Keeper of the Keys

On the accelerator.

The last thing Esmé remembered hearing was not the crash, not the windshield shattering: she heard a baby’s wail.

Jack placed three small shot glasses in front of her with three colored liquids, one green, one yellow, one red. “Here’s your tease. A stoplight.”

“Tell Esmé what’s in it,” Amy said. Esmé, caught up in the frenzy of noise around her, the high spirits, the cars outside, had already knocked back the first one, green, absolutely vile.

Jack explained. “Step one,” he said. “The green drink. You mix an ounce of melon liqueur or Apple Pucker schnapps and an ounce of vodka into a shaker. Heave it to and fro. Then you strain the mixture into a rocks glass.

“For the yellow shot, the halt, caution, do not enter the intersection stuff, you mix an ounce of vodka into a shaker, best available stuff that’s yellow-tinged, or add a little food coloring, shake well with a little ice, and strain that into a shot glass or rocks glass.

“Step three, you add an ounce of Hot Damn or Cherry Pucker to one of Bacardi 151 rum. Put those two ounces in a shaker, bounce ’em around, then strain them into a shot glass or rocks glass. That’s stop, baby,” Jack said, leaning close to Esmé, almost whispering. “For some reason, people who drink this stuff never do stop. Careful.”

By then she had thrown the murky bile to the back of her throat, swallowing a few times to get it all down.

“Hey, honey, sip that stuff,” Eleanor’s friend Carmen said, putting a restraining hand to her wrist, “or Ward’ll be calling in a replacement for you in the morning.”

Esmé shook her off. The red went down sweeter than melted butter.

“I’ll have another,” she said. “No. That was awful.”

“Now that is the truth,” Jack said. “I’ll fix you something nice to get the taste out.” He gave her a manhattan. Esmé felt herself loosening, as though rubber bands had been holding her brain in place and were popping off one by one. Now she was laughing, too. She felt young and adventurous.

“Another.”

“Sure, honey.” Jack mixed it for her. There were peanuts on the bar, but she ignored them even though she hadn’t had di

“More.”

Amy and her big hunky friend Craig stuffed her rather awkwardly into the back seat of their car, Craig holding one arm, Amy the other. Craig drove her home. She had trouble opening her front door, so Craig worked the key.

“You sure you’re okay?” Amy asked, watching from outside of Craig’s car.

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.

20

S itting 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.”