The Key

by Jennifer Sturman

“And I’m trustworthy.” I tried to look like I was.

  She locked her dark-eyed gaze on mine. “You know, you don’t have the greatest reputation when it comes to driving.”

  Under normal circumstances I would have disputed this, but it didn’t seem like a good time to argue. “It will be fine. Really,” I said, in as convincing a tone as I could muster.

  Reluctantly, Luisa opened the car door, making sure the bottom didn’t scrape against the curb as she stepped out. I took her place, lowering myself onto the smooth leather of the driver’s seat. But when I reached out to shut the door, she stopped me, placing a hand on its sleek frame.

  “Remember, only premium gas,” she said. “The most expensive kind you can find. I left extra cash in the glove compartment, so there’s no reason to cut corners and buy the cheap gas.”

  “I will only buy the most expensive gas,” I assured her, attempting again to shut the door. She resisted.

  “And be sure to leave a space between you and other cars in parking lots. People are so careless these days.”

  “I will leave a space. In fact, I’ll leave two spaces.” I removed her hand from the door. “It will be fine. Really.”

  “You said that already.” But she sighed and let me shut the door. “Call us.”

  “I will.” I put the car into gear.

  I could see her in the rearview mirror, watching. Her expression held concern, but I had every confidence that her concern was for the car and not for me.

  I considered it a sign of maturity that I neither revved the engine nor made the tires squeal as I pulled away from the curb. I even used the blinker as I merged into the stream of downtown traffic.

  Ten minutes later I was through the Lincoln Tunnel and in New Jersey, following the signs for Interstate Eighty West. The car handled so well that it seemed criminal not to floor the accelerator, but I held it to just above the speed limit. An encounter with the highway patrol would be particularly unwelcome this evening.

  “Maybe we should stop at Ikea,” suggested a voice behind me. “We could use some extra shelving.”

  I opened my mouth to scream, and this time it worked. A shrieking torrent of noise filled the car.

  My hands jerked on the steering wheel, and I veered into the next lane. A horn blared out an enraged warning, and I swung back into my lane. A preadolescent girl gave me the finger from the passenger side of the minivan I’d nearly hit.

  I’d had so many adrenaline surges in the last few hours that it seemed like my adrenaline supply should be exhausted, but it turned out I had plenty left. It coursed through my veins. I willed my pulse to slow as I struggled to get my breathing in check and my driving under control.

  “Sorry,” Peter said, clambering from the back into the front passenger seat. “I didn’t mean to—”

  “Give me a heart attack? Get us killed? What, precisely, didn’t you mean to do?” I demanded.

  “If you’d really had a heart attack, you probably wouldn’t be able to drive,” he pointed out, reaching behind him for the seat belt. “Speaking of which, it would probably be a good idea to pick a lane and stay there. The kid in the minivan seemed sort of pissed.”

  “Where—how did—I mean, what are you doing here? And by the way, a little advance notice that you were hiding in the back seat might have been nice.” Peter hadn’t been part of the contingency plan, at least not part of the plan I’d authorized. Apparently some adjustments had been made to the plan without my consent.

  “If we’d given you advance notice you would have kicked me out of the car while we were still in Manhattan. After all, we’re in a fight, aren’t we? Don’t you remember storming out of the apartment yesterday?” His tone had shifted from playful to serious.

  “Oh. That’s right.” I’d been indignant, but that was only temporary, a reaction to the shock of his sudden appearance. Now all of my earlier embarrassment and remorse returned. And I still didn’t have the words—much less the confidence in my own emotional stability—to make everything right.

  “Listen, Rachel, I’ve had some time to think about this, and I owe you an apology. I know you’ve been under a lot of stress, and I should have given you your space. And I should have trusted you, too. It was wrong of me to be so suspicious, and to make accusations like I did.”

  “But you were right about Jake—” I protested.

  “Sure, I was right, but I was checking into him for all of the wrong reasons. You have a career that’s important to you, and of course you’re going to need to spend time with your work colleagues. And you had a personal life before, too, and that doesn’t go away just because of me. I need to get used to that and to be more understanding.”

  “Um, well, actually—” I began, but Peter was on a roll. I had the sense that he’d been working on this little speech. I wondered if my friends had given him a list of talking points before smuggling him into the back seat.

  “I’ve never been engaged before—hell, I’ve never lived with a woman I wasn’t related to before—and I guess I’ve been acting sort of possessive. I don’t know what came over me. You know that I’m not the caveman type. It’s just that it’s all so new to me, trying to fit myself into your life.”

  Given how little room I’d been making for him in it, that couldn’t have been easy. I stole a glance at him, my eyes meeting the familiar rich chocolate of his in the dim light of the car.

  I looked back at the road. “Actually, Peter, I’m the one who owes you an apology. And not just about Jake, even though you were the only one who had the good sense to really question him. You weren’t acting like a caveman. You were acting like a normal part of a couple.” I paused and took a deep breath. “It was me. I was acting like nothing had changed, like I was still on my own and didn’t have anyone waiting for me at home. Like you weren’t there.”

  He was silent for a moment. “Is that what you want?” he asked. “For me not to be there?” His tone was mild, so mild that it struck terror in my heart. How could he be so calm about such a momentous question?

  “No!”

  “No, you don’t want me there?”

  “No, of course I want you there!” Suddenly, that was beautifully clear. “But I’m not sure it’s fair to you.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “One minute I’m worried that things aren’t going to work out, because they never do, and then the next I’m freaking out because my whole life is changing, and then you get caught in the cross fire, just because you have the misfortune to be there. Are you sure you want to sign up for that?”

  “You’ll grow out of it.”

  “What makes you so sure? How can you know?”

  “I can’t know for sure. But I do know I love you, and I want to be with you.”

  “Is it really that simple?”

  “No, of course not. This is a first for both of us. It’s bound to get rocky.”

  “I just—I just need to get used to it. I’ve never been part of a—a partnership before, and I’m still figuring out how it works.”

  “We could start with a lesson on the use of the first-person plural.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean that we’ll figure out how it works,” he said. Then he paused. “That was corny, wasn’t it?”

  “A little. Well, actually, a lot. But I liked it anyhow.”

  Out of the corner of my eye, I could see him digging something out of his pocket. It sparkled, even in the dark of the car.

  I took my left hand off the steering wheel, crossing it awkwardly under my right arm and reaching it out in his direction.

  The ring slid smoothly onto my finger.

  Exactly where it belonged.

  chapter twenty-three

  I caught Peter up on recent events as we sped west along the Interstate. My friends were on the case in New York, reporting to the police that Jake had tried to kill me and urging them to treat him as a suspect. Of course, if you hadn’t actually been there during the actual shooti
ng, the whole story would sound preposterous, and I doubted that sharing it with the authorities would solve any of my problems. This was part of the reason I’d decided to get out of town. The other reason was that I—we—had research to do elsewhere.

  Being shot at by Jake was enough to convince me that he was Gallagher’s killer. My earlier gullibility may have been bottomless, but the blinders were officially off where he was concerned.

  It was also enough to convince me that there had to be something going on between him and Annabel, regardless of what he’d told me at Starbucks, because it must have been Annabel who’d attacked Dahlia. Jake had put her up to it, of course, which was how she knew to disguise herself as a Rachel lookalike, and Peter had unwittingly let him know how perfectly the timing of my late start would align with Dahlia’s commute. He used Annabel to set me up, both to deflect interest in him as a suspect and because he thought I knew something that would incriminate him. Then, when I eluded the police, he tipped them off as to where I was, helpfully aided by me, since I’d pretty much given him Emma’s address that afternoon. In fact, he’d probably told the police about everything I’d told him all along: my “insurance policy,” my love of Forensic City and my hate of all things Gallagher, not to mention my little jokes about murdering Gallagher by poisoning his stupid pencils. When I eluded the authorities again, he came after me himself.

  But while I knew Jake was guilty, I didn’t know why he’d done what he’d done. Was it to secure Gallagher’s fortune for Annabel, and therefore himself, before Gallagher could divorce her? Of course, according to Jake, she was in for only a modest fortune whether she was a widow or a divorcée, but that could have been just another of his lies. Or was it even more complicated than that, related in some way to the intrigue around the Thunderbolt deal? Since New York was dangerous territory for me just now, the default option was to check into the latter. Poking around at Thunderbolt headquarters might help us answer, once and for all, if this entire thing was about the deal and, if so, how. Besides, I’d always heard that Pennsylvania was lovely this time of year.

  Peter, meanwhile, managed not to say “I told you so” at any point in my narrative, and he seemed almost reluctant to add to the case against Jake. But he confessed that he’d continued to research him, in spite of our argument the previous day. He’d gleaned some useful information in the process, including that Annabel and Jake should be taken seriously as an item.

  “Jake may have said their earlier relationship was a casual thing, but what I found suggests it was a lot less casual than he let on,” he told me. “They went to a wedding together several years ago, and the wedding couple put their album online. The two of them definitely don’t look casual in these pictures, and there’s even a picture of Annabel catching the bride’s bouquet. The caption said something about it being about time that Jake made an honest woman out of her, which implies that they’d been seeing each other pretty seriously for a while.”

  Peter had picked up some useful context about Jake’s professional background, too. “I don’t know what he told you about his previous work with Gallagher, but he worked on the Tiger buyout, too. I found an article from a trade magazine that mentioned he was on Gallagher’s team at Ryan Brothers. The article was mostly about organized labor, and how the downturn in manufacturing has been forcing concessions from union leaders, but it talked about the Tiger deal and the Ryan Brothers team, and it mentioned both Gallagher and Jake by name, along with Perry. Are you sure that Jake wasn’t part of whatever Gallagher and Perry had going on?”

  “If he was, Gallagher did a pretty good job hiding it. He was just as abusive to Jake as to anyone else, practically. And while I recognize that I have no credibility now when it comes to Jake, there weren’t any sidebars, any one-on-one conversations between the two of them that would indicate they were plotting. And if they were in on something together, why would Jake kill him?”

  Unfortunately, all of Peter’s Googling and my being used for target practice hadn’t given us the remotest clue as to what Jake thought Dahlia and I knew that made us so dangerous, much less why he was so eager to set me up as his fall guy. Or fall person.

  And while we had a better sense of who the bad guys were, we were still confused about the identity of the good guys. Neither Peter nor I could figure out who the two other men from the boat basin could be or even whether they were definitely good guys. Hilary had been put in charge of canvassing area emergency rooms in an attempt to track down the black-haired stranger. But I didn’t even know where to begin to track down the guy in the ski mask with the familiar voice, much less how he fit in to this entire mess.

  When I did find out, it was the biggest surprise of all.

  Living in Manhattan can leave one jaded in certain ways. That man jogging up Lexington Avenue in a wig, Wonder Woman costume, and full makeup on a day that most certainly is not Halloween? He doesn’t merit a second glance. The motorcades of visiting dignitaries are a nuisance and the thirty-dollar hamburger is a staple on menus around town. Spa pedicures for seven-year-olds aren’t uncommon in certain circles, although I personally find this tacky. And the city is indisputably a shopping mecca, offering a broader array of wares displayed with more artistic flair than anywhere else in the world.

  But there is one type of retail experience denied to Manhattanites that can thrill even the most jaded among us: the mass market chain store.

  To be fair, there is a Kmart at Astor Place, but it’s not the same as the Super Ks that sprawl luxuriously in suburbs across America, where there are no space constraints. I’ve also heard rumors of a Target in Brooklyn, but it seems to me that part of the experience is pulling off a highway and into a massive parking lot; not taking the subway or a taxi to another borough.

  Peter had spent most of his adult life in California, so he was unprepared for my excitement when we pulled into the lot of a twenty-four-hour Sav-Mart somewhere in western New Jersey.

  “Let’s get a cart.”

  “We don’t need a cart,” he said. “There are spare clothes for us both in the car. A basket should do it. All we need are some toiletries and a couple of things to freshen up your disguise. The bullet hole in your hat is sort of conspicuous once you know it’s a bullet hole. And have I mentioned how much I hate that hat?”

  “But carts are more fun. In New York, they only have the mini carts, and they’re impossible anyhow because the aisles are so narrow.”

  “When was the last time you bought enough of anything at a grocery store to actually need a cart?”

  “Maybe I would do more grocery shopping if there were big grocery stores with big carts in the city,” I countered.

  “Fine. We’ll get a cart.” I had the feeling I was being humored, but that didn’t really bother me.

  We made quick work of picking up the basics, like toothpaste, soda and potato chips (it had been a long time since dinner, and I seemed to have developed a salt-and-vinegar fixation in the last forty-eight hours). But it was harder to plan for my new incognito look with so many choices presenting themselves.

  Peter left me with the cart while he went looking for hats. He caught up with me in the hair dye aisle.

  “No,” he said, taking the box of Clairol Nice ’n Easy Natural Light Champagne Blonde I’d been examining and replacing it on the shelf.

  “No what?”

  “No, you are not dying your hair.”

  “Now you really do sound like a possessive caveman.”

  “I like your hair the way it is.”

  “But the way it is is sort of noticeable. Here,” I said, pulling another box from a shelf. “This one’s a rinse. It only lasts through three shampoos.”

  “Do you sincerely believe that this will be less noticeable than your natural color?”

  “Not really. But if I’m going to dye my hair, I might as well try something really different.”

  “Looking like a Smurf would be different,” he acknowledged.

  “I never rebel
led as a teenager.” The prospect of changing my look completely was enough to make me forget why I wanted to change it in the first place.

  After some debate, we compromised. I got the hair dye, but only the most temporary variety and in a shade called “caramel brown.” “They might as well call it mouse brown,” I grumbled.

  “The objective here is to help you blend in,” Peter reminded me, propelling the cart forward with one hand and me with the other.

  “Blend, shmend.”

  He managed to get us safely back to the car without succumbing to the many valid arguments I put forth as to why the forty-eight-roll package of toilet paper was a steal at any price and how it would be tragedy to pass it up.

  “You must be getting tired,” he said. “Why don’t you let me drive for a bit?”

  “Did Luisa say that you could drive?”

  “She encouraged me to. Everybody knows New Yorkers can’t drive. None of them even have cars. In fact, I was supposed to make you switch places as soon as I could. I’ve been remarkably restrained for the last couple of hours.”

  “I’m a good driver,” I insisted. “And that’s very sexist of Luisa to assume that you’re a better driver than I am.” But I was tired, so I handed over the keys.

  I dozed off immediately, waking up only when Peter brought the car to a stop. I sat up and looked around. We were in the parking lot of a motel.

  “Where are we?”

  “State College, Pennsylvania.”

  “There’s really a place called State College? That’s its name?”

  “I guess there must be a state college around somewhere.”

  “I hope so. Otherwise it’s just strange.”

  “Wait here. I’m going to check us in.”

  I managed to doze off again before he returned. The next thing I knew, he was opening the passenger-side door and nudging me awake. “Forty-nine dollars a night,” he announced, holding up a key.

  I was eager to get to bed, but forty-nine dollars seemed too cheap to be safe. A decent hotel room in New York couldn’t be had for four times that much. “Was there a more expensive one?” I asked as we gathered our things from the trunk and made our way along the line of numbered doors.