Mummy (16 page)

Emlyn had no idea what their parents would think, or how much checking there was, or how much worry. But she
could
safely conclude that the mummy had not been cut. They were taking the mummy and the saw to a better location. And what might that be?

A location with no grandparents arriving soon.

One Emlyn would not know about and could not interfere with.

And where they could leave a mummy safely until they had time to use the saw.

Every one of them had to be in school in the morning, and school began at five minutes before eight. It was going to be three A.M. before anybody could get home and climb into bed. Tomorrow Donovan worked, Maris had play practice, Lovell soccer, and so did Jack.

Emlyn was sure, based on the party earlier that afternoon, that these four would not just grab any old ten minutes, split the mummy in half, and rip out what they wanted. They would make an event of it. They would want several hours, and they would want pleasures to accompany them: music, food, time to laugh, and time to celebrate.

So she would bet that they were not, in fact, going to tear open this mummy until next weekend. And she would also bet that even if Donovan and Lovell did not at this instant know what Jack and Maris were doing, Jack and Maris would not leave them out. They were a team; they needed all their players; it wouldn’t be fun with only half the team there.

But what fun it would be to outwit the outsider … Emlyn.

I haven’t played the game very well, she thought. If I wanted to keep my team on my side, I should have shared with them, told them more, giggled with them, trembled with them, let them in on my adventure. I actually chose to be the outsider. I didn’t let any of them be anything except escort or driver.

Saw in hand, Jack walked around the van to the driver’s door. He stood for a moment, looking up the road where Emlyn had driven her station wagon ten minutes earlier. Maris said something Emlyn could not hear. Illuminated by the ceiling light of the van, Maris looked incredibly beautiful. Her hair had fallen dramatically around her, and the light above shadowed her face. She, too, seemed immortal in her beauty.

But Jack paid no attention to her. He leaned forward and set the saw between the two front seats. Then, leaving his door open, Jack walked down the lane toward where she had parked the Ford.

Emlyn felt sick.

All he’ll find is an old car, the kind old people drive, she told herself. He won’t know it’s my car. In the suburbs, kids probably know one another’s cars, and the cars everybody’s parents drive as well. But we don’t recognize one another’s cars because we don’t drive them enough. Nobody’s ever picked me up at school in this car. I don’t have the slightest idea what anybody’s father or mother drives. Or if they drive at all.

So he can check the car out as much as he wants. It won’t tell him anything.

But Jack walked slowly. He wasn’t sure what he was anxious about. He paused in front of the third house, but the road had not yet curved, and Emlyn’s car was out of sight.

He shrugged visibly, came back to the van, got in, and drove away. Emlyn moved from pine to pine, watching his taillights. Much too quickly, the bright red pair of lights disappeared. Emlyn reconstructed the little road in her mind. Would he have reached the main road that fast?

She frowned a little and then followed carefully, threading her way from pine to pine, unsure of her footing; unsure of her reasoning.

Then she laughed silently. Yes. Jack had parked and turned off the lights and was waiting to see if anybody followed him out. So he
had
heard the car come down the road at the wrong time in the wrong season, and he
had
wondered.

Who was he afraid of?

She was sure he did not suspect that she, Emlyn, was smart enough to have followed him. So was he worried about police? Neighbors? Donovan? The museum?

Or was it just the general simmering sick worry when you knew you were wrong; you were terribly wrong; and you were deeply, horribly afraid that somebody else knew?

She sat on the ground again. She had waited a long time in the museum, and she could wait here, too. She did not believe Jack could wait. It was not his personality. She placed a private bet that he would last five minutes.

She lost. He didn’t last two minutes. He started up the van, drove off, and she even saw, through the yards and trees, his thoughtful turn signal as he headed onto the eight-mile stretch back to the interstate.

She ran back to the Ford. She’d catch up and follow at a distance; find out what this place was where they believed they could safely stash Amaral-Re.

Jack could not risk a speeding ticket, even at this hour. Maybe especially at this hour. Get stopped by the police in the middle of the night when you were not yet eighteen and it was entirely possible the police would ask him just what was that big plastic-wrapped object lying on the floor? She didn’t think they would have the right to search the van, but the police certainly knew about the missing mummy.

If you’re weren’t thinking about mummies, a big long old trash bag would just be odd; but if you had been told to keep your eyes out for a missing mummy (what jokes must be going the rounds over this!), that bump at one end and the triangular rise at the other might well remind you of feet and head … and mummies.

So Jack would set his cruise control just below the speed limit.

Emlyn set hers just above it. Jack and Maris had a two-minute start.

This time she felt like listening to music. She turned on her favorite station and sang along as she drove.

When she saw the van she stayed back so that she was nothing but a pair of headlights in their rearview mirror. Assuming they were headed home, there was only one possible exit for them to use. She let a couple of semis get between herself and the van. She’d see just fine when they took the exit and would have plenty of time to take it herself.

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.

E
MLYN 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 balance 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.