The Vandemark Mummy (13 page)

Detective Arsenault went over to look more closely. “What is it, gold?”

“Gilded bronze.” Ken turned around to put the wreath back on the shelf. “It worries me, Sam.”

Detective Arsenault didn't give Mr. Hall a chance to speak. “You think that's what the thief was after?”

“How would I know?” Ken asked. “But if I were a thief, it's what I'd take.”

“You'd have to know your stuff, though, wouldn't you? To know its value,” the detective pointed out.

“If I were a thief, I'd make a point of knowing my stuff,” Ken announced.

Nobody said anything for a while. They were all waiting to be told what to do next, except for Detective Arsenault, who must have been wondering what he should tell them to do next, or so Phineas thought. “Place is like a tomb,” the detective said.

“Mr. Hall?” Mrs. Batchelor had finally made up her mind to speak. She cleared her throat. “If you would prefer, my husband was sincere in his offer to have the crown stored at the museum.”

Althea looked at Phineas, and he thought he knew what she was thinking. “I might take him up on that,” their father said.

“My husband is at the museum until seven on Wednesdays, because the museum is open Wednesday evenings until seven. You could call him now, from my office, and I'm reasonably confident that the crown could be taken into safekeeping tonight.”

“That sure would take a load off my mind, Sam,” Ken added, as if Mr. Hall was hesitating. “In fact, why don't I stick around to ride shotgun when we move it. My car's out back.”

“Then I'll be the one riding shotgun,” Mr. Hall pointed out. “Detective Arsenault, is there any objection to moving it? Always assuming the museum will accept it.”

“I don't think you need worry about that,” Mrs. Batchelor said.

“I see no difficulty,” the detective answered. “Although my hunch is that it's the mummy he was after. Since he could have grabbed that crown and been gone, even with the alarm going. But I'll be the first to admit I'm no expert,” he said, with a nod at Ken.

“Besides, we're taking the mummy off first thing in the morning, for X rays,” Phineas's father said. “And as soon as you give the okay, which I hope will be immediately, they're ready to put a new door on here, with a new lock, to which only the captain of the security guards and I will have keys. No insult intended, Ken.”

“None taken,” Ken said. “I'm going to be leaving the country so soon, it would be silly to be given the new key.”

“And the alarm's still in place?” Detective Arsenault asked.

Mr. Hall nodded.

“I think you've done everything you can. I don't think there's any danger of a repeat visit. I figure, it was probably kids. It's summer,” he said glumly, “kids get bored, they read the paper too. But at least your thief wasn't a professional, which is what would worry me, speaking personally.”

“How do you know he wasn't?” Mr. Fletcher asked.

“Well, sir, in the first place, he wouldn't have jimmied the doors. He'd have had a set of skeleton keys. Secondly, he'd have spotted the alarm, and turned it off. But mostly, a professional would have succeeded.”

It was eight o'clock before Althea and their father got home, with Ken Simard tagging along behind them. Phineas took one look at his father and got three cans of chicken noodle soup out of the cupboard. He turned on the oven to four hundred degrees, and started buttering the tops of saltines while the soup heated. They were all too wiped out to say anything and Phineas was too busy to talk—putting the cookie pan of buttered crackers into the stove, setting the table—

“Ken, will you be staying for supper?” he asked. “It's just canned soup and crackers.” Sometimes, with guests who wouldn't go away, you had to make your hints pretty loud and clear.

“Gee, you know? I'd like to. If it's not too much trouble. If there's enough for me. If you don't mind, Sam?”

It was lucky he didn't ask Althea if
she
minded. Phineas grinned into the simmering soup, pale yellow with chunks of chicken and streaks of noodle.

“Won't your wife be expecting you?” Mr. Hall asked. Phineas wondered if that was the grown-up version of a hint. If it was, Ken missed it entirely.

“Michelle's in Boston, looking into a company that might be a good subject for a takeover bid. She's got a full week scheduled, which means she won't be here to see me off on my great adventure. However, that's the way it is, if we're married to successful women with careers of their own, isn't it?”

Phineas set out four soup bowls, four spoons, four glasses. He was doing what his mother would have done. He didn't mind that. Then he asked, as his mother would have, “Do you want a beer?”

Both men did.

Phineas opened two cans and poured them into glasses. It wasn't so bad, being a housewife. He had come back to an empty house, watched a rerun of “Magnum,” then a rerun of the “Cosby Show,” then a rerun of “New-hart,” and now they were all thanking him for making dinner. Ken was more grateful than the others.

“Really good, Phineas,” he said, as if Phineas had done anything more than open three cans and add water. “I for one will sleep better, knowing the crown is safe. I know, I know,” he raised a hand as if Mr. Hall were about to say something, which he clearly wasn't since he
was spooning soup into his mouth as fast as he could, “it's your concern, not mine. I admit to feeling—not exactly proprietary, but perhaps the analogy is to a groom in an arranged marriage, waiting for his affianced to grow up? I've had a couple of ideas for the paper, but what I'd really like to try is”—he pushed the half-empty soup bowl away and leaned forward on his elbows—“something for a more popular market. Maybe the magazine section of the
Times
? Or the
Atlantic, Harper's
, something in that class. To explain the beauty of the thing, the craftsmanship, the symbolism of its use. It could be a crossover paper. So I'm in the happy position of having something to go away for, and something to come back to.”

“What is it that's waiting for you in England, Ken?” Mr. Hall asked. He took some crackers. “Anyone else want peanut butter with these?”

“Waiting for certain? Nothing, of course. Nothing's certain until you hold it in your hand, is it? But at the Bodleian, anything might turn up. They have wonderful materials, and with all the bequests over the centuries, they have so much that they haven't cataloged everything they have. You can never tell what might turn up—especially among the papers of those nineteenth-century explorers and travelers, who bought up whatever. If I let my imagination go unreined, I dream of Platonic dialogue, or an unknown Aristophanes. Imagine the fallout from something like that, Althea. I heard of a man who discovered a Marlowe manuscript nobody knew about, at the Bodleian, this was in the twenties,
not all that long ago. Sometimes, recently, I've felt that my fortunes are about to change.”

“For the better, I assume,” Mr. Hall said, trying to lighten things up.

But Ken couldn't be distracted. “I'm not the only one to hope for Harvard, am I? A scholar wouldn't feel like a fish out of water the minute he stepped off campus there. That's how I feel here, off campus, especially out where we live—like a very small fish out of a very small pond. At Harvard—everyone knows the scholars, and admires them. Well, as always, I'm talking too much. I've got a busy night, big day tomorrow, lift-off time is three o'clock for the shuttle to New York. I guess I ought to be on my way. Thanks for the supper. Thanks also for setting my mind at ease about the crown. I don't know what that vulture lawyer's hidden agenda is, whatever the family puts him up to, but I bet that you got in its way tonight.”

“For that, you owe me,” Phineas's father said.

Ken looked surprised, alarmed.

“It's been a horrible evening,” Mr. Hall explained. “First all that waiting around, to get the new door hung, and a lock in, then for Mark Batchelor to make his appearance with the papers for me to sign.” By then, Ken realized that Mr. Hall was half joking, exaggerating everything. “Pelting across Portland—Althea in the backseat with the crown on her lap, me getting nervous every time we stopped for a light—And then Mark Batchelor making the process at the museum vault as slow as a coronation. . . .”

Both men stood up. “I don't think he delayed on purpose,” Ken said. “Why would he? But as Lucille will tell you, if you're ever foolish enough to get her started, as a curator he is a guardian of Art. Capital A, Art. Capital G, guardian too. You weren't surprised at all the paperwork, were you? You don't think . . ?”

“Think what?”

“Nothing. Nothing. I didn't mean anything. Although I personally thought Lucille was looking just a little too pleased. Didn't you?”

“Frankly, I'm too tired to notice anything or anyone. Even to take offense.”

When Mr. Hall returned to the kitchen and sank into his chair, Althea greeted him. “Ken's tedious, isn't he?”

“Seriously wimpy,” Phineas corrected her.

“Unlike your father, with his boyish charm,” Mr. Hall reminded them. “Your father who has never uttered a boring word. Who is a macho model for both of you.”

“Okay,” Althea said. “It was snide. But what got him going tonight? He was unusually verbose, you have to admit that, Dad.”

“I admit,” Mr. Hall said. “I apologize. I didn't think he'd stay for dinner.”

“I think he likes being where the excitement is,” Althea said, and yawned. “You can go with Dad tomorrow morning, Fin, for the X ray. I'm going to sleep in, and wake up when I feel like it, and get some work done.”

“That sounds all right.” Phineas had never ridden in an ambulance.

“We have to meet them at six,” his father warned him. “At the parking lot entrance.”

Althea smirked. “I put my hours in today, while you were probably vegged out in front of the TV.”

“It's okay, nobody has to come with me. You don't have to, Phineas.”

“But I want to,” Phineas said, which was mostly true.

*  *  *

So there he was at 6:00
A.M
., standing in chilly damp air that was barely light although the sun was long risen. “One misty, moisty morning,” his father recited, and drank from the mug of coffee he'd carried with him. Phineas hadn't brought anything to eat or drink and he was already sorry.

“Have I got time to run home and get something to eat?” he asked.

“Not if they're on time. Stick with me, son. I'll take you out for breakfast while they're doing the X rays.”

“Nothing will be open.”

“There'll be a cafeteria at the hospital.”

“I'm starving.”

“No you're not. Very hungry, maybe, but nowhere near starving. Listen, I bet that's them now.” He drained the mug and jammed it into the pocket of his yellow rain jacket.

The square shape of the ambulance emerged from the drizzly fog, its headlights glowing. It pulled up beside them and a man climbed down from the passenger seat. He went to open the rear door. A young woman got out from behind the wheel. She was long-legged and her red hair was cut to brush back short from the sides of her face but left hanging long down her back. She wore jeans, and a jeans jacket. Her mouth worked steadily
at a wad of gum. She looked bored. “You Samuel Hall?” she asked and when Mr. Hall said yes she said, “Okay, where's this body at?”

“It's a mummy, actually,” Mr. Hall said.

“I know that.”

Phineas and his father led the way, while the two attendants came behind, wheeling the stretcher. The cellar lights turned on automatically at 5:30, so the hallways were brightly lit. The bare cement walls looked as cold as they felt. Phineas rubbed at his arms. White cinder block walls and blank doors, with numbers painted beside them—that was all there was to see. The wheels on the stretcher had a rattle-and-hum sound that echoed in the empty hallways. Their four sets of sneakers made soft, unechoing sounds. They stopped in front of room 015.

The door was open. Except for the light from the hallway, the room within lay dark.

“What—?” Mr. Hall said, and flicked on the light switch.

The mummy was gone. All that was left was the shroud she'd been lying on, like an old sheet left on the table, an old dirty sheet.

Phineas went up to the table. He thought, somehow, that if he got closer he would see the mummy, even though it was obvious that she wasn't there.

“Dammit,” his father said, in a low choked growl. “Damn and blast, and—”

The young woman came to stand beside them. “You been ripped off, mister,” she said.

“I don't understand,” Mr. Hall said.

“To the tune of one body,” she said.

“Not a body, a mummy,” he corrected her.