what do you see?”

  “It’s a beautiful house,” she admitted.

  “I think-my ideas on what makes a home are changing. I’m designing another house right now, and I want to get it right. I want it strong, but soft. Light but warm. I don’t care about this place anymore. It’s not right.”

  He unfolded an open envelope, reached inside, pulled out a bank statement, and pointed to one of the items. “Look at this. While you were talking to your sister, I read the mail.”

  He held the statement out to her. She read it.

  “There’s an ATM withdrawal from the Idyllwild branch of US Bank. She wasn’t dead when she used the card to take out five hundred dollars on her way out of town,” he said. “Check the date. I just realized that’s the morning after she left.”

  Someone had used the cash card in Idyllwild, a forested mountain community not too far from Palm Springs. Kat sat very still, trying to control her excitement. “Then she’s alive.”

  Kat wanted to call Detective Rappaport immediately. Ray did not. Ray kept saying it proved Leigh was safe.

  “What if somebody took her and forced her to withdraw money? Don’t the banks keep videos of automatic cash machines?”

  Ray, fingering the statement, obviously loathed this idea. “Nobody abducted Leigh. She ran away on her own. She took the money out herself and moved on. Please, let’s not complicate things. Let’s not involve the police unless we have to. It’s only been a week. We have no proof of anything good or bad.”

  “This is the eighth day, Ray. No, something is still very wrong.”

  “Look, whoever took the money that day would have to know her personal identification number, her PIN. That’s not something Leigh would give out freely.”

  Kat thought about her friend. Leigh hated trivia and even more hated math. At Cal High, she had almost flunked trigonometry, in fact had relied on Kat to cheat on her homework. “She might have written the number down in her wallet.”

  His compressed lips confirmed her hypothesis.

  Kat jumped up. “Let’s go,” she said.

  “Where?”

  “Idyll
wild. Bring a picture.”

  “Idyllwild-wait-”

  “Come on, Ray. Grab whatever you need to grab. Her parents had a cabin there years ago.” Up in the mountains that fringed the Los Angeles Basin, Idyllwild was a few hours away. “Uh, the street was called Tahquitz Lane. They called the place Camp Tahquitz, that’s why I remember. That was so long ago. I wonder if they still own it?”

  “I never went there, but she mentioned it a few months ago. She said that her parents had some run-down old shack that they never went to anymore and were trying to sell.”

  Kat ran out to her car to get her laptop, tapped into his AirPort, and pulled up Realtor.com to have a look at multiple listings for Idyllwild. The town was too small to have a separate set of listings, but she called up the area listings and very quickly found a cottage for sale on Tahquitz Lane.

  “Two bedroom,” she said. “Sixty-five years old. They’re only asking two-twenty for it. How refreshing. Cheap these days.”

  “She described it as a dump.”

  “The description matches. I’m going to call the realtor up there.”

  “We could just call her parents. But then they would-”

  “It would be out of our control after that,” Kat said. They looked at each other.

  “Go on. Call the realtor,” Ray said. “You will with or without my permission.”

  The lady handling the cottage wasn’t in but her broker was, and Kat, using her appraiser credentials, managed to get the owner names.

  Hubbel. No bites had come into the office after more than a year. The cottage had sat there unsold for months, in desperate need of updating, but the owners refused to fix it up.

  Kat hung up. “She’s either dead, abducted, or on the run,” she said. Ray put a hand over his eyebrows, as if seeing something in the distance he didn’t want to see. “But she went through Idyllwild,” Kat continued inexorably. “I bet she left you that charge on your bank statement in case you were looking for her, just like those people leave signs of who they are in the homes I appraise. She’s smart-she didn’t want you to know right away where she was going, but she didn’t want to be completely cut off from you, either.”