The Last Key in the Drawer

The night Mrs. Calder’s house was broken into

Title: The Last Key in the Drawer
Rating: E
Word Count: 912

Everyone in town trusted me with their keys.

Spare keys. Shop keys. Old house keys wrapped in masking tape with faded names. They slid them across my counter like confessions, and I locked them away in narrow drawers behind the register. I ran Miller Lock and Safe for twenty two years, long enough that people stopped thinking about what it meant to hand someone access to their lives.

I liked that trust. It felt earned.

The night Mrs. Calder’s house was broken into, I was closing up. I remember because I was fighting with the front door, which stuck when the weather turned cold. The radio was still on, low and scratchy, when I heard the sirens. They screamed past my shop, red and blue bouncing off the glass. I figured it was another drunk driver or a bar fight.

The next morning, half the town showed up buzzing like flies.

Mrs. Calder was gone.

Her house sat at the edge of town, big and lonely, filled with antiques she never let anyone touch. No forced entry. No broken windows. Just an empty bed and an open back door.

By noon, the sheriff stood in my shop, hat in his hands.

“We’re checking everyone who might have access,” he said, polite but firm.

I nodded and pulled out my ledger. I always kept it neat. Names. Dates. Drawer numbers. Mrs. Calder’s name sat right where it should be, written in my own careful handwriting.

“Anyone else have a copy?” he asked.

“Not that I know of,” I said. “She was particular.”

He glanced at the rows of drawers behind me. “Mind if I take a look?”

“Go ahead.”

He opened the one marked C. Her key lay inside, exactly where it belonged.

That should have been the end of it.

But the questions kept coming. People whispered when I walked by. A woman at the diner stopped mid sentence when I sat down. Trust, once cracked, makes a sharp sound.

A week later, they found Mrs. Calder’s car abandoned two towns over. No sign of her. No blood. No struggle.

The sheriff came back, this time with less politeness.

“You ever make copies without logging them?” he asked.

“No.”

“You ever keep a key for yourself?”

I laughed, a short sound. “Why would I need to?”

He watched me too closely. “Sometimes people do things they can’t explain.”

After he left, I locked the door and sat behind the counter longer than I meant to. The shop felt different. Smaller. Like the walls were leaning in.

That night, I went through the drawers. Not because I needed to, I told myself. Just to prove something. To who, I did not know.

Everything was in order. Every key accounted for.

Except one.

At the very back, in a drawer I had not opened in years, lay a single brass key with no tag.

My stomach tightened.

I knew that key.

It was old, worn smooth, the teeth filed just enough to catch. I remembered shaping it myself, late one night, when the shop was quiet and my hands needed something to do.

I sat there, the memory rising slow and clear.

Mrs. Calder had come in months ago, shaking. She said someone was coming into her house at night. Moving things. Standing in her hallway. She begged me to change the locks, but asked me not to tell anyone.

“I just want to feel safe,” she said.

I had changed the locks. I had given her the new keys.

And I had kept one.

Not for theft. Not for harm. That is what I told myself. I told myself it was for emergencies. For reassurance. For control in a world that kept slipping.

The night she disappeared, I remembered waking from a dream, restless. I remembered walking. The sound of a door opening easy as breath.

I remembered her face when she saw me in the kitchen, fear turning into something else. Recognition.

I had told the sheriff the truth, as far as I could reach it. No forced entry. No copies logged. No reason to suspect me.

The next morning, I walked into the shop and unlocked the drawer. I wrapped the key in a rag and dropped it into the trash behind the building.

Two days later, they found Mrs. Calder alive.

She was in a care home three counties away. Confused. Dehydrated. She said she had wandered off after a panic attack. She said no one had taken her.

The town breathed again.

So did I.

That night, I closed the shop and checked the drawers one last time.

In the back, where the empty space had been, lay a brass key with no tag.

Clean. Familiar.

Waiting.