The Vandemark Mummy (23 page)

“But why did Ken stop by here, on his way to the airport?” Phineas asked. He swished the last bite of pancake around in the pool of maple syrup on his plate and popped it into his mouth. He
loved
maple syrup. If he'd been alone, he'd have leaned his face over to lick what was left on the plate.

“With your mouth closed, please,” Althea said, for about the sixteenth time. Phineas closed his mouth and chewed on. “You're revolting,” she said, just as he'd known she would.

“A few more?” Mr. Hall asked. Phineas nodded his head. Pancakes for lunch—but could it be lunch if it was the first meal you ate in a day?

“Anyway, why did he?” Phineas asked again. “The rest of it makes sense, trying to convince us that the crown was what the thief was after, and then calling up so the mummy would be returned safely. Even destroying her feet makes sense. But what's the sense in stopping by our house, when he—?”

Mr. Hall stood by the stove, watching over the pancakes on the griddle. They'd been up for a couple of hours, just talking about Ken, and what had happened, making sense out of all the pieces now that they knew how to fit them together.

“To gloat?” Althea suggested.

“That's a depressing thought,” Mr. Hall said. He slipped a stack of four pancakes onto Phineas's plate. “No more, the cook is retiring.”

Phineas set to work buttering. “I don't think it was gloating. If it was me, if I'd been him—I think I'd have wanted to make sure we weren't suspicious of me. We weren't suspicious, were we, Dad?”

“Not a bit. Trusting babes, that's what we were.”

“But what would he have done if you had been suspicious?” Althea asked.

Phineas poured syrup over the pancakes. He wasn't hungry, but they tasted so good he didn't want to stop eating. “What I'd have done in that case is gone back and turned you loose. That way, there was only the question of breaking and entering, and the damage to the mummy. That all could have been”—he took a bite, chewed, remembering to keep his mouth closed, and swallowed—“like, a plea of temporary insanity. A lighter
sentence, or maybe even everything could have been hushed up.”

“And if you weren't suspicious?” Althea asked. “Which you weren't.”

“Then I'd have figured that I would get away with it,” Phineas explained. “And felt pretty smart.”

“But Fin, how could he think that when he still had to explain about the poem. Or the fragment, or whatever it is. People would ask where it came from, otherwise it could be a fake. How was he going to explain that?”

Phineas had no idea what Ken had in mind. “If it was me, I'd have hoped I'd figure out something, when I needed to. Ken looked like he thought he could do anything, didn't he, Dad? You didn't see him, Althea, he looked like he'd just tricked everyone into electing him president of the world. So he must have thought he could get together a good enough story. As long as you didn't turn up to expose him.”

Phineas heard his own voice go stiff at the last sentence. So, apparently, did his father, because Mr. Hall's next question was, “You're not thinking of a career in crime, are you, Phineas? You seem to be revealing an aptitude for it, in the last twenty-four hours.”

Phineas grinned. It was a sort of compliment. Besides, they were all three sitting around their kitchen table, all freshly showered and ready to go together down to the police station, all well fed, and they'd been talking together about something they were all three interested in. Everything felt fine, everything was okay.

“What I have trouble understanding is how he thought he could get away with it,” Mr. Hall said.

“I can't understand what he wanted to do it for, in the first place,” Phineas said. “Except,” he added, before anyone else had a chance to say anything, “he's a bad person.”

“Doesn't that depend what you think bad or good is?” his father asked. “If you define good as what benefits you—”

“Come off it, Dad,” Phineas said. “Nothing that lets you tie somebody up, and gag them so they can't yell for help, and leave her where you hope she can't be found, can be good.”

“Not found until I was dead,” Althea corrected, quietly.

Phineas hadn't wanted to actually say that.

“Listen, kids, I agree with you. I think you're absolutely right, Phineas. I'm just taking it from another angle, just thinking. In a way, it's survival of the fittest. The fittest survive, so if you survive you know you're fittest, so you do anything you can to survive.”

“That depends on what fittest means,” Phineas argued. “I know about Darwin, but fittest is different for human beings. At least, in terms of what they ought to do.”

“We hope so,” his father said.

“My trouble is,” Althea said, “that I can sympathize with him. No, I really can. I wouldn't do it, myself—I couldn't, at least I hope I couldn't, I can't imagine that I could, but—if Ken was the one to discover a Sappho
poem, he'd be famous. His career would be made. Harvard might even call him up and offer him a job. You didn't see his house, Fin—it was expensive, and the kitchen had everything in it, huge stove and microwave, a little TV built into the wall, processor and blender, everything expensive, and—he must have felt like nothing next to his wife.”

Phineas wasn't sure about either one of them. There was his father turning it into some philosophical question, and his sister looking at it as if it was part of the equal rights problem. As far as he was concerned, it was a bad thing to do and he was glad Ken had been caught. “I hope he rots in jail,” Phineas said.

“Oh, so do I,” his father agreed.

“Me too,” Althea said.

“Then why are you justifying him?” Phineas asked.

“I'm not,” Mr. Hall said, surprised. “There's no justification for what he did to Althea.”

“Or the mummy,” Althea added.

“Change of subject,” Mr. Hall announced. “When we talk to your mother tonight, I want you two to go gently with her. One of the things she knew, without knowing how it would feel, is that we'd be able to get along fine without her.”

“We almost didn't,” Phineas pointed out.

“Yes, well, be sure she knows you think that,” his father said. “Are you two ready? Put your plate in the sink, Fin, and we'll go pick up O'Meara. Your date.”

“She's not my date,” Phineas said. “She was just hinting so badly, and she was here last night trying to help,
and—it's not a date. Or,” he turned the tables on his father, “if she's anyone's date it has to be yours, because you're the right age.”

“I'm much too old for her,” his father protested.

Phineas and Althea exchanged a look.

“And I'm not eligible,” he said. “I'm
married
,” he reminded them.

“There is that,” Althea agreed, with mock solemnity.

At the police station, the Halls were taken into a room with glass walls and a glass door; in the center of the room was a long table. They sat around one end of the table, Althea between her father and Phineas, and O'Meara at Phineas's other side. “Wait here,” they'd been told.

O'Meara took her pad and pen out of her big purse. She took a breath. “I didn't know that was your wife,” she said. “If I had, I'd have said more, but how could I know? She could have been anyone. I don't know anything about your private life—well, not much anyway, I did know she lives in Oregon. Your wife. You aren't angry, are you? I can see why you might be and I do apologize. I can see she might have misunderstood. What I was doing at your house at that hour. I can see
that I should have told her more. But do you mind if she's a little jealous? Or, wasn't she jealous? I don't want to assume anything, but she obviously misunderstood—and anyway, I don't think a woman should have children unless she's planning to stick around to take care of them as long as they need her. Although,” she said, turning to Phineas and Althea, “I guess you didn't need her. Did you. I guess you did take care of yourselves. Wrong again, O'Meara,” she said, and laughed a short laugh. “And to think that Dr. Simard is really a crook. And to think that I have the exclusive.”

“You have it as long as you sit quiet,” Mr. Hall said to her.

O'Meara nodded her head and pressed her lips together. She held her pen poised over the notebook. Her eyes shone.

Detective Arsenault came into the room, but he didn't greet them like a friend. He didn't sit with them, either. He sat at the center of one side of the table. Phineas decided that the detective had the kind of face, with bags under the eyes, that always looked tired, whether he was or not. “They're bringing him in now,” the detective said.

Suddenly, Phineas wanted to go home. It was one thing to talk about Ken in the abstract, about what he'd done and why; it was another to think about having Ken actually there, facing them. Phineas squirmed in his chair. Althea sat quietly beside him.

Ken came through the door angry. He wore the same suit he'd worn the day before, only it was rumpled. Mr. Fletcher was right behind him, and one look at the stern
lawyer, with his three-piece suit and his briefcase, made Phineas uneasy. If Mr. Fletcher was defending Ken . . . Phineas had the sudden uneasy sense that things might not be as simple as he'd thought.

Ken sat down at the opposite end of the table, with Mr. Fletcher next to him. It was like boxers in a ring, with the detective as referee, but Phineas wasn't sure who it was who was supposed to fight with Ken. As soon as he had sat down, Ken had something to say.

“What's this all about, Sam?” he demanded. “I'm glad to see that you decided to turn up, Althea. You had us all worried. But what's she doing here?” he asked, pointing at O'Meara. “Since when is the press present at what I take is a routine questioning?”

He turned, as if he expected Mr. Fletcher to say something, but the man was taking a long yellow legal pad out of his briefcase, uncapping a thick black fountain pen. Mr. Fletcher didn't say anything.

Nobody said anything.

“Forgive me for being so dense,” Ken said sarcastically. “You have to remember that I've crossed the Atlantic twice, in twenty-four hours. And not, mind you, on the Concorde.”

Nobody said anything.

“Have it your way.” Ken leaned back in his chair. He didn't look worried. He looked like someone who was about to play the winning card.

It made Phineas nervous. It wasn't the way the guilty person was supposed to look.

Detective Arsenault cleared his throat. “There is a charge of kidnapping.”

“Who is it that I'm supposed to have kidnapped?” Ken asked. Then he looked at Althea. “Oh, Althea,” he said, sounding as if she was a favorite student he'd just caught cheating on a test.

Althea studied her hands and didn't say anything.

“With what purpose am I supposed to have kidnapped her? I hope she isn't crying rape. I know she's attractive—”

Althea's head jerked up.

“—and intelligent, which can't help but appeal to me—”

Althea's cheeks were pink.

“—but she's just a girl. I'm a grown man, I wouldn't ever think of a schoolgirl as a—an object of passion.”

He spoke with conviction and sincerity. Even Phineas believed him. But rape wasn't the question. Ken had taken the conversation and turned it into an accusation of something he was innocent of. In another minute, Ken would walk out, walk away, get away with it.

“You tried to murder her,” Phineas said, since nobody else seemed about to say anything. He spat the words out of his mouth as if they were pieces of liver that he'd somehow bitten into. “Nobody would have gone into that storeroom for weeks, and you know that. You knew it.”

“Is that what she said I did?” Ken asked. “Oh, dear. Oh, dear, Althea. I'm afraid I'm going to have to tell the truth about what happened. I didn't intend to, but now I have to. The truth is—I wasn't going to say anything to you, Sam, I was going to spare you this—that Althea came to my house. She came on to me, Detective, isn't that the phrase? Propositioned me. Of course, I
told her no. She took it badly. I don't know where she went after that, or what happened to her, although I gather it was unfortunate. I am sorry, Althea,” he said. “I never meant to tell anyone about the shameful scene.”