The Missing Key

The sleet started an hour out of Reykjavik and never let up.

Curtis Fitzpatrick drove with both hands on the wheel and his pitch running in his head like a treadmill he couldn't step off of. Twenty-nine years old, single, and talking to himself in an empty rental car. That was the job. Medical supply sales, territory, quotas. Nobody warned you about the driving part.

"So the main thing," he said out loud, "is service. Anybody can sell you a cart. We service the carts."

He'd been doing that pitch for five years. The company had thanked him for five years of it by cutting his territory in half last month, and the new map had a pencil line through the whole glacier region. One last run. Close the Muller account at the viewpoint clinic or don't bother coming back.

The road bent around a black hill. The glacier showed up on his left like a wall of dirty white light. On the right, down in the hollow, sat a long low building with a lit sign. ICEFIELD VIEW INN, it said. Below that, smaller, VACANCY. Below that, in handwriting on a scrap of cardboard, MOSTLY VACANCY.

Curtis read that twice. He slowed down.

"Weird," he told the car. The car agreed.

***

Inside smelled like coffee and wet wool. A big man stood behind the front desk, which was really a gift shop counter with postcards and mugs arranged around a bell. The man was maybe thirty-four, tired around the eyes, wearing a sweater with a hole at one elbow.

"You're Curtis, right? The salesman?" He stuck out a hand. "Lee Conners. I own the place. Own the problems too, apparently."

"Lee." They shook. "The website said single room, glacier side."

"Yeah. So. Here's the thing." Lee rubbed his jaw. "We had a booking for that room, and then we had another booking for that room, and both of them are real. I checked. Twice. The system says one arrived Tuesday and one arrived Tuesday. Same Tuesday."

"Which Tuesday?"

"That's the part I don't love." Lee pulled a ledger across the counter. It was paper, old school, and there was a smear of ink where somebody had written and then unwritten something. "The room exists. You exist. The other guest exists. I've got eleven rooms and twelve people tonight. The math is off by one and the math has been off by one since Thursday."

Curtis looked at the clock on the wall behind the desk. It said 4:40. He looked at his phone. 7:15. He looked at the clock again. It said 4:38.

"Your clock is running backwards."

"The clock does that. Ignore the clock." Lee waved at it like it was a dog on the couch. "So. Options. I can put a cot in the lounge, which is next to the bar, which is loud until late. Or I can split the double. Two beds in that room. Honest to God two beds, I checked that too. Or there's a floor."

"You checked the floor?"

"I check everything now!" Lee shrugged. "Guy who runs a hotel where Tuesdays double up learns to check."

Curtis thought about the cot by the bar. He thought about the pencil line through his territory. Mostly he thought about how a normal man would ask for a refund and drive an hour back toward town, and how he'd never once in his life been a normal man.

"I'll take the split," he said. "If the other guest doesn't mind."

"They haven't arrived yet. They will. Everything here arrives eventually, that's the one rule that holds." Lee found a brass key on a board behind him and held it up. "Room nine. If the light flickers, that's normal. If the hallway is longer than it was, turn around and it won't be."

"Sure," said Curtis. "Normal stuff."

"That's the spirit." Lee rang the bell, which seemed to be for his own morale.

***

Curtis carried his case up and got the door open. Room nine was small and warm, radiator ticking. Two beds, as advertised. A window with the glacier in it, going blue in the dark. A desk, a chair, a lamp.

He put his case on the far bed and was halfway through hanging up a shirt when there was a thump on the stairs, and another, and a woman's voice saying something short and rude to a suitcase.

She came in without knocking, because it was her room too, and Lee had apparently already told her. She was twenty-seven, maybe twenty-eight, dark hair coming loose from a knot, wearing a stage-black jacket over a shirt with glitter on it. She had a case in one hand that was shaped all wrong for luggage. Flat on one end. Round on the other.

She stopped when she saw him.

"You're the roommate," she said.

"Apparently. Curtis." He didn't put his hand out this time, since hers were full. "Salesman. Medical supplies."

"Ann. Gomez." She set the case down on the floor with care, like it might bruise. "Ventriloquist."

"Seriously?"

"Seriously. Community halls. Libraries, one memorable ferry. I'm doing the hall in the village tomorrow night." She looked at him, taking stock. He got the feeling he was being read like a room. "You don't strike me as a puppet crowd."

"I sell catheters to clinics. I'm nobody's crowd." That got half a smile out of her, gone fast. She looked wiped. He'd seen that look in truck stop mirrors. "Bad show?"

"Bad show." She dropped onto the near bed and sat there, elbows on knees. "The hall in Höfn had a boiler quit, so forty people in coats, hats on, nobody takes a hat off to laugh. And my partner..."

She nodded at the case.

"Partner?"

"Oscar." She opened the case. Inside, packed in foam, was a puppet. Old-fashioned felt fellow, bow tie, wide painted grin. He was missing the index finger on his right hand. "Oscar. Thirty-one years old. Older than both of us and acting like it."

Curtis leaned over to look. "He's missing a finger."

"He's missing a finger and I'm missing a key and this week can end whenever it wants." Ann shut the case softly. "Sorry. You didn't sign up for the ventriloquist's woes. You signed up for half a room and backwards clocks."

"You know about the clocks?"

"I know about everything in this hotel by now. Third night here." She rubbed her face with both hands. "Lee's a good man. Hotel's a madhouse. There was a woman at breakfast this morning who checked in last week and also checked in this morning, and they had coffee together and got on fine, which is either very sweet or a warning."

Curtis sat down on his bed. Across from her. It was strange how easy that was, sitting across from a stranger in a cold country, both of them too tired to perform.

"What's the key?" he asked. "You said you're missing a key."

She looked at him for a beat. Then she got up, went to the desk, and turned the lamp on. There was a typewriter on the desk. Old, black, scuffed. A real machine, the kind with keys like piano keys.

Ann pointed at the second row.

The E was gone. Not stuck, not broken. Gone. There was a clean little round hole where it should be, and you could see the bare metal arm behind it, waiting for a key that wasn't coming.

"I write my own material," she said. "On paper, before you ask. But the act, the new act, the big finish, it's typed. Tour tradition. My grandmother's rule. The last page of every new act gets typed, no copy, no backup, one original. Superstition."

"And you can't type an E."

"I can't type an E." She said it flat, like reciting a fact about weather. "The key came off in Höfn. I heard it drop. Never found it. And the new act is called Everything Ends, which, when I picked that title, was a laugh. Now it's a lot of lines with gaps in them." She made a shape in the air with her finger, a sentence with a hole in the middle. "It's not a word without it."

Curtis looked at the little hole in the machine. Something about it bugged him. Not the superstition. The neatness. Keys don't come off clean like that, not old ones, they rust and fight.

"Maybe it's in the hall," he said. "In Höfn. Somebody swept it up."

"Maybe." Ann sat back down. "Or maybe this hotel ate it. Things go missing here. Lee mentioned a spoon that's been missing since spring and turned up in a room that didn't exist on the day it went missing."

"That's a sentence you said out loud."

"Welcome to the Icefield View." She flopped back on the bed and stared at the ceiling. "I'm sorry. I'm bad company when a show's this close. Tomorrow night, the booker from the coast circuit is coming. If he likes the act, I get a real tour. If he sees a puppet with nine fingers doing a script with holes in it, I get to drive home and think about a career with health insurance."

Curtis didn't say anything for a second. He thought about the pencil line on his map, the one last account, the treadmill pitch running in his head all day.

"So we're both down to one shot," he said.

Ann lifted her head and looked at him. Really looked, this time.

"Huh," she said. "Roommate's got one shot too."

She sat up properly. "Okay. Deal. No more doom for one hour. There's a bar downstairs and a bartender who tells the truth, which I trust more than most things. You drink?"

"I drink."

"Then let's go find out what's true." She grabbed her jacket, then paused at the case on the floor. "You don't touch Oscar, though. House rule. He's sensitive."

"He's felt."

"He's felt and he's listening," Ann said, dead serious, and then she grinned, and Curtis figured maybe the week wasn't hopeless. Maybe.

Ann went down the stairs like she'd lived in the building for years. Curtis followed, watching her take the crooked steps without holding the rail. It was maybe seven outside by his phone. The clock over the bar said half past four, going backwards, patient about it.

Alexia Boston was behind the bar. Tall, tan, forearms of a woman who hauled rope for a living. She was wiping a glass that already looked clean.

"Ann. And a new face."

"Curtis. Sales. Room nine."

"He's the one who got double-booked," Ann said. She climbed onto a stool and put her elbows on the bar. "Two of whatever's cheapest."

Alexia looked at Curtis. "You want the truth about this hotel?"

"Sure."

"The truth is the walls are thicker than the schedule. We're out of the cheap stuff. Ann drank it."

"See?" Ann said. "Truth. Worth the price of the good stuff."

Alexia poured two whiskeys and didn't charge for one of them, which she said was for the double-booking, and which Lee would have argued about if he'd been there. He wasn't. There was a sound of a man arguing with a radiator somewhere upstairs instead.

Ann drank half hers and set it down. "So. Curtis. Sales. Tell me the pitch."

"You don't want the pitch."

"I absolutely want the pitch. I do comedy for a living. I want to watch a man sell gauze to a glacier."

"It's bandages and tubing and a machine that suctions things," Curtis said. "Five years of it. Last month they cut my territory in half. There's one account left on the map, the Muller clinic, out by the viewpoint. If I close it, I keep the region. If I don't, I'm a cautionary tale at the regional meeting."

"You close it tomorrow?"

"Day after. Which means I'm sitting here with a whole spare day and a head full of numbers."

Ann turned on her stool so she was facing him full on. She had a way of doing that, all at once, like a door swinging. "Here's what I think. I think you rehearse in cars. I think you know your numbers cold and your sleep not at all. And I think you checked in here to sell something and instead found a hotel where time doesn't work, and part of you is relieved."

Curtis drank. "That's a good read."

"I do rooms full of strangers. You get fast at reads." She tilted her head. "You want to see something worse than my read?"

"Is it the puppet?"

"It's not the puppet. Okay, it's a little the puppet. Come on." She was off the stool and heading for the little stage in the corner before he could argue. There wasn't much of a stage. A floor that was two boards higher than the other boards, mostly. She set her case down on it and popped the latches.

* * *