Mummy

by Caroline B. Cooney

The cars ahead and behind had parked so tightly that he had to maneuver back and forth and back and forth to get out, with Donovan yelling, “Don’t hit them! We can’t have an accident right now! Watch what you’re doing! Can’t you drive?”

  “Shut up, Donovan! Whose van is this, anyway?”

  Emlyn curled up on the floor next to Amaral. The van had thick carpeting, which on her orders Jack had vacuumed thoroughly. She hadn’t wanted the mummy to pick up mud and grit from their shoes.

  She peeled back some tape and gently folded up the black plastic.

  A square of woven linen was exposed in the middle of black plastic, as if Amaral were a patient going in for surgery. The bandages had been woven log-cabin style, intricately, beautifully. Emlyn touched the linen. Then she took off her knit glove and her two disposable gloves and for the first time actually touched Amaral-Re. The cloth was harsher than she had expected, more like canvas than a handkerchief.

  I stole a mummy, thought Emlyn.

  A terrible, inexplicable horror seized her, and for a moment she was afraid she would begin sobbing and have to cling to the mummy for comfort.

  She sat up quickly, got a Coke from the cooler, popped it open, and had a sip. Not letting herself look again, she tucked the plastic back. Then she checked her watch.

  Eight fifty-one.

  All that time. A lifetime, it had seemed, of fear and stupidity. And it was still early.

  “Okay, here’s the interstate, we’re safe, we’re out,” Donovan told her.

  Jack accelerated up the ramp. “We got so scared for you,” he said. “There’s been all this activity in the museum. There was some kind of event at the theater we didn’t know about. It wasn’t on the museum calendar, so it must have been private. Probably fifty people went into the theater long after Maris and Lovell were home from the film.”

  “And,” said Donovan, “it turns out there’s a guard who walks around the outside of the museum! We saw him twice.”

  Emlyn’s heart shriveled. Pure luck he wasn’t waiting for me on the other side of the garage door. Pure luck I didn’t run smack into him while I was racing around the block.

  “And then when we saw the director pull up!” said Donovan. “We had heart attacks. We thought of telephoning you on your cell phone, but we figured, it rings in there and she’s dead.”

  Emlyn imagined her phone ringing while she was hiding in the bathroom and Dr. Brisband and his friend Bob were booting up the computer a few feet away. She couldn’t laugh. “How did you know it was Dr. Brisband?”

  “Just a guess. But a new four-door Mercedes? Vanity plates,” said Jack, “that say MUSEUM? Sounds like a director to me.”

  The front had two bucket seats, Jack driving, Donovan the passenger. She knelt in the opening between the seats. “Where are we?”

  “Going north on the interstate. We’ll get off” at exit 65, and then it’s eight miles to my grandparents’ cottage,” said Donovan.

  “You’re sure they won’t be there?”

  “They’re in Florida. They don’t usually go down till after Thanksgiving—they’re afraid of hurricanes this time of year—but friends of theirs are having a fiftieth anniversary celebration. The cottage is empty.”

  She was sweaty in a strange, cold way. What if she had left a trace in the office and they located her? What if a camera in some corner had photographed her? What if that outside guard had seen her get in this van and written down the plate number?

  “I can’t wait to see the mummy,” said Jack. “There’s a truck stop, I’m going to pull in there and open her up.”

  “No,” said Emlyn. She put her hand on the part of the mummy that must be her head. Even though she wasn’t going to let Jack see the mummy, she had to. She turned around and gently worked the plastic back up again, all the way to the top. Jack was too busy driving to see and Donovan too busy talking.

  He was on the car phone with Maris and Lovell. “In the van!” he kept saying. “We’ve got the mummy in the van!” as if this were impossible to comprehend. “No, we don’t have details yet. Emlyn has to catch her breath. Yes, I’ll tell her. Em, Lovell says you’re awesome. Maris says ten thousand congratulations.”

  In the soft, changing dark of the car, sudden quick light from the highway overheads darting in and darting out of the windows, the mummy was extraordinary.

  Her face was larger than life. Her eyes, dark and sad, had far more makeup on them than Emlyn had seen through the old, discolored, scratched case. The gold leaf of her ornaments was so much more beautiful. Emlyn touched, and it was gold, even the tip of her finger knew it was gold. Nothing so rich and deep could be painted. The magnificence of Amaral-Re went through Emlyn’s skin and into her soul.

  What have I done? This girl, this work of art. This thing of beauty. I have thrown her into the back of a van with two punks who’d use her for a picnic bench. Who intend to string her up like a scarecrow so four hundred seniors can get ten minutes’ kick out of her.

  The realness of Amaral-Re was horrifying Emlyn covered her again. She thought, What do I mean, two punks? I think I’m a good guy?

  She had complete, sick knowledge of herself, the one to whom you were supposed to be true.

  “Give me your seat, Donovan. I have to see where I’m going I’ve spent a whole night with no idea where I’m going and I want to read road signs. Be careful where you step. Amaral is very fragile.”

  “You make her sound like your girlfriend,” Donovan teased. He climbed over into the middle swivel chair, and she took the front seat. The normalcy of turnpike signs and gas station signs and fast-food restaurant signs took away some of her anxiety. The city receded.

  If they do have a photograph of me, it won’t be long before they come for me. Dr. Brisband and his secretary will recognize me as the high school girl who made the appointment. They don’t have my right name or my right school, but it’s just a matter of showing the photograph to the principals. My principal sure knows me. His daughter lettered in crew last year when I did. “What if they catch me?” she said softly.

  “How could they?”

  “What if there was a hidden camera?”

  The boys were silent for a while.

  Then Jack said, “I don’t think the museum would want the publicity. I think they’d just want their mummy back. They won’t want people to know how easily a mere high school kid got in and out with a precious artifact. I bet they won’t go to the police. If they do have a photograph, and I don’t believe they do, they’ll try to find you privately.”

  Emlyn had assumed that a museum in need of donations and visitors and gift shop sales would find publicity a terrific thing. But she could see the argument for silence.

  “There were paintings stolen from a museum in Boston a few year ago,” added Donovan, “and I remember the museum begging the thief to return them. Anything, we’ll do anything, they said. We won’t prosecute, we won’t tell, we won’t do anything, just don’t hurt the paintings, and please give them back.”

  Emlyn thought of the mummy she had nearly dropped, the mummy from which something had fallen. Twice. The mummy would be easy to hurt. She thought of a museum staff whose entire purpose was to keep their stuff safe. Did they love Amaral-Re? Would they gather and weep and worry?

  “Anyway,” said Jack, “it’s all of us. We agreed on that from the beginning All five are doing it, all five are responsible.”

  “Besides,” said Donovan, “it’s a senior prank. It’s not theft. We’re just borrowing it in a very dramatic way.”

  Emlyn swiveled in her seat to make sure Donovan wasn’t touching the mummy. Her family’s car did not have swivel seats. She must suggest this kind of vehicle to her father.

  “Drive faster, will you?” grumbled Donovan.

  “Can’t. I’ve had three speeding tickets. I’ve got points against my driver’s license. I get another speeding ticket and guess how long I lose my license for?”

  “How long?”

  “A year.�
��

  A year meant nothing to Emlyn. She rarely drove. It could be a year before she got to drive again anyway.

  “You’re sure your grandparents’ cottage is the place to keep the mummy?” she said to Donovan. They had been over this twenty times. But she needed to hear it again.

  “They haven’t closed the cottage for the season. They’ll be back. But I promise you, they don’t go up to the loft. They can’t get up the ladder anymore, it’s vertical, and the rungs are far apart and don’t have much toe space, and my grandparents can’t climb. They can hardly even get up out of their chairs. So we put the mummy up under my bunk bed. It’ll keep just fine.”

  Emlyn’s grandparents also had a cottage on a lake. They didn’t own it. Every year they rented the same little bungalow for the same two weeks. They reclined on the same lawn chairs and waded in the same water. Emlyn had gone with them a few times. It was pretty quiet. You had to bring a lot of books.

  Her other set of grandparents had taken up world travel. They preferred low-end tours with as many elderly people as possible crammed onto a bus. They started Europe from the south up, because they wanted to be warm. Over and over they went to Sicily in July and Italy in August. They were warm enough. They took thousands of photographs, and Emlyn was the only person on earth willing to look at these.

  At Christmas, they took roll after roll of film of their three grandchildren. They couldn’t get enough photographs of Emlyn.

  She had a grotesque vision of other photographs of herself. Police photographs. And what would her grandparents feel about her then?

  Jack left the interstate. It was a traveler’s exit with three gas stations, pancake house, hamburger place, tacos, doughnuts. They stopped and everybody went to the bathroom and then got a hamburger. In the bathroom Emlyn wrapped her remaining gloves in paper towels and crushed them up and dropped them in the trash.

  By now the museum staff would have found the glove that was keeping the basement door open. She imagined them saving it for the police. She imagined them standing in the Egyptian Room by the empty bier. The shock. The disbelief.

  She was feeling shock and disbelief herself.

  Eight more miles brought them to a small lake that gleamed in the moonlight. It was surrounded with tiny houses so close to one another they were like tents in an army camp. Each had a tiny unpaved driveway, towering trees, and a strip of garden and gate. Each had two little steps in front and a little screened porch in back, hanging over the water. Tiny docks stuck out into the lake, narrow as ladders.

  It was very quiet.

  Donovan hopped out of the van and fiddled around with the light fixture on the teeny front stoop.

  “You open the door by turning a lightbulb?” said Jack.

  Donovan laughed. “I don’t have a key. But they keep one hanging inside the lamp. So does everybody else around the lake. Just a little tip, in case you want to make off with somebody’s twenty-year-old black-and-white TV”

  Inside the cottage was a darling little kitchen, like a toy, and a living room so small Emlyn could not imagine having grandchildren visit on a rainy day. The ladder to the loft really was vertical. Emlyn and Donovan reached the top, and Jack handed them the mummy’s feet, and they crouched while he fed the mummy upward.

  The front of the loft had no wall, just a sort of curb. “What did you do when you were babies?” she asked Donovan. “Fall off and bounce?”

  He laughed. “There used to be a gate. They took it down once we got older.” He turned on the light in the loft.

  There were three bunks, one against each wall. The ceiling was too low for a second bed above them. The floor had exactly enough space to lay Amaral-Re down.

  They took the plastic off quickly, gently removing the masking tape from the mummy’s shoulders and sides.

  “Don’t touch her,” said Emlyn thickly. “We can’t get oil or bacteria on her.”

  But it was impossible not to touch. They stroked her painted hair, black as night, and her lips, dark red. They felt her sharp elbows and ran their hands over the triangle of her captured feet.

  “Wow,” said Jack. “Three thousand years old. Wow.”

  “In the exhibit,” said Donovan shakily, “it didn’t seem so—well—fantastic.”

  “It seemed smaller,” said Jack.

  “Less important,” said Donovan.

  “Is that real gold?” whispered Jack.

  “You know it is,” said Donovan.

  “Is it going to look amazing hanging up in that bell tower, or what?” said Jack.

  “Don’t call her it,” said Emlyn. “She’s a she. And we can’t hang her in the bell tower.”

  “Oh,” said Jack. “Where do you want to hang her, then?” He turned as if accepting her expertise on senior pranks.

  “She’s not sturdy and she might fall apart,” said Emlyn. “And what if it rains? We can’t let her get wet. It doesn’t rain in Egypt.”

  The boys began to laugh.

  “You’re really taking this seriously,” said Jack.

  “Amaral-Re took her death very seriously.”

  “Well, yeah, but she’s had time to get used to it, Em.”

  She knew she was not thinking clearly. The evening had truly taken everything out of her. This was how Amaral must have felt when her brains were removed by the embalmers. Emlyn had thought she would rejoice, would hug herself with the delight of her Bad, the success of her Wrong. But there was no such feeling. There was just a deep, appalling dread.

  She had not known the mummy would be real.

  Even though she had taken the mummy, lifted and hoisted and sweated to take this mummy, she had not known the mummy would be real.

  “I’m exhausted,” said Emlyn. “Let’s get out of here. I feel as if I’ve rowed a hundred miles.”

  Jack looked at his watch. “Okay,” he said with an unexpected reluctance. “I guess we can fit that in.”

  “Fit what in?” said Emlyn.

  “It’ll be on the news,” said Jack. “Stolen mummies don’t happen every day. Eleven P.M. is local news. I figured we’d stay here for the news, but yeah, I think we can get to Lovell’s just in time.” He gestured to Donovan, and the two of them slid Amaral under a bunk, stowing her like old sweatshirts.

  Emlyn frowned. “Jack. You just said you didn’t think there would be publicity.”

  “Well—except, you know, the police report. That part. That’ll be in the news. So, hey, let’s go, you first, Em. I’m coming.”

  The ladder was harder to go down than it had been to go up. From the floor she could not see the bunks, let alone the mummy. Amaral was well and truly hidden. But what if there was a fire? What if—

  Emlyn stared at Jack. He had a big, dumb grin on his face. “You phoned the police, didn’t you? When we stopped for a hamburger, you called it in on your car phone, didn’t you? Because you want publicity. You don’t care what the museum might want or what I might want.”

  “Aw, Em,” said Jack, grinning, leaning down toward her face as if the closer he got the more she would agree. “It’s no fun keeping secrets. Gotta tell. I mean, they don’t know it’s us. They don’t know we took it. They don’t know it has anything to do with senior prank. All they know is, a voice called and said there’s been a theft at the museum. A major artifact has been stolen.”

  “You used those words? Theft and stolen?”

  “Well, yeah. The police wouldn’t come if I said borrowed.”

  They walked out to the car. Donovan said, “You really think that’s real gold?”

  Thirteen

  LOVELL LIVED IN AN apartment building several blocks east of Emlyn’s, but everybody said “my house” even though nobody lived in a house. Way back in maybe second grade, Emlyn had been to a birthday party at Lovell’s, because when they were littler everybody went to every party. They had never become friends. Just classmates who recognized each other.

  Emlyn had no memory of the apartment although she could remember the little
prize she had won. It had been a diary, its pencil attached by a gold ribbon. She had been so proud and had even written in it once.

  It was only minutes before eleven when they pulled up at the apartment building.

  In the lobby there was no doorman. Lovell could come and go much more anonymously than Emlyn. They pressed the buzzer, Lovell pressed back, they rushed in, stabbed the elevator button, and the boys all but hopped up and down to make the elevator lift more quickly.

  “We’ve got the TV on,” said Lovell, flinging open her door. “Quick! They’ve been giving teasers for the last half hour! ‘Stay tuned,’ they’re crying, with those snarfy little smiles, for an exclusive story about the theft of a major work of art from the city museum!’”

  Jack slapped his knee with joy. He and Maris hugged efficiently and separated and went straight to the TV. Then Maris said, “I am so impressed, Emlyn. I mean, really, in the end, I thought we’d all panic and run.”

  “She’s not the panic-and-run type,” said Lovell.

  “She’s awesome,” said Jack. “But everybody stop talking. We don’t want to miss a word.”

  Emlyn might not even have seen the TV, which was draped with plush, long-legged purple-and-violet creatures of unknown species. The apartment looked like a gift shop for creatures made of fur or velvet, corduroy and lace. Stuffed animals sat in rows on the couch and the chairs; they leaned on shelves and tipped in corners. There were pandas and lambs, camels and cats. There was no place to sit, unless you perched on the very rim of a sofa occupied by various teddy bear families.

  “Mom and Vanessa and I collect stuffed animals,” explained Lovell.

  Lovell’s father had left long ago. Possibly there had not been room for him. In any event, both mother and sister had dates tonight and were not back yet. Lovell didn’t expect them before midnight. So they had an hour to talk things over in safety.

  Everybody sat on the floor. Even the floor pillows were shaped like animals. Lovell handed Emlyn an immense, swollen pillow that turned out to be a pig with Velcro-attached piglets.

  “You don’t have to take the piglets off,” said Lovell generously, “although, of course we never squash the piglets.”