The Vandemark Mummy (16 page)

“Can we?” Mr. Hall asked.

“Why not? X ray's still open. Exactly how fragile is this thing?”

“Assume it's as fragile as spun glass,” Mr. Hall said.

“Or a spinal injury. You better let us handle it, then. Stand back—you too, mister. We'll carry the stretcher by hand,” she told her partner.

In no time, the garbage bags were lying in the back of the ambulance. Althea declined a ride. “We'll walk. I'd rather,” she said.

“But Althea—” Phineas started to say. He'd never ridden in an ambulance. He thought, if he asked, they might let him ride in back with the mummy, or with the garbage if that was what it turned out to be.

“So would Phineas,” Althea said.

His father was talking with the detective, and barely registered what she was saying. He got into Detective Arsenault's car. The ambulance pulled away. The detective pulled away.

“Thanks a lot Althea.” Phineas had half a mind to jog all the way to the hospital, to pay her back. “And we'll probably miss the excitement.”

“We'll just miss signing forms, and waiting. You've been X-rayed enough, Fin, you know how long it takes. Remember that sprained ankle? We sat around for three hours.”

“But when I broke my collarbone falling off the roof it only took—no time at all.”

“I want to talk with you,” Althea said, ignoring him, setting off. If she wanted to talk with him, why was she ignoring what he said? He fell into step with her anyway.

“I wonder if Dad will have them check to make sure the crown is safe,” Althea said.

“Why should he do that?”

“Because Ken says the crown is valuable, and taking the mummy could be only a blind, to distract us, and leave time to get the crown away, and hidden, until it can be sold.”

“But it's in the museum safe.”

“What if the Batchelors are the ones, though. What if—for example, he could have a duplicate made of the wreath, and then sell it, or use it in some way to get himself a better job. He could go to Egypt and claim to find it there, which would build his reputation. Would you know a fake, if it came back a fake? And she has keys, I bet she even has a copy of the new key to the door, so she could get the mummy out. She'd help him.”

“Then why go through the door with a blowtorch?” Phineas thought it was a brilliant point.

“To mislead us. Like we talked about the first time.
If the most important thing for her is keeping control over the library; if the library is like her child.”

“Wouldn't she worry about getting caught?”

“Nobody's ever in the cellars after dark. Even we aren't, and we're the only ones who've been there. They're closed up for the summer. So she could take all the time she needed. Or they could. Nobody would see them, if they took the mummy out the door into the parking lot.”

“I can't imagine it, Althea. Your imagination is getting you carried away.”

“Then who?”

“Why does it have to be someone we know?”

“It doesn't have to, but it probably is. I don't think it's Dad, do you?”

“What?”
They were on the sidewalk now, stopped for a light. Phineas just turned to stare at his sister.

“When marriages are in trouble, people begin to act strange. Out of character. Remember Karen's mother, the way she bought an Irish wolfhound? And nobody wanted a dog? Not even her? So who knows what Dad might do.”

“I don't think so,” Phineas said. He didn't ask Althea if she thought their parents' marriage was in trouble; he didn't want to hear her answer.

“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.

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 one 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.”