Sammy Keyes and the Hollywood Mummy (24 page)

“You criminals!” she cries. “You thankless, sinful criminals! What have you stolen? What is that?” Her pitchfork is positively shaking as she pins us back with it. It's like she's harnessed three bolts of rusty lightning that she can't quite contain. And I'm inching back, trying to decide how to explain to her just exactly what
is
going on, but really, there's no talking to a yellow-eyed mummy with a spastic pitchfork.

So I pass my mother's files off to Marissa and say, “Run!” Then, before I can talk myself out of it, I whip my arm over the top of the pitchfork prongs, and this time I manage to grab the base of the handle and twist the fork down and away from my body. And I know she thinks I'm just an evil juvenile delinquent, and I know she's fighting for what she thinks is justice and honor and truth, because let me tell you, it is making her
strong
.

Either that or digging up dandelions gives you a really good workout.

Anyway, we're twisting and struggling with each other, and I'm saying, “Inga! Claire's body's in there …in a coffin…he made her into a mummy! He's crazy!” and she's fighting back, crying, “How dare you!” and, “You liar!” and, “You belong in
jail
!”

Finally I manage to twist around so my back is toward the reception room doorway. I try one last time. “Go in there and
look
. Behind the tapestry there's a secret room. She's in there! Behind the clothes.” Then I fling my end of the pitchfork to the side as hard as I can and run.

I guess the Pitchfork Mummy didn't want to compare wrap jobs with her sister-in-law, because she comes flying after me, screaming, “Come back here! You! You come back here!”

Like
that's
really something I'm going to do.

No, I beat it out of Little Egypt, through the back door, down the path, and straight into Hali's cottage. And I'm checking all the rooms, rasping out, “Hali? Reena? Marissa?” only no Hali, no Reena, and no Marissa.

And I'm in their kitchen area when I spot Inga, cupping her hand against the screen door, looking for me. And I can tell that she's not sure if I'm inside or not, because if she
was
sure, she'd be inside turning me into Sammy kabob.

There's a door at the back end of the kitchen, and I don't know where it goes, but I'm taking it. I mean, maybe it's safer to stay inside, but I'm trying to do more than get away from the Pitchfork Mummy—I'm trying to save my mother's life.

I squeeze out the back door and find myself in a narrow dirt corridor between the cottage and the garage. And when I close the kitchen door, I realize that I hear voices. Whispering voices.

I sneak along the wall of the garage and peek around the corner, and there's Marissa, holding on to Hali's arm, talking a hundred miles an hour.

I come out from behind the garage and nearly give them both a heart attack. Hali recovers first. She points to Marissa and asks me, “What
is
she babbling about?”

“Hali, please—you've got to take us out to Venice,
now
!” I look over my shoulder. “Inga's after us with a pitchfork.”

“With a
pitch
fork?”

Just then I hear the back door to the cottage clap closed. I grab Hali and whisper, “Is your mom around?”

“No.”

“Then that's Inga, sniffing us down.”

Hali's around the garage with the door pulled up in two seconds flat. Marissa takes the front while I dive past the driver's seat into the back, and Hali's got the Bug fired up before the car doors are done slamming.

And we're just backing out of the garage when
smack!
there comes the garage door, swinging down on Hali's Bug. Inga's holding it down while she looks through the opening, so Hali rolls her window down and yells, “Out of my way, Inga, I'm coming through!”

“You, Hali! You're the ringleader! I should've known!”

The ringleader? I couldn't believe my ears. Like we're a band of robbers, out to lift the silver.

Hali revved up the motor and let out the clutch, calling, “Out of the way, Inga!”

Inga tried, but even her hoeing muscles couldn't keep a lid on the Mighty Bug. Hali let out the clutch and rammed right into the door, tearing it out of Inga's grasp.

Does that stop the Pitchfork Mummy? No way. She picks up her oversized fork and
jab! jab! jab!
she tries stabbing
right through the moving tires. And while she's jabbing, she's crying, “You think you can get away? Over…my… dead… body!”

Hali must've figured, Why not? She's wrapped and ready, let's get her a coffin! because she practically plowed her over, peeling out of there.

And even after we were out of her reach, even after we were down the drive and out onto the street, Inga kept on coming, waving that pitchfork in the air, crying, “Come back! Come back, you hear me? Come back!”

Hali watches her in the rearview mirror and shakes her head. “Auntie Inga.” She throws me a look in the mirror and mutters, “And you think you've got trouble with
your
relatives.”

When we were a safe distance from the house, Hali says, “Okay. Marissa here tried to explain to me what's going on, but to tell you the truth, it sounded a little … how do we say… crazy?”

I'm leaning forward between the front seats, nodding. “That about sums it up.”

“Well, could you take it from the top? Sloooowly?” She comes to a complete halt at a stop sign and says, “And
why
are we going out to Venice?”

“Because … because … we've got to go to a restaurant there.”

“A restaurant? Look, I don't have my wallet and I'm shoeless, so I don't know that this is something we should be doing, Burdock.” She frowns at me and says, “Does this restaurant have a name?”

I can see her right foot pressing down on the brake pedal.
Nothing but toe rings. I cringe and say, “Trouvet's?”

“Are you serious? There's no way they're gonna let me in!”

“Hali,” I say, shaking her seat, “
floor
it! There's no time for this!”

She gives it the gun and says, “Okay, okay—I'm flyin'!” She grinds into second gear and says, “Now tell it to me from the top. Something about cancer and reincarnation?” She shakes her head. “You girls are so lucky you got me, 'cause anyone else would've had you wrapped in little white jackets by now.”

I didn't know how she'd react to hearing about Max. In one day he'd gone from employer to father, and now I was going to break it to her that he was dying and a
murderer
? A hammer to the head might've been less painful.

But what choice did I have? I needed her to get me to Trouvet's,
fast
, and I knew that if I stalled, she would, too.

So I told her. I started at the beginning, because I knew it just wouldn't make sense to her if I started at the end. And after I'd explained about all my mother's lies, all about me wanting to get her contract and figuring out that Max had a secret room, and after I'd confessed about stealing Max's key and escaping from Inga through the window, I told her about what we'd found in the secret room—about the open phone book and hitting Redial; about the dresses and what we'd discovered behind them. And when I got to the part about opening the sarcophagus, Hali's green eyes were cranked wide open and all she could say was “Tell me this isn't going where I think it's going.”

“She's in there, Hali. She's been, uh… mummified.”

“Are you sure it's her and not one of his … you know… collector's pieces?”

“There's a little music box inside with her name on it.”

“Oh, god. This is too sick. He's had her in there all these years?”

“Twenty-five, to be exact, and why that matters is, that's how old Dominique Windsor is.”

She squints at me. “Again?”

So I explain to her about the death day/birthday and tell her some of the things he'd said at LeBrandi's service. And when I'm all done, she just sits there, hands clamped to the wheel, eyes straight ahead, her Bug whining along at eighty miles an hour. I whisper, “He says it's their destiny to be together. He called her Claire when he proposed. He says your mom doesn't understand the ‘concept of Claire.’ Hali, the concept of Claire is that her soul is recycled— reincarnated—ongoing. And he thinks Claire has come back to him as Dominique Windsor.”

She kept staring straight ahead, the speedometer needle pushing past eighty-five.

“Hali, he killed LeBrandi by mistake—he meant to kill my mother. And the reason he's doing this is because he's got cancer; he's dying. And if he dies and she lives, he'll lose her again. But if he kills her, he'll start their souls over again. Together.”

Marissa whispers, “But wouldn't he have to kill himself then, too? Cancer can take years!”

“Maybe he was going to. Maybe he
is
going to.” I lean in a little farther and say, “Hali, are you all right? You're going awfully fast.”

She jogged around a car in the fast lane like it was standing still. “I'm just trying to get you there.”

“Then you believe me? You believe
it
?”

“Oh, it's crazy, but in my heart I know you're right. All my life I've heard him say, ‘In my next life …’ Even I say it. I just never knew he believed it like
this
.” She barreled along in silence for a while; then suddenly we're scooting across three lanes at once, taking an off-ramp. “I think we should call the police. I'd use my cell phone, but it's back at home with my shoes and my wallet.”

“I want to call the police, too, but first can we get to my mother?”

“We're almost there.”

So we're whipping through the streets of Venice, going against traffic, honking and swerving and in general acting like the Getaway Girls, when Hali spots a police car at an intersection. And she starts to slow down, but suddenly she grins and says, “Who needs a phone?” She lays on the horn, blasts into the intersection, and spins that Bug around in a complete three-sixty, right in front of the cop.

Well, heigh-de-ho and away we go, with a Venice squad car in hot pursuit. Hali whips down the street, saying, “I bet that boy's on the radio, callin' all cars!” Then she zips into the red zone in front of a long arched awning, screeches to a stop, and says, “Out-out-out! I'll catch up with you later.”

There are sirens in the distance, all right, and as we shoot out of the Bug and up Trouvet's red-carpet walk-way, I look over my shoulder, and there's Hali, with her hands in the air, being confronted by two policemen.

Now, if you come from a town like Santa Martina and you're dropped at a place like Trouvet's, you can't help but feel like, well, like pigeon poop on a parasol. But we managed to get past the doorman—probably because he was so busy checking out the commotion Hali was causing that he just
whooshed
the door open without thinking—and in we went.

But then I felt like a pigeon
inside
a parasol. I tried not to flutter around too much, but it seemed like everyone was looking at us. The entry area was pretty big, with large, Roman-looking pillars all around. To the left people were getting or checking their coats; through some pillars to the right was the bar area, purring with laughter and voices; and straight ahead was a podium.

The podium was like a big oak roadblock, and the heavy gold rope that stretched from it to a brass O-ring in a Roman pillar conveyed way more than any
PLEASE WAIT TO BE SEATED
sign could. It said
HOLD IT RIGHT THERE, BUDDY and WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE?
and
MILK DRINKERS GO HOME
, all in one simple swoop of gold velvet.

Behind the podium, checking his seating charts, signaling his staff with finger snaps and commanding waves, was the tuxedoed maître d'. And maybe I should've just gone up and asked to be let in, but I could tell he wasn't in the mood to listen. Not at less than six bucks a syllable, anyway.

So we put our noses up and our chins out and tried to look adequately snotty as we ducked behind a pillar to make a plan.

Marissa says, “Sammy, maybe we should rethink this. Obviously nobody's being murdered here. Maybe we just let our imagination, you know, get away from us?”

I look her straight in the eye. “The coffin, Marissa. Remember the coffin. Did you
imagine
the mummy?”

“No, but look, Sammy. Nothing's going to happen here! This is a public place.”

Now, ever since we'd whisked through the door, I'd had the same feeling. And to tell you the truth, I was kind of embarrassed. I mean, I was so sure my mother's life was in danger that I'd put everyone else in danger, trying to save her: us, rattling along in Hali's Bug at ninety miles an hour; Hali, out there getting ticketed or arrested, or who knows what; even Inga. Crazy Inga. Pitchfork or not, we could've really hurt her.

Marissa points across the way and whispers, “I think you can see down into the restaurant from there. You want to try and spot her?”

So that's what we do, and sure enough, there's a great view of the restaurant from about a half level up. The ceiling in the dining area is very high, and it's dripping with chandeliers, and the tables are all laid out in heavy white linens and crystal, separated from each other by white marble pillars topped with plants. Ferns, ivy, big droopy crawly plants.

And smack-dab in the middle of all these tables and crystal and big droopy crawly plants is my mother. I grab Marissa's arm and point. “There! There she is!”

Marissa smiles and says, “See? She's fine.” Then she grabs
my
arm and points. “Over there! Isn't that Jason
Stone? It is! And look! There's Suzette Andron! Wow! Sammy! Over there! Ohmygod, it's Cole Canyon!”

Now, while Marissa's going goo-goo over some guy whose name sounds like a mining town, I'm watching my mother. And at first I'm relieved because, well, there she is, sitting at a table out in public, doing just fine. Their dinner plates look mostly empty, and she's holding a glass of wine a few inches off the table, her head moving from side to side as she's listening to Max.

But then my heart stops because I realize that she's wearing the Honeymoon Jewels.

Max lifts his wineglass and waits until my mother lifts hers. They make some kind of toast, although my mother seems pretty wobbly about it. Her glass barely comes out, but she does take a sip. And when she takes another, he lifts his again and downs what's left in it.