The Vandemark Mummy (5 page)

Phineas nodded, as if now it was all clear to him.

“It's my father who is the most upset about this. This was the only chance to place a Vandemark gift in the halls of the MFA.”

“I can understand your frustration,” Mr. Hall said, distracting Mr. Vandemark's attention.

“It's not the money,” Mr. Vandemark said. “Nobody would have minded a building, nobody minds. In fact, we rather expected that.”

“Should I apologize?” Mr. Hall asked.

“I don't see what good that would do,” Mr. Vandemark said. “No, we have to grin and bear it, even you. Because I'm sure you agree that you don't have the qualifications—”

“Well,” Mr. Hall said, his eyes bright, “I'll do my best. If that's not good enough, your problems will be solved.”

“Although even this particular building project we have our doubts about. We feel the money would be better used in some forward-looking field. The sciences perhaps. Something with its eye to the future. I can promise you, however, that even if the terms Grandfather set up aren't met, no member of the family would attempt to take the money away from the college.”

Mr. Hall didn't say anything.

Mr. Vandemark didn't say anything.

None of the kids said anything.

After a while, Mr. Vandemark spoke again. “You'll want to see the provenance files, and I have your contract here, financial statements, a copy of the will. . . . Why don't you three go outside and play?” he asked, as if he had just noticed the children at the table.

*  *  *

Althea, Phineas, and Casey sat down in a row on the front steps, with Phineas in the middle. Casey studied his tasseled loafers, for a long time. Althea picked at the soles of her sneakers. Phineas didn't have anything to talk to anybody about. The sky was blue. The leaves rustled. You couldn't hear anything—no voices, no cars, nothing.

Finally Casey asked, “Are you two twins?”

“What?” Phineas asked. “Us?” he laughed.

“Well you look about the same age.” Casey brushed his hair back, as if it were allowed to grow long enough to fall over his forehead.

“Identical twins, right?” Phineas turned to grin at his sister.

Casey pulled at the tail of his tie. “Then how old are you?”

“Twelve.”

“Althea?”

“Fifteen next month.”

“Oh,” Casey said. He studied his loafers some more. His nose had an interesting bump about halfway down it. Phineas had enough friends to know that you couldn't
judge a kid by his parents. “I'm never good guessing ages,” Casey said. “All of my brothers and sisters are a lot older than I am. I'm thirteen,” he said, although nobody had asked him. “My next oldest sister is going to graduate from college next year. Princeton. I'm an afterthought. Where's your mother?”

“In Portland,” Althea answered, before Phineas could say anything.

“Mine stays in Boston, except for some weekends. We come up to Kennebunk for the summer. We always come up for the summer, even before Bush.”

Nobody said anything.

“All right, look,” Casey finally said, words bursting out of him. “I'm sorry about what my father's been saying. The trouble is, the family is used to getting its own way. Except for Great-Grandfather, nobody ever crossed the family, and as soon as he got old they moved in, with doctors and nurses and practically kept him a prisoner, to keep him from doing the things they didn't like. I know it's not your father's fault about the collection. I'm sorry about the way my father talks. Mother says that it's lucky he never had to work for a living, because he's so tactless he'd never have gotten above the bottom rung on any ladder. I said I was sorry.”

Althea was as puzzled as Phineas. “We don't mind,” Phineas said.

“I have a pretty crappy life,” Casey said.

“I'm going to the library.” Althea stood up. “I've got work to do.” She didn't ask if either one of them wanted to go with her. Phineas might have wanted to go with her, that afternoon.

“What work does she do?” Casey asked.

Phineas decided he might as well talk to the kid. He might as well find out if they had anything in common, since this was the first kid he'd met in Portland. Unless he wanted to be stuck dealing only with adults—and Althea—until school started, which he didn't, which he seriously didn't, he'd better make an effort. “She's studying Greek.”

“Why?”

“To learn it.”

“No, I mean why.”

“To learn it,” Phineas repeated, stubbornly. Then he reminded himself that Casey was just trying to be friendly. “She's got this idea, she wants to read Sappho in the original.”

“I guess Sappho's Greek?”

“Ancient Greek, even before Homer. You know Homer?”

“Not to say hello to.”

It was a pretty weak joke, but Phineas appreciated the effort.

“Why Sappho?” Casey asked.

“Because she's a woman, and a poet, and my mother always says women never had much of a chance to really accomplish much, in art. My mother's a feminist, and it always used to be she and Althea agreed about everything. See”—he turned to face Casey—“the Portland where my mother is is Oregon. She got a job there, and she took it.” End of subject, as far as Phineas was concerned. He got up from the steps.

“Is that what's wrong with your sister?”

Phineas turned around. “Nothing's wrong with Althea. Maybe she's shy, because people who don't know her think she's weird. Actually, she's just brilliant.” Phineas didn't know why he felt like he needed to defend Althea. She didn't need defending. “Maybe she is upset,” he admitted.

“But you aren't?”

Phineas shrugged.

“Why, did they fight a lot or something like that?”

Phineas drew the line. “What makes you so nosy?”

But Casey refused to take offense. “I thought—maybe we'd be friends, and if we were, I thought, I should know.”

“Why should we be friends?” Phineas demanded. He didn't care how rude he sounded.

Casey's face lit up with mischief, which made him look much more like someone Phineas would like to be friends with. It made him look like his flannels and blazer, tie and tasseled loafers were a costume. The wrong costume, Phineas thought.

“Because I know something you don't. The newspaper reporter was only guessing, but she was guessing right. There
is
a mummy's curse.” Casey was lying and Phineas knew it, and Casey knew Phineas knew. Casey was just messing around. “What nobody has told you, or your father, is that when my great-grandfather died he looked—nobody had ever seen anyone look like that before. They wouldn't let me see him, but Mrs. Willis went in, and she told me. He looked as if he'd seen something—and his heart stopped. Because when he saw it, it was so terrible, he died. And his hands . . .”
Casey held his own hands out in front of him, fingers outspread.

Phineas was mesmerized, waiting for whatever it was he was going to hear next, which would be worse than anything he'd ever heard or imagined before in his life.

“His hands—both of them—all of the fingers were disjointed. The knuckles pulled out of their sockets. As if he'd been trying to pull back against something, something with incredible force that was pulling him out of bed, to take him—Who knows where? Who knows what? Something so strong it dislocated his fingers, and you know what that means?”

Phineas shook his head. This was terrific.

“It means the thing probably had hands too.” Casey waited a beat. “Like a mummy had come up to his room, when he was alone in the middle of the night, and
pulled
his life out of him.”

“You're lying.”

“Am I?”

Phineas thought for a minute, checking his impression. “Yeah, you are.” Casey shrugged, grinned, shrugged again. “Listen,” Phineas said, “you want to go climb some trees? Or can you, in those clothes? There are some good trees right over there in the woods. I could show you some good climbing trees.”

Casey was already undoing his tie. “I've got plenty more clothes. Aren't you even a little scared of the mummy?”

“Why should I be?” Phineas asked. “It's just a dusty old dead person, isn't it?”

It was lucky for Phineas that the Egyptian Collection had turned up. It gave him something to write about to his mother, in the letter that accompanied a sock he'd worn for three days before he put it in a plastic bag, put the plastic bag into a thick manila envelope, and put the whole shebang into the mail.

Phineas didn't like writing a letter to his mother. He'd have preferred talking to her. They had always talked a lot. But when she wasn't actually around, when she wasn't right there—yelling at him about his messy room or wondering if he was getting along all right with his friends or reminding him that he was one of the new generation of men with what she hoped would be a new attitude to women . . . It was easy to talk with his mother,
but he didn't have anything to say to her in a letter, not really. So he was glad the collection was there, to write about to her.

The Egyptian Collection also gave him somewhere to go and something to do. He only went as far as room 015 in the library cellar, and what he did there wasn't much—he just put his hands down into packing straw and pulled up whatever his fingers found—but that little was a little like Christmas, which made it an okay level of fun. It was like a Christmas where nothing was anything you were hoping for, but since everything was wrapped up there was some excitement in finding out what everything was.

Except when Mr. Hall had classes, they spent all day unpacking the collection. Dr. Simard joined them. He'd asked Mr. Hall's permission, as if he were a kid in a TV sitcom asking to use the family car; and Mr. Hall had said yes, as if he were the father and Dr. Simard was the kid. Between his father, and Dr. Simard, and Althea, there wasn't much they didn't know about the pieces in the collection. Phineas felt pretty stupid sometimes, but he didn't mind. Stupid was better than bored, and he was picking up some interesting new words, like wedjat and stela. Wedjat was his favorite, partly because the idea of the two Egyptian gods fighting, and one ripping out the left eye of the other, gave him the shivers. The collection contained what Ken called “A rather fine obsidian wedjat,” which stared out at Phineas from the shelf where they had placed it.

Dr. Simard had asked right away if they would all call him Ken, since they were all on the same work crew.
Phineas's father was about to object, but Ken looked as if it was something he really, really wanted, so Mr. Hall let it ride. Althea approved, but Phineas wasn't so sure; if grown-ups were equals, then they wouldn't leave you alone to be a kid. But there wasn't anything he could do about it.

In any case, they found out the first day they were unpacking that Ken wasn't going to be around all that much longer. He was going to study in England—“Oxford, I'm pleased to say. They have a papyrus collection I'd like to write a paper on.”

“Do you have a grant?” Mr. Hall asked, sounding impressed.

“Unfortunately not. My list of publications is good enough, but when nobodies at Nowhere University are writing your academic recommendations—you don't stand much of a chance, do you?” He gave them no time to answer. “But,” with a flash of teeth, “you can't keep a good man down. Isn't that what they say? Our finances permit me to go over for five weeks this summer, so I'm going ahead with the project, grant or no grant.”

Phineas held his breath and hoped Ken would stick to the subject of grants and off the subject of papers. He already knew too much about Ken's papers. Ken was only thirty-one, but he'd already published a dozen papers. Just writing the papers didn't count; you had to publish them for them to count. Count for what, Phineas wasn't sure.

“Did you ever publish anything, Dad?” Phineas asked. His father had his hands deep in a crate, and the other three were waiting to see what he'd pull out. Althea was
in her usual place on a stool at the end of the table, where she kept a list of what they unpacked, complete with brief descriptions.

“Just a couple of little pieces.”

“Time,” Ken called, holding his hands up in the familiar coach's signal. “Time, time out here.” Phineas couldn't help laughing. “Your father has a way of selling himself short, Phineas,” Ken said. “I read one of your papers, Sam, the one in the
Classical Language Journal.
The one on the history of the alpha privative.”

“That,” Mr. Hall said. He had both hands buried in straw, and pieces of straw in his hair and on his arms. “How did you come across that?”

“The library subscribes to
CLJ
, so when I looked up your publications, I found it. To see what kind of man you were.”

“Why would the alpha privative interest you?” Mr. Hall asked, not really paying attention.