Keeper of the Keys

At the back of a leather-bound volume on the bottom shelf of many albums, she found three pictures of Tom with Leigh.

In one, they sat together on a boat, heads inclined toward each other, hers so very blonde, his darker, his thick eyebrows furrowed, worried looking. Leigh looked up at him, and although the picture was black and white, her gray eyes appeared translucent. They sat in the stern of a speedboat, a white trail behind them, globules of water decorating both their faces. Tom gazed back at her, lovestruck. She appeared happy, without co

In another, they smiled into the camera, Tom, several inches taller than Leigh, standing against a desert backdrop of treeless, cracked ground. He had looped an arm over her shoulder. They looked relaxed, like two people who belonged together.

In the third and last picture, Tom was peripheral, not part of the framed group. He sat on a bench in the background, watching Leigh whoop it up at an evening party, champagne glass in one hand, a plate of hors d’oeuvres in the other. Behind her, an orange desert sky blazed. Tom, lurking in shadows, appeared to glower.

Leigh glowed like the moon, handsome young men hovering nearby.

Kat pulled out the photos and pushed them into her pocket. She shut the album.

“Find anything?” Ray called from outside.

“Nothing.”

“I have something.” He held his hands cupped as he showed her some broken nutshells.

“These haven’t been around long. I found them strewn all around under the back balcony where the blue jays hang.”

“Peanuts. She likes peanuts.”

“She sat out there eating peanuts.”

Neither of them said the obvious: maybe whoever had hurt her had sat out there, watching the jays.

“Put ’em in another bag, and we’ll bring them, too,” Kat advised. “For DNA testing.”

“You’ve made up your mind she’s dead,” Ray said. “Haven’t you?”

Kat held up her hands.

“I want to spend a few more hours in the area before we go back,” Ray said. “Please. I can’t go back quite yet. It’s too awful. That shirt. I need some kind of hope.”

“It’s an important discovery, Ray. I think we have to go back.”

“Just check a gas station or two. I think I remember vaguely where the reservation is.”

Kat shook her head, but in the end, she felt as though whatever harm had come to Leigh had come and gone, and a few more hours wouldn’t cause any more harm.

They packed quickly. “We need a better map of this area,” Ray said. He seemed calm, rested, on patrol this morning. They closed up and drove into the village, to a local market which carried maps. Ray studied the one they bought, saying, “Maybe,” as if to himself.

They drove north and then east along the long hill, catching glimpses of taller mountains in the distance, stopping at every convenience store, every grocery store, every gas station, moving farther and farther from Los Angeles. They showed photos of Leigh.

Nobody knew anything. Morning turned to mid-afternoon under the blue mountain sky.

Without discussion, at the foot of the next mountain, Ray turned his Porsche onto the road that led toward Palm Springs.

Kat, dozing in the comfortable coolness of the Boxster, felt the car turn left and crunch onto a road that was not highway. Ray said, “I saw a road sign. There’s a reservation down here. Let’s check it out, see if I recognize anything. It’s the only one marked on this map. It’s called Baños Calientes.”

“You think it’s the one Leigh visited?”

“I can’t remember. I don’t know if she even told me the name of it. It could be.” On both sides of them, scrub and sand stretched away. The chaparral plants were so evenly placed, so organized in their desperate struggle to find just enough water for their roots, that the landscape looked like a park. Of course, this park was assiduously tended mostly by snakes and scorpions.

“What exactly did she buy there?”

“Wood. For furniture she wanted to make.”

“What else do you remember about it?”

“Just that an old guy sold it to her. She told me she liked him. I wasn’t paying much attention. It could be this place, or there may be a dozen small reservations around here.”

“Well, hip hip hooray.” It popped out.

“What?” He sounded offended.

“I’ve felt like I dragged you along with me on this hunt for Leigh, Ray. Now here you are actually trying to help us move forward. Maybe you didn’t kill her after all.” Now that one foot was lodged in her jaw, she had to cram the other one in, too. Even as she spoke, she realized she would regret it.

Ray’s chin moved to the forefront. “She’s not dead. Stop assuming that she is. You never gave me the chance to take charge, Kat. You’re a prodder. A poker. I hate women who prod and poke. Especially ones who look like stick insects with red hair.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, real men don’t wear boxers. Especially plaid ones.”

“How would you know? You’ve never had a real man.”

“I was just trying to say-”

“The same shit you’ve been handing me all along to keep me moving.”

“Which worked, finally.”

“I worked up to it on my own, little lady.”

Kat folded her arms and stared straight ahead, though the bouncing from the potholes detracted from this dignified posture. They were sending up a rooster tail of dry sand behind them, even though Ray was doing under thirty miles an hour now.

After a minute, he said slowly, “Although the hot poker up my ass did make me jump a little faster.”

“You really were frozen. Immobilized. Except for ru

“Had to do it,” Ray said.

“What did you get out of it?”

“I figured out where some keys fit.”

“That’s not all of it.”

“It’s good enough for now.”

Kat felt they had just barely avoided an impasse that would have sent them careening back home. Ray seemed relieved, too-he whistled a little under his breath. She resolved, as she had a thousand times before, to keep a close watch on the openings to the body, guard the mouth-guard the-whoa, guard all the orifices, that meant-she had a silent epiphany involving her love life, an epiphany which she managed to keep from sharing with Ray.

“I think his name was Pablo,” Ray now said. “Of course, I could be making that up to throw you further off the scent.”

Replying carefully and reasonably, she said, “Okay, Baños Calientes, here we come. We still have a few hours before we should turn around and go to the police. How far are we from Topanga?”

“Two and a half, maybe up to three hours, depending on traffic. I’ll get us back.”

Behind them, the San Jacinto Mountains loomed, their rugged shapes piercing the sky like vampire teeth. An outcropping of sedimentary rock appeared, and over a rolling hill a settlement of nondescript ranch houses and trailers in an oasis of willows.

Four-thirty in the afternoon. A small hawk perched on a telephone pole, feathers barely moving; women wearing Sunday-go-to-church dresses chatted in the parking lot of the trading post, which was basically a mom-and-pop grocery store; a leathery senior in a white hat and lived-in jeans filled up his Ranger at the gas pump out front. Ray pulled the car into a parking spot.

He locked the car remotely with a click. Kat followed him into the store.

Racks of bait mixed incongruously with fresh spices. Apparently the people down here not only liked to catch fresh food, they liked to cook with spices, rare beer batters, unusual root-based roux. Unlike the grocery stores near her house in Hermosa, the aisles were not speckled with plastic grasses or lit with halogen spotlights to create the illusion of cozy gourmet. This store reminded her of the one down the hill from Franklin Street in Whittier when she was a kid, what they used to call “the little store.” Fusty candies in moldering baskets decorated the shelf below the counter cash register. The rest of the store held basics like toilet paper, tampons, and peanut butter stacked up to the black painted ceiling without any fanfare.