THE SPARE KEY
A Short Story by Michele Joslin
Part 1 of 4
The key is in the freezer.
Kerry finds it at 9:40 on a Tuesday, four days into house-sitting, digging for the ice pack because the dog knocked her knee into the counter. It’s inside a bag of peas. Not loose in a drawer. Inside the bag, in the middle, where you’d have to want it.
Brass. Stubby. An gray plastic tag on a loop of wire.
The key goes under the tap, and then into the light over the sink. The tag has numbers rubbed almost off. 1-1-4.
Annie’s house is a four-bedroom off Devine Street with a front door, a back door, a side door off the laundry, and a basement door nobody uses. The real keys are on the hook by the fridge. Annie handed them over Friday with a sticky note and a bottle of wine and said there’s nothing to it. Daisy’s toothbrush is the pink one.
Annie and Daisy are in Charleston until Sunday. Two hours down I-26.
The front door takes the key a quarter inch and stops.
Back door. Same. Twice, the way you do, like the lock might change its mind. The side door off the laundry won’t take it at all. The basement door takes it almost to the shoulder and then jams, and it comes out only with both hands.
The shed. The padlock on the gate. The filing cabinet in the office. The lockbox on the closet shelf. She knows the combination and shouldn’t.
Nothing.
Kerry sits on the stairs with the key in her palm.
Who freezes a key?
At 10:15, the tag number goes into her phone three different ways and comes back nothing, so the color goes in, and then the color with Columbia, and the fourth result is a facility map with a hundred block of gray roll-up doors.
Extra Space Storage. 108 Harban Court, just off Exit 103.
Twenty minutes, door to door, if the interstate is empty.
The photos in the listing show the same gray. Exactly the same gray.
No reason to drive to Harban Court at ten thirty at night.
The dog goes out. Two glasses go in the dishwasher. The kitchen doorway holds her a while, and she looks at the freezer and thinks about how long a bag of peas sits in a drawer before somebody decides it’s the safest place in the house.
She grabs her sweater.
I-26 is nothing after nine. Dark pines, a dark car lot, a gas station with one truck at the pumps. Harban Court is a quarter mile of warehouse frontage and a sodium light over a gate.
There’s a keypad at the gate. She doesn’t have a code.
The gate is open anyway, rolled back on its track, the way a gate is when somebody’s inside.
She pulls through.
Hundred block. Doors 101 through 120, roof lights buzzing, half of them out. The brights go on and the numbers count down, because getting out of a car in the dark is not happening.
114 is second from the end.
The car stops with the headlights square on the door. Engine running.
The padlock is old brass, and the stubby key goes in all the way, and it turns like it was made for it. Because it was.
She lifts.
The door goes up loud — every roll-up door in the world sounds like an alarm — and the headlights throw her shadow in on the floor ahead of her.
The unit is almost empty. That’s the part that hits first. Concrete, one plastic chair, and nothing else but what’s in the middle of the floor.
A black duffel.
Beside it, propped against the duffel like it’s waiting to be picked up, a kid’s backpack. Purple. Lightning bolts. A name patch on the front pocket.
Daisy’s backpack is red.
Daisy has had the red one since kindergarten.
Kerry reads the name patch and stops breathing.
Part 2 of 4. Next Sunday.
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