Mummy (11 page)

And just because there are only two cars doesn’t mean there are only two people here. A hundred other guards could have parked on the street

She and the mummy eased out, Emlyn keeping a toe in the door so it wouldn’t close. There was the terrible possibility that she could not get out of the courtyard, either, and would have to go back into the basement and find another route. She could not let the basement door lock after her.

She had expected the basement to be below ground, but now that she thought about it, you had to go up a lot of steps to get into the building’s main floor, steps on which she had sat and had ice cream and waited for people. But she’d been too dumb to analyze this. The first floor was high. So the basement was not a basement but a ground-level storage area. She emerged onto the truck-high cement walkway she’d seen from the road.

The garage door was marked by red reflectors.

She could not see any other door, although she knew there was one. She could not walk around the entire enclosure feeling for cracks. Especially not with a mummy in her arms. Especially with time running away from her.

She looked at the lit windows. Still blurry, definitely covered in some way.

There were no handy rocks or sticks with which to prop open the door. She took off one black glove and wedged it between the door and its lock.

She thought hard.

People got careless, and this was a careless museum to begin with. They did not have alarms, they did not have grilles at every opening, they did not frequently examine every room every night. They hired secretaries who talked too much and guards who just assumed that an office door that ought to be locked was locked.

And so it was just possible that the museum van had been left open.

Because it was quickest and because she could not use up more precious seconds, Emlyn lifted Amaral once more, carrying her horizontally on her shoulder, and walked straight across the parking area right under the blazing lights.

She had guessed right. They were counting on the courtyard for security. The driver’s door of the van was not locked.

She opened the driver’s door, leaned up, and tapped the automatic garage door opener with her finger. Then she shut the van door and ran across the entire, wide-open, well-lit asphalt to the garage door. It clattered and clanked—and opened, rising upward.

Emlyn ran as if she were carrying the scull to the river, as if there were a whole team with her, as if they were all yelling to raise her own excitement, as if there were no mummy and no museum and no danger and no drowning in gold.

She ducked out into the street. She was on the far side of the museum and had to circle two long blocks to get back to the van. She ran.

I’m out, I’m out, I’m out! she screamed in her head. I have the mummy! I did it! I’m safe!

But she was not safe.

Emlyn ran the block, turned the corner, ran harder. She was now running past the windows of the mansion, and should Dr. Brisband look out, he would see—what?

Just a moving shape. Neither boy nor girl. As for the mummy, it would just be a thing.

She was falling apart.

Not the mummy. Emlyn. She was starting to sob, and she could not afford the breath or the breakdown. Her wrist felt rebroken and her shoulder dislocated. Her head ached and her fingers could hang on no longer.

She must get to the van.

The rows of parked cars seemed impenetrable. She had not looked at her watch in ages. Was it two in the morning? Or were people still having dinner and strolling around the block and getting in and out of their cars?

There was the van.

She darted between cars parked on her side, crossed the street, and got safely to the far sidewalk. Now there were two rows of parked cars between her and the museum. She did not see how she could support the weight of the mummy another step, but she had a half block to go. She was staggering, lurching, and the mummy was sliding inside its bag and blistering her shoulder, and then the side door of the van slid open and hands reached out to help.

“H
OUSTON!” YELLED JACK, Á
la space launches. “We have a mummy!”

They rested the mummy flat on the floor, her head behind the front passenger seat and her feet pressed up against the rear bench.

Jack threw his arms around Emlyn, no mean feat in the cramped van with the floor occupied. He hugged her exuberantly.

“Tell us everything!” demanded Donovan. He kissed her on the forehead and then on the cheek.

“Open the bag,” said Jack.

“We thought you’d never get here!” said Donovan.

“We’ve been crazy with worry,” said Jack “We’ve been on the phone every ten minutes with Maris and Lovell for advice.”

“Get going,” said Emlyn. “Now. I had to open the automatic garage door to get out. They know somebody was there who shouldn’t have been there. They just don’t know yet what I did. But they will. In one minute.”

“Right,” said Jack. “Right.”

He was so excited he ground the gears and the car sounded like wounded lions.

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.