Off the Wall (12 page)

When the girls got there, the sarcophagi in the middle row of the room were lined up as still and silent as ever. But both Jane and Lucy knew where they needed to go. They found the hidden corridor again, and peered to the end of the hallway. The sarcophagus that had been open last night was now closed shut. They hadn't been able to see the painting on the lid the night before with the way the lid had been angled, but now, even though the painting on the lid's surface was highly stylized, they both thought the same thing: The face kind of looked familiar.

Jane's heart was pounding hard enough to wake the dead as she and Lucy crept toward the end of the hallway. The night before, the card next to the sarcophagus had been missing. Now she could see that it was back.
When she and Lucy got close enough, they silently read the card together.

“This sarcophagus, found in the Valley of the Kings, contains the mummy of an unknown princess. Her tomb contained few clues about her background. Judging by her size, however, she was probably ten to thirteen years old when she died. A small mummified cat—perhaps a pet—was entombed along with her. The hand hieroglyphic seen in various places on her sarcophagus probably stands for something resembling our modern letter
D
. It's quite possible that the princess's name started with the
D
sound.”

Daria. It had to be.

“So the rumor was true,” Jane said quietly.

Lucy nodded. “A mummy
was
haunting the museum.”

A mummy who had pretended to be a mummy to play a trick on them.

“I wonder if she comes out a lot,” said Jane. “Maybe she's lonely in there.”

Lucy snorted. “She didn't act lonely. She acted snotty.”

“Well, if she's a princess, maybe that's the only way she knows how to act,” Jane replied. “Maybe she doesn't
really know how to make friends.”

She stared down at the lid of the sarcophagus. The body of a girl their own age was in there, with only her cat to keep her company. She had been in there for so long.

Good-bye, Daria,
Jane thought.

“So, new friend!” said Lucy brightly as the two girls made their way back to the dining hall. “How about some pancakes?”

FOUR YEARS LATER

“Please, people. We're representing our school. People, please exit the bus in an orderly fashion.”

“Why do teachers always call us ‘people'?” Lucy whispered to her friend Cailyn as they stood up to get off the school bus.

“I guess they think it makes us feel more grown-up,” said Cailyn. “Doesn't work for me, though.”

The girls' high school art teacher, Mr. Flaren, was hovering outside the bus now. He looked as flustered as a hen who's lost a chick.

“This way, please, people,” he said. “Right up the steps and in the main entrance.”

“How
else
would someone get into the museum?” Cailyn muttered.

Lucy smiled without answering. She knew there were other ways into a museum than just the main entrance.

Not that Lucy remembered the lock-in all that well. She was in high school now, with a lot going on. And she and Jane had never managed to connect after the night in the museum. In all the confusion at pick-up time, Lucy hadn't had a chance to get Jane's e-mail address or phone number. She hadn't even gotten to say good-bye.

Lucy had been sorry about that. She'd liked Jane a lot, and she had the feeling they could have been good friends.

She had also wondered about Daria from time to time. As her memory of the lock-in began to fade, Lucy became more and more sure that Daria hadn't been anything more than a grumpy middle-schooler.

Probably nothing unusual actually happened that night,
she told herself now, as she and her art class climbed the broad museum stairs.
It's so easy to remember things wrong. And even to remember things that didn't happen.

Still, she had never managed to entirely shake the feeling that Daria had been the mummy rumored to
roam the halls of Templeton Memorial. A mummy that must have been lonely and bored and just wanted to have some fun with them, so she dared them to go on a hunt in a museum in the middle of the night for something she knew they'd never find.

What did it matter now, though? They were visiting the museum during the day. So were tons of kids from other schools. Any supernatural being would have to be nuts to show itself in front of so many people.

Lucy herself hadn't been back to this particular museum since the night of the lock-in. But she was glad to be back at Templeton where she had spent so much time when she was younger. As the years of high school passed, she was becoming more and more sure that she wanted to work in an art gallery or museum, or maybe even become an artist herself. When her school had offered the kids in Lucy's painting class a chance to take a field trip to the Templeton, Lucy had accepted eagerly.

The lobby hadn't changed at all, Lucy saw. It was bustling with field trips from all over the city. A group of excited preschoolers was being shepherded up the stairs. A fifth-grade teacher was telling her class, “I don't want any snickering when we get to the Greek and Roman
statues.” And Mr. Flaren was practically hopping up and down, he was so flustered.

“Keep together, people,” he kept repeating. “I don't want you to get mixed up and think you're part of another class.

“Now, before we go to the Portrait Gallery, we'll take a brief walk through the Egyptian wing, since I know that's a favorite section for many of you,” said Mr. Flaren.

Not mine,
thought Lucy.

Ever since the lock-in, Lucy had avoided Egyptian art. Somehow it didn't appeal to her anymore. But as she stared at the half-remembered exhibits, she could feel her interest returning.

There was Prince Amun's sarcophagus, and there were the turquoise beads—still as bright as when they'd been made four thousand years earlier. The onyx statue of Horus, the falcon-headed god of the sky. The shards of pottery that were valuable because they showed such realistic scenes of ordinary Egyptian people doing ordinary things.

And down the hidden hallway was the other sarcophagus—the one Lucy couldn't help but check out.
The one that had been open and empty on the night of the lock-in. The one that had been closed the morning after. The one that possibly housed Daria's mummy.

The sarcophagus was closed now, just as it had been the last time she saw it. The ancient painting on its surface stared blank-faced at the ceiling. The image of the unknown princess looked serene and untouched, as if the princess herself had never felt a single emotion.

Lucy leaned over and stared into those intensely black painted eyes. “Are you in there, Daria?” she whispered.

Of course there was no answer.

With a little sigh, Lucy followed Cailyn and the rest of her classmates out of the exhibit. Mr. Flaren was talking about their next stop—the Portrait Gallery one level below. Now that he wasn't so worried about losing people, he had relaxed into his usual teacher-speak.

“There are several things I want you to keep in mind as you study the paintings,” he said. “Look at the eyes first. They'll tell you the most about the subject's personality. What about the sitter's expression? And look for little details that might be clues. What about the clothes? What about jewelry? Is the subject rich or poor? Is there anything that shows what interests the subject
might have had? And take notes, because we're going to talk about these in the next class!”

Lucy had always loved portraits. She walked into the gallery so eagerly that she almost banged into the guard at the door.

“No need to rush, miss,” said the guard in a friendly voice. “The people in these paintings aren't going anywhere, believe me.”

The members of her class began to drift around the first room, but Lucy wanted to be more organized. She decided to start with the closest paintings and work her way around the whole gallery.

It's almost like meeting new people,
she thought.
The longer you look at the face, the better you get to know the person.
She decided to make a little game out of reading each painting's title before looking at the picture itself. Then she'd be able to compare her expectation with the actual painting.

Frau Schmidstorf Making Lace.

Lucy envisioned a stern, stout middle-aged woman, but Frau Schmidstorf turned out to be frail and elderly, just examining her lace.

The Honorable Hugh Nettlestone
.

Instead of the white-wigged old judge Lucy had imagined, Hugh Nettlestone turned out to be a little boy patting a pet rabbit.

Charles Dickens at His Desk
.

Lucy already knew what Dickens looked like. No surprise there!

Madame Isabelle Meunier and Her Daughter Jeanne
.

This would be a woman giving her baby a bath, Lucy guessed. But no—the two were outside. The woman had her arm around her daughter, who looked about twelve. She had a shy smile and wavy blond hair.

Wait.

Lucy stopped in her tracks.

Jeanne looked just like Jane, the girl she had met that fateful night so many years ago.

Lucy read the card again. Under the title were the words “Early nineteenth-century watercolor by an anonymous artist. A gift to the museum.”

And the year that that gift had been made? The same year as the lock-in.

Jeanne . . . Jane. Jane was the English version of Jeanne. . . .

Lucy suddenly remembered that Jane had said
something about how she had
just gotten here,
or
just moved in,
or something similar to that. She remembered that Jane hadn't known her own address. Was that because she didn't actually
have
an address outside of the Templeton Museum? She had seemed so shy and awkward at first. Was that because she had never been around real girls?

She didn't even know what a peanut butter cup was,
Lucy thought.

“Look at the eyes,” Mr. Flaren had told the class. Lucy knew that the eyes in a portrait often seemed to be following whoever looked at the painting. That was an effect used by lots of artists. It had something to do with the way our brains perceive two-dimensional objects.

But Jeanne Meunier's eyes were
definitely
following Lucy now. It wasn't an effect. Jeanne's eyes had widened at the sight of Lucy—just the way Lucy's eyes must have widened when she saw Jeanne.

So Daria hadn't been the only strange guest at the lock-in that night. Like Daria, Jane too had come to life and wandered through the museum. Lucy wondered if Jane had even known that she was only a character in a painting when she was outside of it. She certainly had
acted just like one of the girls. And no one had suspected a thing.

As Lucy stared at the painting in shock, Jane gave her the smallest possible wave—nothing more than the fluttering of a fingertip, really.

Then she winked at Lucy.

And the painting was still again.