The Vandemark Mummy (25 page)

Phineas looked up at her, in her bathrobe, with her hair frizzing out and onto her shoulders. “What are you doing upstairs?” he asked.

“Working.”

She took down a mug, spooned honey into it, and added a tea bag. “You know, Dad, if we're going out for dinner tonight, you have papers that have to be corrected, and the week's lessons to plan. This afternoon.”

Mr. Hall looked up, scissors in his hand. “I'm almost
through with this. Your mother will enjoy these. I think she's a little jealous.”

“Of course she is,” Phineas said. “She's missing all the fun and excitement.”

“She also feels guilty for not being here,” his father pointed out.

Phineas knew that. He didn't need to be told.

“You know, I don't think she had any idea how much work her job was going to be,” Althea said. “She told me she works twelve to fourteen hours a day, and six or seven days a week. I don't think she expected that.”

“She likes to be busy,” Phineas said. When they both turned to give him a Look, he added, “It's a good thing we're not living with her. We'd just be trouble. She'd really feel guilty then, if she was neglecting us and we were right there.”

“Your mother's too intelligent not to have understood that the kind of fundamental changes women want to make won't be easy,” Mr. Hall said.

“That's no reason not to make them,” Althea said.

“I never said it was,” he answered.

The water boiled and Althea poured it into her mug. They weren't talking about Ken at all, and Phineas was glad of that. He didn't want to think about Ken, and what Ken had done, and what was going to happen to him. They'd have to testify at a trial, unless Ken pleaded guilty, but until then they seemed to have agreed to forget about him. They would get through a trial if they had to, together. They didn't need to say that to one another.

The phone rang,
blatt blatt
, but Althea was on her way back upstairs so she answered it. “It's for you, Fin,” she called. “Casey.”

Phineas went to the phone. “You made the
Times
,” Casey said. “Did you see it?”

“We made the
Times
, Althea,” Phineas called up to her feet.

She turned around and sat on the stairs.

“Do you want to come down for the day, or the night?” Casey asked.

“I can't. We have to have dinner with the president.”

Casey hesitated to ask. “Bush?”

Phineas laughed out loud. “No, President Blight. Isn't your father going to be there? I thought it was like a celebration dinner, and your father would have to apologize to mine.”

“He is going up for the dinner. But I don't think my father knows how to apologize.”

“My dad's been practicing his modest smile,” Phineas said.

“How about Tuesday, then,” Casey asked. “I have sailing all day tomorrow, but Tuesday—”

“I'll ask,” Phineas said.

“Althea could come along too if she wanted to, if she's bored, or lonely, or . . .” Casey's voice trailed off.

Phineas looked at his sister, and wondered. He frowned, watching her. You might find Althea seriously attractive, if you liked a face that looked like the person behind it had a lot of her own ideas and would fight about them if you crossed her.

“I'll ask,” Phineas said. “I'll call you right back, is that okay?”

“Great,” Casey said.

“Or if you'd rather, you could come up here and meet our famous mummy,” Phineas offered.

“I'd like that too,” Casey said. “George can do all the driving, so there's no problem with transportation.”

“Nice to be rich,” Phineas said, and right away he wished he hadn't. It was a pretty dumb thing to say to someone you didn't know at all.

But Casey was smiling, he could hear it. “I'm not complaining.”

Phineas hung up laughing. “He wants me to come spend Tuesday,” he reported to his sister. “He wants you to come too, if you'd like.”

She shook her head.

“I think maybe he's got sort of a crush on you.”

Althea's cheeks turned pink and she ignored that. “I'm going back to work.”

“What's so important?” Phineas asked. “You could meet people.”

“I'm trying to make a translation of that poem,” she told him. “Detective Arsenault let me xerox a copy of the photographs, and I want to try it on my own, before the scholars do it. I know I can't make a good one, I don't know enough about putting the words together, what order they probably go in, or the vocabulary, or the syntax, I know that, but—before I read the rest I want to try my own. I know you think I'm weird, Fin. Don't bother saying it.”

“I don't think you're weird,” he said. “And I wish you'd stop telling me what I think. It's pretty annoying, someone doing that.”

“Sorry.” Althea sounded like she meant it.

“It's okay,” Phineas told her. He had a sudden idea and said, before he thought, “I don't like thinking about Ken either.”

“I guess,” she answered slowly, “we can't help it. I guess it's dangerous not to think about him. Because I don't think he feels all that differently than I do about this Sappho poem, but I'd never . . . Phineas, if I told you I was thinking I'd like to take a karate class, would you laugh at me?”

Phineas shook his head no. But he was biting the inside of his cheeks to keep from laughing at the idea of Althea doing karate.

“I couldn't fight back at all. I couldn't defend myself. I was as helpless as the mummy. And the mummy's dead. I asked you not to laugh,” she said.

“I'm not,” Phineas said, and it was true.

“So, will you take it with me?” Althea asked.

Then Phineas did laugh. “Sure,” he said. “Why not?” He'd seen
The Karate Kid
lots of times, he knew how to do it. He bent his knees, brought his hands up flat to chest level. “Hi—yah!” he cried as he kicked his left leg out, stiff. “Hiii—yaaaah!” and he stepped down onto his left foot, chopping viciously with his right hand.

“Jerk,” Althea said. “You saved my life, but you're still a jerk.”

B
OOKS BY
C
YNTHIA
V
OIGT

Homecoming

Dicey's Song

Winner of the 1983 Newbery Medal

A Solitary Blue

1984 Newbery Honor Book

Tell Me If the Lovers Are Losers

The Callender Papers

Winner of the 1984 Edgar Allan Poe Award

Building Blocks

The Runner

Jackaroo

Izzy, Willy-Nilly

Come a Stranger

Stories about Rosie

Sons from Afar

Tree by Leaf

Seventeen against the Dealer

On Fortune's Wheel

The Vandemark Mummy

Atheneum Books for Young Readers

An imprint of Simon & Schuster Children's Publishing Division

1230 Avenue of the Americas

New York, New York 10020

www.SimonandSchuster.com

Copyright © 1991 by Cynthia Voigt

All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

Design by Kimberly M. Hauck

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Voigt, Cynthia.

The Vandemark mummy / Cynthia Voigt.

p. cm.

Summary: When, as the new Classics professor at Vandemark College, their father is made responsible for a collection of ancient Egyptian artifacts, twelve-year-old Phineas and his older sister Althea try to find out why the collection is the target of thieves, especially when the mummy disappears.

ISBN 978-0-68931-476-6 (print)

ISBN 978-1-4391-3258-6 (eBook)

[1. Mystery and detective stories. 2. Brothers and sisters—Fiction. 3. Universities and colleges—Fiction.] I. Title.

PZ7.V869Van   1991

[Fic]—dc20    91-7311