Perri O'Shaughnessy - Keeper of the Keys

Esmé waved her hands sideways. “Better than okay,” she said. She shut the door in Craig’s concerned face. “I’m good,” she told the door.

She tried leaning against it to keep herself propped up but she was pretty dizzy and it felt better to slip down and feel the cool hardwood. She passed out in the entryway.

Sitting beside him so close she could smell Ray’s Pi aftershave and touch his shoulder each time he shifted, Kat studied the map. Just outside San Bernardino, they were heading east and most of the way out of the L.A. Basin. The Porsche’s outside temperature gauge showed a hundred four Fahrenheit on this Saturday afternoon in August. Not a single car they passed had the windows rolled down. The air carried a distinctly orange tinge. Little could be seen along the freeway-sound walls covered with ice plant, roofs. Not exactly scenic, but it got you there.

She said, “I went to Idyllwild on a field trip when I was in fourth grade. All I remember is bugs, dust, and manzanita. There’s no lake very close by. But one of the women in my office likes the place, and she told me it’s an artists’ town. A tourist town, prosperous these days.”

“It’s the closest mountain to L.A.,” Ray said. “Of course they would plant a town there, to escape to in the summer. It’ll be packed this time of year. And there’s some real forest, too, in the Mount San Jacinto park.”

“Did Leigh tell you about the ghost?”

“What ghost?”

“She claimed her parents’ cabin was haunted.”

“Then maybe she didn’t go there.”

“If there’s no sign of her, we’ll ask at the motels.”

“She could have just been passing through.”

“Going where?”

“I have one other idea,” Ray said. “She bought supplies for her work from a man who lives on a reservation somewhere around there, a Native American.” The Porsche whizzed into the middle lane and passed a slower car in the fast lane.

They did eighty on the uphill winding road, but Ray had his eyes fixed on the road and his hands squarely in the ten and two o’clock positions on the leather-covered steering wheel, so Kat just said, “What reservation?”

“I can’t remember.”

“Think!”

“I told you, I can’t remember.”

“This map doesn’t mark any Indian reservations.”

“It’s a highway map. What do you expect? Tell me about the Hubbel ghost.”

“He hovered in the air. He wore old-fashioned clothes.” She told him what she could remember, which wasn’t much. She did recall Tom relating a story or two. She guessed he had gone up there with Leigh, but this wasn’t information she thought Ray would appreciate, so kept those memories to herself.

She thought about the ghost up there with Tom, how he had laughed at the stories but came home looking remarkably chastened at the encounter. She thought about Tom, a ghost himself now.

The trip took nearly three hours, but the Porsche managed the twisty roads magnificently. Arid semi-desert turned to fir and pines, greener as they attained the higher elevations.

Kat closed her eyes and let her head be cuddled by the headrest. She worked to recapture more about the time when Leigh first told her of the ghost. It must have been soon after she fell for Tom. It was this very cabin that she had taken Tom to when they ran away together, benighted lovers, hiding out at her parents’ spooky getaway.

Leigh had claimed she and Tom had made love for the first time at the Idyllwild cabin in a room that turned out to be haunted. “I saw something, Kat, something creepy but I wanted him so bad I never said a word. I wonder if Tom saw it, too?”

“What did you see?” Kat, on the floor in Leigh’s girlhood bedroom, remembering her brother’s story, sat close to the faint breeze coming through the upstairs window on Franklin Street. It felt just like sitting directly inside the pink oven in the downstairs kitchen. Kat wore a tank top and cutoffs, but even in these minimal clothes her moist legs stuck to the hardwood floors.

At twenty-six, Leigh still lived at home. Her bedroom held the furniture she had grown up with that her grandparents had brought from Mississippi, heavy dark mahogany, probably modest in its time but rather admired these days, especially with the gaudy fabrics Leigh had draped over them. The walls, baby blue, were covered floor to ceiling with posters of-what else-furniture through the ages, William Morris designs in particular.

“A guy in old-fashioned overalls appeared,” Leigh said, completely seriously. “He didn’t make a sound, except to moan. He hovered at the foot of the bed while we went at it.”

“Overalls. Omigod, how horrifying!” Kat had reacted, and both young women found this hilarious.

“I love Tom, you know.”

“I can’t imagine why.” But she could. Everyone liked him. All the women fell for him.

“Well, you’re his older sister. Where I see a charming and fun-loving man, you remember his snotty baby nose.”

“Definitely.”

“Kat, I hope you believe I would never hurt him.”

Leigh’s mother came up and rapped on the door. Leigh called out, “ Entrez at your own risk.”

“Your father wants to talk to you,” Rebecca Hubbel said.

Leigh slid off the bed, pushing her feet into a pair of flip-flops.

“He’s upset,” her mother said.

“Why?”

“He’ll tell you.”

“See you in an hour if I’m lucky,” Leigh said, handing Kat a magazine devoted to woodworking. Rebecca Hubbel gently closed the bedroom door behind herself and Leigh.

Kat looked at the pictures, sometimes reading the captions. Twenty minutes later, Leigh reappeared.

“What did your dad want?”

Leigh pulled out a suitcase, threw open her bureau drawers, and started filling it. “Oh, the usual horseshit about Tom and me. They’re worried. They heard about us going up to Idyllwild together. Things are progressing too fast and seriously, according to my dad. I told him I’m moving out.”

“Really? Where?”

“Can I stay with you and figure that out for a bit?”

At that time, Kat lived in a studio apartment in Manhattan Beach. “Of course,” she said, her heart sinking. Where would she put Leigh?

“It’s been good, living here. No rent. Happy parents. I’ve saved some money. They wanted me to stay home until I’m married, I guess, but geez.”

“Your folks were upset.” Kat hated to think of that.

So did Leigh, who stopped packing for a moment to wipe her eyes. “They both practically cried.”

“Our ma expected us to leave after high school. When it took longer, I think she held it against us.”

“I don’t want them in my sex life anymore.”

“What will you do?”

“Whatever the hell I want.”

She actually bypassed Kat’s studio and went straight to Tom’s Balboa place.

Fifty-three hundred feet high in the San Jacinto Mountains, Idyllwild boasted hundreds of miles of hiking trails, horseback riding venues, shops, and an eclectic selection of restaurants, plus fishing and distant access to two flanking lakes, Lake Fulmor and Lake Hemet. So said the brochure they picked up at the Visitor Center, anyway. They cruised along a tree-dominated main street filled with chalet-style shops displaying paintings and gift items. Tourists wandered about.

By the time Kat and Ray arrived at the Hubbels’ rustic cabin, they had between them drunk four waters, eaten three PowerBars, and squabbled twice rather bitterly, eventually descending into silence.

Ray pulled the Porsche into the gravel driveway and slammed on the brakes. Kat lurched forward as they came to a halt. “Holy shit, Ray.”

He stared at the cabin. They both did. Wooden shutters closed the front windows. The place looked deserted.