Perri O'Shaughnessy - Keeper of the Keys

“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?”

“Idyllwild. 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.”

Ray said, “I’ll be right back.” He left the living room. Kat took out the notebook and read some more of Leigh’s love poems. In five minutes he returned, loaded down. “A couple sweaters,” he said. “Two sleeping bags. It might get cold up there at night, even in summer, and I sure don’t expect sheets. Bring another bottle of that French stuff from the fridge.”

“Yessir,” Kat said, scrambling up from the floor. “Don’t forget toothbrushes.”

I’m outta here,” Eleanor Beasley said, walking past Esmé’s station. “See you tomorrow.”

“Wait a second, Eleanor.”

Eleanor waited while Esmé finished checking through a big shopping cart, whizzing through the bar-coded items and bagging them with efficiency born of long experience.

“Thanks for shopping at Granada Market,” she told the customer, who nodded. Esmé swiftly fastened the chain to her station. While she finished her closing-up chores, Eleanor talked to the bagger at the next register about his new Prius. Eleanor wasn’t a hurrier; this could be a problem in a grocery store, but the customers liked how she noticed when they were tired and asked how they were doing.

Granada Market had started out as a small specialty health food store in the seventies. Over the years, as people became educated about the virtues of healthy food, the store had tripled in size. Granada gave Safeway and even Trader Joe’s a run for their money. The store had twelve full-time clerks, but since it was open until midnight, they all worked long shifts during extra-busy times or vacation times. Esmé most appreciated the ten percent employee discount on food items.

“Where are you going tonight?” she said as they pushed open the double doors and entered the cool, dim rear of the store.

“Jackstraps,” Eleanor said, “same as every Friday night.” She pulled her scrunchie off and her blonde hair stayed put until she ran her fingers in and out a few times. She had the thin, hard-living face of a smoker and drinker and had been divorced for decades from her rodeo-rider husband. She pulled lipstick out of her bag and ran it over her lips without checking a mirror, then traced her work with a finger.

They punched out. “I thought-maybe I could join you?” Esmé said.

Eleanor’s eyebrows went up and she smiled. “You changing your ways, Esmé? It’s pretty rowdy there.”

“I feel rowdy,” Esmé said. She felt like exploding, was how she felt, after the latest call from Ray. Something had torn between them like the tear on a piece of fabric that continues straight across, all the way across the cloth until the piece is neatly halved. If she went home now she would call him, apologize, say things she shouldn’t, anything to try to mend this tear.