Mummy Read online

  “The iron grilles are the problem,” said Jack. “I don’t know why I never saw them before. But they’re definitely closed every night, because I asked. So what I can’t figure out is how to get from one room to another. It doesn’t matter how much we want the mummy if we can’t get to it.”

  Emlyn felt a tiny bit better. She had written down (wide-eyed and intent as a four-year-old) the location of every grille. In fact, you could go from the freight elevator hall into the Bird Room, and there was no grille between the Bird Room and the Egyptian Room. You could get to the freight elevator hall from the offices in the mansion. Furthermore, from the Great Hall you could climb the huge old stone steps of the mansion, turn left through Mammals, and get to Egypt that way. No grilles. Of course, you couldn’t get into the Great Hall to start with because of grilles—unless you came from MUSEUM OFFICIALS ONLY.

  “Who did you ask about the grilles?” said Emlyn.

  “The guard. After Maris shoved the mummy around.”

  “I didn’t shove it,” said Maris. “I barely even touched it.”

  What had it felt like? Was the linen rough or soft? Could you feel the resin, poured on and dried three thousand years ago? Was the mummy completely stiff? Like plaster? Or soft like a bedroll? But Emlyn felt too awful to ask.

  “Anyway, the guard followed us,” said Jack. “It was a kick. I never had anybody suspect me of doing something bad before.”

  “What would you have done if an alarm had gone off?” Emlyn asked Maris.

  Maris shrugged. “Nothing. I’d have said, ‘Oops, bumped into it, didn’t I?’”

  Maris had no fear, because Maris did not consider any of this wrong. You aren’t afraid of using the stairs or drinking from the water fountain. So why would you be afraid of touching a mummy? Just because it was in a museum behind Plexiglas and had guards?

  So why am I full of fear? thought Emlyn.

  “Aw, Em. You just took it way too seriously,” said Jack. “It’s a joke, and it’ll work or it won’t.”

  Maris put in, “Donovan says another group of seniors wants to hang a pair of kayaks up there, stuffed with dummies of the vice principal and the principal as rowers.”

  “That’s not funny,” said Jack scornfully. “That’s not even difficult. Kayaks don’t weigh a thing.”

  “Neither do mummies,” pointed out Maris.

  “Yeah, but the mummy is so cool. It’ll look so weird, swaying up there in the wind. We want lots of publicity for our class prank. A mummy is definitely the way to go. We get the mummy up there and call the TV station.”

  Amaral-Re. Princess.

  Hanging on a cord, TV stations mocking her, students pointing and hooting, her dignity destroyed.

  “Listen, Emlyn,” said Maris. “We’ve made our plans. We’ve decided to meet tomorrow after practice. I’m in the play, and rehearsal ends around four thirty. Lovell has a soccer game, but it’s home, she’ll be done by five. Jack has soccer practice, he’ll be done at quarter of five, and Donovan’s out of work usually at six, but he’s going to leave at five. We have to figure out a strategy. Now. What about you?”

  The other four equaled “we.”

  Emlyn was “what about you?”

  It might mean simply that Emlyn had not committed herself and the others had. But it might mean Emlyn would remain an outsider. If they or she were caught, the four who were “we” would stick together, and the one who was “what about you?” would be left to hang. As it were.

  Jack ticked his fingers to make a list. “We have to figure out how to get into the museum. How to get the mummy out. Where to keep it till we hang it. How to get it into the high school and up into the bell tower.”

  Is Amaral-Re it or her? thought Emlyn. If the mummy is an it, then it’s nothing but dried-up old history held together with bandages. But if Amaral-Re is her, then she is a girl, a beautiful girl whose family loved her enough to try to give her eternity.

  “There are magic spells written on her linens,” said Emlyn.

  Maris shouted with laughter. “Emlyn, of all people! I would never have suspected you of worrying about ancient curses! I thought you were the most sophisticated of us, and here you’re the most babyish.”

  They had stung her so many times now she felt as if she had walked into a wasps’ nest. Pretty soon she would go into respiratory failure. “You guys are way ahead of me,” she said. Her voice shook. She pretended to clear her throat, as if she were coming down with something.

  Jack patted her kindly.

  Maris looked amused. “Tomorrow, then, Emlyn?” Maris had not asked whether Emlyn was busy or when she would wrap up her sport or activity or job. “Under the two maples if the weather’s good,” said Maris crisply, “McDonald’s if it’s not.”

  Theirs was a city school, every inch of ground used for playing fields. There were few corners of free grass and only two trees. The maples were glorious, especially now that it was October. There might be other kids sitting beneath them, watching a practice or talking, but probably not. It was getting cold for sitting on the ground. The maples were a good choice.

  McDonald’s, however, a half block away, had been constructed with a second floor, a much-frequented high school hangout. Dozens of kids would see them together and listen in. If the weather was bad … well, she would deal with that tomorrow. She nodded.

  Jack and Maris walked away, leaving Emlyn standing alone in the music room doorway. She felt like a walking exhibit of pride smashed.

  And then she remembered.

  She was the one with the master key.

  Six

  EMLYN’S PARENTS LIKED TO know where she was but had long ago stopped checking. On a weeknight, Emlyn was expected home by ten and must let her parents know her destination. On a weekend, she could be out till one A.M. as long as her parents had a phone number and knew who was driving.

  But they did not check.

  After all, she was a high school senior and she had never let them down. And they had the boys to worry about.

  Emlyn lived in an apartment building roughly halfway between her high school and the museum. The eight-story building was about fifty years old, and Emlyn and her family lived on the seventh floor. Emlyn and her brothers routinely ran up and down the seven flights instead of using the elevator, because the family was very fitness oriented.

  Although there were parts of the city where school buses were used, Emlyn lived in an area where everybody walked. She rode in buses when she had an away game, and she did occasionally use city buses, but since she always felt the need for more exercise, she tended to walk or jog. Her own sports were crew, field hockey, volleyball, track, and swimming. She also had marching band, debate, and high school academic bowl. It was not possible to do all these every year. And this—her senior year—she had broken her wrist. The cast was off, but forget rowing or volleyball. Forget hockey sticks.

  It was wrenching to be a nonparticipant. There was only so much pride you could feel in handing around water bottles. More than once, Emlyn had claimed a physical therapy appointment and extricated herself from a practice in which she could not join.

  How incredible that she had been upset about a college application that would imply she could not play on a varsity level—but she was considering being criminal on a varsity level.

  Emlyn tried to arrange her thoughts, but her mind was flying about like pieces of shrapnel. It had been years—middle school, probably—since she had felt such relief to have a school day end. She found her coach, who just nodded when she said she didn’t feel well enough to sit on the bench, and then she left school and headed for the city library.

  If Maris and Jack and Lovell and Donovan had decided on tomorrow for a strategy meeting, Emlyn had precious little time to gather more facts.

  The reference desks were so busy that nobody on the staff paid attention to anybody not lined up and pleading for help.

  She would check out no books. The computer system saved checkout information.
Emlyn did not want to be on record as having taken every mummy book just prior to the theft of the city’s only mummy.

  In the children’s room, she found four excellent, highly illustrated books about mummies and one, unexpectedly, about the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

  It turned out that mummies had always been snatched. The concept of a mummy prank was not new. In Shakespeare’s time, people ground up mummies and used them for medicine. Emlyn imagined being in bed with the plague or tuberculosis and having the doctor say, “Here, tincture of mummy.”

  It just went to show that people had always been sick and twisted; it hadn’t started with Emlyn’s generation.

  It was Napoleon who set off the mummy craze. When he invaded Egypt in 1798, his staff sent back to France such exciting drawings that everybody in Europe must have rushed to Egypt to bring home a souvenir mummy.

  Travelers to Egypt could buy mummies in the bazaar as easily as people bought sunglasses today. There were thousands of mummies because for hundreds of years the Egyptians, and later on Greeks and Romans who lived in Egypt, practiced mummification.

  X-rays showed who had been murdered (Tutankhamen) and who had had arthritis (Ramses).

  Dental studies proved that Egyptians ground their flour for bread with sand, and wrecked their teeth, and lived in pain.

  Emlyn felt the plump part of her palm beneath her thumb. Once a girl named Amaral, breathing the scent of the Nile, writing on papyrus, laughing among lotus blossoms—had also been happily planning her tomb and looking forward to death, when she could dry out like an apple core in the sun.

  And then, of course, the big treat—lying forever, staring at the ceiling of her pyramid.

  Ancient Egyptians.

  You could show up at that Egyptian Room every rainy Saturday for your whole childhood and not be any closer to understanding what these people had been thinking of.

  Emlyn was shocked to find that she had spent the entire afternoon leafing through children’s mummy books.

  She went to the pay phones on the lower level of the library where the little coffee shop and the magazine room were. She said hi to several high school friends. What if they knew what she was planning? Would they find her despicable? Or just a good ole classmate setting up a good ole class prank?

  She phoned the museum, which had recorded messages from which you could exit to more detailed explanations. It would certainly be a kick in the teeth if plans were made for a day on which they couldn’t get in to start with. Emlyn listened to every sentence of every choice.

  And that was a good timing, because the Friends of the Museum were having a meeting that very night. Emlyn glanced at her clothing. She did look like a person who might show up for a Friends’ meeting: tailored and academic.

  Her parents were members, but it was just for the get-in-free card; she could not recall that they ever actually attended anything, and they wouldn’t tonight, because her brothers’ school had its open house. Her parents would be rushing from room to room, trying to meet every science, math, language arts, history, music, phys. ed. teacher, and administrator. They would be saying to each other, Isn’t it wonderful that our daughter is a good girl and we never have to worry about her?

  When Emlyn called home, her younger brother answered, which was nice. He certainly never cared where his sister was, and all she had to say was, “Tell Mom and Dad I’ll be home by ten.”

  He said, “Sure,” and that was that.

  Next she hit the Internet, and as was often the case she was drowned in too much material. “Egypt” produced five hundred sites; “mummy” more than fifty. And because absolutely everything could be counted on to turn up on the Net, there was a site dealing with museum theft. Another site for Classical Antiquities Theft. Even a discussion of “movable cultural property.”

  Well, if she took Amaral, she would know where to look for insider updates.

  Skipping dinner gave Emlyn exactly enough time before the Friends’ meeting to go back to the children’s room and glance at The Children’s Guide to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

  Two sentences destroyed everything

  “As soon as the museum closes in the evening, cleaners get to work with mops and brooms and buffing machines. The cleaning goes on all night.”

  Emlyn had never dreamed that the museum would not be empty and silent at night. She had pictured hiding out in the ladies’ room until all staff and visitors were gone. But that was the first place a cleaning crew would go. They would go everywhere. And they’d have every light on, to see the dust by.

  Her museum was probably not a tenth the size of New York City’s famous museum. Certainly nobody had ever bothered to write a book about it. But cleaning was cleaning.

  She stopped off at a pizza counter and had a single slice of cheese pizza.

  Would Dr. Brisbane want some floor polisher whining during a Friends’ meeting? Surely he would not want an important Friend in need of a bathroom to have to wait till the floor dried. Perhaps tonight there would be no cleaning crew.

  I can take the mummy tonight, thought Emlyn.

  There were about seventy-five people at the meeting which was seventy more than Emlyn would have expected to show up. She saw no guards. They must be around but keeping a low profile. You did not want potential donors to feel they were not trusted.

  She wondered if Dr. Brisband would recognize her. She doubted it. On the other hand, people who loved publicity and people who gathered donors (and Dr. Brisband must be both) had to be excellent at remembering names and faces.

  Well, he had never known her name, but he might know her face.

  With a sinking heart, Emlyn realized that she had given a name to the secretary. Regrettably, she did not remember the fake name she had given.

  Wonderful, thought Emlyn. Brilliant strategist cannot even recall name.

  She distracted herself by estimating the age of the other people at the meeting. She was the youngest by fifty or sixty years. The rest of the Friends looked as though they never remembered their names, either.

  Should she pretend to be the same Girl Reporter she had been during her last pass through the museum? She had her notebook. She would have to be sure nobody saw the pages mapping grille locations.

  Harris Brisband looked wonderful. Tall and elegantly slim, in a starched pale yellow shirt and a charcoal jacket woven through with an occasional red thread. His bow tie was bright and jaunty. He was definitely in love with his microphone. Emlyn could always tell when a person was crazy about the sound of his own voice.

  “We are not a small, unknown city,” said Dr. Brisband, “and we should not have a small, unknown museum. We, tonight—you and I—are setting a new goal and heading in a new direction. We in this city must rise to the same rank as Cleveland’s great art museum or Baltimore’s!”

  Emlyn did not think it sounded particularly exciting to be Cleveland or Baltimore.

  “Our museum must cry out!” said Dr. Brisband, taut with excitement. The excitement looked real to Emlyn. Dr. Brisband was proud of this building, and all that was within it, and all that was to come. He was the kind of speaker who made eye contact with every person in his audience, drawing them into his arms and heart, and hoping also to draw their checkbooks.

  Emlyn never looked away from a teacher’s gaze, but she looked straight into her lap and pretended to be taking notes for her article about the museum when Dr. Brisband turned toward her.

  “Our museum must tell the world: We have great art! We have magnificent sculpture! We have history and beauty and truth!”

  Oh, that’ll bring high school students by the carload, thought Emlyn.

  She gazed up at the ceiling of the Great Hall, where the gold glinted back and the tiny windows were shiny from the night sky. The folding chairs were delightful old things: wooden slats and learner seats, and each seat back had a neat little learner pillow, like a dentist’s chair, so you could rest your neck as you gritted your teeth. Emlyn rested her neck
.

  “Very few of the artifacts we possess are on display,” said Harris Brisband. “We have so many things in storage. It’s a crime. Boxes and crates of fine artifacts, none of which you have ever seen. Or ever will, unless we raise the money to increase our staff and expand our exhibit potential.” He paused, and when he spoke again his voice had changed dramatically. “However, no matter how much money we require, we must honor the will and the intent of the founder of this museum. We must never be unworthy of his trust.”

  Emlyn slid into a coma.

  What was she going to do with this mummy after she took it?

  Suppose she got out of here, mummy in hand. Then what? The mummy was large and stiff. Emlyn lived in an apartment building where dozens of tenants used the same front door. They would notice her. At any hour of the day or night, the doorman would definitely notice her. That was his job. He was good at it. And she did not have a cellar or an attic. Apartments never had extra closets hanging around waiting to hold something large. And the mummy would have to be held for a while. Senior prank day was always Mischief Night, just before Halloween, two weeks off. If she figured out how to get the mummy tonight, she’d have a lot of other problems along with the mummy.

  Dr. Brisband suggested that they move down the hall to Impressionist Paintings, where he had a new acquisition for them to gaze upon and there were refreshments.

  Everybody was happy to hear the word refreshments. It didn’t matter how cultural an event was. Whether you were a toddler or a grandparent, you hoped there would be food.

  Emlyn stuck her notebook back into her purse. She knelt as if to tie a shoelace. Many rows of folding wooden chairs were between her and the exiting Friends. In moments, Emlyn was alone in the Great Hall. How long would refreshments hold out? Twenty minutes? An hour?

  There are no iron grilles between me and the Egyptian Room, thought Emlyn. What if I go there right now? Right up those huge stairs.