Tess Gerritsen - The Keepsake

“Is it complicated?”

“You want me to show you? Come in, come in!” He led her into the living room, having forgotten whatever task had been occupying him earlier. From a drawer, he pulled out a sleek little device scarcely larger than a pack of cards. “Here, I’ll turn it on and you can give it a spin. You won’t need my help at all. It’s all intuitive, you see, just a matter of navigating through the menu. If you know the address, it’ll take you right to the door. You can search for restaurants, hotels. You can even make it speak to you in French.”

“I like to hike. What if I’m in the woods and I break my leg? How do I know where I am?”

“You mean if you want to call for help? That’s easy. You just dial nine one one on your phone and tell them your coordinates.” He snatched the device from her and tapped the screen a few times. “See? This is our location. Latitude and longitude. If I were a hiker, I wouldn’t go into the wilds without it. It’s as essential as a first-aid kit.”

“Wow.” She gave him an appropriately impressed smile. “I just don’t know if I’m ready to shell out the money for one of these things.”

“Why don’t you borrow it for a day? Play with it. You’ll see how easy it is.”

“Are you sure? That would be great.”

“Like I said, I have two others. Let me know how you like it.”

“I’ll take good care of it, I promise.”

“You want me to come with you? Give you some operating tips?”

“No, I’ll figure it out.” She gave him a wave and stepped out of his apartment. “I’m just going to take it on a little hike tomorrow.”

Josephine pulled into the trailhead parking area and turned off the engine. She sat for a moment, studying the entrance to the trail, which was merely a narrow passage carved into the gloom of thick forest. According to Google Earth, this was the closest point she could reach by car to the coordinates written on the map. It was time to get out and walk.

Though the heaviest of the rain had ended last night, gray clouds still hung low in the sky this morning, and the air itself seemed to drip with lingering moisture. She stood at the edge of the woods, staring at a narrow footpath that faded from view into deep shadows. She felt a chill, like a breath of frost on her neck. Suddenly she wanted to climb back into her car and lock the doors. To drive home and forget she’d ever received that map. Apprehensive as she was about venturing into the woods, though, she was even more fearful of the consequences should she ignore the note. Whoever had sent it could turn out to be her best friend.

Or her worst enemy.

She glanced up at the cold kiss of water dripping from the tree branches overhead. Pulling up the hood of her jacket, she started down the trail.

The dirt path was studded with brightly colored toadstools, their caps glistening with rainwater. The fungi were no doubt poisonous; the pretty ones usually were. As the saying went: There are bold mushroom hunters and old mushroom hunters, but there are no old, bold mushroom hunters. The coordinates on the handheld GPS began to change, the numbers readjusting as she hiked deeper into the woods. The device would not be able to give her pinpoint accuracy. The best she could hope for was to be led to within a few dozen yards of what she was supposed to find. If the item she sought was small, how would she locate it among these dense trees?

Thunder crackled in the distance; another storm was coming. Nothing to worry about yet, she thought. If the lightning got closer, she’d stay away from the tallest tree and crouch down in a ditch. That was the theory, anyway. The drip of rain from the leaves became steady, drops clattering onto her jacket. The nylon hood trapped noise, magnifying the sound of her own breathing, her own heartbeat. In tiny fractions of degrees, the GPS coordinates inched slowly toward her goal.

Though it was midmorning, the woods seemed to be falling swiftly darker. Or maybe it was just the thickening rain clouds, threatening to turn this slow and steady drip into a torrent. She quickened her pace, moving at a brisk walk now, her boots splashing through mud and wet leaves. Suddenly she halted, frowning at the GPS.

She’d overshot. She needed to go back.

Retracing her steps, she returned to a bend in the path and stared into the trees. The GPS was telling her to leave the trail. Beyond the tangle of branches, the trees seemed to open up, revealing a tantalizing peek of a clearing.

She clambered off the footway and toward the clearing, twigs snapping beneath her boots, her progress as loud and clumsy as an elephant’s. Branches hit her face in wet slaps. She climbed onto a fallen log and was about to drop down on the other side when her gaze froze on the soil, and on the large shoe print stamped into the earth. Rain had worried away the edges, melted the tread marks. Someone else had climbed over this log. Someone else had scrambled through this underbrush. But he had been moving in the other direction, toward the trail, not away from it. The print did not look fresh. Nevertheless, she paused to scan her surroundings. She saw only drooping branches and tree trunks scabby with lichen. Who in his right mind would hang out here all night and all day in the woods, waiting to ambush a woman who might not ever come? A woman who might not even recognize that those numbers on the map were coordinates?

Reassured by her own logic, she hopped off the log and kept walking, her gaze back on the GPS, watching the numbers slowly shift. Closer, she thought. Almost there.

The trees suddenly thinned and she stumbled out of the woods, into a meadow. For a moment she stood blinking at the broad expanse of tall grass and wildflowers, blossoms drooping with moisture. Where now? According to the GPS, this was the spot where she was meant to come, but she saw no markers, no outstanding features of any kind. Just this meadow and, at its center, a lone apple tree, its branches gnarled with age.

She walked into the clearing, her jeans swishing through wet grass, the dampness seeping through her pant legs. Except for the drip, drip of rain, the day was eerily still, with only the distant bark of a dog. She walked to the center of the meadow and slowly turned, taking in the periphery of trees, but saw no movement, not even the flutter of a bird.

What do you want me to find?

A crack of thunder split the air, and she glanced up at the blackening sky. Time to get out of this clearing. It was the height of foolhardiness to stand beside a lone tree during a lightning storm.

Only at that instant did she focus on the apple tree itself. On the object that hung on a nail that had been pounded into the trunk. It was above her eye level, partly hidden by a branch, and she had missed seeing it until now. She stared up at what dangled from the nail.

My missing keys.

She pulled them off the nail and whirled around, frantically searching the meadow for whoever might have left them hanging on the tree. Thunder cracked. Like the shot of a starter pistol, it sent her running. But it wasn’t the storm that made her flee headlong into the trees, that made her tear through the underbrush and back toward the trail, heedless of the branches whipping her face. It was the image of her own keys on that tree trunk, keys that she was now clutching tightly, even though they felt alien. Contaminated.

She was gasping for breath by the time she stumbled from the trailhead. Her car was no longer the only vehicle sitting in the lot; a Volvo was now parked nearby. Her hands cold and numb, she fumbled to open the door. Scrambling in behind the wheel, she clicked the locks shut.

Safe.

For a moment, she sat breathing hard, the windshield fogging up from her breath. She stared down at the keys she’d just plucked from the lone apple tree. They looked exactly the same as always, five keys dangling from a ring made in the shape of an ankh, the ancient Egyptian symbol for life. There were the two keys to her apartment, the keys for her car, and the key to her mailbox. Someone had had them for over a week. While I slept, she thought, someone could have walked into my apartment. Or stolen my mail. Or rifled through…