Skeleton Key Read online

  “I don’t think you ought to drink any more of that,” Annabel said. “I think you’re going to end up passing out.”

  Tommy smiled politely. Then he put his head down on the bar and closed his eyes. He wasn’t going to pass out. He was just going to go to sleep. The bartender put her new St. Pauli Girl Light down and waited. Annabel opened her purse and got out a five-dollar bill.

  “You’re going to have to do something about him,” the bartender said.

  “I know,” Annabel replied.

  “It’s college boys,” the bartender said. “You see it all the time. They don’t know the difference between getting high and getting stewed. Most of them don’t know the difference between getting high and getting sick. At least he isn’t sick.”

  “No,” Annabel said. “He isn’t sick.”

  The bartender made change. Annabel put the change down on the bar next to her glass.

  “You’re going to have to do something about him eventually,” the bartender said, again, and then he moved away down the bar.

  Annabel poured beer into her glass and swung her legs. It wasn’t true that she hated Kayla Anson—at least, it wasn’t true exactly. It was just that it sometimes seemed as if she’d gotten the wrong end of some cosmic bargain. Kayla didn’t even care about acting out and having fun. Rules didn’t faze her. She never felt suffocated by the things everybody expected of her. Even that last night at school, when she was helping Annabel down the sheet rope from their dorm window and onto that idiotic old horse, she had only been in it out of general good nature. She was helping Annabel. It didn’t even occur to her that she could come into town herself and find a boy of her own.

  No, Annabel told herself again. It really isn’t true that I hate Kayla. I’ve known her forever. And if there are times I sometimes wish I could wipe her face out of existence, that’s only natural. Because she is who she is. And it’s frustrating.

  Annabel got down off her barstool and moved as close to Tommy as she could. With his head down on the bar like that, he was in the best possible position. All she had to do was run her hand over the back of his pants—it made him smile, in spite of the condition he was in—and there was his wallet, right where she would have expected it to be. She got it out and put it into her purse, careful not to appear self-conscious. She was a woman with a drunk on her hands. Nobody was going to be surprised at anything she did. She moved her hands around to the front of Tommy’s trousers and went looking for the keys. That was harder, because he was lying sideways across the place where the pocket she needed had its opening. When she finally got in there, she could feel his penis against the side of her hand. It was limp as a worm. She got the keys and got out.

  “You’re going to have to take him home,” the bartender said. “You don’t want him driving you anywhere, the condition he’s in.”

  “He couldn’t drive me anywhere,” Annabel said. “All he’d do is fall asleep behind the wheel.”

  “You’re going to have to drive him home,” the bartender said again.

  Annabel waved the keys in her hand. “Before I drive him anywhere, I’m going to go to the bathroom. Then maybe I can find somebody to help me get him to the car.”

  “Maybe,” the bartender said.

  Annabel walked away from the bar to the back of the room, where the rest rooms sat on a small corridor near the kitchen. The Lucky Eight had a whole menu full of food it said it served, but Annabel had never seen anyone eat anything there except big plates of nacho chips with melted cheese and salsa. No one she saw tonight was eating even that. The small round tables were mostly full of couples drinking beer. Every once in a while, somebody had a shot glass or a cocktail. Off to the side, the band was setting up for the night. It would start at 10:00 P.M. and play country music until well after 2:00, or as late as it could until the state police decided to shut it down.

  Annabel went into the small corridor where the rest rooms were and looked into the kitchen. The cook was smoking a cigarette and watching a game on a small television set up near the microwave. Annabel thought it must be a rerun of some kind. She kept on going and went through the back door into the parking lot.

  The bright red Corvette was not difficult to find. It was especially easy because Tommy had parked it across two spaces, diagonally, to make sure nobody scraped his sides. When people did that, other people sometimes took their keys and scraped for real, but this time the car had been left alone. Annabel found the key for the door and got inside it. The alarm whooped once and stopped when she pushed the safety button. She slammed the door closed and went for the glove compartment.

  It wasn’t true that she hated Kayla Anson, any more than it was true that she hated any of them, all those people she had gone to school with and grown up with, all those people who seemed to be able to get away with anything while she was left making it up as she went along. It was just that she was a little—angry—with Kayla now, because this last expulsion had been completely unnecessary. They could have lied their way out of it. It was Kayla who had insisted on coming clean and telling the truth.

  Annabel took the road maps and the owner’s manual out of the glove compartment. Under all that there were two little Baggies, one full to bursting and the other with just a little in the bottom of it. The one that was full to bursting had marijuana in it. The other one had a fine white powder. Annabel supposed it was cocaine. She couldn’t be sure. These days, some of the boys had heroin. It was the latest thing in drug chic on all the best campuses in the Ivy League.

  Annabel shoved everything back into the glove compartment and got the compartment shut. Then she hooked her seat belt into place and put the key in the ignition. The Corvette started up without any problem at all. She maneuvered it out of its parking space—not easy, with a diagonal position like that to start with and the rest of the lot chock full—and headed out on 209.

  What she really wanted to do, right now, was find a pay phone and turn the Lucky Eight and everybody in it over to the police. She would have done it, except that she knew that if she did she would only shut the Lucky Eight down and make all the other roadhouses in the Northwest Hills scared to death of serving underaged drinkers. Tommy would not get arrested. He wouldn’t even get turned over to a drug and alcohol program.

  What she was going to do instead was drive home to her own driveway and park the car and get out, with the drugs safely hidden away in her purse. Then she was going to call Tommy’s parents and tell them, more or less, what had happened and where he was. That wouldn’t get him in trouble, either, but at least she’d have the dope.

  She got to the junction of 209 and 109 and turned right, toward Washington Depot. The road was dark and deserted and quiet. The moon overhead would have been full and bright, except that it was covered by clouds.

  It wasn’t true that she hated Kayla Anson, Annabel told herself again. It was only true that she sometimes wished her dead.

  4

  Faye Dallmer believed in the Goddess. She thought she might always have believed in the Goddess, even when she was small and going to Methodist Sunday school—but she knew for sure that her belief had been strong at least since 1978, which was when she had moved to the Northwest Hills. Before she had come up here for the first time, with the man who was then her husband, Faye hadn’t realized that there were places like this left anywhere in New England. Well, maybe there were, up in Maine, say, or in northern Vermont or New Hampshire, places that were too far away and too isolated to do her any good. The Northwest Hills were the best she could have hoped for, under the circumstances. They were prime antiquing country for every overpaid corporate manager in New York, and they were home to a lot of wealthy people with pretensions about wanting to save the earth. Fay made handmade quilts and elaborately crocheted afghans, among other things, and she had a good eye for her potential customers. They almost always came from the city, and they almost never knew anything important about anything.

  Faye had decided to go out tonight
because the moon was full, even if she couldn’t see her fullness. She had closed up the small shop she had had built right next to the edge of the Litchfield Road and made sure that all the doors were locked. This close to Halloween, she couldn’t be too careful. Then she had gone back to the house and picked up Zara Anne, who was sitting in the kitchen as usual, trying to read a book. Zara Anne was the latest in a long line of Faye’s lovers, each picked for her supposed commitment to Preserving the History of the Crafts, and each stupider and more leaden than the last. Zara Anne was thin, as well, as skeletal as some of the white trash women Faye sometimes saw buying beer at the gas station at Four Corners—except that Faye would never call anybody “white trash.” People were not trash, not even if they were men, and calling these people white would have been superfluous. One of the truly shocking things about this part of Connecticut was that it was practically all white, and mostiy Anglo-Saxon white on top of it. Maybe the ethnic people didn’t feel comfortable here, or maybe they were just too smart to get stuck in the snows that hit so regularly during the winter. The first snow of this year was very close. Faye had been feeling it coming on all day. If the bad weather started this early, there would be hell to pay by Christmas, which was when most of the towns would run out of money to plow the roads. Then they would plow the roads anyway, and there would have to be town meetings to impose surcharges that would make up the difference. It was as if nobody thought of planning ahead.

  When Faye came into the house, Zara Anne was watching some news program on channel 8. That meant it had to be eleven o’clock, which seemed to be damned near impossible. Faye took the white gauze scarf off her head and put it down on the little table in the hall. Her earrings tinkled like wind chimes, mostly because they were like wind chimes, tiers of metal that knocked against each other. All of Faye’s jewelry was big and bright and loud. It contrasted well with the skirts and sweaters she wore, which were always in blacks and navy blues, to disguise the fact that she was getting a little thick around the middle, now that she had reached the menopause. She wasn’t getting really fat, though, only just a little thick around the waist. She couldn’t help feeling proud of herself for that. Sometimes she wanted to take Zara Anne by the neck and wring the life out of her. At least it would be some kind of change, when Zara Anne was usually as placid and immobile as a rock sealed into a vacuum chamber.

  “I thought we’d go out and cast stones,” Faye said, as she came through the hall into the living room.

  Zara Anne was sprawled out on the couch with her legs twisted into something vaguely yoga-ish, covered in a batik cotton something whose colors all looked vaguely wrong. Faye had no idea what Zara Anne called the things she wore—dresses, maybe, or saris, or wraps—but she’d always thought there ought to be something special to say about them, as if they were an art form of their own. Fay had no idea where Zara Anne got them, either, since Zara Anne didn’t drive and never wanted to shop.

  “I thought…” Faye started again.

  Zara Anne moved her entire body sideways, as if she could no longer move just her neck. “Somebody took the Jeep again,” she said. “I heard them.”

  “Excuse me?” Faye said.

  “Somebody took the Jeep again.” Zara Anne hauled herself forward, so that she was almost sitting up. Why couldn’t she move the way normal people moved? Why did she always look like a robot? “They came in the garage. It was hours ago. When the other news was on. I heard them.”

  “And you didn’t come and get me?” “The other news” would mean the six o’clock, or maybe even the five-thirty.

  “You were working. And besides. You’d already said. It’s because it’s Halloween. And they always bring it back.”

  This made sense, although it didn’t seem to. In the weeks around Halloween, Faye’s Jeep did get stolen, on and off, by kids who liked to trawl it up and down the blacktops. That was because it was a regular Jeep with a regular Jeep engine, but fitted out with extra large farm vehicle wheels, so that Faye could drive it around her back lot whenever she needed to. She’d had it customized that way at Z & J’s in Danbury, to use for gardening. She had an ordinary car—a little Escort with a hatchback—that she used for actually driving on the roads.

  Now she went to the door that led to the garage and opened it. The space where the Jeep usually sat was empty. The Escort was where it always was. She closed the door again and went back down the hall to the living room. Zara Anne was still watching television. Zara Anne still hadn’t moved enough to be occupying any really new space.

  I brought this woman here, Faye reminded herself. I met her at the naturopath conference and brought her here, all the way from Hartford. I can’t just kick her out the door and expect her to fend for herself.

  “Zara Anne,” Faye said. “Do you remember at all, when it was this happened? How long ago exactly?”

  “It was after six. Ann Nyberg was on the news. And Diane Smith had already been. But I didn’t worry about it. Because you said—”

  “Well, yes. I know what I said. But it’s after eleven.”

  “I heard it go by later,” Zara Anne said. “I recognized the noise. And I went out on the porch and looked at it.”

  “You looked at it going by.”

  “She was going by, too. You know. That girl. The one with the millions of dollars who lives in Washington Depot and is on the news all the time.”

  “Kayla Anson.”

  “I don’t think people should have millions of dollars like that, when so many other people have nothing. I don’t think it’s fair. Do you believe in Marxism?”

  The last thing Faye wanted was to get into a discussion of Marxism with Zara Anne. Then she tried to remember Zara Anne’s last name and couldn’t, which made her feel incredibly stupid. Maybe she was getting too old for this. Years ago, she had left her husband because the sex had been so awful. She had wanted nothing more in her life but lover after lover, male and female, orgasm after orgasm. She’d even written a philosophy about it, and the philosophy had been published as a book by a small press in New Jersey. The small press was dedicated to feminist and environmental issues, with (of course) a definite political slant. The same press had published four of Faye’s other books. Then one of the books had made it onto one of the national bestseller lists, and Faye had switched her allegiance to Simon and Schuster. Her reasons were entirely practical. Under all the outsized jewelry and flowing, not-quite-over-being-a-hippie clothes, Faye Dallmer was a supremely practical woman. Simon and Schuster paid advances in six figures. That was all she needed to know.

  Faye went back to the door to the garage one more time. The Jeep was still gone. The Escort was still there. At this point, it didn’t matter so much if the Jeep had been stolen by kids or professional car thieves. If it had been stolen by thieves, she ought to call the police on principle. If it had been stolen by kids, she had to worry that they’d had an accident in it The Jeep didn’t go missing for hours at a time like this. The kids always brought it back and parked it where it belonged before she’d even had a chance to worry about it.

  Faye went back to Zara Anne. The phone was on a small table between the couch and the biggest armchair. Faye sat down on the armchair and began punching numbers into the pad.

  “I’m going to call the town police,” she said. “We should have done this hours ago. There may have been an accident”

  “You told me not to worry,” Zara Anne said stubbornly.

  The phone rang and rang in Faye’s ear. Then it was picked up and Faye recognized the voice of Rita Venotti, who seemed to have been on the night shift at the police department before forever.

  “Oh, Rita,” Faye said. And then she explained, in detail, so that Rita wouldn’t say what Zara Anne had, that it had happened before, that there was nothing to worry about.

  “I could send somebody out,” Rita said. “I could send Danny Hazelton. Would that be all right?”

  “That would be fine,” Faye said.

  “We don
’t have any accidents over the radio,” Rita said. “I don’t think you have to worry about that. We monitor the state police all the time.”

  “Maybe it was professional thieves, then,” Faye said. “Although it hardly seems possible.”

  “I know, I know,” Rita said. “It hardly does seem possible. It used to be you never had to worry about any of that out here.”

  Faye put the phone down. Zara Anne was wielding the remote, punching channels as if her life depended on them. Sometimes, late at night, she settled on the Trinity Broadcasting Network and watched the PTL club as if it were a documentary. Now she had found a rerun of an ancient Hawaii Five-O episode. Jack Lord was looking just as tense and phony as he ever had.

  “Zara Anne,” Faye said carefully. “I’ve been meaning to talk to you about some things. I’ve been meaning to talk to you about us.”

  “You’ve been meaning to throw me out,” Zara Anne said. “I could see it coming.”

  “I don’t think it’s a question of throwing you out,” Faye said. “I think it’s more of the order of, well—”

  “Sometimes I really do believe in God,” Zara Anne said. “I believe in a God of the devil. If you get what I mean.”

  “No. No, I don’t.”

  “I bet nobody ever threw that girl out. The rich one. I bet she gets to stay anywhere she wants for as long as she wants. I bet all she has to do to get a lover is say she wants one, and there it is.”

  “It?”

  Zara Anne swivelled her head around. Her face was mottled with red. The skin of her face was slack and loose and creased, like polyester that has been left to wrinkle at the bottom of a laundry basket. Faye didn’t think she could have been this unattractive when she first came here. In fact, Faye was sure she couldn’t have been. If Zara Anne had been this unattractive, Faye would never have brought her home.

  “If you think you’re going to get rid of me just by saying so,” Zara Anne said, “you’re going to have to think again. I’m not a piece of cardboard. I’m not here just so that you can push me around.”