Mummy (19 page)

Donovan caught up.

“The big question,” he said, “isn’t what she makes up. It’s how fast she moves. She absolutely did not have enough time to get from one apartment to another and then to the museum on foot. She drove. So who knows what kind of car she drives? Because it’s parked out there. And it’s carrying a mummy.”

“I
WANTED RISK,” EMLYN
told them, walking toward school. They walked with her. They didn’t know what else to do. None of them knew what her family car looked like or whether Donovan’s guess was correct. Bluff, thought Emlyn. You can do this.

“I could have taken up ice climbing, I suppose,” she said in a quiet, friendly voice, as if they were buddies sitting over Cokes and hamburgers. “Or piloting small planes or studying live volcanoes. I could have gotten a sea kayak and explored caves. But I took up theft. I wanted to take something that wasn’t mine. And I’ve done it. And it was incredibly exciting. But I thought it would be like a skit on a stage, just one little act. No. It was bigger and more wrong than I thought it would be.”

They kept pace with her, but they were staring down at the sidewalk.

“We aren’t criminals,” said Emlyn. “You’re not going to kick in the window of my car and jump-start it, Donovan. You’re not going to shove me against that building and rip the car keys out of my pocket, Jack. You’re not going to pull my hair and kick me, Lovell. And Maris isn’t going to break into my house.” She held out her hand for the key, and Maris, embarrassed, dropped it into her palm. I am the better actress after all, thought Emlyn. “We took a precious object,” she said, “and at this moment, yes, she is in my hands. And it turns out she is a trust. I am her trustee. I have to do the right thing”

They were almost at the school.

Had they fallen for this? Did they feel uncomfortable and uncertain, the way she wanted them to?

Jack actually held the front door of the school open for the others. Maris and Lovell entered first, and after a long, uncertain look at Emlyn, they went their separate ways down the halls, shrugging off the event, moving on with life.

Emlyn came in next and then Donovan, and Jack said, “Let us know, Emmy,” and she nodded and looked at her watch to see which class she ought to be in.

Jack hurried to catch up to Maris, but Donovan walked alongside Emlyn. “You don’t have calculus,” he said in his nicest voice. “I’m in calculus, see. I know everybody taking the course. And I don’t believe for one minute that you’re going to give that mummy back to that museum. You loved stealing that mummy. You’re like me. You hide everything you can. But I’m like you, so I see through it. You’re keeping that gold for yourself, Emlyn. Well, forget it. I’m hanging on. You’re not going to dump me. I’m getting gold, too. It’s a lottery, see, and I have a ticket, and you’re not taking it away from me.”

Emlyn nodded. She thought, this was the person I thought I might fall for. I was wrong at every turn. I was wrong about me, wrong about them, wrong about stealing, wrong about fun, wrong about my brilliance.

She said, “Well, come on in, then, and share my table in physics.” She walked into physics. Donovan took an uncertain step into the door. Emlyn did not look back but walked through the large classroom in spite of the lecture going on and into the laboratory shared with the chemistry class next door. She threaded her way through people obeying the steps in their lab books. The laboratory was in the corner and had two exits. Emlyn went out the other way, into the other hall, where Donovan could not see her. In two quick steps she was in another stairwell, racing down, going out another door, and running to the far corner for another taxi.

She used her key.

It was dark inside and damp. She worried a little about the damp. But it wouldn’t be for long. She shifted some of the other objects lying crosswise over the beams and yanked out an old tarp. She wrapped the huge, shining birthday present in the tarp and set it in the very back, stacking old broken oars and some out-of-date flotation devices on top of it.

The boathouse was in constant use. But Emlyn had participated in this sport for three years. People were single-minded. They did not explore dark corners. They did not wonder what was in the back, and they did not care what was discarded.

She put her hand on the bulge that was Amaral-Re’s head and whispered, “I’ll be back”

She locked the boathouse, went back to the Ford, drove home, and smiled at Donovan, who was pacing on the sidewalk in front of her building. “Come on up,” she said. “I owe you a pizza.”

But I do not owe you a mummy.

Emlyn’s friends were tickled at the extent of the crush Donovan had on her. How adorable it was; he was like a puppy, following her. They loved it.

But he was not like a puppy. He was like a pit bull. He had his teeth in this, and he was not letting go. Whenever he stood near her, she felt the intensity of his desire. Not for her; she was meaningless. For gold. She could imagine him in some California gold rush, standing by some icy mountain stream, ready to knife the man who got there first.

She rarely saw Lovell or Maris or Jack, and that was natural. She had rarely seen them before their senior prank plans. But Donovan was everywhere, with a copy of her schedule he had convinced the office secretary to give him.

It took her three days to slip away from Donovan.

By then, other seniors had gotten hold of a huge advertising balloon from a car dealership and tied its ropes to the steel beam in the bell tower, and senior prank was over and done with. The dealership didn’t mind. Advertising is advertising.

On Halloween, Emlyn took her brothers and their friends door-to-door in their building, gathering candy and gum and paperback books and apples. Lots of kids were mummies.

The day after Halloween, Emlyn made it to the public library without being followed. She waited patiently at various corners. No Donovan appeared. No Lovell, Maris, or Jack.

She waited another twenty minutes for the particular computer she wanted. It was the only one whose screen was entirely sheltered from passersby, and the only one facing the door. She got on the Internet, ready to shut down quickly. If she left the screen on, the next person could follow her trail and see where she had been. If the next person was Donovan, he was smart enough to figure out her plans.

She read a few sentences, scrolled a few lines, checked the door and the people coming and going, and read again. Truly the Internet was astonishing. So many sites. She began to have hope. There was a way out.

She was standing in the fiction section in front of New Mysteries when Donovan caught up to her. Emlyn did not actually like made-up stories; she liked real history, science, and biography. But she pulled one off the shelf at random and smiled at Donovan. He didn’t smile back. She thought that if they had not been in a public place he would have grabbed her and tried to shake out of her the location of the mummy. For the first time, she was physically afraid of him.

They were not criminals. They were not bad people. But if you wanted something badly enough you might take a very bad step to get it. Not only did Emlyn have to get the mummy to safety, she had to accomplish this publicly so Donovan would know that the mummy was beyond his reach forever.

She took a bus home, which she rarely did. She wanted the company of all those strangers. She did not want the company of Donovan. She had it anyway. At least he could not come in the apartment with her.

At home, she called the store where he used to work before he started following her. “Hi,” she said to the manager, giving him Maris’s name. “We’re planning a surprise party for Donovan, and we need to know when he’s at work so he doesn’t catch on to any of the preparations.”

The manager, who thought this touching and sweet, the sort of thing teenagers had done in the good old days, immediately gave her Donovan’s schedule. “He took this week off,” explained the manager. “He had to study for exams. But he goes back to his regular schedule on Thursday.”

There were no exams the week after Halloween, but it sounded good.

So on Thursday, knowing Donovan was safely stocking shelves, Emlyn went to a huge, busy chain store, a print and copy shop where you could also rent computer time.

She had written out the e-mail in her room, getting every sentence exactly right. Then she ripped her practice e-mail in shreds and came here without it. Typed onto the screen, it looked as suspect as a message from the kind of psychopath who stalked celebrities.

I wish to open negotiations for the protection of a mummy I now possess.

Right. How quickly would that message go into the trash?

She worked and reworked her sentences. No matter what she wrote, it read back badly. Nobody would bother with her nonsense. Her brainstorm was no longer shot full of brilliance. It was a pathetic attempt at sidelining her theft.

She was out of time for this afternoon. Life and its annoying schedules—in this case, taking one of her brothers to the orthodontist—got in the way. Emlyn sent the e-mail.

All through the orthodontist appointment (which included fifteen minutes of waiting in the magazine room and fifteen more waiting in the chair), Emlyn catalogued her stupidity. If this didn’t work, she had no more ideas. None.

Friday, Donovan was due at work at two thirty, meaning that he had to leave school the instant the bell rang. At two forty-five, Emlyn went to one of the ranks of pay phones in the school lobby. They were not booths but slanted, open cubes. There was no privacy, and yet nobody paid any attention, so she felt relatively safe. She couldn’t use her phone card, she didn’t want the bill to arrive and her parents to ask about the numbers. So she had enough quarters to call New York.

When the phone was answered, a flush of humiliation burned Emlyn’s cheeks. She had never felt so wholly stupid. “I’m the one who e-mailed about the mummy,” she said. It was just a receptionist. She would have to explain it all to some clerk, some secretary, and get slowly passed from person to person, endlessly repeating her nonsense.

“Yes, of course,” said the receptionist “We were waiting for your call. Let me transfer you.”

Emlyn felt substance beside her. Bulk. Shadow. She whirled. It was Jack, smiling. Maris behind him. Emlyn felt a sob rising in her throat. It was too much. It was not fair! She had thought the rest had thrown in the towel, given up.

“I have to go,” said Emlyn. “There are people here.”

“Don’t hang up!” said the person on the other end. The man there sounded breathless and frantic, which was a good sign; a yes-we’re-interested-in-a-missing-mummy sign.

“ ’Bye,” said Emlyn politely. “Talk to you later.” She disconnected. She smiled at Jack and Maris, dropped more change into the phone, and dialed again. It was just random numbers, she didn’t care who answered or what they said. She just wanted to hang onto the receiver instead of deal with Jack and Maris.

“Who were you calling?” said Maris. “Police? FBI? Museum moguls around the world? Distant cousins who own empty tombs?”

“All of the above,” said Emlyn. “But my cousin with the empty tomb doesn’t want a mummy, so I’m back to square one.”

It took the rest of the weekend to make her calls, but Donovan worked weekends, and Maris and Jack and Lovell had a thousand better things to do than wander around hoping to catch Emlyn on the phone or shifting museum treasures.

The final arrangements were actually quite easy to make. They never asked her name, they never demanded details, they just agreed. “Why us?” they said during one conversation.

“Who else is there?” she said, and they had to agree.

She arranged things for Tuesday at four P.M., when Donovan was at work and the others had after-school activities. It was a viciously cold and grim November day. No Egyptian princess had ever felt weather like this. Emlyn hated to think of Amaral-Re, frozen and stiff in her box in the boathouse.

She left school, looking carefully and seeing nobody. She paused as usual at various corners and inside the sheltered, invisible openings of stores, but nobody followed her. She began the long hike to the river.

The river was hard to find, for over the decades it had been shut away by raised highways and embankments. There was only one point at which there was a park, and Emlyn, wishing she had a scarf and mittens, walked in bitter wind to one of the benches that lined a strip of grass near the boat launch. The grass was brown and crunchy, and the bench was so cold to sit on she almost stood up again. But this was where they expected to find her. This river, this park, this bench.

There were no pleasure boats still in the water by November and very few still in their berths at the marinas. River traffic for the winter would be a few tugs and barges and the occasional sightseeing boat for spotting eagles. This afternoon the river was gray and silent, a cold reflection of a cold sky.

Other people had come to gaze at the river, but they wisely came in cars whose heaters they kept running and whose radios were probably playing. They seemed to drive in, reassure themselves that the river was still there, and drive back out.

Emlyn sat for quite a while, getting colder and colder.

They were late. Or they were not coming. Or had they decided on some other ending for her?

Her heart began to hurt a little, and then her stomach, and then her head. What was she waiting for now? What had the fates planned that she had not been able to plan for herself?

Donovan sat down next to her. He was smiling. “I just wanted you to know, Emlyn. You’re not the smartest page in the book. Or as we say in boat lingo, you’re rowing with one oar.”

She couldn’t speak.

He held up a key.

It matched the key in her palm.

“You stood outside the school looking left and looking right and peeking here and peering there,” said Donovan, grinning, “and I thought, this is it. She’s on her way. You are so pathetic, really you are, Emlyn. You were looking all over the place for somebody on foot. You never checked out the cars. It was a picnic to follow you in my car. Once I realized where you were going—and I have to say I kicked myself; I should have thought of the boathouse—I drove back to get the key from the athletic office.”