The Vandemark Mummy

by Cynthia Voigt

  “Would he have woken us up leaving the house the last two nights? I’d have heard the car start, I think. I’m not sure. Did you hear him sneaking around at all, Fin? Did you see him asleep in bed?”

  “Dad isn’t doing crazy things,” Phineas said. “I can’t prove it, but—we’d know, wouldn’t we?”

  “Besides, it wouldn’t do him any good. The collection is a piece of luck for him. Unless he’s feeling self-destructive. What do you think, Fin?”

  “I think you’re the one who’s going crazy.”

  “It couldn’t be you, I know that, because where would you have put it, and you’re the one who answered the phone.”

  “Maybe there was no whisperer,” Phineas suggested.

  “Possible,” Althea said. “But I doubt it, I saw your face. Besides, you’d need someone working with you, to make the call so we could go find the mummy, and you don’t have any friends here.”

  “What about Casey?”

  “He’s not a friend, is he?”

  “He might be. I can’t tell yet.”

  “So it’s not you or me—because if there was a whisperer you have to know it can’t be me. I was right there in the kitchen. I keep wanting to think it’s Ken, but that’s because I don’t like him. I can’t think of any reason for him to take the mummy. It’s the crown he’s interested in.”

  “For a paper,” Phineas said.

  “One of his brilliant papers,” Althea said.

  “So brilliant he’ll be offered a job at Harvard.” They both snickered.

  “Unless he’s in collusion with the Batchelors? But that’s too many crazy people, don’t you think?”

  “How about Mr. Vandemark? If he really wants the collection to go to the Boston museum, he might hire some crooks to make trouble. Casey told me—He said they’re pretty ruthless, when it comes to the family.”

  Althea stopped dead. A man ran into her, and apologized, but she barely looked at him. “I never thought of that. That makes sense—how the thief knew about the mummy, and why she had to be returned safely. Because they wouldn’t want any damage done. No museum will be interested in damaged pieces, not when they’ve got undamaged ones. He’d be able to pay someone, whatever the price was, and he looks like the kind of man who thinks that when he wants something that automatically makes it all right.”

  Now that he thought of Casey’s father that way, Phineas could see that it was possible. He felt pretty smart. “Don’t forget O’Meara, if she’s hungry enough for some story. She could turn this into a mummy’s curse thing, she doesn’t care very much if it’s true, as long as she gets the story.”

  “I don’t think O’Meara would,” Althea said.

  “How come you’re willing to think Mr. Vandemark would but you won’t even consider O’Meara?” Phineas answered his own question. “Because she’s female.”

  “Historically, women are victims rather than criminals,” Althea said. “I mean, even the mummy. She’s female, isn’t she? And look what’s happened to her.”

  Phineas was sorry he’d mentioned it. Once she’d started, Althea was almost impossible to stop.

  “It’s as if you’re stuck with the sex you are forever. Even after you’re dead. Women are stuck being weak, being victims. All on account of sex.”

  “Yeah, well, women are as eager for it as men are,” Phineas said. He knew he was deliberately misunderstanding her and he meant to. He meant to sound crude too, but once he’d said it he didn’t know why he’d said it. He didn’t know beans about sex, and he didn’t much care. He figured he would care when he got older, but for now all he knew was how to sound crude. And he knew he was faking his crudeness even if nobody else knew. Not even Althea, who was giving him the dirty look he deserved. What if everybody else who sounded like they knew what they were talking about was faking it, just like he was? “I’m sorry, Althea,” he said.

  “You should be.”

  “There are always women like Sappho,” he said, hoping to change her mood.

  “How many like that are there? Out of how many millions?”

  They were coming up to the entrance of the emergency room. Out of the ambulances parked in the ambulance bay, Phineas couldn’t pick out theirs. He wished he’d never started this conversation with Althea; and he wished she’d just lay off men. “Men go to war,” he said.

  “Women have babies,” she said.

  They were walking side by side, but not looking at each other. He suspected, from the sound of her voice, that Althea was finding him just as irritating on the subject as he found her. “So what?” he said, and held open the door for her, sarcastically.

  CHAPTER 14

  Their father was watching for them. He led them through a door and into one of several curtained cubicles. No one paid any attention; the doctors and nurses were busy at their own jobs. In the cubicle, curtains pulled closed, Phineas and Althea stood side by side at the foot of the bed where the garbage bags lay. Detective Arsenault stood by the head. Mr. Hall had a pair of scissors, and started cutting the top bag.

  It was bright in the little space, and crowded. The scissors cut away first one bag and then another. Phineas had forgotten the quarrel, and he thought Althea had too because she had a hand on his arm, as if having him beside her made her feel less nervous. Her hand on his arm made him feel more nervous, as if nervousness was a cold, and he could catch it.

  Mr. Hall folded the plastic back off of the shape. What was revealed by that was a dirty white blanket. He folded that carefully off, letting it hang down, and did the same with the dirty blue blanket he found next. The thief had wrapped her up in blankets. Unwrapped, the mummy lay on the high hospital bed, like a sacrifice on an altar, with the black plastic hanging down, and the white blanket, and the blue.

  The mummy had no feet. That was Phineas’s first thought, as his father and Althea drew in whistling breaths. But that wasn’t entirely true. The feet were flattened, as if somebody had driven over them. Or smashed, as if someone had clubbed them with a baseball bat, hammering down on them.

  “What’s this about?” Detective Arsenault asked. He was bending over to look at the mummy’s shoulder.

  Mr. Hall crowded around to look. Phineas shifted himself to see, without getting in anyone’s way.

  A long dark slash gaped behind the portrait panel. Its edges were pushed in slightly, as if someone had tried to shove his hand into the mummy’s neck.

  “The portrait looks just the same,” Phineas said. He said it to cheer himself up, because the sight of the smashed feet and slashed neck sank his spirits. Seriously sank his spirits. Even smashed, the mummy didn’t smell bad, though; just old, dusty and old. “At least he didn’t hurt the portrait.”

  Somehow, damaging the portrait would have been the worst thing. If the portrait had been defaced, or destroyed, or damaged, then she would have been really lost. Really dead, he thought, and he could have laughed at himself. If there was anything deader than a mummy, he’d like to know what. Dead was all you could be, once you died. But still, he felt as if—as long as her face looked up out of the portrait she was only dead. Not really gone, disappeared. He guessed maybe the ancient Egyptians who spent so much time and money on mummies must have felt the same way.

  “Was it for the necklace?” Mr. Hall asked.

  What necklace? Phineas thought.

  “She’s wearing one in the portrait, probably uncut emeralds set in gold, according to Ken Simard,” Mr. Hall said.

  Voices spoke beyond the curtains. Althea stood at the mummy’s feet, staring down. Phineas had no idea what she was thinking. Her face was more of a mask than the mummy’s portrait. Her two frizzy ponytails stuck out behind her ears like antennae, and it was almost as if Althea were listening to something they were radioing in to her.

  “Would the mummy have been buried wearing the necklace?” the detective asked.

  “Ken said probably not, but it’s not impossible. It’s just not what they usually did in the Roman era. That’s o
ne of the things the X ray would have told us. But Roman era burials weren’t like the earlier dynasties, when the tombs were treasure houses, and the mummies were covered with amulets and breastplates, necklaces, scarabs—not to mention the artifacts all around the tombs.”

  “Like Tutankhamen’s tomb,” Detective Arsenault said. “So probably the thief was looking for the necklace. That’s the way I read this. And when there was no necklace”—his big hand gestured toward the mummy’s wounded neck—“he got angry.”

  “And took it out on the feet?” Mr. Hall asked. “For the same reason that muggers will beat up on someone who doesn’t have any money?”

  “Or a house will be trashed,” the detective agreed.

  “But why the feet?” Althea asked. Her voice was a croak, and they all stared at her. She shook her head. She didn’t want to be asked any questions, she wouldn’t answer.

  Phineas looked at the little mound of smashed bones and dehydrated flesh and wrappings that had been the mummy’s feet. It was like any other pile of dirt, no more than what you might sweep up from under a refrigerator that hadn’t moved for about a hundred years.

  But did they have refrigerators a hundred years ago?

  His mind was jumping around. It was as if he didn’t want to think about what had happened.

  “What do you think, Sam?” the detective asked. “Could somebody have figured out with this incision that there was no necklace? I assume he didn’t find one, the way I read what happened.”

  Mr. Hall bent down to look more closely at the wound. Without touching the mummy, he held his hand beside the wound, as if imagining. “Maybe. With a small hand? Or long fingers? It would explain why the edges are sort of crushed.”

  “I wouldn’t want to stick my hand in there,” the detective said.

  Phineas could see what might have happened, and the frustration the thief would have felt after taking all that risk—two nights in a row. He guessed the guy must have been angry, with all the disappointment. Angry enough to want to destroy something.

  “What puzzles me,” the detective said, “is just what you asked, Althea. Why the feet?”

  Althea nodded, her lips pushed tightly together as if they would quiver if she left them alone. She was seriously upset, Phineas thought. He didn’t blame her.

  “Why not smash the whole thing, if that’s the way it happened,” the detective said, musing. “Why call you, to tell you where it was? Why wrap it up so carefully?”

  Mr. Hall shrugged. “I suppose we should be grateful,” he said. “And I am.” But he didn’t sound it.

  Althea turned on her heels, and pushed her way through the curtains. Nobody tried to stop her.

  “I am grateful it hasn’t been entirely destroyed,” Mr. Hall said. “But it was perfect, and now it’s—” The more he said, the more he sounded angry. “The damage is irreversible, irremediable.”

  Phineas knew what his father meant. If he’d ever had a dog, and anyone had ever run over it, he’d feel this way. He blinked his eyes.

  The mummy’s sad face smiled up at the ceiling light, as if she knew what had happened.

  “At least, it hasn’t been destroyed,” the detective suggested.

  “But she was perfect before,” Mr. Hall snapped back. “I get so sick of this century, or this country—’Look on the bright side.’ If someone dies, the first thing anyone asks is ‘Are you getting over it?’ If a marriage breaks up, the first question is ‘Are you dating anyone?’ It does, it makes me sick. It disgusts me. Sorry, I’m just—”

  “No, I understand,” the detective said. He was looking at Phineas’s father with an alert expression that made Phineas wonder if his father was a chief suspect. “I do, or I think I do. Listen, Sam, I’d like—if you’d like—would you come for dinner some night? With the kids, a family dinner.”

  “I’d like that.” Phineas’s father was pleased.

  “I’ll talk to my wife and call you.”

  He must not suspect Mr. Hall, Phineas thought. You wouldn’t invite someone you suspected of a crime to your house for dinner.

  “I’ll be seeing you soon anyway, to sign statements. Although, I have to tell you, I don’t think we’ll ever find the man who did this. Or woman, it could be a woman.”

  Unless that was exactly what you’d do, so your suspect would relax his guard.

  The mummy lay under the bright light, looking out under her portrait. She didn’t know that after more than fifteen hundred years of being perfect she was now ruined. No matter what anyone did, she could never be perfect again.

  Phineas minded that. He knew there was nothing to do about it, but he couldn’t stop minding.

  CHAPTER 15

  By the time the mummy had been X-rayed and returned to the collection room in the cellar of the library, it was midafternoon. As soon as they got home, Phineas went to work making sandwiches for his father and himself. His father ate without saying anything, and then sat staring at the wooden tabletop while Phineas cleaned up. “Why don’t you go up and take a nap, Dad?” Phineas finally suggested.

  His father smiled, but not as if he was about to laugh. “I’m waiting for Mr. Vandemark’s phone call. So, Phineas, how do you think we’ll like living on the West Coast?”

  “Are we going to move?”

  “After they fire me.”

  “Why should they do that? It’s not your fault there was a thief around who wanted to steal the necklace.”

  “People like having someone to blame,” his father explained.

  “There’s no way you could have prevented it. Is there?”

  “Sure there is. I could have hired round-the-clock security, or I could have camped out in the room. Especially after the first attempt.”

  “Yeah, but the guy would probably have brained you. The way he did the mummy’s feet.”

  “Can you brain feet?” his father asked. It was pretty feeble, for a joke, but at least it was a try. “Oh, well, I can go back to tending bar.”

  “You’re a teacher, not a bartender.”

  “Don’t underestimate me, Phineas. I put myself through school tending bar, and I’m pretty good at it. The difficulty is, when you’ve been fired, it’s hard to get another job. People wonder why you were fired.”

  “That doesn’t make sense,” Phineas said.

  “The world doesn’t make sense,” his father said dismally.

  “No, I was thinking about the necklace. Who knew about it? I know, anyone who read O’Meara’s article—”

  “Bless her pointed little heart,” Mr. Hall murmured.

  “—but, Dad, he could have looked for it right there, he didn’t have to take the mummy out. Why would he kidnap the mummy? And don’t tell me you can’t kidnap a mummy, okay?” Phineas said, just to get his father to smile again.

  A knock on the screen door interrupted them. Mr. Hall didn’t look interested, so Phineas went to answer it. A tall, broad-shouldered man stood there, althletic looking despite his khaki suit, with long legs and narrow hips; he was some kind of businessman, with the tie. For a few seconds, Phineas didn’t recognize him.

  “Ken?” he said, opening the door. Behind Ken’s shoulder, he could see a taxi waiting.

  “I just came to say good-bye, and good luck,” Ken said. He stepped into the hallway. “I hope your father is home.”

  “In the kitchen.”

  Phineas followed Ken down the hall. Something was different. “You shaved your beard,” he realized. He moved around to look at Ken from the front. The skin the beard had covered was paler than the rest of Ken’s face. He’d left the mustache, but trimmed, as his hair had been trimmed. “You look—” Phineas couldn’t figure out how to say it.

  “Better,” Ken suggested with a laugh.

  “Let me see,” Mr. Hall asked.

  Ken turned around and flexed his muscles, fists raised in the traditional strongman pose. Then he turned his profile, and swung his arms down, one flexed in back, one flexed in front, and posed briefly that w
ay. Then he relaxed and smiled. “I have a lucky feeling about this trip. Although I hate to abandon you when things are such a mess, Sam. I heard about the mummy.”

  “It’ll sort itself out. At the moment, I’m not feeling too sanguine.”

  Ken’s face sobered. “I can imagine. But I’ll be back in a month, and at your disposal.”

  “If I’m still here.”

  His father looked small, sitting there, shoulders slumped, small especially compared to Ken. His father looked small and weak. Phineas didn’t like seeing his father look that way.

  “They can’t fire you, Sam. You’ve got a contract.”

  His father smiled. “Life is full of surprises.”

  “You’d better be here when I get back,” Ken said. “Whatever happens, don’t do anything until I get back. I won’t let them fire you. You’re too good a teacher.” He looked, as he said it, as if nothing would stand in his way, because he could take care of anything. Phineas was surprised at the difference shaving his beard made in Ken.

  “Thanks for the vote of confidence,” Mr. Hall said.

  “You know as well as I do there’s nothing you could have done,” Ken announced. “But I really have to go. I’ve got a plane to catch. See you, Phineas.” He shook Phineas’s hand. “Sam.” He shook Mr. Hall’s hand. “Is Althea around? I’d like to say good-bye to her.”

  Phineas went up to get Althea, but she wasn’t in her room. Opening the door, he saw the bed—made, of course—and the empty desk, a single light like a spotlight on the papers spread over it. He ran back downstairs. “She’s not here.”

  “Where is she?” Mr. Hall asked.

  “I don’t know,” Phineas answered.

  “Probably off with some boyfriend,” Ken said. “I wouldn’t worry if I were you. When she turns up, tell her I wanted to say good-bye, will you?”

  They walked out onto the porch to watch Ken set off. He turned to wave before he climbed into the taxi. The taxi pulled away.

  “What a difference,” Phineas said. “He looks like a businessman, a successful businessman. Doesn’t he?”