The Key

by Jennifer Sturman

  And still nothing.

  Then I noticed that despite the throbbing in my head and the queasiness in my stomach and the awkward position my arms were in and the way my neck still ached from Jake’s headlock, one body part felt pretty good.

  My ear no longer itched.

  chapter thirty-six

  T he transmitter was gone.

  I briefly tried to convince myself that perhaps that it had fallen out of my ear and attached itself to a piece of clothing or tangled itself in my hair, in which case, Ben would have been able to continue monitoring the conversation even if I was unable to hear anything from his end. But the continued absence of Ben or any type of rescue effort didn’t do much to bolster my hopes. And then Jake put the nail in the coffin of my hopes.

  “Hey, Rach. You didn’t spend your own money on that transmitter thing, did you? Because we threw it out the window somewhere on Canal Street. Sorry about that.”

  I pictured the small, ticklike button lying on the dirty pavement and tried not to groan.

  The transmitter was completely gone. And I was completely screwed.

  I was alone, outnumbered and defenseless, and I was fairly confident that the waters off Bridgehampton would be less than balmy. Not that I’d last very long once overboard. I could only hope that sharks migrated south in the winter like birds.

  Nobody would be coming to rescue me. Nobody knew what had happened, or where I was, or what Jake and Annabel had planned for me, or why they had planned it in the first place.

  I should have known better than to rely on anyone else.

  It was up to me, and only me, to save myself.

  This realization drained the last of my good humor. Jake and Annabel were still playing their little game of You-Shut-Up/No-You-Shut-Up in the front seat, but I’d had enough.

  “Why don’t you both shut up!” I bellowed.

  “Hey, Rach. There’s nothing to gain by getting all worked up,” said Jake.

  “There’s nothing to gain by killing me,” I snapped back. “Nobody—nobody—would believe that I killed myself over you, you conceited ass.”

  Annabel chimed in. “You are conceited, Jake. I mean, I’m not worried that we won’t be able to put the whole thing over, but your ego is getting sort of bloated.”

  Divide and conquer, I thought, as they bickered over whether or not Jake was conceited. I would use my keen wit to derail their plan. The fact that the two of them seemed headed for couple’s therapy at a rapid clip could only work in my favor. My mind raced as I tried to come up with a reason for Annabel to join me in ganging up on Jake, or any reason I could put forth to dissuade them from their current path.

  But it was as if they could read my thoughts.

  “You have to understand, Rach. It’s nothing personal,” said Jake after he and Annabel had agreed to table the conceitedness issue. “We spent a lot of time thinking this through, and there’s just no other alternative.”

  “He’s right, Rachel. You have to take the fall for the Dahlia thing. There’s no other way. It’s either you or me, and I’m going to have to go with you.”

  “That’s so typical of you, Annabel, to look at it that way. Killing Rachel is something we need to do for our future. It’s not just about you. I may be conceited, but you’re selfish,” Jake said.

  As they launched into heated debate over whether Annabel was more selfish than Jake was conceited, I turned my attention to my hands and feet. If reason was out, maybe I could attempt physical persuasion. If I could only untie myself, then I’d be able to take them by surprise and overpower them somehow. There had to be a weapon of some sort here in the back seat with me, a tire iron or golf club or handy meat cleaver I could put to good use.

  But no matter how I wiggled and squirmed, I couldn’t free my hands from the knotted silk scarf, and I knew better than to think that anything that expensive would simply tear and give way. The odds of physically persuading Jake and Annabel not to kill me seemed about as inauspicious as the odds of reasoning with them. They’d probably have to untie me so I could write out whatever fake confession they wanted me to write out, but I doubted that they’d be careless enough for me to make my escape then.

  “Slow down,” Jake warned Annabel in the front seat. “You don’t want to miss the turnoff.”

  “I’m not going to miss the turnoff.”

  “You’re in the wrong lane. You need to start getting over.”

  “The exit’s not for another two miles.”

  “You’re still in the wrong lane.”

  The car swerved to the right. “Happy now?”

  “Happier, yes. But you should use your blinker when you switch lanes.”

  “There’s hardly anybody else on the road! Who cares if I use the blinker?”

  I scanned through my options again, hoping against hope that I’d missed something. But I wasn’t coming up with anything viable.

  In fact, I was coming up with nothing.

  The car’s pace slowed as Annabel turned off the highway. It seemed wrong that when I actually wanted to go to the beach, traffic was a nightmare, but when I had no interest in arriving there we just cruised right along.

  I sighed. It was looking like I should start resigning myself to a cold and watery death. A certain fatalism washed over me. I found myself wondering if there was anything embarrassing at my home or office, any items that I wouldn’t want discovered by the unfortunate person charged with clearing out my belongings. Not that it really mattered, since I couldn’t be embarrassed when I was dead, but I didn’t want to tarnish the memories of me that Peter and my family and friends would otherwise cherish. And I hoped there would be good food at the reception after my funeral. I’d always been a big fan of the pig in a blanket, and while I recognized that some might consider it an inappropriate funeral dish, I personally believed it was suitable for any occasion. Although, it was a dish best served with champagne, and not the cheap stuff, either. I hoped that somebody would spring for something nice and dry and bubbly.

  “The light’s turning red,” said Jake.

  “It still looks yellow to me,” Annabel replied.

  “This would be a very bad time to get pulled over for running a red light.”

  “Geez, Grandma,” Annabel grumbled, but the car came to a stop.

  “I’d feel a lot safer with my grandmother behind the wheel.”

  “How long is this light, anyway?”

  “What’s your hurry? We can’t kill her until after dark. We have plenty of—”

  I was weighing the relative merits of pigs in a blanket and miniquiches when I briefly registered the sound of a car engine accelerating behind us.

  Then Jake’s words were lost in the roar of metal crashing into metal.

  chapter thirty-seven

  T he impact threw me forward, my head collided with the back of the driver’s seat, and the sunny afternoon gave way to shooting silver stars.

  The car skidded some distance and then crashed into an unyielding object. My head hit the back of the driver’s seat again.

  I heard a voice cry out. It could have been mine, or it could have been Annabel’s—it could even have been Jake’s, taking on a strangely soprano note—but it was impossible to tell over the whoosh of exploding air bags. Not that there were air bags in the back seat—my safety hadn’t been of primary concern to the happy couple in the front.

  I struggled up into a sitting position, which took significantly more abdominal strength than I would have guessed I had, New Year’s resolutions regarding personal trainers notwithstanding. Through the haze of shooting silver stars, I managed to ascertain that the air bags had pinned both Jake and Annabel to their seats, effectively immobilizing them. Police sirens sounded in the distance.

  I registered a fleeting moment of joy. My would-be killers had been thwarted, I wouldn’t be swimming with the fishes any time soon, and I’d learned that I should leave very specific instructions in my will regarding hors d’oeuvres to be served at my fun
eral.

  Then I blacked out completely.

  When I came to, I heard Peter’s voice nearby, in muted conversation with other, unfamiliar voices.

  My first thought was to wonder what he was doing there. It was with a mix of relief, affection and shame that I realized I’d been a little quick to assume I’d been left so thoroughly on my own. I hadn’t been alone, after all. There was someone I could rely on. And he’d turned out to be very reliable.

  My second thought was to wonder how he’d gotten there. Then I opened my eyes and took a good look around.

  My third thought was to hope that Luisa’s insurance covered this sort of thing.

  It was late by the time we were able to hitch a ride back to the city, and I’d lost track of how many law enforcement agencies had questioned us, much less which agency was actually providing our transportation. However, I appreciated that the officers in the front seat seemed comfortable leaving us to our own devices in the back seat. That the front and back seats were separated by a bulletproof glass panel also helped secure our privacy, although I found the lack of handles on the doors a bit discomfiting, especially given how recently I’d been entrapped in another moving vehicle.

  “How did you know?” I asked Peter. “Jake said they tossed the transmitter out on Canal Street.”

  “I was worried that everyone was underestimating Jake, and I wanted to make sure you had more backup than the transmitter. I was in Luisa’s car just below Canal as you were waiting for him.”

  “You found parking?” This was almost more impressive than the way in which he’d saved my life.

  “I got there early—I left the apartment right after you left to meet Ben—and I circled the block. It took awhile, but eventually a space with a good view of the corner opened up.”

  “And then you trailed us up the street? And you saw what happened? You saw Jake pull me into that alley?”

  “The nerve of that guy.”

  “But—how did you follow us? How did you know where to find me?”

  “A handy little thing I like to call a map,” he said with a smile. “I’d been studying it while I was waiting, and I knew where that alley led. I got there just as the Range Rover pulled out, and I could see Jake and Annabel in the front. I figured they wouldn’t have bothered with the car if they were going to leave you in the alley, so I followed them. Before I knew it, we were over the Manhattan Bridge and on the highway. I thought I’d keep the car in sight and call the police.”

  “Didn’t your phone work?”

  “I’m an idiot—I didn’t even have it with me. I’d left it in the apartment when I sneaked out on Thursday, and I forgot all about it this morning.”

  “So you had to improvise.”

  “Yes,” he said. “I had to improvise.” The warm chocolate of his eyes was now set off by purplish bruising from where the airbags in the BMW had exploded in his face. Ben wasn’t going to be the only one with a black eye in the morning.

  “You know, nobody’s ever going to lend us a car again.”

  “Who needs a car when you live in Manhattan?”

  We would find out later that Luisa’s car was indeed insured; regardless, she made it very clear that neither Peter nor I was ever authorized to drive one of her vehicles again.

  “Would you rather that Peter hadn’t done anything? That he’d saved your precious car but let Jake and Annabel kill me?” I asked her.

  “I don’t know if you want me to answer that question,” she replied.

  I also found out that all of my friends being in town the same week wasn’t a fortunate coincidence but had occurred purely by design: they’d been planning a surprise engagement party for Peter and me.

  Of course, I’d ruined everything by skipping town the night before the party, but they seemed willing to forgive me.

  “I just don’t know when we’re going to be able to get another date on the calendar,” said Jane. “Between the baby and everyone’s schedules, it’s going to be hard. And we really wanted it to be a surprise.”

  “It was a surprise,” I said. “I had no idea that you were planning anything. So it worked. Thank you.”

  “Surprising you isn’t the same thing as having a party, though. Maybe we can do a bridal shower,” suggested Emma. “Or a joint baby and bridal shower for Jane and Rachel together. That could be fun.”

  “How would that be fun?” asked Hilary. “Have you ever even been to a shower?”

  I probably took more pleasure than was seemly in helping Ben put together his case against Nicholas Perry and Senator Brisbane and in testifying against Jake and Annabel. Annabel’s new outfits were far less becoming than her usual selections from Prada and Gucci, but orange is a difficult color for blondes to wear well.

  I took less pleasure in the statements I had to make about Andrew Marcus. He might have been a coldblooded killer, but he’d killed to avenge his family, which seemed like a more noble purpose than the money that had motivated the various other wrong-doers involved. I also appreciated the way he’d prevented Jake from shooting me at the boat basin, not to mention the thorough efficiency with which he’d completed his work on the Thunderbolt deal. Good associates were hard to find.

  And I could have used a good associate, because I was soon busy at work again, helping Frank Kryzluk and the Thunderbolt board of directors put together an employee buyout of the company. There was a McDonald’s at the Pittsburgh Airport, but even though the flight from New York took over an hour, it didn’t really count as a road trip, so I couldn’t justify stopping there.

  It was close to midnight by the time we reached my apartment building that Sunday night. The doorman helped us out of the squad car that had chauffeured us home from the Hamptons with an admirable lack of comment. I slumped against Peter in the elevator, my eyes closed and practically asleep on my feet. It had been a long day. In fact, it had been a long week.

  “Come on,” he said as the elevator doors parted.

  I opened my eyes.

  “Peter, we’re on the wrong floor.” The little brass plate said sixteen, not fifteen.

  “No, we’re not.” He bent and retrieved a key from under the door mat in front of 16A.

  “Peter, you can’t just take somebody else’s key like that. And this is the apartment right upstairs from mine. Whoever lives here can make things pretty miserable for us if we piss them off. Stomping around, dragging things, playing loud music. It can get ugly.”

  He ignored me and turned the key in the door.

  “Peter, this really isn’t funny. It’s dangerous to upset your upstairs neighbors.”

  He started to pocket the key, and then he caught himself. “We’ll need to make a copy of this for you.”

  “Have you not had enough interaction with law enforcement agencies today?”

  “Come here,” he said, propping the door open with his foot.

  “What are you doing—” I started to ask. Then he picked me up.

  “It’s a little premature, but I’m carrying you over the threshold.”

  “Of somebody else’s apartment.”

  “No, it’s ours.”

  “What?”

  “I bought it. It’s ours. And we can build a staircase down to your apartment. I already checked with an architect.”

  “How did you—I mean, when did you—” Was this what all of his phone calls had been about? And why he’d been here instead of at his office in the middle of the day?

  “Shh,” he said.

  And he carried me over the threshold.

  THE KEY

  A Red Dress Ink novel

  ISBN: 1-55254-734-5

  © 2006 by Jennifer Sturman.

  All rights reserved. The reproduction, transmission or utilization of this work in whole or in part in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including xerography, photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, is forbidden without written permission. For permi
ssion please contact Red Dress Ink, Editorial Office, 225 Duncan Mill Road, Don Mills, Ontario, Canada M3B 3K9.

  This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, incidents and places are the products of the author’s imagination, and are not to be construed as real. While the author was inspired in part by actual events, none of the characters in the book is based on an actual person. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental and unintentional.

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