Master Key

She had been a locksmith for twenty years and she could open anything given enough time.

She found the key in a box of estate hardware she bought at auction, a lot of two hundred miscellaneous pieces. Old skeleton keys, padlock keys, car keys from the eighties, a few she couldn't identify at all. She sorted through them over an evening and set aside anything interesting, and the key she found at the bottom of the box was interesting.

It was iron, old, with a shape she didn't recognize the profile of. Not a standard cut. A pattern she hadn't seen before, and she had seen most patterns.

She brought it to work and spent an hour trying to match it to something in her reference books. Nothing.

She put it on her keyring because she always put interesting keys on her keyring. It sat there with her car key and her shop key and her apartment key and after a while she stopped noticing it.

Three weeks later she was letting herself into her apartment after a late job and she dropped her keys on the landing and they slid under the edge of the door across the hall. The tenant was eighty and moved slowly and it took a few minutes for her to arrive at the door. When she did, she looked at the keys on her floor, her expression difficult to read.

“Where did you find that?” the old lady asked.

“Which one?”

“That one.” She pointed to the iron key.

“At an estate auction. Why, do you recognize it?”

The old lady was quiet for a moment. “Come on in,” she said. “I'll put the kettle on.”

She went in. The apartment was full of things, cluttered. Books and furniture and framed photographs and small objects on shelves. She had been in here a handful of times over the years and had never looked at it carefully. She looked at it now.

On the wall above the fireplace was a painting of a door. Just a door, wooden, set in a stone frame, with a keyhole that was very precisely rendered. She had never noticed it before.

“It was my grandmother's,” the old lady said from the kitchen. “She brought it from the old country. She said it opened her way here.”

“Opened it how?” she asked.

“She was never specific.” The old lady came back with two cups. She was looking at the key. “She only said that when she needed a way out badly enough, she found the door, and after that she didn't need the key anymore.”

“And then it ended up in an auction lot.”

“Things end up places.” The old lady sat down. “The question is whether you need a way out.”

She thought about the old lady’s words. She thought about the late job she'd just come from and the one before it and the particular quality of her life recently, which she had been trying not to examine too directly.

She looked at the key in her hand. “I might,” she said.

“Well,” said the old lady, wrapping both hands around her cup. “Then you should probably hold onto it.”