Perri O'Shaughnessy - Keeper of the Keys

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.”