The Return

by Bentley Little

  "When I saw that, I remembered your mummy," Melanie said. "That's why we're here."

  Nate thought for a moment. "I never had any trouble with that mummy, never heard tell of any stories from my clerks over the years either, although a lot of 'em made fun of it because of the hair. But maybe mine had been deactivated at that point or had used up all his juice or whatever. The shrine in that house in the ghost town makes it seem to me like someone sure thought that thing had power, but maybe it had just faded away by the time Jack found it."

  "Can you tell us anything else about that shrine?" Melanie asked. "Or put us in touch with your friend Jack?"

  "Oh, Jack's been dead some twenty years now. Tommy, too. And I don't know much more about the shrine than I already told you. Fact is, I didn't care that much about it at the time. It was the mummy itself I was interested in, not details about where they found it." He closed his eyes, frowning, as though trying to remember long-forgotten information. "You know, seems like Jack did tell me something else about it, but I can't quite . . . That's right, that's it. The shrine was adobe. He thought that was weird because the rest of the house, and all the other buildings in town, were wood. He said the shrine looked like some kind of Mexican thing, a Catholic thing. I don't know exactly where it was in the room, but like I said, all the furniture and everything was intact, and whether Jack told it to me or I just came up with it on my own, I have the impression that there was empty space in front of it so that the people could . . . I don't know, worship it or pray to it or something."

  "But you never--" Glen began.

  Nate shook his head. "It might as well have been a fake, a dummy, for all the problems it gave me. But what I'm thinking, after what you told me, is that maybe it was the reason that town went ghost. You know what I'm saying? There are ghost towns scattered all over the desert. Most of them don't have names and no one knows what happened to them because no one knew they were there in the first place. The history of the West isn't as well documented as the history of the East. So who's to say what happened there? Maybe that mummy . . . did it."

  "Where is it now?" Melanie asked.

  "I sold it to an antique dealer from Wickenburg about four or five years ago. He stopped by the museum, hung around in there way longer than any normal person does--" The old man smiled. "You've been through it. There isn't a whole lot to see--and then he left and came back the next day and offered me five hundred bucks. I turned him down flat, gave him the whole spiel, how this was a real Aztec mummy, carried out of the Mexican jungle by a real-life Indiana Jones, but he wasn't buying it and he said he wanted it for what it was, not what I was making it out to be. I'm not sure exactly why I did sell it to him. I think maybe I was thinking of selling out entirely instead of just retiring from the day-to-day operations. Business hadn't been the same since they got rid of the fifty-five-mile-per-hour speed limit, and I was getting burnt out. But after I sold my mummy, I was kind of reinvigorated. I found another mummy down near Tucson, a place called The Place. Guy was upgrading, getting rid of the carny stuff, making The Place into a real museum. That's the mummy you see out there now. A little more decrepit than my old one, a little more traditional, but I got it for a price and haven't had any complaints--"

  "Do you have any photos of the old one?" Glen asked. "So we could maybe compare them?" He held up the Polaroid.

  "Oh, I surely do. Step right this way." He led them down the hall to a room he called his "work space," talking all the way about how he built a special case for the mummy and how he'd decided to make it the last exhibit and place it near the exit so that everything else led up to it. The room was decorated with black-and-white photos of the roadside attraction in various decades: sixties, seventies, eighties, nineties. There were also blown-up pictures of the mummy both in and out of its case, and Glen was shocked at how much it looked like the creature in Cameron's Polaroid. He had known that already, but somehow seeing it for himself was different, more jarring. They were putting together a jigsaw puzzle here, but with each new piece in place, the overall picture changed, surprising him every time.

  Nate also had several shoe boxes filled with photos, and while most of them were unrelated, snapshots from his army days or pictures of places he'd gone on trips, there was a series of photos in color and in black-and-white from the early days of the museum, when the mummy had just been received and installed. There was even one of Nate, Jack, and Tommy holding up the mummy like a drunken buddy, its huge, dirty orange afro resting partially on their shoulders, a sight that made Glen's blood run cold.

  "I think I will take you up on that beer," he told Nate.

  The old man grinned. "No problem." He quickly sorted through the remaining photographs and handed one to Melanie, a shot of the mummy alone against a white wall. "That's it for the pictures, but you can have this one if it'll help you."

  "Yes," she said. "Thanks."

  "Let's go back out to the front and I'll get us some drinks."

  They returned to the living room. "Just water for me," Melanie said, sitting down next to Glen on the Chinese loveseat. Nate went into the kitchen and emerged with two cans of Coors and a tumbler of ice water.

  "So do you know the name of the antique dealer you sold the old mummy to?" Melanie asked.

  "Not off the top of my head. But I still have his card around somewhere. I could give him a call for you."

  "That would be great."

  Nate put his beer down on an end table next to the recliner, and walked back down the hall to his "work space." He returned soon after, triumphantly waving a small white business card. "Here it is. Preston Alphonse. There's an antique dealer name for you. Couldn't make up one like that. Let me give him a call. Don't hold your breath, though. He didn't have a museum or sideshow attraction. He owned an antique store. Which means that he probably found some buyer for it and sold it. Told me he wouldn't, told me he wanted it for himself, and I believed him at the time, but the more I think about it, the more I think that was probably just a line he fed me. More likely than not he already had some collector in mind and passed it on at a tidy profit."

  Nate sat down in his chair, picked up the cordless phone from the end table next to him, and dialed. He listened for a moment, then frowned. "Huh. Phone's out of service." He clicked off. "Like I said, it's been a few years. I guess we could try calling information, see if we can get a number for him. Hold on." He dialed again, asking the operator on the other end of the line if there was a listing for Preston Alphonse in Wickenburg. There was a pause. "Uh-huh," he said. "Okay. Thank you." Nate looked up. "She said that number was unlisted. Which means there still is a number, which means he's still in Wickenburg. He's kind of young to be retired, I think, but maybe he's older than he looked. Or maybe it's just that I'm a workaholic. I didn't retire until I was seventy-five, and I'm still only partially retired. I mean, I don't work the register anymore, but I'm out at the museum at least two, three times a week--"

  "You've been a big help," Melanie said, breaking in before he went too far off on a tangent. "We really appreciate it. Do you have a piece of paper and a pen I could use to copy down the name on that business card?"

  "Why, sure." Nate kept talking as she wrote down the information, and Glen found himself feeling sorry for the man. He seemed to be so grateful for their company. He clearly lived alone, and the lack of photographs around the living room indicated that he'd never been married. It was no wonder that he couldn't just retire, that he still hung out at his museum several times a week. They'd probably made his day with their visit, and he'd probably be retelling their story for weeks and months to come.

  That was one way to get the word out.

  The afternoon was getting late, and Nate invited them to hang around, stay for dinner, but in as polite a way as possible Melanie informed him that they had to leave. "Okay, wait a minute!" he said. He ran back down the hall, and they heard the sound of drawers being opened and then slammed shut. He was talking to himself, saying something uni
ntelligible in a clearly exasperated voice. Then he hurried back, two white tickets the size of playing cards in his hand. "Here," he said, handing one to each of them. "Permanent passes. They'll let you into the museum free any time you want. Good forever. So next time you're up this way, stop in."

  Glen thought of the museum and felt guilty about the way he and Melanie had made fun of the exhibits. They might be crude and amateurish, but this man took them seriously. He'd devoted his working life to them, and Glen found that he had a new appreciation for the roadside attraction. This wasn't kitsch, it was Americana, and never again would he smugly dismiss it.

  "We will," he told Nate gratefully. "Thank you."

  "Yes," Melanie said. "Thank you very much. You've been a big help."

  "Let me know how this all turns out, won't you?"

  "We will," Glen promised.

  Nate followed them outside and stood by his Japanese garage door, waving as they pulled out of the driveway. "Good-bye!" he called.

  They both waved as they drove back toward the highway.

  "I guess we're going to Wickenburg," Melanie said.

  "I guess we are."

  They spent the night in Holbrook, within throwing distance of an enormous, ugly power plant spewing continuous clouds of smoke into the sky. For some ungodly reason, nearly all of the hotels in Holbrook were booked, and the only one they found with a vacancy was a ratty little motor inn called the Shangri-La Resort. Their motel room smelled of pine-scented disinfectant, and there were stiff bodies of dead flies in the thick dust of the windowsill. In the bathroom, the toilet ran constantly, a sluicing spray sound loud enough to overpower the sound of the muted television.

  "Charming," Melanie said.

  "We've still got each other."

  She laughed, put a hand on his arm. "Yes, we've still got each other."

  Glen opened up the tank and fixed the toilet. Melanie dusted and cleaned with successive wads of wet Kleenex, and they managed to make the room seem tolerable if not entirely pleasant.

  He dreamed that night of his mother, and in his dream she was young, younger than he was, the same age she'd been when he was a little boy and she had her paper route. She was sitting cross-legged on the hard floor of a Spanish church in New Mexico, doing needlepoint. The square of yellow cloth in her hands depicted an Anasazi pueblo being overrun by hordes of creatures with bushy heads of bright orange hair. They were of all different sizes, from dwarves to giants, and though they'd been sewn onto the cloth, they seemed to shift positions every time he glanced away. He was standing in the center aisle of the church, facing his mother, and behind her the chancel was lit with dozens of votive candles. It was a warm comforting sight, but he was acutely aware of the fact that behind him was darkness, blackness that he was afraid to turn around and see.

  "It's all over," his mother said. Her voice was sorrowful, her eyes sad, but she was smiling crazily, the corners of her mouth pulled up in a Joker-like rictus. "You're too late. You failed."

  In full view, one of the afro-headed creatures climbed off the yellow needlepoint cloth, shimmied up his mother's dress, and slid between her lips and down her throat. There was an audible clack, a strangely mechanical sound, and tears began streaming from his mother's desperately unhappy eyes. Her voice, issuing from that insanely grinning mouth, suddenly took on the properties of a skipping record, complete with scratches and clicks: "You failed/You failed/You failed/You failed . . ."

  They got a late start the next morning. There was no alarm clock in the shabbily furnished room, so they'd asked the desk clerk for a six o'clock wake-up call. But either he didn't tell his counterpart on the following shift, or the new clerk forgot about it, because they didn't receive their call and it was nearly eight by the time they awoke.

  Melanie dressed and packed while Glen took a quick shower, and they hurriedly loaded the car, deciding to skip breakfast and just hit the highway. Melanie took the roll of toilet paper and an unused plastic cup from the motel room before they left. "I'm going to get something out of this," she said.

  There was supposed to be a shortcut, a back road between Prescott and Wickenburg, but Glen wasn't sure how much shorter it was. The route seemed endless, and the narrow two-lane traveled through country so remote that they saw not a single other vehicle. Melanie tried McCormack on the cell phone, just to make sure it worked out here. As he'd suspected and she had feared, they were out of range.

  "We'll be fine," Glen said reassuringly.

  "Yeah. Our trips together are always so smooth and problem free."

  They did make it to Wickenburg without breaking down or experiencing even the slightest hint of car trouble, but that was where their luck seemed to end. Preston Alphonse was not just hard to find; he seemed to have disappeared. Wickenburg was a small town, but his name was not in the phone book, and none of the proprietors of the other antique stores at which they stopped knew him or were willing to admit they did. Glen suspected the latter. One old man was genuinely hostile when they asked him about Alphonse, and though both of them denied it, it was pretty clear that the old man thought they were cops. The others probably did, too, although why antique dealers would be afraid of the police was a mystery.

  They were about to start canvassing door-to-door when Glen saw a white posterboard sign nailed to a telephone pole. ANNUAL LDS RUMMAGE SALE, the sign announced, SAT. 8-3.

  "What day is it?" he asked Melanie.

  She frowned. "What do you mean, 'What day is it?" '

  "I lose track. What day is it?"

  "Saturday."

  He pointed to the sign. "Annual rummage sale," he said. "I'm not an expert, but don't antique dealers get most of their stuff from garage sales and rummage sales and then jack up the price? My hunch is that he's been there before, probably every year, and if we're lucky, someone knows him."

  "Good thought," she said.

  The LDS church was a big building of tan brick that seemed far too large for a town this size. Tables full of piled clothes ringed the parking lot, along with boxes of records, books, and children's toys. Quite a few cars were parked on the street in front of the church, and several families were sorting through the items for sale. Glen found a spot between a new Cadillac and an old Jeep, and he and Melanie walked across the marked asphalt to a stand-alone table where two elderly women sat behind a metal cashbox and a pile of used grocery bags.

  "Hello," one of the women, a short old lady with tall beehive hair, greeted them. "Looking for anything in particular?"

  "Actually, we are," Glen said. "We're looking for a man named Preston Alphonse. He used to have an antique store here in Wickenburg. Do you happen to know him?"

  "Preston? Sure I know him."

  "Great. Can you tell us where he lives?"

  The woman's eyes narrowed. "Why?"

  What was with all this secrecy surrounding an antique dealer? The Californian in him was tempted to say, Because we're IRS agents, but instead he simply said, "A friend of ours sold Mr. Alphonse something a couple of years ago, and we'd like to buy it from him if he still has it."

  "What is it?" the woman asked suspiciously.

  Glen saw no reason to lie. "A mummy," he said. "An Indian mummy."

  "A mummy?"

  He nodded. "It used to be displayed up at a place outside of Beltane, off I-40. But it was originally from a ghost town near Rio Verde. A guy named Jack Carpenter discovered it on a hunting trip."

  She looked at him suspiciously, and then the suspicion cleared. Apparently, his story rang true and she was no longer worried that he was a private detective or a federal agent or a mobster or whatever she'd feared.

  "Preston's just down the block," she said, pointing. "I don't know the exact address, but you can't miss it. The big Victorian-looking house on the left. White roses in front, a trellis over the walkway. There's an antique plow and old wagon wheel in the flower garden, a white wicker settee on the porch. Like I said, you can't miss it."

  "Thank you," Glen said gratef
ully. "We really appreciate this."

  The old woman gestured around the parking lot. "See anything you like? We're kind of winding down here. Everything's half-price between now and three."

  "If we don't spend all our money at Mr. Alphonse's, we'll be back."

  She laughed. "Fair enough."

  They drove down the street in the direction the woman had indicated. For the first block, the houses were all similar-looking homes of fairly recent vintage. Houses on the next block over were older, more individualistic, and halfway down, sandwiched between a remodeled farm cottage and a two-story log cabin, was a large, light-blue faux-Victorian house with white trim and a blooming garden out front.

  "This is it." He pulled to a stop, but a sign next to the curb said NO PARKING ANY TIME, and instead he drove into the house's driveway, parking behind an old black T-Bird. As they got out, Glen expected to see Alphonse on the porch, heading toward them, either curious as to why they had pulled into his driveway or furious that he was being disturbed. But the house appeared to be deserted. Alphonse wasn't going to make this easy for them, Glen thought.

  He was wrong.

  They walked onto the porch, rang the front doorbell, and a slight, pleasant-looking man with a small gray mustache opened the door, peering at them through the screen. "Yes?"

  Melanie stepped forward. "Hello. We're looking for Mr. Preston Alphonse."

  The man looked puzzled. "I am he."

  "My name's Melanie Black and this is Glen Ridgeway. We're here about a mummy that you bought from a tourist trap up near Beltane about four or five years ago--"

  "Ah, that," Alphonse said, and Glen thought he heard a tremor in the older man's voice.

  "Yes. We just came from Nate Stewky's, and he told us he sold the mummy to you. We"--she gestured toward Glen--"have been working at a newly discovered archeological site near Bower under the direction of Dr. Al Wittinghill from ASU. You may find this hard to believe, and you may think we're overstating the case, but that mummy may be the key to unlocking a centuries-old mystery."