Sammy Keyes and the Hollywood Mummy (12 page)

And it's strange. It's like all my senses are on red alert. Everything looks real
clear
—like it's magnified, only not any bigger. The pebbles on my palms feel like glass, the air has a woody sort of sweet smell to it, and even though that fan is only a purr, it seems to be screaming in my ears.

That's when I see Tweedledee step up to the porch and can tell that he's definitely not Officer Borsch. I mean, he's
whistling
. And even though part of me is dying to know if
he's Gil Borsch's twin brother, the minute he's inside I turn around and scurry along the house and out of there.

When I get to a break in the hedge, I look both ways, then charge across the lawn and up the street to where Hali's Bug is idling.

Hali's watching the rearview mirror like a hawk, and even when I open up the passenger door, she doesn't look my way. She just keeps staring straight into that mirror.

I try to sit down without gouging myself on the picture frame or giving away the fact that I'm packing pinched photos. I tell her, “Sorry it took so long,” but to my surprise, Hali's not mad. She says, “You did good,” and keeps her eyes glued to the mirror, shifting her gaze back and forth between the police parade parked down the road and the mansion's front door.

Now, with her eyes up and open like they are, and with the light from outside kind of bouncing in and shining on them, I catch a glimpse of something in the mirror that I hadn't noticed before. I lean sideways for a better look in the mirror, and sure enough, her eyes are green. Not brown like her mother's.
Green
.

She grinds the Bug into gear, looks straight at me, and says, “That was a detective, did you know that?”

I'm still leaning sideways, but now I'm looking right at her. And what comes out of my mouth? Not Yeah, that's what I figured, or Yeah, for a minute there I thought he was this cop I know back home, or even Yeah … and why are you so charged up about it?

No, what comes out of my mouth is, “Are those contacts?”

She stares at me a minute, then snorts and gives the Bug the gas. “You and every guy who's ever asked me out.” She shakes her head, muttering, “They're mine, and they're blind.”

“Blind? What do you mean?”

“Never mind. No, they're not contacts!” She pulls the gearshift into second. “Wish they were.”

Marissa pipes up from the backseat, “Do you know where we're going?”

Hali snickers and throws the car into third. “That would help. What block of Hollywood Boulevard?”

I say, “Sixty-six hundred? The address is sixty-six thirteen.”

“What's there, anyway?”

“Oh, just this store we heard about.”

“How long's it gonna take?”

“Uh, I don't know… not too long.”

“Long enough for me to get a latte somewhere?” She had it floored, the little Bug heart fluttering along as fast as it could. “I could even go pick up the stupid dry cleaning, I suppose.”

I flashed Marissa a relieved look and said, “Yeah. That'd be fine.”

Hali downshifted into second, then rolled right through a stop sign.

And that was pretty much the way she powered through traffic, zigzagging around cars, beeping at pedestrians, grumbling about incompetent airheads and bank-boy yahoos, breaking every traffic law on the books—plus a few that lawmakers probably haven't even thought to write up.

And I was just thinking that Hali's little rumba through town made wobbling around on Marissa's handlebars seem like graceful ballet when she squeals around a corner and says, “Okay. This is the sixty-six-hundred block of Hollywood. What's the place?”

“Oh, just drop us anywhere. Right here's fine.”

She spots 6613 at the same time I do, then slows down and cranes her neck at the dirty black security shutters covering the store's windows. “Cosmo's Curios …who told you about this place?”

“Uh …” I look up and down the street at all the shop windows, covered in the same black diamonds of steel. “Dominique did.”

“Dominique? I can't see that china doll shopping down
here
.”

“Yeah, well…”

She saved me from myself, interrupting with, “Sorry. I know she's your aunt and all, but if you're looking to buy souvenirs, I can drop you somewhere a whole lot better than this.”

“No, that's okay. We'll be fine.”

She looks straight at me and says, “You really are from Kansas, aren't you?”

I tried to laugh, but it came out stalled and stuttery. “Are you making fun of us?”

At this point we're double-parked, holding up traffic. And while cars are zooming past us, honking and cursing, she stays put, looking at me and then Marissa. Finally she points outside and shakes her head. “Look around, lamb-chops. You see what's out there? Derelicts, deadbeats, and
drug dealers.” She turns back to me suddenly, her eyes wide. Like she's trapped face to face with a carnivorous koala. “You're not here to
score
, are you?”

“Score?” I couldn't believe my ears. “You mean buy
drugs
?”

She's still looking at me like I file my canines into wicked little points.

“No!”

It takes her a second, but finally she lets out a big sigh. “Wow. For a minute there …” She smiles at me, and I smile back at her, and then all of a sudden her face falls.

“What?” I ask her, but I already know. She's looking right at my sweatshirt.

A bus swerves past us, blaring its horn, but Hali doesn't budge. She squints at me and asks, “What'chu got under there, girl?” and I can tell by the look in her eye that no little lie is going to get me out of this.

I am busted.

Busted big time.

ELEVEN

Hali didn't wait for me to try and explain. She tore at my sweatshirt until Claire's picture and the head shots were uncovered, then she snatched them from me and said, “You tricked me into bringing you down here so you could pawn
these
?”

“No! I just have to
show
them to him.”

“Him? Who's him?”

“I don't know… Cosmo! Or whoever runs the place.”

She looked in the rearview mirror as she ground into first gear, and my head whipped backward as she peeled back into traffic. At the first intersection she ran a red light turning right, then bounced up a narrow driveway plastered with
ONE WAY
and
DO NOT ENTER
signs. She squeaked to a stop, nose to nose with a parked delivery truck, then yanked up the brake and turned on me. “I am sick to death of being lied to! Mama told me you were hiding something. She said she could see it in your eyes. I told her it was her voodoo imagination again, but she was sure, really
sure
, that you were lying.”

“I did
not
lie to her!”

“You expect me to believe that after the way you tricked me into being your little Tinsel Town Taxi? And for what? So you could pawn some stupid photographs? Like anyone's going to give you a nickel for those.”

“If you would please just listen …”

She turns her back on me, looking out the driver's door window. And for a second I thought this might be her listening position, so I'm about to start explaining at least part of what I'm doing with the pictures when all of a sudden she whips around and looks me straight in the eye. “Where in Kansas?”

“What?”

“Where in Kansas are you from?”

Uh-oh. I blinked at her, then tried to put up a convincing scowl. “What's
that
matter? Would you let me explain about the pictures?”

“What city? I want to know. Now!”

“Wichita.” It was the only city I could think of. I glanced at Marissa, who was crammed in the back with her eyes pinched closed, praying for deliverance. Hali had turned back to the window, so I tried, “Look, I don't blame you for being mad at me, but—”

She whips around again. “Where in Wichita? What street?”

“What
street
? Hali, would you please let me tell you why I've got—”

She leans in closer, her eyes blazing. “Just tell me this— do you like living in a capital city?”

“A capital—”

“Answer me!”

If my brain hadn't been so tied up trying to get out of the mess I was in, I'd have said, I hate Kansas—all of it, or something else vague like that. But I
wasn't
quick enough. “Sure,” I said. “It's great. Now—”

The side of her fist slammed against the steering wheel. “She was right!” She turned back to me, her eyes like cold, hard emeralds. “The capital of Kansas is Topeka, and you're nothing but a punk liar! Get out of my car!”

“No, Hali, wait!” I grabbed the picture of Claire and tapped on the glass. “See this brooch? We found it in LeBrandi's dresser. It was hidden in a sock along with a scrap of paper that had 77CURIO written on it. We figured out that it was a phone number, and when we called it we got connected to Cosmo's Curios.”

Our eyes were locked together, but I could see the hardness in hers being chipped away by curiosity. “What were you doing nosing through LeBrandi's dresser?”

So I told her about searching around for something to break into the other room with, and how the brooch jabbed me through the sock.

“So where is it now? You got it on you somewhere? Is that what you're here to pawn?”

“No! We put it back in her sock drawer!”

“Then what are you doing here?”

“We're here because
all
the jewels are missing!” I point them out on Claire's picture. “The necklace, the ring, and the brooch.”

“What? Pedal back now, girlie. How do you know all this? Who told you so?”

“I was in Max's office this morning when he discovered they were gone. He called them the Honeymoon Jewels, and he got mad.
Really
mad. And then he said something about Opal.”

“Opal? What's she got to do with this?”

“She's the one who stole them—at least that's what Max seems to think. And what I think is that LeBrandi— being Opal's roommate and all—found out she was going to pawn them and blackmailed a piece from her.”

Hali mutters, “Just her sort of MO,” then adds, “But why are you so bent on getting yourself raveled up in it? So you found the brooch; it's not like
you
stole it.”

“I…we… well, it's real important, okay?”

Hali's expression made it clear—this was not going to cut it. She picks up the other three head shots and flips through them, murmuring, “LeBrandi, Opal, and Dominique.” She hesitates, then looks over her shoulder at Marissa—who's still praying for deliverance—and back to me. “You two are trying to protect Dominique somehow, aren't you?”

I hesitated, then my head bobbed. Barely, but it bobbed.

“Which brings us back to you being from Kansas.”

Looking at her seemed painful. Blinding.

“That was Dominique's idea, wasn't it? You don't seem blond enough to say you're from some state you've probably never even visited. What's the deal? What are you hiding? What's
she
hiding?”

By now my heart's going
ba-boom, ba-boom, ba-BOOM
, because I know I've got to find some way to stop her, and I can't for the life of me think of a thing to say. It's like I'm lie-shy. All the ones I've told have somehow come back to bite me, and I'm scared to try another.

And I'm telling myself that if I do lie to her about it, she'll probably see right through me and blab everything to the others anyway, but if I tell her the truth, well, I
might as well forget about ever patching things up with my mother. She would never forgive me.

So there I am, caught in my mother's Dungeon of Deception, staring down at my high-tops, not knowing how to escape, when a little voice from the backseat says, “You're the one who's hiding something, Hali.”

Hali whips around to look at Marissa. “Don't you start messing with me, girl.”

“Well, it's true! You've got some terrible secret, and it's killing you to keep it.”

I jerked around because I couldn't believe my ears, but Hali did more than jerk. She cried, “Shut your mouth!”

Marissa's voice stays low. Calm. “Look at you, Hali! You're furious with your mother, but you're still trying to keep it all inside. What's she done to make you so mad at her?”

“It's none of your stinkin' business, so just stay out of it!”

“Well, we know it has
something
to do with Max….”

“This is
none
of your business. I'll work it out on my own, in my own time, and I don't need no sneaky school-girls interfering in my pain.”

While Marissa's talking to her, little picture cubes are pushing and spinning around in my brain, landing one on top of the other:
thump
, Reena's eyes, so dark and intense, looking into mine;
thunk
, the cool and cocky Hali who'd come out of the cottage to needle my mother about Max's proposal;
thwack
, the angry Hali who'd attacked her the next morning about the very same thing;
smack
, the way she'd spit out insults about Max like she was dying to be
fired; and then
smack, thunk, thwack
, the way she'd ignored her mother, run from her mother,
yelled
at her mother.

And looking at Hali, I realized that it was her
eyes
that kept these wobbly blocks from tumbling. They were like the crowning arch connecting the columns.
They're mine, and they're blind
. All these years she hadn't been able to see it herself. All these years she'd lived as a servant in that house without knowing.