Mummy Read online

  Mummy

  Caroline B. Cooney

  This book is for Harold Hawkins, radiologist and mummy consultant, for Lynne Hawkins, librarian extraordinaire, and for Ann Reit, editor par excellence.

  Contents

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  A Biography of Caroline B. Cooney

  One

  EMLYN HAD A BAD streak.

  She was well aware of it and kept it contained. Others might yearn to be the hero and save the world or save the baby. Emlyn yearned to be a brilliant thief. Not your bloodthirsty type. Emlyn would never hurt anybody; never use a knife or gun.

  But she was continually making mental notes: seeing a place to stash loot, a situation crying out for photographs or blackmail, or trust where there should be locks. She set these notes on the shelf in her mind where she stored her wrong plans. As the years went by, it became an entire library in her head. Wrong things to do, and how to do them.

  If other girls were daydreaming about how to obtain a secret from a pharmaceutical research lab, or how to smuggle things on planes or falsify papers, they certainly never said so.

  Once Emlyn read a list of favorite fantasies. It was in a slick and glossy woman’s magazine, with pencil-thin models whose makeup and hair had a cruel geometry to make you shiver, or a wild lioness look to make you jealous. Between those covers, at least, fantasies revolved around beauty, sex, fame, power, and money.

  Emlyn was more interested in ways to acquire money. Especially ways that might seem illegal to some. She loved the phrase “insider information.” O! to be an insider who knew more and could pull it off.

  She had no idea what she’d spend the money on. Who cared? Emlyn did not enjoy shopping and could never think of anything she needed. She just wanted to get away with things.

  As time went by, she understood herself better. First, she wanted a great plan: a terrific, twisted scheme. Second, she wanted to make it work. Third, she wanted never to be caught.

  Emlyn believed she could have all three of these. The main difficulty, as Emlyn saw it, would be the temptation after the theft to tell other people what you had accomplished. It was clear to Emlyn that your triumphs must be personal. You would do your wrong thing, and do it brilliantly, but then it must be kept inside you forever. You could not share it. With anybody. For any reason.

  But of course Emlyn did nothing wrong, at any time or for any reason, because she was a good person, with good parents, attending a good school among mainly good people.

  Instead, she did things like study hard and sing in chorus and work on her watercolors and learn Spanish and star in volleyball and get bruised in field hockey and take up crew. Emlyn loved rowing. She loved the river below her and the rhythm around her.

  By the time Emlyn turned sixteen, she had done nothing wrong in her life, except an occasional fib. She had stolen nothing except a pencil once or twice, and that was by mistake.

  She began to feel that she could outgrow this desire to be deeply, successfully bad.

  She was at an age now where boys and girls began to date with some intensity, and she had begun to consider boys with a certain hope and ache. She began to dress for them, posture for them, flirt with them.

  But around the edges of her soul, and sometimes taking over her entire soul, so that nothing else mattered—not family, not boys, not clothes, not studies, not rowing—was a deep, thick yearning to do something—anything!—that you were never, never allowed to do. To do something so wrong that your essential self must go into hiding.

  When she felt like this, Emlyn rowed.

  She had a rowing machine for seasons when she could not go out on the river. She could pull on those pretend oars, pull herself into sweat and out of larceny. She took up running because there were very few days of the year when she could not run. The pounding, the demand, the gasping exhaustion of running took away the darkness inside her.

  She took up reading, also, but not romance or suspense. She never bothered with adventure or fantasy. She read books that were supposed to tell you how to lead your life. How to Do such and such or How to Be a Better so-and-so. She read essays by famous Americans from Jefferson to Emerson. She read ancient philosophers. She was the only person she knew, religious or atheist, who had actually read the Bible.

  The Bible was unexpected. Its stories made clear that from time immemorial, people not only wanted to do things wrong, they rushed right out and did them, over and over. If she ever zeroed in on her wrong thing, Emlyn would have company.

  But fortunately, or unfortunately, Emlyn had lots of family, and she loved them. Her parents were happy with their own lives and work, as were her two brothers. Her uncles and their families lived in the same city, and they often gathered for picnics and dinners and day trips together. Emlyn was labeled as the calm, studious, athletic cousin.

  It would destroy her family if they actually became acquainted with Emlyn’s true self.

  Philosophers, from Plato to Thoreau to her English teachers, spouted the belief that you should be yourself. “No matter what, be true to yourself!” they cried.

  Emlyn’s true self, however, was not a good one.

  She had kept her true self a complete secret, but now, in the first half of her senior year of high school, Emlyn was finding it more and more difficult to refrain from Bad.

  And so when Jack and Maris and Lovell and Donovan approached her with their scheme, she knew that she had never had an offer so wonderful. So perfect. So true to herself. So necessary and wrong and beautiful.

  She would do it no matter what.

  There was no question in Emlyn’s mind.

  But whether she would do it with Jack and Maris and Lovell and Donovan was another thing entirely.

  “It’s an interesting idea,” she said, keeping her voice bored and her face bland, to imply that it was actually a foolish and unworthy idea.

  Their faces fell. Emlyn’s first triumph at Bad. She had acted, and they had believed her. Their idea no longer seemed so beautiful.

  She now possessed the idea, and it was just as beautiful as they had thought. But she wanted it for herself. Casually, she said, “What made you think of me?”

  This was important. Had they somehow seen within her soul? Seen that dark spot? Was she an X ray to them, and over the white bones on her negative was there a spray of badness, as clear as a tumor to a radiologist?

  “Well,” said Jack, “you never talk, Emlyn. You just do things, and ace them. You don’t brag, or make excuses, or discuss.”

  Jack had grown astoundingly, probably six inches in six months. His flesh had not kept pace, and he was lean and bony and mismatched. Girls loved measuring their height against the thin tower that was Jack.

  If he wanted to be hidden or anonymous, his height would work against him. He was impossible to miss.

  Jack said, “We figure nobody can keep a secret the way you can, Emlyn.”

  Jack’s girlfriend, Maris, leaned forward. She was the lioness type, tawny and gold and powerful. Maris said, “You don’t gossip, Emlyn. I have never heard you say a good word or a bad word about anybody.”

  Emlyn in fact loved gossip and stored all of it. But she did not contribute. She had to be careful. How could she be anything else, given her personality?

  “Museums cannot be easy to steal from,” said Emlyn. “Surely the city museum has up-to-date security and plenty of guard
s and alarms.”

  As a matter of fact, Emlyn knew that it did not. When others went on field trips to the museum for art class and wandered in boredom, filling in their sheet of questions about Impressionist painters, or when they went for history class and wandered around filling in their sheet about medieval armor, Emlyn filled in her sheet for storage in her mental library of Bad.

  How to stay in the museum past closing.

  How to fool the guards.

  How to outwit the supposedly hidden cameras in the Sculpture Hall.

  “So you don’t think we can do it, huh?” said Donovan.

  If Emlyn were going to fall for a boy, it might be Donovan. He was the kind of guy who just started and walked till he got there. He had no plan, he was not particularly smart, he created no strategies. He just saw the goal and started moving. Whether it was math or baseball, a science paper or car repair, Donovan had a relentless, sturdy approach.

  He was the sort of person you would want with you in war or disaster.

  Or crime.

  Emlyn beat this thought down. Donovan, she knew, was a good person. In his case, it was not faked. It was one of the things that attracted her. Perhaps if she became close to him she would learn how to be like that, or at least to imitate goodness more easily.

  She said, “Donovan, I’m surprised you want to be a party to this.”

  He nodded. “Me, too. Actually, I had plenty of other ideas, but Jack and Maris and Lovell didn’t think much of them.”

  Emlyn respected the opinions of Jack and Maris. Therefore Donovan’s ideas had been second-rate. But she said courteously, “What were they?”

  “Well, last year’s senior class managed to get two llamas up there,” said Donovan, tickled by this memory, “and so I was thinking we could do a cow.”

  “Staying with animals,” said Emlyn encouragingly.

  “And the year before that, they got the chassis of an old Camaro up there, and I was thinking we could do the vice principal’s Miata.”

  “Cars are nice,” agreed Emlyn. She knew where the vice principal kept her purse and car keys, and it would be the work of a minute to obtain these.

  “Or,” said Donovan, “I was thinking maybe the principal’s desk. Put it on a hoist, you know, let it swing. Papers flying. Maybe hang the chair, too, and a filing cabinet.”

  “That has possibilities,” said Emlyn.

  “No, it doesn’t,” said Jack. “Every senior class has done either an animal or a car or something that belongs to the administration. I mean, boring. Our class has to do something really really really special.” He gave a tight, little, excited-with-himself smile and opened a folder. Inside lay drawings and photographs. He removed a postcard and handed it to Emlyn. She could actually see his fingerprints on it. Emlyn held the postcard neatly between her two palms, leaving no prints.

  She loved getting away even with that. She loved the image of the FBI finding this, trying to call it evidence, but never able to prove that Emlyn had held it.

  Like most of her fantasies, it was ridiculous, and she knew it and laughed at herself—but only half laughed.

  The postcard was from the museum gift shop. It was in color. Its background was a dark, gleaming room with stone and pillars. Resting on a granite base about three feet high was a heavy wooden slab about five feet long. A glass case like an aquarium was fastened to the wood.

  Inside the case lay a mummy.

  Emlyn knew the mummy well. Her parents were Friends of the Museum, and Emlyn had spent many rainy Sunday afternoons putting up with dull exhibits so that eventually she could stand next to the mummy and think about the three thousand years in which that mummy had stared at a ceiling.

  The mummy was straight and slim, rounded where her arms were tucked, and running smoothly down to the triangle of her protruding feet. Her wrappings were intricately woven in basket-weave layers, and over the centuries had taken on a stained look, as if people had spilled tea over her. Partly covered by the wrappings was a face mask, painted on papier-mâché made of papyrus.

  Beautiful sad dark eyes and the lovely soft mouth of a young girl looked up into eternity. The mummy wore an intricate necklace of blue paint and gold leaf, and the terrifying amulet on her forehead was a glittering, many-legged beetle.

  The hieroglyphs on her wrappings identified her as Amaral-Re. Princess.

  Emlyn handed the postcard back and shifted her book bag so that she would have something to cling to. She did not want Jack to see that she was trembling with excitement.

  “So,” said Jack, “our class has to pull off a really exceptional trick for Mischief Night. Therefore, I thought of the mummy.”

  “I thought of the mummy,” said Maris sharply.

  Jack and Maris gave each other tiny glares and then smiled stiffly.

  Emlyn thought, They date, they hold hands in public, they buy each other presents. But they don’t actually like each other.

  Emlyn said, “I really can’t imagine stealing a mummy.”

  She could imagine it perfectly. She was going to do it. But she didn’t want these four in the way.

  Donovan was too open, too practical. Jack and Maris were too vivid, too demanding of attention. She thought highly of them separately, but together they were busy sticking pins in one another and might not be reliable. Those three could never do anything quietly and in secret.

  Lovell was an unknown. Lovell hadn’t been in a class with Emlyn since second grade. That made Emlyn uncomfortable. She had not yet executed one of her schemes, but she knew it would be risky to work with a person she barely knew.

  “But can’t you just see it, Emlyn?” said Lovell, in a mysterious whisper. “The bell tower on the old high school, open to the wind and weather? The huge steel beam on which the bell once hung and from which students in the past have hung llamas and the chassis of a Chevy? And this year, hanging in the night? Swaying in the starry dark? A real, honest-to-God Egyptian mummy.”

  It had been lyrical and correct until Lovell said “honest-to-God.” Whatever else stealing a mummy might be, it did not involve honesty with God. It did not involve honesty.

  So Lovell was a girl who did not even listen to herself. She did not actually know what she was saying, or why. And Emlyn was sure that in theft or embezzlement or larceny, you must be sure of what you are saying and why. “So how come you aren’t doing it yourself, Lovell?” said Emlyn.

  Lovell giggled. Her laugh was fluty and appealing, and she expected the others to join in. Jack and Maris did. Donovan did not.

  Certainly Emlyn did not.

  Lovell said, “I don’t want to get caught. I mean, it’s a joke thing, really, and you wouldn’t— like, you know—get arrested or anything. Like, the museum people, once they understood it was just a high school thing, you know, traditional and all, and Mischief Night before Halloween—they’d be cool. But still, they might not be. And I—like—I don’t need that on my record.”

  Emlyn smiled sweetly all around, letting her smile rest a little longer on Jack, the ringleader. “But you think I would like to be caught?” said Emlyn.

  “No, no, no,” said Jack. “We work on it together, as a team. If something does trip us up and we get found with the mummy, Emlyn, you’re the kind of person who can talk us out of it. You led that debate, remember? Nobody could touch you. You practically won even when nobody in the entire auditorium agreed with you. I know it was an assignment and you didn’t care about your side and you didn’t agree, either, but you were so convincing.”

  She remembered the debate vividly. The teacher had chosen a real-life local issue: Should a toxic waste dump (which the city must have) be placed on the old elementary school grounds near the river?

  Naturally, nobody thought it should.

  Emlyn had been assigned to take the positive, and she loved her assignment. She slept with it and cozied up to it, acting as if she planned to manage the toxic waste herself. She didn’t win the debate, but she got an A and a standing ovation.r />
  Emlyn had been downcast. She didn’t care about applause or grades. She cared about winning. Well, it turned out she had won after all. She had won Jack and Maris. They thought she could talk her way out of anything. She would start by talking her way out of this.

  She said, imitating Lovell, “Really, I don’t know what to say. Like, I’d love to hang with you guys, and I’d love to, like, be involved if you’re going to use one of Donovan’s great ideas, like the principal’s desk and chair, I mean I love that, and his papers flying in the wind? That’s, like, excellent. But I mean, stealing?” She gave a laughing shrug and spread her hands. “I mean, I think, you know—jail and all. And my parents and all. But good luck. I hope you make it.”

  She had, of course, timed this speech, because third lunch was twenty-one minutes long, and Emlyn always knew exactly how much time she had left, and she needed the bell to ring so she could make a graceful exit, with no more explanations or exchanges.

  The bell rang exactly when she expected it to, and everybody laughed in a silly way except Donovan, who didn’t understand random laughter. Then they separated.

  If Emlyn had not been a very controlled person, she might have begun yelling and walking on the wall. Mainly boys wall-walked, but if there was nobody watching, Emlyn sometimes raced down the hall and managed a footprint or two on the wall. But she paced evenly to her next class, said a courteous hello to the teacher (she was one of only a handful of kids who bothered), and sat neatly at her desk.

  Emlyn got high grades in participation, even when she never participated, because she kept her eyes glued to the teacher. It was one of her favorite deceptions. It was not wrong, and yet in a tiny way, it was. She never ducked her head, never hid in her book, never slid behind her own hair—and never said a single word or asked a single question.

  The two classes following lunch required immense self-discipline on Emlyn’s part. She did not permit herself to think of the museum.

  When school finally ended, Emlyn’s heart shot into the air. She felt like a Frisbee, thrown across green grass in a fine, clean swoop.