nothing more than to lie down and sleep for the next sixteen hours, but I was afraid of what might happen once I drifted off. If I drifted off.
My flame hand seemed to catch on something. I looked down, puzzled. I was out in the middle of the yard; there wasn’t so much as a tall dandelion nearby. I waved my hand through the empty air. And there it was again, the sensation of an invisible seam.
“Hey, there’s something weird over here,” I said to Pal. “Can you see or feel anything?”
He came over to investigate. “No, I don’t sense anything … What is it?”
“I’m not sure.” I blinked through several views with my enchanted stone eye. One showed a faint blue rectangular outline in the air, just barely perceptible.
Acting on a hunch, I dug my flame fingers into the seam and pulled. A small door swung open midair, revealing the inside of a wooden shipping crate. It was a little bigger than a school gym locker, maybe three feet tall and two feet wide, and perhaps as many deep. Stacked inside were several plastic-wrapped bricks of white powder and compressed plant matter. The air inside was musty with a familiar sweetly weedy odor.
The patio door slid open.
“We fixed your glove,” Mother Karen called, sounding more like her old cheerful self again.
“Hey, did you know someone put an extradimensional drug stash back here?” I called back.
“A what?” Karen strode across the yard and stared into the crate. Her expression changed from surprise to irritated recognition. “Darn that boy, I knew he was lying to me.”
“Which boy?” I took the repaired opera glove from Mother Karen’s outstretched hand and slipped it on. I hoped Jimmy wasn’t in any trouble; I liked the kid.
“I fostered a teenager named Rick Wisecroft about five years ago. He had a lot of natural ability, but he seemed mostly interested in making drugs and selling them at the local high schools. I personally have nothing against adults partaking responsibly in whatever substances they choose to, but his behavior was completely unacceptable. Neither the authorities nor I could ever find anything on him, of course. He swore up and down he never brought anything illegal to the house.” She sighed. “I tried to give him the benefit of the doubt, but some kids just don’t want to do the right thing.”
“What happened to him?” I asked.
“He stayed long enough for his eighteenth birthday party, and then ran away that night with his gifts and the cash from my purse.” She paused, looking sad. “I haven’t heard of or from him since. I’m surprised he left all this behind.”
“Maybe he made some enemies and had to leave in a hurry. Or maybe he smoked too much of his own supply and forgot where he put it,” I replied. “It was pretty well hidden.”
“How did you find it?”
“Pure accident, I think. I felt the doorway in the air.” I wiggled my flame fingers at Karen. “Apparently the Hand o’ Doom is useful for more than wanton destruction.”
“Thank goodness for that.” Karen reached inside the crate and pulled out the bricks of white powder and stacked them on the grass. “These I assume are cocaine or methamphetamine; be a dear and burn them, would you? Just try not to breathe the fumes.”
Karen pulled out the bricks of marijuana. “I’m going to check these to make sure they haven’t been tainted with PCP or any nonsense like that. And then … well, no sense in wasting a perfectly useful herb.”
“There’s probably more of these,” I said. “I mean, if I were a high-school coke dealer, I’d want to have more than one hiding place, just in case.”
Mother Karen nodded. “Please check the rest of the yard, would you?”
“Sure thing.”
I spent the next hour slowly going over the yard bit by bit with my flame hand. I found another extradimensional cache by the fence that contained just a couple of organic chemistry manuals, but in the trees I made a startling discovery: doors that led into the basements or gyms of the toniest high schools in the city: Thomas Worthington, St. Charles Prep, Bexley High, Bishop Hartley, and Upper Arlington. There wasn’t a door into the suburban Talent high school, Dublin Alternative, presumably because the custodians there were on the lookout for such enchantments.
“The kid was slick.” I carefully closed the last portal.
“It does seem he was running quite the operation.”
I hefted one of the kilos of anonymous white powder. “Maybe he