The Mystery of the Key

photo by Deb Marshall

Here’s a mystery: how did a key get into my cell phone –  an old-fashioned flip phone – inside the small, zippered pocket in my purse, in which I keep nothing but my phone?

I’m a creature of habit, and sort of need to be, because I’m very much a night person. It isn’t unusual for me to be awake and happily working at my computer, or cleaning out the pantry, or sorting through old files, or even painting a room at 3 am; but as most the world isn’t awake at that time, I generally have to get up earlier than I’d like to. When I worked as a freelance writer and editor of computer magazines, my off-schedule tendencies worked to my advantage: most the people I needed to interview were in California, so they and I were on the same time zone for a good part of the day. When I became a full-time t’ai chi teacher, my world kind of fell apart. Students who were unfortunate enough to be in my 6 am classes in Concord can tell you stories about how I used to sit on a bench against a wall in the practice room, hunched over my coffee cup, with a bagel in hand, and growl at the class, “Do t’ai chi! I’ll tell you when it looks like crap!”

Usually by the end of a set or two I’d woken up enough to actually teach something.

Nowadays I’m a Chinese medical practitioner, and while it’s taken me half a decade to figure it out, I now realize that I don’t have to be up and functioning and in my office at 8 or 9 am; I can actually wander up to the Upper Valley by a reasonable hour in the early afternoon, and wave goodbye to my last patient at 9:30 at night, and we’re all – mostly – happy. But there are days, especially during nasty upper-respiratory-external-invasion, and pulled-muscles-shoveling-or-falling-on-ice season, when my noon-time trek north edges closer to an 11 am or earlier trek, just so I can see everyone who needs seeing. And that means I’m rousing myself out of bed just when I most want to be deeply asleep. Hence, I’ve become the creature of habit.

If everything is in its place – and everything has a place – then I don’t have to think too hard at 8:30 am when my brain has not left my lovely warm blankets when my body did. I know exactly what I’m going to eat, because I made enough on the weekend to last the duration; I know exactly what I’m going to wear – often what I wore yesterday, switching it up every couple of days; I know that if it’s Wednesday I have to also bring the bag with my teaching-college-class gear; and I know that everything else I need is already in purse and backpack. The mornings following the nights when I have to recharge the phone battery are the days I’m apt to leave the phone at home.

One day in November last year – a Wednesday, in fact – shortly after the elections, and prior to Thanksgiving week, my day seemed to be going as usual. When I got to my office, I took my phone out of its pocket and turned it on, checking for voice messages from patients; tucked the purse into my backpack and closed the pack up before storing it in the little medicinals annex in my treatment room where it’s out of the way during office hours. I treated several patients before it was time to head to the college to teach class; before I left the office, I checked my phone (which had been on my desk all day) one more time in case a student had called, then I turned it off, closed it up, and put it into its zipper pouch in my purse.

When I got to school, a little early, I needed to make some copies of a quiz I was giving, so I briefly left my purse inside my school bag, and the school bag inside the classroom, where a couple of students were already present and doing some last-minute studying. Then I dashed off to the copy machine, and when I got back to the classroom, there were still the same two students in the room, still studying. 

Community colleges, where I teach, have generally an older population of students than a regular, 4-year college. That semester, I had only four students in class, and only one was a just-out-of-high-school student. They’re fun to teach, because they’re generally very serious about what they’re studying, and often intensely intelligent and focused.

That night my purse lived in the school bag for the duration of the class, as it usually does. And when I got home that night, I went through my habitual routine to prepare for the next day. That night, I also needed to plug the phone in to recharge the battery, so I pulled the phone out of its pocket and opened the flip top to make certain the phone was off, and –

-          - out of the phone fell a key.

The key was a brand-new key; it had no scratches on it, was very shiny and bright, and even the slim barcode label across its bow was new-looking. “That’s odd,” I thought. “I’ve never seen this key before. How did it get into my phone?” I asked the Husband, hoping it was an unusual, clever plan on his part to deliver some kind of surprise.

“No, it’s not mine and I didn’t put it there,” he said. “And, actually, how could it get into your phone?”

We spent the next few minutes experimenting: if the key were in the zipper pocket, was it possible for the key to slide into the phone when I pushed the phone in? We quickly discovered that that would be very unlikely; it takes a pretty good push to force the key into the closed phone, and it was very likely to cause damage to the phone in the process. Not only that, but I generally put the phone into the pocket hinge-side down, and being a creature of habit, it’s unlikely I did it the other way on this particular day. Could the key have been in the pocket for some time, and I just didn’t notice it? Again, the pocket’s really just about phone size; had the key been in there, loose, it’s unlikely I wouldn’t have felt it when I put my fingers in to pull the phone out, or not seen or felt its outline when I patted the pocket to make sure the phone was there (another habit).

“One of your students must have put it there as some sort of joke,” the Husband decided. “Or one of your patients did.” 

Under the circumstances, these were unlikely answers, but I decided to wait and see whether anyone inquired after a missing key during the next few weeks. I half expected a student to inquire, but also thought it would be very, very strange if the two women students who had been in the classroom where I left my bag with the purse in it hadn’t mentioned to me that someone was rifling in my purse while I was out of the room. Not a likely scenario.

At the office next day, I tried the key in everything there that has a lock, and it fit into nothing. At school, we don’t use keys: it’s all about electronic name tags that open doors, and there are no things like lockers and file cabinets. Over the next two weeks, no one inquired about a missing key, nor sniggered wildly at some unspoken joke whenever they saw me. 

The bar code strip on it identified the key as having come from an Ace hardware store, and the key itself had only the markings “Taiwan” and “Y11” on it. So the next weekend, the Husband took it to our local hardware store to see if they could identify it. This is where I take all the keys I need to have copied, because they’re incredibly accurate – I’ve never had to bring one back to be re-cut – and I thought, just maybe, my aging brain has forgotten that I’d had this key made. A clue might remind me what it was for, and when I made it. It might also make me worry about the onset of Alzheimer’s, but that, if it happens, won’t be a mystery.

But it wasn’t one of theirs. They don’t put bar code strips on the keys they cut. They could tell us that it wasn’t a door key, and that it would fit something like a locker of the kind they have in train stations or airports, or a lock-box of some sort, but there’s nothing to indicate which, nor where such a thing would be located. None of these things do we own, and none exists at the office.

Stranger and stranger! But, phew, not Alzheimer’s!

If that were the end of the story, it would be a good mystery, and one I forgot in the flow of daily life. However, the key seems to have a mind of its own.

I put the key into another purse zipper pocket, the one where I store the key chains that hold the various keys to the offices I use and the single key I need to access a storage closet at the school, which is also attached by its own loop to one of the larger key chains. 

If anyone asked for the mysterious key, it would be easy to find. No one asked, but between Thanksgiving and Christmas that key would turn up, every so many days, on top of my desk at the office, and I’d flip it over and handle it and think about it, then put it back into my purse with the rest of the keys. Then, around Christmas time, it disappeared altogether.

I never thought another thing about it until, two weeks ago, it showed up again – on top of my desk in the office. I put it back into the key pocket of my purse. Three days later, as I was scrounging around in the depths of my purse’s main pocket for some change, there it was again – at the bottom of my purse, in its main pocket, underneath the change purse, the glasses case, the pocketknife, the wallet and the checkbook. Once again, I put it firmly into the key pocket. Two days later, it was back on my office desk.

The other day I showed the key to out-back neighbor Eddie B. He has a creative and also a practical and mechanical mind. Maybe he’d have an idea. After examining it closely, all he could tell me was that the way it was cut – what it did and didn’t show for markings from the cutting – was a little unusual.

He’s my witness: he watched me zip it back into the zipper pocket where I keep my keys. If I find it somewhere else, or it disappears again, he will tell you what he saw.

I have to wonder…is it just coincidental that this mysterious key appeared shortly after the election, and reappeared again shortly after the inauguration? Is there a box somewhere – something like Pandora’s box – that this key opens? What’s in the box, if so – a treasure, a cure for what ails our President, all the demons of hell ready to rush out and destroy us? 

Are there other mysterious keys just like this that have shown up in other parts of the country?

If any of you are missing a key, please let me know. I might have it. And after rigorous vetting, I might give it back to you.

Written for the blog alone.