Lost Key Found

Monica had been working at city hall for six years, and in all that time she had never once needed to go into the basement storage room at the bottom of the old east wing. She was thirty-two, a puppet maker by trade, and the city kept her on contract for festivals and school events, which meant her workspace was a corner of the third floor with a sewing machine and about forty pounds of foam and felt. The basement was where the city put things it did not want to think about.

Except the archive request had come through that Tuesday, and the answer to it was in a box down there, and so down she went.

The elevator was ancient. It had a folding metal gate that screeched, and a button panel with worn numbers, and it took almost a full minute to descend two floors. Monica rode it down with a flashlight in one hand and her key ring in the other, jingling it against her palm without thinking about it, which she would think about later, a lot.

The basement was exactly what she expected. Rows of filing cabinets against one wall. Stacked boxes going back, judging by the labels, to before she was born. A corner near the far end with a workbench and a plastic bin, which was apparently where her predecessor had stored the old parade puppets, the big ones, the ones with poles and articulated arms that had not been used since some mayor's term nobody remembered fondly.

She found the box. She found the puppet inside it, a wizard thing with a cracked staff. She reached up to pull it off the shelf, and that was when her key ring slipped.

It did not just fall. It fell, bounced off the edge of a box, spun in the air in a way that felt almost deliberate, and dropped straight into the heating vent along the base of the wall. The grille was loose. One of the screws was missing entirely. The keys went through the gap and she heard them hit metal, then something further, then nothing.

Monica stood there for a good ten seconds.

"No," she said, to the vent, to the basement, to nobody.

She crouched down and peered through the grille. It was dark in there. She could see maybe the first foot of duct, and then the flashlight beam just gave up. The keys could have gone anywhere. The duct ran the length of the wall and probably connected to the main HVAC trunk, for all she knew.

The worse part came right after that. She had propped the elevator gate open with a box because the thing kept trying to close on her, and while she was on her knees with her face near a dusty vent, the box shifted, the gate slid shut, and the elevator, sensing no passenger, went back up with a grinding noise that faded away into the ceiling.

She stared at the closed door of it for a while.

There was a fire exit, she remembered. Heavy gray door near the stairs, the kind that auto-locks from the outside, the kind you are not supposed to open unless there is a fire. She went and tried it anyway. It had a push bar and a lock with a little window, and the window was empty. Master key only. She knew this because there was a laminated sign taped to the door at eye level that said, in Icelandic and English, that the door required a master key, and that misuse was a security violation, and she read it twice while her stomach did a slow rotation.

So that was the situation. Locked in a basement with a broken elevator, one auto-locked fire door, no keys, and a wizard puppet with a cracked staff.

Monica did what she usually did in a crisis, which was get annoyed and then get practical. The vent grille came off with a hard yank; the remaining screw stripped out of the old metal without much fight. She got her arm in up to the shoulder and felt around. Cold sheet metal, dust, a dead moth. The duct turned a corner somewhere past her elbow and she could not follow it.

She needed a tool. She went looking.

The snow shovel was leaning against the wall by the boiler room door, which was a strange place for a snow shovel, though this being Reykjavik somebody had probably just carried it in one day and abandoned it. It was a plastic scoop on a metal handle. She got the handle into the duct at an angle and started fishing, scraping it along the bottom of the channel, listening for the sound of metal on metal.

That was how Toby found her, twenty minutes later, ass in the air, arm shoulder deep in a heating duct, swearing at a snow shovel.

* * *

She heard the elevator first. The grinding started at the top and came down, which confused her for a second because she had thought the thing was broken. Then the gate screeched open and there were footsteps, and she pulled herself out of the duct fast enough to bang her elbow and turned around with dust on her cheek and the shovel still in both hands like a weapon.

Toby stood there holding a rolled tube of blueprints and a coffee cup. Thirty-three now, she noted, and the years had been mostly kind. Broad shoulders, that same crooked front tooth, hair shorter than the last time she had seen him, which was eight years ago and under circumstances neither of them had ever discussed.

"Monica," he said.

"Toby." She lowered the shovel. "What are you doing down here?"

"Blueprints." He held up the tube like it explained things, and honestly it sort of did, since he was supervising the renovation and the old drawings lived in the basement. "The elevator only comes down when somebody calls it. I called it. What are you doing with a snow shovel?"

"Retrieving my keys."

"From a vent."

"From a vent, yes!"

He looked at the open vent, then at her, then at the shovel, and she watched him do the math and arrive at the wrong answer. "You dropped them."

"I did not drop them. They fell."

"That's dropping them."

"Falling is an accident. Dropping is carelessness. There's a difference and it matters legally." She heard herself getting loud and did not care. "And for the record, if I hadn't come down here for the archive request, I wouldn't be fishing in a wall, so really the city is at fault, and after that the vent manufacturer."

"The vent manufacturer," he repeated. He set his coffee on a filing cabinet with the carefulness of a man buying time. "Okay. So why is this my fault? Because I have a feeling it's about to be my fault."

"It's not your fault yet." She pointed the shovel at the fire door. "But you came down in the elevator, which means the elevator works, which means it can come back down. Except it needs to be called from a panel, and the panels are up there and down here, and this one," she rapped her knuckles on the wall plate, and it did nothing, and she felt a small vicious satisfaction at how dead it looked, "is not responding. So as of about four minutes ago, it might be your fault too."

Toby walked over and pressed the call button. Nothing. He pressed it again, holding it, the way people do, as if the elevator were a stubborn dog. Nothing happened. He took his phone out and turned it around so she could see the screen. No signal. Hers had none either; the concrete and whatever old wiring ran through the walls killed it dead down here.

The fire door got tried next, together, both of them leaning on the push bar, and it did not move at all, not even a rattle. Master key only. Monica watched his face go through the same stages hers had gone through, annoyance and then arithmetic and then the slow settle of oh.

"So the master key," Toby said.

"Is in my key ring."

"Which is."

"In the vent." She pointed at the hole in the wall with the shovel. "The fire door master key, on a ring with my apartment key and my bike lock key and a little bottle opener shaped like a fish, currently in a heating duct, whereabouts unknown."

There was a silence. Somewhere in the pipes above them something ticked, water moving through old metal, and both of them looked up at the sound and then back at each other.

"Okay," Toby said finally. He unrolled his blueprints on top of a box, found a flat spot, and smoothed them down with his palm. "Then we get them out. Duct has to run somewhere. It comes up somewhere. There's a register on the ground floor, probably, or in a stairwell. If we can't reach them from here we go up and get them from the other end."

"We can't go up. That's the whole problem, Toby."

"Not by elevator. There's a stairwell." He tapped the blueprint, a section drawing, and there it was, a narrow line of stairs beside the elevator shaft, marked service access. "It comes out behind the records office. Door's probably locked too, but locked is a thing we can argue with. A duct is not."

Monica looked at the blueprint. She looked at the vent. She looked at Toby, who was already crouching to peer into the dark with his phone flashlight, and she thought, with a feeling she could not quite name, that of all the people in the city who could have come down that elevator, it had to be him. Eight years, one night, and now a heating duct between them and breakfast.

"Fine," she said. "Hand me the shovel."

The duct turned out to be about fourteen inches wide and went back farther than either of them wanted to think about. Toby lay on his stomach with his arm in up to the shoulder while Monica held the shovel in past him, and after ten minutes of scraping and cursing they agreed the keys had slid somewhere beyond the reach of any human limb.

"It curves," Toby said, pulling himself out with dust on his chin. "Or there's a joint. I can feel air moving, which means it connects to something. But it's not happening from here."

"Great. So we climb the service stairs, get in through the records office, and go find the register at the other end."

"Or," Toby said, standing and brushing himself off, "we stay here and wait. Somebody will notice eventually. The janitor does his rounds at six."

Monica did the arithmetic. It was a little after four now. Two hours, assuming the janitor actually did his rounds, assuming he didn't just clock the elevator gate shut and wander off. She thought about the laminated sign on the fire door. She thought about explaining any of this to the janitor.

"I'm not sitting here for two hours waiting to be rescued from my own key ring," she said. "And if we open the records office ourselves, nobody has to know the gate got shut or that my keys are in a wall. You came down here for drawings. I came down here for a box. Officially, none of this happened."

Toby looked at her for a moment, and then that crooked front tooth showed up in a grin she remembered too well. "You want to break into your own workplace."

"It's not breaking in if I have keys to most of it."

"You have keys to most of it in a vent."

"Then it's really more of a retrieval."

* * *

The service stairs were behind the boiler room door, exactly where the blueprint said, and the door at the top was locked with a deadbolt that had no keyhole on this side, which meant somebody had thought about this, which meant it was probably in the building's key plan, which meant Toby got out his phone and started photographing pages of the blueprint while Monica sat on the second step and ate the granola bar from her coat pocket.

"Split it," he said, so she did, and they sat on the stairs in the dust and the pipe noise and ate half a granola bar each like it was a strategy meeting.

The door at the top was not going to argue with them, that much was clear. Toby said the lock looked like a fire code deadlock, the kind that needed a specific key, and Monica said she had a specific key, and Toby said hers were in a wall, and Monica said thank you, she had noticed.

So back down they went.

The basement looked different the second time around, or maybe she was just looking differently. Without the panic, she noticed things. The filing cabinets went back farther than she'd ever bothered to explore, row after row, and behind the last row there was a corner she'd never seen from the workbench, a low shelf stacked with more boxes, and on the wall above them a faded sign she had to squint at.

COSTUME AND PROP STORAGE. LEVEL B. AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL.

"Well," Toby said. "Authorized personnel."

"I've worked here six years. That makes me authorized."

"It makes you a person who works here. That's different from authorized."

"You're an architect. You would think that."

"I am an architect," he said, with the tone of a man who had heard that particular tone before.

Monica opened the first box on the shelf, and it was like the parade puppets had cousins. More poles, more articulated arms, a chicken head with one eye and a hinge for a beak. A knight with a dented helmet. A whale, half-deflated, that had clearly been someone's pride and joy in some mayor's term and then retired here to think about it.

"Okay, this one's kind of amazing," she said, holding the whale up. "Look at the tail mechanism. Somebody built this by hand. There's no way this was a catalog order."

Toby looked at it the way he looked at her sewing machine, politely, from a distance. "It's a deflated whale."

"It's a mechanism. The tail articulates. Somebody sat somewhere and figured out how to make a whale tail swing and then did it, and then somebody else put it in a box, and now it lives in a basement, and you're standing there calling it a deflated whale."

"I'm standing here calling it a deflated whale because it is a deflated whale, Monica."

"Toby." She set the whale down with exaggerated care. "You design buildings. I make puppets. Both of us make things that have to move the way we say they'll move, and the difference between us is that when my thing fails, nobody writes a report."

He laughed before he could stop himself, that short surprised laugh she remembered, and she pretended she hadn't noticed it landing somewhere under her ribs.

They went through two more boxes. A box of foam shapes that had hardened into archaeology. A crate of flags on sticks. Then Monica opened a box near the back and found, under a folded tarp, a bottle of red wine with a dusty label and a piece of masking tape on it that said DO NOT in somebody's handwriting, the rest of the sentence lost to time.

"Well," she said.

"That's not ours."

"It's not anybody's. Look at the dust." She turned it in her hands. "It's a bottle of wine that has been waiting in a basement for somebody to have a bad day, and we are two people having a bad day."

"There's no corkscrew!"

"There's a workbench full of tools ten feet away. There is definitely a corkscrew. There's a whole bin of them from some facilities order, I've seen it."

There was, or something close enough. Toby found one in the third drawer he tried, and Monica found two plastic cups from the same box, the cheap kind, and they ended up sitting on the floor between the filing cabinets and the workbench, backs against the cabinets, legs stretched out, passing one bottle and two cups in a basement that smelled like dust and old paper.

The wine was not good. It was also not bad. It was wine, in a basement, in a situation that had gone from annoying to absurd, and somewhere in the second cup Monica stopped keeping score about whose fault anything was.

"So the puppet thing," Toby said. "Eight years. You went from the festival gig to, what, full time?"

"City events. Six years now. I have a corner of the third floor with a sewing machine and about forty pounds of foam and felt, and people bring me their weird ideas and I make them real, and I love it, and every so often somebody tells me it's not a real job and I resist the urge to hit them with a marotte."

"And the keys."

"The keys are a separate incident."

"The keys are in a wall, Monica."

"The keys are temporarily misfiled."

He laughed again, longer this time, and she found she was