Mummy (17 page)

“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.

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.

She began to laugh a high, shuddery laugh. It was not loud and it was not strong, but it convulsed her, and she shivered at the horrible sound of her own laugh.

She could not return the mummy to the museum. The trustees would snatch Amaral-Re from her arms and send out the invitations for the unwrapping party.

She could not return the mummy to Dr. Brisband. He was safe only if he did not have the mummy. Were she to put the mummy on his doorstep, he would really be arrested.

If she tried to protect Dr. Brisband by saying, “I did it,” not only would she be arrested (if they’d arrest the director of the city museum, they would certainly arrest a plain old high school senior), but they would insist that she produce the mummy.

And then the same thing would happen: The trustees would arrange for Amaral-Re, princess, to be destroyed.

She had said to Lovell and Donovan, to Maris and Jack, that pyramids were beginning to look logical.

Indeed.

For where—where on this earth?—was she going to hide a mummy, if even the museum wanted to destroy that mummy?

Emlyn went back into her bedroom. She held her hand at a slant in front of her face so she would not have to see Amaral-Re’s sad eyes focused on her ceiling. But it was impossible. She knelt by her own bed, as one saying prayers, and stared at the gold and the indigo-blue of the guest in her house.

You are wrong, Harris Brisband, thought Emlyn. Amaral is not an object. She is herself. I owe you, Amaral. I became yours when I took you. And you became mine.

The integrity of the mummy.

Integrity meant having honor and truth in your soul. But it also meant completeness, soundness, unbroken perfection.

Emlyn lacked integrity. She had stolen.

But for the moment, Amaral still possessed her integrity.

Emlyn took her museum card from its hiding place in an old shoe box filled with index cards, notes from projects beginning in third grade. Yes, she was right. That card, too, used the word
stolen.

My heart has stolen forth and goes quietly to a place it knows well.

Was Amaral talking about death or love? Had she stolen away from her house to meet a boy she adored? Or had she stolen her last breath and gone quietly to another world?

And me, thought Emlyn. What have I prepared for all my life? To let Dr. Brisband be accused of stealing from his own museum? To let an innocent man lose his career and his future?

But if I tell, I will have to produce the mummy. And then it won’t be Lovell and Jack and Maris and Donovan with the rusty saw on the kitchen table. It will be the Board of Trustees with a shining stainless steel saw on the gleaming expanse of their table at their fund-raiser.

And Amaral’s integrity, and mine, will be ruined forever.

E
MLYN TOOK EVERY BOOK,
CD, stuffed animal, perfume bottle, and piece of junk off one of her shelves. She lifted the board from its angle irons. She slid Amaral onto the board, which was exactly long enough but not nearly wide enough. The board was twelve inches wide. Amaral, at the shoulders, was several inches more.

From a long, shallow kitchen drawer filled with oddities, Emlyn got a roll of wrapping paper. It took an entire roll of Scotch tape and every scrap of wrapping paper in the house: birthday, Christmas, Valentine’s Day, and wedding shower included. Amaral looked spectacular. Anybody would want that present.

Emlyn put on a jacket with huge baggy pockets. Then she grabbed a flat sheet from the linen closet, folded it until she could jam it into one of the pockets, dropped the car keys into another pocket, and shouldered Amaral: board, paper, ribbons, mummy, and all.

“Wow,” said the elevator guy. “Somebody’s getting a cool present.”

“You bet,” said Emlyn. “I don’t do things by halves.”

He went with her to the car, and together they opened the rear of the wagon, and Emlyn crawled inside to put the backseat down. Now she took the foot end of Amaral and the elevator guy helped with the head end, and they slid the mummy neatly into the Ford. “Thanks,” said Emlyn.

“What is it?” he asked.

“That papier-mâché doll I brought in earlier this morning,” she said. “It’s a surprise.”