She stopped singing. Her mind was clear.
Her task was obvious.
To prevent its ruin, she must get the mummy back.
No matter what Jack and Maris thought, there was only one place on earth where the mummy was safe: back inside the museum.
The drive between the lake and the city was a little more than an hour, and Emlyn promised herself that by the time Jack took the downtown exit, she would know how she was going to get Amaral back into the museum.
Think doors, think windows, think utility courtyard, truck—hey.
I could ship Amaral back to the museum. Enough styrofoam peanuts and I can have her delivered—
Well, not quite.
Delivery required payment, addresses, a phone number …
Maybe she would deliver Amaral herself, in the night, setting her on the doorstep and calling the police or Dr. Brisband from her car. Yes, that was wiser. Forget the getting in and out. Forget packing and shipping. Set her down, run, and call. Get a weather report first, so it wasn’t raining. A few things like that—but keep it simple.
She was planning so hard she forgot Jack, and it was with a shock that she glanced over and saw he had taken the exit. Her own car was flying past it; she hardly had time to get on the exit ramp, didn’t have time to signal.
It was so much harder to do things than she had anticipated. Too many directions for thoughts to fly, and when she herself was flying at seventy miles an hour, there was not just the danger of getting caught. There was also the danger of splatting on the pavement.
City driving was pretty straightforward. The blocks were rectangles and squares; the lights turned red and green at predictable intervals. By the turns Jack took, Emlyn knew they were going to Maris’s apartment building. She wanted to get close but couldn’t risk it, so she just moved over a block and drove parallel to the van, crossing the cross streets exactly when they did, but a block to the east. It was fun and it worked.
Emlyn did not waste time looking for a space but just double-parked. She left her blinkers on so that anybody glancing at the vehicle would expect her back momentarily. She jumped out and ran to Mark’s, staying on the opposite side of the street and stooping behind all the parked cars. It was much easier than when she had done this carrying a mummy. Parked cars gave her a solid fence to hide behind. She stationed herself directly across from the van.
Jack, too, double-parked, and he and Maris both got out. There did not appear to be a doorman in the building. Maybe he went off at midnight, or maybe they didn’t have one. Emlyn liked having a doorman.
Together, Jack and Maris carried their plastic bag. Maris opened the outside door and then the inside door, and Emlyn could only guess what happened after that.
A moment later, Jack came back and just sat in the van.
Emlyn hoped nobody would drive by and see her peering between the hoods of cars she did not own. What if Maris could look down from her apartment? What if the people on this side had insomnia, and stood on their balcony with a cup of coffee, and called the police about the female crawling around their Buick?
Five entire minutes passed.
Then Maris was back. No mummy.
She and Jack talked, Maris ran back inside, and Jack drove away.
So he was the keeper of the saw, and Maris was holding the mummy.
Emlyn went back to her car and drove home. She had never entered her own parking garage in her own building at night, by herself. It was scarier than the basement of the museum. She could not think of a reason why she should have the car at this hour—she, Emlyn, whose specialty was thinking of falsehoods and lies. Her mind was pudding and her heart racing, and although it must be physiologically impossible, her racing heart was blinding her.
She wanted no doorman, no elevator guy, no neighbor to pop up out of the shadows and grab her arm, recognizing her in the night, demanding to know where she had been and what she was doing and maybe even march her inside to be interrogated by her parents.
But, of course, that wouldn’t happen. Nobody would question her. Nobody would report her. She had let her nerves gain control.
She let herself into the apartment. It was silent. Nobody had awakened and found her gone. Nobody had panicked and called the police.
She put the car keys down where her mother or father had set them earlier.
She lay awake in the silent dark of her bedroom, the hours creeping toward dawn, as she planned the second theft of the same mummy.
Seventeen
EMLYN WAS ASTONISHED WHEN she woke up, because this proved that she had, in fact, slept.
She had not set her alarm.
She was horrified to see that it was nine in the morning. School had started an hour ago. Emlyn was never late. She was never sick, either, and never missed school. She jumped up and ran through the apartment, but everybody was gone.
Nobody would have looked in on her. When they didn’t see her at breakfast, they’d assumed she got up early, which she did a lot, and was already at school. The library opened an hour ahead of classes, and Emlyn often did her homework in the morning instead of the night before.
She felt weirdly isolated from the four other people who lived in this place. They knew nothing of what she was doing or thinking or suffering. It should have been lovely to be home alone in the soft morning peace of the apartment. She rarely saw the sun at this angle in these rooms. But she felt a queer anguish, as if she were some trespassing stranger.
She wanted almost desperately to hug her parents and even embrace her little brothers. Then she pulled herself together, dressed in her usual blend of khaki pants, dark sweater, white shirt, collar barely showing. She fixed her hair, put on a little lipstick, and reviewed her next theft. There was no way to do this one except by demand.
She walked the long, sunny blocks to Maris’s apartment.
Maris would have gone to school no matter how tired she was and no matter how much she wanted to examine the mummy. If you hadn’t been in school that day, you weren’t allowed to go to any athletic practice or drama rehearsal. The rule was that if you weren’t well enough to go to class, you weren’t well enough to go to rehearsal. Maris had a lead; she would never skip rehearsal. She’d sleep through classes and fail quizzes instead.
Maris’s mother worked at home. She was a consultant for something, Emlyn couldn’t remember what. Her entire life was phone and fax. They had a million phone lines at Maris’s, and you weren’t supposed to use any of them.
Emlyn took the elevator up, knocked on the apartment door, and Maris’s mother opened it. “Why, Emlyn,” she said, confused. “Whatever are you doing here? Come right in, darling. Are you all right? Isn’t this a school day? What day is this, anyhow?”
“No, you’re right, it’s Tuesday. Don’t panic. I’m so sorry to bother you at work, I won’t be here a second. It’s just that Maris is storing a huge art project for me, and I got my times wrong, and I have to get it to art class right now. It’s about five feet tall. It’s very fragile. Papier-mâché. It’s a person, see, and I didn’t have five feet of space in my apartment, so Maris volunteered.”
“Well, darling,” said Maris’s mother, even more puzzled. “There’s no place here, either. Maris has put it under her bed or else it’s hanging from the ceiling. Those are the choices. Our rule is, you buy something, you throw something else out. Otherwise we’d have to walk on top of our belongings. Let’s go look. I’m skeptical, darling. If there was space for five feet of anything, I’d have filled it.”
Maris’s room was extremely small and extremely crowded, with built-ins and cubbies and hooks and possessions overflowing and tipping and jammed and doubled up.
Hanging by bungee cords from a ceiling hook, like a big, dead, vertical plant, were the taped-together trash bags. The chair Maris had stood on to hang it there was still right beneath the mummy. It looked like a suicide.
“I’m so lucky you’re home,” cried Emlyn, hopping up on the chair seat. She managed to ba
lance the mummy and free the bungee cords. She was amazed that the plaster had held. She would have expected the weight of the mummy to pull the whole ceiling down.
“I’m so glad I’m not an art teacher.” Maris’s mother shuddered. “What a mess it must be! Thirty teenagers making five-foot-tall papier-mâché dolls? How much papier-mâché is that? How much spilled goop?”
Emlyn threaded herself and her five-foot burden around the corner and toward the door. “My mother feels just the same. There’s nothing messier.”
“Do you need help?” asked Maris’s mother, pushing the elevator button for her. “Shall I go down to the car for you?”
“Oh, no, thanks, papier-mâché hardly weighs a thing,” said Emlyn, who had in fact blistered her shoulder from the friction of the mummy when she ran with it and was trying not to show the pain as the mummy now tore the blister open again. “Thank you so, so, so much. Bye now!”
She and Amaral rode the elevator down and left the lobby. Then she walked out into the daylight with a mummy in her arms.
In midmorning it was easy to flag a taxi. “Whatcha got?” said the driver. He was used to people carrying things around: porch chairs, long ceiling light tubes, baby carriages, Christmas trees. He helped her balance her package on the top of the front seat, sticking backward into the cab. Emlyn slid in back with the mummy’s feet and gave him her address. “It’s an art project for school. We made papier-mâché dolls.”
“Oh, yeah? The kind at kids’ parties? Where they whack ’em open with baseball bats and grab the prizes?”
“Exactly,” said Emlyn.
“Room for a lot of prizes in a doll that big,” said the taxi driver. “What’s the exact name? There’s a special name.”
Mummy, thought Emlyn, but she said, “Piñata.”
“Piñata,” repeated the taxi driver happily, and he dropped her off.
She repeated the piñata story to a resident of her building, to the doorman, the mailman, another neighbor, and finally, the elevator man. “Don’t you have school?” they all said, frowning.
Cities were supposed to be anonymous. What was this small-town character this one had suddenly developed? She was sick of their interest in her life. “School,” she agreed, smiling pleasantly. “It starts late for me today.”
“Oh,” they said, as if this were a sensible answer.
She got into the apartment without breaking her shoulder or her mummy. She put the mummy on her bed and peeled back the trash bags.
Amaral-Re was untouched. Her painted eyes still watched the ceiling, and her linens were tightly bound.
The bandages had been wrapped with astonishing care: woven basket-style, their pattern formed little squares surrounded by larger squares, like picture frames with many mats. Somebody had loved Amaral-Re. Somebody cared how she looked for eternity. Once she would have had a coffin, perhaps carved of cedar and shaped like the girl herself, adorned with gilding and paint. This would have nested inside a sarcophagus, a huge stone chest of granite. Now she was alone, with nothing between herself and a very greedy world except Emlyn.
Emlyn, whose plan had been to do bad things.
Emlyn, whose integrity did not exist.
Emlyn, the sole possessor of gold and ancient treasure.
Emlyn paced around the apartment.
It was too bad that her brothers would never know about this. Once they stopped laughing (my sister stole a mummy!), they’d be right there with the saw. Little boys love blood and gore, even when it’s been dry for three thousand years.
On her next pass through the front room she saw the car keys, motionless on the high narrow table exactly as she had left them in the middle of the night. Neither parent had driven to work. She should have known that, because taking the car depended on the weather. Rain meant car. Sun meant bus or walking. She had run down sunny streets to collect the mummy from Maris’.
The car was available.
Emlyn’s skin changed texture, pricking and trembling. Had it felt like this for Amaral-Re when they started to embalm her, when the natron was poured over her and the salt began its terrible work? She didn’t feel a thing, Emlyn told herself sharply. She was dead.
Between mail-order catalogs nobody had had time to leaf through and the catalogs in which her brothers had circled things they couldn’t live without lay the morning paper. Emlyn rarely glanced at the newspaper. News was so remote. It had no connection to the world of school and sports, of friends and fights, of triumph and hope.
A shaft of yellow sunlight cast a long, slanting rectangle over the headlines of the front page.
MUSEUM DIRECTOR ARRESTED FOR MUMMY THEFT.
She sat at the table like a grown-up, her morning paper in one hand, her glass of orange juice in the other.
Over the summer, said the article, scientists doing studies of mummies held by museums asked Dr. Brisband to let them take Amaral-Re to the hospital for X rays and CAT scans. There, radiologists could determine many things about the living person who had become that mummy—health, diseases, condition of teeth, the method by which the person had been preserved. They could determine age at death, and by charting the ages of all mummies in the study would know more about the life expectancy of people in ancient Egypt. Other scientists would take DNA samples, so the mummy’s genealogy could be studied. They would try to link this supposed princess, Amaral-Re, to other royal mummies.
The scientists were reassuring. Nobody would touch the mummy during these examinations, since if afflicted by bacteria, the mummy could still rot, even after all these centuries. Moving the mummy would be done by six people, three on a side, as gently as if it were a child with a fractured back, because it was easy to fracture the dried bones.
But Dr. Brisband (said the board) cared nothing about scientific advance. Dr. Brisband was not impressed with the Egyptologists who had contacted him. He felt they did not fully respect the integrity of the mummy. Their real reason for X-raying the mummies was to see what kind of jewels covered the corpses. He believed their goal was to be in a television special, the kind that exaggerated, or even lied, about the real history and value of an object. Dr. Brisband refused to permit Amaral-Re to be included in the study.
The Board of Trustees was furious. They overruled him. By unanimous vote, they agreed to submit their mummy to such an inspection.
It took only a Monday on which the museum was closed to visitors, and when the work was done the mummy was safely returned and nobody was the wiser.
And then the board was shown the X rays of the mummy.
Stupefying X rays; mesmerizing X rays.
The newspaper quoted a trustee. “Clearly, our mummy was a treasure lode. We instructed Dr. Brisband to arrange to have the mummy unwrapped. The museum is in need of funds. We have so many projects on which we cannot begin. What if we could pay for our new direction and our expanding collection by retrieving the treasures inside the mummy?”
The board had voted to unwrap the mummy? thought Emlyn. The board? The people responsible? The people voted into place to protect the museum? They, like Donovan, like Lovell and Maris and Jack, they, too, just wanted gold?
“It was my idea,” the chairman said, “to have a party. This idea met with great excitement. How much would you pay in order to take your turn unwrapping a mummy? I’ll tell you what you’d pay. A lot. You would get to be one of the first people on earth to see that gold. Think what a major fund-raiser the party would be! People would come from all over the world.”
No doubt this was true. People who had taken trips to the Cairo Museum, stared up at the Great Pyramid, shivered in awe at the feet of the Sphinx—of course, they would pay a fortune to be present at the unveiling of an ancient Egyptian treasure. They might not even care whether it turned out to be gold. They would just want to be there.
Emlyn was shivering all over.
Amaral, lying on her back, huge dark eyes staring at yet another ceiling, while people gnawed on her ribs like dogs. I’ll have a leg, I�
��ll have a wrist, give me a bone, give me a jewel.
Television cameras and silver-haired commentators, paid Egyptologists and snickering board members. Let’s auction her off! What am I bid? First the bones and then the skull.
Dr. Brisband had referred to this at his Friends’ meeting, but Emlyn had been too excited about her own project to listen. Emlyn had been scornful of Lovell, who had not even listened to herself. But Emlyn was no better; Emlyn had paid no attention to anything that mattered.
According to the paper, Dr. Brisband had had a serious fight with his Board of Trustees. The museum mummy party was to take place in January. Dr. Brisband said they would damage the mummy over his dead body! He would call in museum experts from all over the world; he would show them. But they overruled him once more and set the date for the mummy unwrapping party.
And now the mummy had been stolen. What more likely person to have snatched that mummy from its bier than Dr. Brisband himself?
“Dr. Brisband,” said the chairman, “would like us to believe that somebody managed to get into the museum—in spite of guards—and spirit the mummy away. That’s ridiculous. He stole the mummy for himself. He knows its value. The trustees have obtained a search warrant for Dr. Brisband’s home.”
The police confirmed that Dr. Harris Brisband had been alone in the museum when the mummy was taken. The guests at that private party had been in the theater, had come and gone by theater doors, and had not had access to the museum.
The man Bob, thought Emlyn, must have been a board member on Dr. Brisband’s side. He could say he’d seen Dr. Brisband briefly on the night the mummy was taken, but Dr. Brisband had stayed on alone.
They can’t arrest him just because he was in the museum, thought Emlyn. He’s the director, he’s always in the museum, there’s every reason why he ought to be in the museum and not a single reason why it’s suspicious. They don’t have any evidence because they can’t have any evidence, because I am the only person on earth who knows exactly what happened.
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