The Vandemark Mummy

by Cynthia Voigt

  “Waiting for certain? Nothing, of course. Nothing’s certain until you hold it in your hand, is it? But at the Bodleian, anything might turn up. They have wonderful materials, and with all the bequests over the centuries, they have so much that they haven’t cataloged everything they have. You can never tell what might turn up—especially among the papers of those nineteenth-century explorers and travelers, who bought up whatever. If I let my imagination go unreined, I dream of Platonic dialogue, or an unknown Aristophanes. Imagine the fallout from something like that, Althea. I heard of a man who discovered a Marlowe manuscript nobody knew about, at the Bodleian, this was in the twenties, not all that long ago. Sometimes, recently, I’ve felt that my fortunes are about to change.”

  “For the better, I assume,” Mr. Hall said, trying to lighten things up.

  But Ken couldn’t be distracted. “I’m not the only one to hope for Harvard, am I? A scholar wouldn’t feel like a fish out of water the minute he stepped off campus there. That’s how I feel here, off campus, especially out where we live—like a very small fish out of a very small pond. At Harvard—everyone knows the scholars, and admires them. Well, as always, I’m talking too much. I’ve got a busy night, big day tomorrow, lift-off time is three o’clock for the shuttle to New York. I guess I ought to be on my way. Thanks for the supper. Thanks also for setting my mind at ease about the crown. I don’t know what that vulture lawyer’s hidden agenda is, whatever the family puts him up to, but I bet that you got in its way tonight.”

  “For that, you owe me,” Phineas’s father said.

  Ken looked surprised, alarmed.

  “It’s been a horrible evening,” Mr. Hall explained. “First all that waiting around, to get the new door hung, and a lock in, then for Mark Batchelor to make his appearance with the papers for me to sign.” By then, Ken realized that Mr. Hall was half joking, exaggerating everything. “Pelting across Portland—Althea in the backseat with the crown on her lap, me getting nervous every time we stopped for a light—And then Mark Batchelor making the process at the museum vault as slow as a coronation. . . .”

  Both men stood up. “I don’t think he delayed on purpose,” Ken said. “Why would he? But as Lucille will tell you, if you’re ever foolish enough to get her started, as a curator he is a guardian of Art. Capital A, Art. Capital G, guardian too. You weren’t surprised at all the paperwork, were you? You don’t think . . ?”

  “Think what?”

  “Nothing. Nothing. I didn’t mean anything. Although I personally thought Lucille was looking just a little too pleased. Didn’t you?”

  “Frankly, I’m too tired to notice anything or anyone. Even to take offense.”

  When Mr. Hall returned to the kitchen and sank into his chair, Althea greeted him. “Ken’s tedious, isn’t he?”

  “Seriously wimpy,” Phineas corrected her.

  “Unlike your father, with his boyish charm,” Mr. Hall reminded them. “Your father who has never uttered a boring word. Who is a macho model for both of you.”

  “Okay,” Althea said. “It was snide. But what got him going tonight? He was unusually verbose, you have to admit that, Dad.”

  “I admit,” Mr. Hall said. “I apologize. I didn’t think he’d stay for dinner.”

  “I think he likes being where the excitement is,” Althea said, and yawned. “You can go with Dad tomorrow morning, Fin, for the X ray. I’m going to sleep in, and wake up when I feel like it, and get some work done.”

  “That sounds all right.” Phineas had never ridden in an ambulance.

  “We have to meet them at six,” his father warned him. “At the parking lot entrance.”

  Althea smirked. “I put my hours in today, while you were probably vegged out in front of the TV.”

  “It’s okay, nobody has to come with me. You don’t have to, Phineas.”

  “But I want to,” Phineas said, which was mostly true.

  * * *

  So there he was at 6:00 A.M., standing in chilly damp air that was barely light although the sun was long risen. “One misty, moisty morning,” his father recited, and drank from the mug of coffee he’d carried with him. Phineas hadn’t brought anything to eat or drink and he was already sorry.

  “Have I got time to run home and get something to eat?” he asked.

  “Not if they’re on time. Stick with me, son. I’ll take you out for breakfast while they’re doing the X rays.”

  “Nothing will be open.”

  “There’ll be a cafeteria at the hospital.”

  “I’m starving.”

  “No you’re not. Very hungry, maybe, but nowhere near starving. Listen, I bet that’s them now.” He drained the mug and jammed it into the pocket of his yellow rain jacket.

  The square shape of the ambulance emerged from the drizzly fog, its headlights glowing. It pulled up beside them and a man climbed down from the passenger seat. He went to open the rear door. A young woman got out from behind the wheel. She was long-legged and her red hair was cut to brush back short from the sides of her face but left hanging long down her back. She wore jeans, and a jeans jacket. Her mouth worked steadily at a wad of gum. She looked bored. “You Samuel Hall?” she asked and when Mr. Hall said yes she said, “Okay, where’s this body at?”

  “It’s a mummy, actually,” Mr. Hall said.

  “I know that.”

  Phineas and his father led the way, while the two attendants came behind, wheeling the stretcher. The cellar lights turned on automatically at 5:30, so the hallways were brightly lit. The bare cement walls looked as cold as they felt. Phineas rubbed at his arms. White cinder block walls and blank doors, with numbers painted beside them—that was all there was to see. The wheels on the stretcher had a rattle-and-hum sound that echoed in the empty hallways. Their four sets of sneakers made soft, unechoing sounds. They stopped in front of room 015.

  The door was open. Except for the light from the hallway, the room within lay dark.

  “What—?” Mr. Hall said, and flicked on the light switch.

  The mummy was gone. All that was left was the shroud she’d been lying on, like an old sheet left on the table, an old dirty sheet.

  Phineas went up to the table. He thought, somehow, that if he got closer he would see the mummy, even though it was obvious that she wasn’t there.

  “Dammit,” his father said, in a low choked growl. “Damn and blast, and—”

  The young woman came to stand beside them. “You been ripped off, mister,” she said.

  “I don’t understand,” Mr. Hall said.

  “To the tune of one body,” she said.

  “Not a body, a mummy,” he corrected her.

  “Same thing,” she said, cracking her gum.

  “Not the same thing at all,” Mr. Hall said, almost yelling.

  “Looks like someone went through this door with a blowtorch,” the male attendant announced from behind them.

  Phineas didn’t care. He didn’t know what to think. He couldn’t think. He looked around the long room, hoping to see the mummy lying on the floor, looking up at the ceiling with her little smile. She wasn’t there, and he wasn’t surprised, but he kept feeling that if he just looked harder he’d see her.

  “Nothing for us here,” the young woman said. “We better get on back to where we might be needed.”

  Phineas’s father nodded his head. The ambulance attendants left the room, with the sound of stretcher wheels.

  “I’ll have to call the police, Phineas,” his father said, and now he sounded tired out. “And Mr. Vandemark. A plague on both your houses,” he said, and he slammed a fist onto the empty table. “A plague on everyone’s house!”

  “Hey,” asked the woman’s voice from the hall. “Can someone show us the way out?”

  That was something Phineas could do. “I’ll do it, Dad,” he said. “I’m really sorry.”

  “It’s not your fault,” his father answered, still without looking up from the empty sheet. His voice was low again, dull.

>   “I know that, but—anyway, I’ll be right back.”

  “And Dan Lewis too.” His father went right on talking, as if Phineas, already at the door, was still standing beside him. “Lucille, President Blight . . . But I don’t understand, what happened to the alarm?”

  CHAPTER 12

  “The mummy’s gone.”

  Althea looked up from her bowl of cereal, the spoon halfway to her mouth. Their father had stopped at the phone in the hall and was dialing it, then talking into it.

  “What do you mean, gone?”

  “Gone, you know, like, gone. Not there. Stolen, missing, lost—don’t be stupid, Althea.”

  Her eyebrows drew together. “What’s going on?” she asked, which was just what his father had asked.

  “They cut through the door with a blowtorch, or that’s what we think. That’s what it looked like.”

  “It doesn’t make sense, Fin.”

  “All that was left was the shroud.”

  The more he said, the worse Phineas felt. He didn’t know why he should feel so bad over a mummy. He didn’t know why that mental picture of the table, empty, just the shroud lying there like someone’s tossed-away towel, should make him feel so bad.

  “We haven’t had any breakfast, or anything to eat,” he said. He opened the refrigerator, took out eggs and English muffins. His father would need a good breakfast, after what had happened, before the day that awaited him. “I guess these were professionals after all,” Phineas announced.

  “I don’t understand,” Althea said. She got up from the table and stood beside him while he cracked eggs into a bowl. She didn’t do anything, she just stood there, watching him.

  “What’s so hard to understand?” Phineas turned to look at his sister, their eyes level. “The mummy’s been stolen. It’s gone. Probably forever.”

  “I thought it was the crown that was valuable.”

  “Apparently not.” For a minute, he thought he was going to get angry at Althea. She kept making him say it over and over. He whisked the eggs with a fork. The mummy was hundreds of years old, so he didn’t know why it should bother him so much.

  “I mean, who would want a mummy? What would you do with it?”

  “Don’t you even care?” Phineas demanded, turning on her, never mind that the fork was dripping raw egg down onto the floor.

  “Of course.” But she didn’t sound upset. “I care about Dad, especially. He’ll lose the collection.”

  “But it’s not his fault.”

  “But he’s in charge, he’s the one responsible. They’ll blame him.” She stared at Phineas without seeing him. “Who would want a mummy? Seriously, Fin, who? Unless she was buried with that necklace, so it’s simple stealing, and then it could be anyone. Who else but museums wants mummies?”

  Phineas put the split muffins into the toaster and pushed the lever down. Butter bubbled in the frying pan on the stove. He had no idea. His father’s voice spoke into the phone. “Detective Arsenault? I’m sorry to call you so early. It’s Sam Hall, at Vandemark—Yes, well, there’s bad news. The mummy has apparently been stolen.”

  Phineas poured eggs into the pan and turned down the heat. You had to cook scrambled eggs gently, he remembered his mother saying that; otherwise they got too dry, and leathery.

  “Museums, places like schools with collections of their own, people with collections,” Althea said, talking to herself. “But none of those would steal, would they? Or, if they did, they’d go after a mummy that was more valuable, from an earlier period. Not ours.”

  Phineas stirred the eggs, gently. His father hung up the phone, then dialed another number. “Yes, is Mr. Vandemark in,” he said. “Samuel Hall, from the college.”

  “She’s not worth anything, not in herself,” Althea said.

  “Look, Althea, could you set the table and pour some juice?”

  “What? Oh, sure. What does Dad say?”

  On the phone, Mr. Hall said, “Why should I call him in? He’s leaving for England today. He may have already left. It’s my responsibility, Mr. Vandemark. My sole responsibility. I accept that. I don’t need Ken here to deflect the fire, or justify my decisions.”

  Phineas buttered the muffins and served eggs onto plates.

  “Yes, I can be there at noon. Yes, I imagine I’ll be done at the police station by then. Who, Phineas? He’s right here. Phineas?”

  “Breakfast is on,” Phineas told his father, as he took the phone. He didn’t know why Mr. Vandemark would want to talk to him.

  But it wasn’t Mr. Vandemark, it was Casey. “I was going to see if you could come down for the day today, or tomorrow,” Casey said. “But I guess it’s bad timing. I just want you to know that I wanted to ask you over.”

  “Yeah,” Phineas said. This was something else whoever had stolen the mummy had taken away from him.

  “And I don’t think I ought to come up today, when my father does,” Casey’s voice said. “He’s pretty angry. He probably wouldn’t let me anyway.”

  “So I’ll see you whenever,” Phineas said.

  “Whenever.”

  They ate breakfast in silence. Althea just sat and stared into space. Mr. Hall stared at the food he was eating, as if he wasn’t seeing it. Phineas stared at the two of them.

  “All right,” Mr. Hall said when his plate was empty. “I’m going to take a shower before I go to the police station. There’s no reason why I shouldn’t look clean, and feel clean, is there?”

  They both shook their heads at him.

  He stood up and looked down at them. “Your mother should be here,” he said, and sounded angry about it. He turned abruptly and left the room. They listened to his feet going up the stairs.

  “We’ve got to do something,” Althea said, her voice low.

  “What should we do? Should we call Mom?”

  “That’s the last thing I want to do. Sometimes you are really dense, Phineas.”

  When their father came back downstairs, they hadn’t moved from the table, and they hadn’t spoken a word. Mr. Hall wore a khaki suit, and a tie. His cheeks glowed from being shaved. His hair had been slicked down by a wet brush. He looked like a businessman about to go to work in an office, except that there was something about his face that could never look like a businessman. Even when he looked troubled, as he did right then, his face looked ready to laugh, if there was anything he could find to laugh at, and his eyes were thoughtful, as if he was ready to think if there was anything to think about.

  His children stared at him.

  “Your mother would tell me to wear it,” he said. “Dressing for power.”

  “You look good,” Phineas said.

  “It’s only khaki,” Mr. Hall said. “I don’t know when I’ll get back, probably after lunch, I hope before dinner. I don’t know what’s going to happen.”

  “You look good,” Phineas said again. He didn’t know what else to say. He’d never heard his father sound so discouraged before.

  After the front door had closed behind him, Althea spoke. “This is serious, Fin.”

  “I’m going to wash the dishes.” Frankly, he didn’t want to think about it. He didn’t want to have to think about it.

  Althea moved beside him, but not to help out with clearing or washing. She just stuck with him to keep her face close to his ear. “What are you going to do?” she demanded.

  “Like I said, the dishes.”

  “No, about it.”

  “What can I do? Nothing,” he answered himself. “We’re only kids, Althea.” He turned on the water, hoping that might shut her up.

  Althea just talked louder, standing so close she was crowding him. “When a married couple each has a career, then neither of them can afford to be a failure,” she said.

  He shrugged.

  “Which has been bothering Dad, all these years.”

  “He wasn’t a failure. He’s a good teacher.”

  “I know that, and you know that, and Mom does, and his students too—but what ab
out everyone else? People don’t think very highly of a high-school teacher. If people thought teachers were important, they’d pay them more. Didn’t you ever think about that? What it means to be in a low-paying job? Why do you think housewives have so little self-respect?”

  “Does everything have to be feminist to you?” Phineas demanded.

  Althea barely hesitated. “That’s why this job is so important to Dad. College professors are respected, at least people respect them. Mom had to know that.”

  Phineas took a scouring pad to the frying pan. “It’s not as if they’re the only married couple who have two jobs.”

  “Two jobs on two opposite coasts of a large country.”

  Phineas opened his mouth to let her know what he thought of that dumb argument, but the blatt-blatt of the phone cut him off. Althea answered it. Phineas turned off the water to listen.

  “No, Mr. Lewis, he isn’t, he’s down at the police station. And after that, he’s going to Mr. Fletcher’s office, to meet with Mr. Vandemark. . . . I think it makes him nervous too. . . . Oh, then I’ll tell him to pick up the new key. Thanks, Mr. Lewis.”

  Althea returned to the kitchen. “They’ve already put in another new door.”

  Phineas had been thinking: “Two people, you’d need two people. Or, at least, it would be easier with two. Carrying a mummy.”

  “Who is there two of, except the Batchelors—and I don’t know, would he risk his job so she could have her job the way she wants it? Did you get the feeling he was that crazy about her?”

  “How can you tell if a husband is crazy about his wife?” Phineas asked.

  Blatt blatt, the phone answered him. Althea went to get it, and Phineas mopped up the table and counters.

  “That woman,” Althea muttered, returning.

  “O’Meara,” Phineas guessed. He didn’t know where that guess had come from, but he knew he was going to be right. It was the same feeling that he had when he served up an ace, a sure knowledge that began before he’d even begun to swing his racket down into the follow-through. “What did she want?”

  “I hung up on her. She must have one of those shortwave radios, with a police band. Otherwise, how could she have found out so soon?”