The Autumn Prince

3. Stained Glass

I should have been studying.

Technically, I could afford an evening off. The effort of maintaining my grades with a mental disability had come close to breaking me, but between single-minded obsession and a stable drug regimen, I'd fallen into a frenetic rhythm, and when I graduated high school a year ahead of my peers, nobody was more surprised than me. I'd maintained those habits through college and now rode a little more than two weeks ahead of my current curriculum, but I didn't want to lose ground. Instead, I kept going back to the contents of the envelope.

I leaned into the cushions of the second-hand sofa shoved against the back wall of a modest living room, or what passed for one in my semi-studio apartment. University policy dictated new students live in campus housing for the first year, but my condition, in a rare moment of helpfulness, argued the case on my behalf and I was permitted to live in row housing four blocks away. It wasn't much, but my needs were few and it cost less than a dorm, so the full-ride scholarship that got me into BAU was more than enough to cover rent.

Two separate textbooks sat open on the worn coffee table, thoroughly ignored, while I turned over the most interesting of Miss Gold's gifts. It resembled an old, iron key, the kind that fit locks you could pick with a screwdriver, but at its end, instead of a crude, metal tab, there was a short tube with a series of grooves and protrusions on its surface, as if someone had carved a maze into the cylinder of a music box.

The second item was almost a disappointment, a business card for Midway Attic, a storage facility just outside of town. On the back someone had written, in an elegant blue script, "D26," and next to it, "In left in right out right." D26 was probably the number of a locker, but I couldn't imagine what the rest might be.

The third was a dime bag filled with herbs that I thought, at first, was weed, but a square of parchment stapled to the bag contained instructions in the same precise, blue script that was on the business card.

"Empty contents into a cup. Bring eight fluid ounces of water to boil. Immediately turn off heat. Wait two minutes and pour over herbs. Brew twelve minutes without stirring or straining. Drink while hot."

It was tea. How could one serving of herbal tea be considered a clue? One last note beneath the instructions made it even more surreal.

"Be still and ingest nothing else for thirty minutes following."

That sounded like the warning labels stuck to the pill bottles sitting on my bathroom sink. If it had a narcotic effect drinking it wasn't an option. Almost anything that messed with my head would send the carefully measured psychoactive drugs in my bloodstream into a tailspin and I'd end up hitchhiking naked, or setting fire to my apartment—or much worse.

My godmother, if I chose to believe her, seemed to think I could do something with the contents of her envelope, but if they were parts of the puzzle, they didn't fit any of the other pieces in my possession. She had said I would need to trust her to proceed. That had to mean more than telling her I believed her story, and it had to be something I could demonstrate, like acting on one or perhaps all of her gifts. I didn't know what I was supposed to do with the key, but the obvious conclusion was that it had something to do with the storage unit. That would have to wait. The office for Midway Attic wasn't open on Sundays and the envelope didn't include a passcode, fob, or keycard to get me inside after hours.

I had a fourth clue, the picture of my mother. I took a snapshot with my phone and searched the Internet for matches, but most were stock images of models that looked nothing like the woman in the photograph. The photo appeared to be genuine to my untrained eyes, or at least I could believe that the person in it probably looked that way twenty-three years ago. Apart from that, nothing. Next, I pulled out my laptop and searched for Miss Gold and Caratacos. My expectations were low and I wasn't disappointed.