“Time to get up sleepy head. School today. Wake up Dani.”

Dani stirs to the cadence of mommy’s morning call. She covets the cozy comfort of her warm bed, because Mommy is older than the way she looks in the gold framed photo on the night stand and that scares her. The photo is a family portrait of the three of them: Mommy, her boyfriend and Dani in between, her smile alive with the promise of finally being part of a real family. The portrait reminds Dani that you cannot rely on anyone, and that even your own reliable mother can turn against you in the cruelest way.

Blinking sleepy eyes she burrows her face into her pillow. She snuggles her twelve-year-old body deeply into the bedding feigning sleep in hopes that mommy will go away. Instead she lingers at the narrow door to the tiny chamber that used to be Dani’s bedroom. The room is overwhelmed with a canopied bed that is overwhelmed with stuffed animals and watched over by a poster of Kate and Leo embracing above the majestic prow of the ill-fated Titanic. The half window under the sloping ceiling lets in cold light and rattles under the burden of gale force winds.

Dani glares at Mamma who is standing just outside her bedroom door.

“You can’t make me do anything. You left me. You’re the one who had better things to do and better people to spend your time with. You come home to me!”

It is hard to believe in her outrage, hearing it expressed in that young, impatient, maddeningly twelve-year-old voice.

Mama’s reaction is unerringly patient. She was never this patient in real life.

“Time to get up. Daddy left a key in the closet. Get up and find it. I’ve waited as long as I intend to. Day is wasting. Sunshine and raindrops. Don’t be late for school.”

Her voice trails off as she walks into the interior of the house which beyond the weak wintry light in Dani’s room is lit with a murky, smoky light.

“Don’t make me come back up here Danielle and for heaven’s sake do not forget the key. The bus will be here any minute.”

There is love and tenderness in her voice and that, above all else, infuriates Dani.

Love! “You left me, you bitch. You left me.”

On her way home from Logan she detoured north to Bennington, Vermont, woke her cousin Ethan at 1:47 a.m. with a few sharp raps on his apartment door and asked if she could crash on his couch. Of course Ethan said yes. His girl Debbie came and stood in the bedroom doorway, wearing one of his shirts. Her auburn hair was ruffled and her eyes sleepy. She had great legs.

“Sorry about the intrusion Deb.”

“Are you coming from Middlebury?”

“No. Paris.”

“I told you,” Ethan said to Debbie. “Angie called Mom. What did you do in Paris?”

“I picked up a sweetie named Nancy, took her home and screwed the living daylights out of her.”

“You did not.”

“I did.”

She handed him a manila envelope she had brought in from the car.

“What’s this?”

“It’s the bill of sale, registration and insurance on the GEO. I want to sell it back to you. Give me a dollar and it’s yours.”

“Why would you sell your car?”

“I won’t be using it for a while.”

“Where are you going?” His voice was laced with suspicion, but it was nice suspicion, the worry of a big brother for his little sister.

She shrugged. “I don’t know yet. I was driving home, but when I reached the Lee exit I got off the interstate and drove here. I decided I should sell my GEO back to you. I know I can count on you to keep it in running condition for me.”

“Dani, you’re not planning to hurt yourself, I hope?” Debbie interjected.

“What?” Dani and Ethan turned in unison and exclaimed together.

“People planning to – you know -- hurt themselves...” She shrugged and then pointed out the obvious. “It’s your car Dani.”

“Good heavens. Just keep my GEO in running shape and when I’m ready I’ll buy it back for $2 so Ethan can make a profit.”

After her first dreamless sleep in weeks, the next day Dani took the local afternoon bus to Troy, New York, let herself in at Aunt Angie’s Brownstone on Belmont and made a beeline to her second floor bedroom, dropped her bags on the bed and began to empty her closet. She was still sifting through the boxes, bags and baskets when Angie came home well after seven o’clock. Her work as an attorney at the law office of Barr, Willard and Thompson kept her busy. Arriving home before eight o’clock was pretty early for her.

“What are you doing?” Angie asked.

“I don’t know. Looking for something, I guess.” She could hardly admit that she was searching for a key she had dreamed about. She had not really thought far enough ahead to be prepared to answer such questions.

They made a late dinner of liver and onions with salad greens and wild rice. Angie did not ask much, but listened while Dani regaled her with the details of her trip.

“Did you find what you went looking for?”

For a moment, Dani thought she was asking about the key because all through their table talk she was trying to come up with the explanation she had promised a week ago, but then she realized Angie was referring to her trip. She shrugged. For the first time since Maris’s escape she felt a modicum of peace. Barb had been right. The message of the dream had been clear. Find the key. Since detouring to Ethan’s and leaving her car she felt she was on a mission.

Getting no immediate answer, Angie sighed.

“You have a pile of letters on the front hall table.”

Angie began clearing up dishes and Dani went to the sink and started rinsing them, stacking them willy-nilly in the dishwasher in a way that made Angie wince.

“I’m still waiting for an explanation for your withdrawal from school. Breaking up with Maris, while upsetting, can hardly have been bad enough to make you quit.”

“I didn’t quit.” Dani retorted. What could she say? Angie would not welcome the information that she had been having dreams about Mama. She wanted as much as her aunt to keep the subject of her mother buried. It was the past. Angie would not be pleased to hear that Dani’s future had been derailed by that old betrayal, however temporarily. Dani finished stacking dishes and tipped the door of the washer shut with a rattling bang. She began scrubbing the iron fry pan under a stream of hot water with a brush.

“Was the break up so bad?” Angie asked in a conciliatory tone.

“Not really.” Dani mumbled.

Angie wiped the stove top and counters clean.

“You two were such good friends. What happened?”

“I don’t know,” Dani spoke with a sharpness she did not intend. Maris had lost interest and found herself another girlfriend. What was so hard to understand? The rejection still rankled -- perhaps it would for a long time.

Relenting, Angie handed her the classified section of the Times Union Record.

“Get a job. There’s nothing like work to keep you occupied and your pockets filled with loose change. Rite Aide is advertising for cashiers.”

Later Dani gathered up her belongings and stuffed them back into the closet and closed the door. Anything left for her by Mama’s boyfriend would be in the house in Bennington where she grew up. She hadn’t lived there in seven years. The important furniture was in a 15 foot by 15 foot storage shed in Bennington while other artifacts that made up the rest of Dani’s material inheritance were stored upstairs in the attic. Her mother had not meant this closet, but a closet in the old house.

What were the odds the prince had really left a key for her – a key to what?

The old house was inhabited by the Perkins, a childless middle aged couple and their two pet Rottweilers. If a key had been left behind by her disappearing mother and the boyfriend – Mama had never called her biological father “Daddy” -- it was not likely to be in the old house at all, but buried in some box in the attic above – or long buried in the landfill.

She showered and went to bed but sleep eluded her. She tossed and turned. A new restlessness filled her, a need to take action, to solve the puzzle of the key and find out where the discovery might lead her.

Angie found her in the wee hours in the attic sifting through boxes and trunks amid lamps broken bits of ancient tables and chairs and other odds and ends.

“What are you doing?” Angie sounded exasperated. “For heaven’s sake Dani, it’s after three in the morning.”

Dani did not answer. She tugged at the corner of a cardboard box, bracing her foot against the box beneath it, but it refused to budge. She changed her tactics. She put her two hands and right shoulder to it and shimmied it inch by inch until Angie stopped her with a sharp reprimand.

“Dani! That’s Grammy’s china. If it drops ….”

“So?”

“What are you looking for?”

Dani had already gone through the contents of several boxes and found nothing that remotely hinted at being a “key.” She gritted her teeth and rocked back on her heels. She glared at her aunt scrubbing her dust streaked cheeks with her knuckles.

“Well?”

Again Dani had no answer because she knew the answer would only bring out the cross examiner in Angie.

Her aunt sighed and shook her head. “All of this is your inheritance, including the china, all that Grammy left your mother and is now yours by default.” There was an unpleasant bitter quality in her comment. “You’re welcome to look through it to your hearts’ content, but can’t you wait for daylight at least?”

Dani stared at Aunt Angie, feeling cross and out of sorts.

Aunt Angie stared back, her expression disapproving. She shook her head. “I knew there was more to your trouble at school than a silly breakup.” She sighed in exasperation.

“Come downstairs. Wash up and I’ll brew a pot of coffee.”

A quick ten minute shower later and a damp Dani, wrapped in her blue and green and tan plaid flannel bathrobe, sat at the kitchen table opposite Aunt Angie. They each had a steaming cup of coffee. There was a battered and faded blue and tan shoebox with the logo “Old Navy” waiting on the table between them. Aunt Angie’s arms were folded over a large manila envelope on the table in front of her.

They regarded the box for a long time, Dani with more trepidation than curiosity and Angie with a guarded expression. Dani knew the box, had seen it before though the last time had been about seven years ago, when it had appeared on Aunt Angie’s kitchen counter the day after Mama’s disappearance and there it had stayed for several weeks while Dani pointedly walked around it, ignored it, until she stopped seeing it altogether and one day it had just been gone, never to be seen or thought of again until now.

Dani sensed how taking hold of that worn box meant taking a turn she had never contemplated taking before, going in a direction from which she might never return. Don’t keep me waiting, dream Mama had said. Finally she knew she had to tell Angie as much of the truth as she could, or risk repeating the same unforgivable mistake her mother had made – leaving without a word of explanation. She could not do that to Angie or the rest of the family. Before she lost her nerve she told her aunt about Maris’s letter and everything that followed – except for the repeating dreams.

As if she knew the direction Dani’s thoughts had taken, Angie said, “This is why you sold your car back to Ethan?” In the McHugh/Allen family news traveled as speedily as the crack of a whip.

“I won’t need it where I’m going.”

“And where would that be?”

“I’m going to find her.” Until she said it Dani had not the slightest inclination that the search for the key would lead her to a search for Mama, but it was the only explanation for leaving her car with Ethan. The contents of the box, besides holding the key – she hoped – might hold clues to Mama’s final destination and how she had traveled there.

“Why!” Angie’s reaction was sharp.

“Someone has to. She has to be brought back to explain herself to the family.”

“Oh Dani, don’t you think we turned over every boulder and spent wads of money trying to find her?”

“I won’t be looking in the same places.”

Angie paled, but before she could voice her protest Dani pointed with her chin. “What’s in the envelope?”

“These are your guardianship papers.” Her voice was wooden. She could not argue with Dani’s plan without admitting that she understood that Mama was on a planet other than earth, millennia into the future.

“And the box?”

“She left it for you. She told me that if anything happened to her I was to give you this box. She kept it in the attic at Grammy’s house. I though she meant Walter. I had no idea she meant leaving with that man. After they disappeared, I brought the box out of the attic.”

“I didn’t want to. I almost didn’t but I had to. It was her dying wish –so to speak.”

At the sight of the box and the implications of preparation that went into Mama’s seeming unexpected disappearance, Dani felt a surge of outrage. They knew they would leave her and never bothered to explain to her why? It never occurred to her, not even in that moment that the box might hold the explanation or a clue to why they left her behind without explanation.

“I’m telling you straight what I mean to do because I won’t do to you what she did to us. I don’t know how, and if I, by some strange luck discover how, I can’t guarantee that I will make it back. I will return if I can, I promise you that. Leaving school was not what I wanted, you have to believe me. I’m as angry about it as you. I am going after that bitch and I am going to bring her home.”

“Dani ….”

“I know you understand where I have to go though you can’t admit it. I understand that but you can’t stop me. ”

The shoebox, battered, faded and crumbling a bit on one side was secured with a length of rough and hairy twine. With a purely instinctual protective gesture, Dani pushed her empty coffee cup aside and dragged the box over and cradled it in her arms, before Angie tried to take it back.

She stood and tucked the box under her arm and walked around the table. She planted a defiant kiss on Aunt Angie’s forehead.

“I love you,” she whispered. Without looking back, she hurried to her bedroom.

Dani slid the scratchy twine off, rolling it to one end, and freed, the cover lifted under the pressure of what was stuffed inside. Dani upended the box, dumping the cover and the contents of the box on the bed. Without regard for anything but the need to find any object that might prove to be a key, she hastily shuffled through everything until she found a small coin envelope.

“Danielle” was written on it in the spidery handwriting she recognized as his --.Mama’s boyfriend. Mama had called him “Daddy” in her dreams. As if! She felt another surge of fury. She picked up the small envelope, feeling its weight, which was significant for an envelope that fit in the palm of her hand. It was sealed.

Her heart was in her throat.

Now or never, she thought.

The deep edge of night was turning gray outside the windows. Soon it would be morning. She retrieved her Kelty Redwing travel backpack from the shelf in her closet and filled it with enough supplies for several days after she tossed the contents of her mother’s box into the bottom of the pack. She crammed the Old Navy box into her trash can. She packed her Adidas several pairs of socks and underwear, three pair of jeans, three muscle t-shirts, three light cotton shirts, one flannel shirt and one pullover sweater, aiming to be prepared for any weather. The outer pockets were already filled with supplies: toiletries, a compact poncho, a first-aid kit with extra supplies added because she was so injury prone as well as a bottle of Germ-X, an emergency blanket, a tube tent, waterproof matches and other camping supplies. She added her empty journal, pens, pencils, and her wallet to the one pocket she reserved for last minute stuff.

She dressed in a pair of jeans, three layers of shirts and her hiking boots. She pulled on her heavyweight hooded sweatshirt. She pocketed her cell phone and the small envelope into her hoodie pocket. With the pack on her back, the waist and chest straps adjusted she hurried down the front stairs. She stopped at the front door, paused and looked in the direction of the kitchen, wondered if she would see Aunt Angie again, or her cousins or any of her friends. She quickly sifted the letters on the table by the door and took the one with the Texas return address. She shoved it into her hip pocket.

For now she had only one desire. She wanted to get her hands on her mother’s neck and strangle answers out of her. And taking Mama away from him would be the choicest revenge.

A few minutes later Dani turned her back on her home of four years and walked up the hill to Fairview, turned right and crossed the street heading in the direction of the RPI campus.

She did not look back.

She stopped briefly at Cumberland Farms and bought two one litre bottles of water, Gaterade, power bars, a chocolate bar and added them to her pack and continued for twenty minutes to the far side of the RPI Quad. She located a cluster of birch trees and sat on the bench below the graceful arch of the white limbs, full of yellow leaves and ghostly in the pre-dawn light. It was too early for anyone to be about.

The deserted Quad floated in a thin layer of fog. The sun was not up yet, but the predawn gray had given way to daylight.

Now or never, repeated in her head like a mantra. She pulled the small brown envelope from her pocket and tore off a strip at the top.

She tipped the opened envelope and stared at the object that fell out into her hand, a tightly folded note came with it. She curled her hand around the amulet and opened the note, seeing immediately that he had written to her in his own language. She was pleasantly surprised when she was able to read it. Going back to a language you had stopped using was like getting back on a bike.

"Dani-girl,” the letter started out, “There will always be a place in my thoughts reserved especially for you. Keep this amulet always close to your heart and I will never be far away."

There was no mention of her mother. There was no signature. She stared at the necklace, at the gleaming silver arc of the medallion and the deep exotic blue of the gemstone affixed to it. She flexed her fingers around it opening and closing them, feeling a shivery vibration in her palm, but she must be imagining that. She ignored a feeling of unease.

The amulet was an exact duplicate of the one the boyfriend used to wear, except this one was smaller and set in silver instead of gold. It was threaded on a slender satin chord that emulated the deeper blues in the sapphire that was the focal point of the filigreed disk. The delicate "rays" of two six pointed stars were intricately laced, radiating from the sapphire. The glimmering gem was about the size of a quarter. It was superb, the color deep and sheer. It would have been like him to find the finest quality gem and silver. Mama’s boyfriend had a taste for fine things.

It called to her. She was fascinated and repulsed. She flipped the medallion into her right hand and shook her left hand to get the fuzzy feeling out of her palm. The sensation started up in her right hand. She knew exactly what the amulet was. It had a name. She refused to think it. Of all the mysteries surrounding Mama’s boyfriend, the amulet and its connections to Mama’s fictional universe, was the most difficult to accept. He had arrived wearing the gold version of this amulet and he had never taken it off, though Dani often saw him lightly touching the gleaming golden arc with a distracted look in his light blue eyes.

She lightly tossed the medallion in one hand and gripped the sheet of lined paper in the other. She read his letter again. She heard the cadence of his strange fluid language and his voice in her mind even as she made the mental adjustments to read the feathery, unearthly script again.

The memory of his voice flooded her with loss so keen her heart skipped a beat. "Keep this always close to your heart."

He had her mother and she had this jewel. Her eyes burned.

Could this be the key? It had to be.

To keep it close to her heart, she would have to wear it. What if the secret to unlocking the key was to put it on? The way it tingled in her hand did not make her feel eager to put it on, but she had to if for no other reason than to find out if it was the key. Crazy, she thought. But then “crazy” was the defining factor in this situation.

The Quad was still mostly empty, the quiet broken only occasionally by people out for their morning run, or walking their dogs. The mist had thinned considerably and the sun’s first rays ignited the tips of the birches graceful limbs. She tipped her hand allowing the medallion to slip out of her grasp and immediately caught the satin cord. That was better. Dani shoved the letter into the envelope and returned it to her pocket.

Her fingers bumped into her cell phone. She extracted it and texted Barb: Hey B. U R right. Message received. Found a key to take me there. If I never C U I will not 4-get U. Remember me. Love, D.

She pocketed the phone. The silver and blue beauty hung from the smooth blue cord swaying lightly beneath her hand. Before she could talk herself out of it, Dani put it around her neck and quickly tucked it inside the three layers of shirts. The metal was warm and as the warmth touched her skin it radiated out across her chest filling her with strange unearthly peace and comfort. But the feeling of peace and comfort did not last. The warmth turned into heat and the heat became a searing pain that spread into her body until it took her breath away and sliced through every cohesive thought. Her body, her brain, her consciousness swarmed with light and an instant later her skin was hit by a blast of frigid wind accompanied by a timpani of thunder. The vertigo of falling followed and ended with an abrupt landing that knocked her breath back into her lungs.

Next Chapter: INTERLUDE