Sammy Keyes and the Hollywood Mummy

  As soon as the door closed, Marissa said, “Well. I'd say you've made some pretty good progress here.”

  I pushed away a tear, and all I could really say was, “Huh. I guess so.” I mean, I'd been so caught up in everything else that I hadn't really been spending much time thinking about why I'd come to Hollywood in the first place.

  I let out a big sigh and leaned back on the bed, but my hand landed on something prickly, so I yanked up and turned around. And there on the bed behind me was my mother's beaded clutch bag.

  I grabbed it and ran to the door, but when I pulled the door open I came to a screeching halt, because blocking the doorway was one of the scariest things I'd ever seen.

  A yellow-eyed mummy with a pitchfork.

  “Hey!” I cried. “What are you doing?”

  “You're not going anywhere,” Inga says, and holds the fork two inches from my chest.

  “What do you mean I'm not going anywhere? You can't—”

  “Oh, yes I can,” she whispers, and jabs that fork right at me.

  Now, Marissa's right—this is not a pitchfork for throwing around full-on bales of hay. It's like a little kid's pitchfork for throwing around piles of, I don't know, dandelions. And I'm not about to let a yellow-eyed mummy with her pint-sized pitchfork stop me from leaving the room. So I say, “Look, Inga, you've got no right to—”

  She snaps, “I've got orders to.”

  “Orders?” I go to grab the handle and swing the fork aside, but the Weed Warrior jabs me with it instead. Right in the stomach. I yelp and look down, and suddenly blood spreads out in little circles across Marissa's dress.

  “Yes,” she says. “From my brother. He finally believes me. Now get back in the room and stay there until he comes home and decides what to do with you.”

  Part of me was furious. I couldn't believe she had actually jabbed me with that thing. I wanted to plow right through her no matter how badly it hurt me.

  But part of me was guilty, too. I knew she had a reason for holding me in the room. To her, I was an evil, lying thief.

  Then Marissa yanked on my arm to get me back inside, so guilt won out. I closed the door, pulled up the dress, and looked at my wounds.

  They weren't bad, really. Just two little holes and a red spot where the third prong hadn't quite drawn blood.

  Marissa says, “I can't believe she did that!” She marches to the door, whips it open, and says, “We need Band-Aids and some disinfectant! Now!”

  Inga jabs the fork in Marissa's direction, and that's all it takes. Marissa squeals and slams the door, then pushes the lock in and shouts, “You maniac!” in Inga's direction. She comes back into the room, zips open her suitcase, and says, “When all else fails, use a sock.”

  We put some pressure on the punctures, and when the bleeding had pretty much stopped we wedged a clean sock inside the top of my dress, where the stretchy fabric held it in place just fine. And while we're straightening out my dress, it dawns on me that we're stuck. Really stuck. I go over to the window and look down. There's nothing to grab on to, no tree anywhere nearby to climb down, and even I wouldn't jump. We're up way too high.

  Marissa stands next to me and whispers, “He must've tried to get into his office before they left. You think?”

  “Maybe. God, I wish we had a rope! We could tie it to the window crank and rappel down.”

  “Or even sheets. Like in the movies?”

  Yeah. I would've gone for sheets. But there was nothing, absolutely nothing, on the beds or in the closet. Then I had an idea. “Hey! What if we tied all your clothes together and made a rope?”

  “I didn't bring that much stuff!”

  “Okay…I know! How about we throw the mattresses out the window?”

  “And jump?”

  “Yeah!”

  “Sammy, that's crazy! What if you miss?”

  “I'm not planning to miss.”

  'Course, I hadn't planned on having a yellow-eyed weed-whacking mummy lock me in a room, either.

  I snap my fingers and say, “How about we take all the clothes we have, tie them together, and throw the mattresses out the window?”

  Marissa looks out through the window and then back at me. “I'd say your chances would be about fifty-fifty.”

  “Good enough for me.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Hey, if I'm going to get in trouble for stealing a key, at least I want to use it.”

  “But—”

  “You want to be trapped in here all night by the Pitchfork Patrol?”

  “No….”

  “Then come on!”

  Mattresses are heavier than they look. Way heavier. And I've always thought of them as being quiet, flat, sedentary items, but try to push one out a window sometime and you'll see—they're really rebellious bales of angry cotton.

  Anyway, by the time we'd gotten one of them wedged in the window, we were both panting and sweating. We wrestled it along, grunting, “Push this way” and “It's hung up over here” and “Shh!” back and forth to each other until finally, finally, we've got it pushed halfway through the window. Then, with one more shove, gravity takes over.

  Now, this was no feather bed, and let me tell you, it didn't even pretend to fly. It dropped like a rock and landed with a thwack! ka-thunk! and crunch! as it took out part of a shrub.

  So it was loud. Real loud. And after a minute of holding our breaths, waiting to see if anyone was going to show up outside, we pulled ourselves inside and I whispered, “Do you think she heard?”

  “I don't know.”

  “Do you want to do the other one?”

  Marissa shook her head. “No way.”

  I head for the door, whispering, “I want to make sure Inga didn't hear,” and when I peek outside, there she is, sitting in a chair with a pitchfork across her lap, blocking the doorway. Her eyes sharpen, so I say, “Won't you let us out? We really have to use the bathroom.”

  She just sneers through her gauze and says, “You're going to have to hold it.”

  I locked the door before I closed it so she wouldn't hear it click. Then I hurried back inside and said, “Let's get going!”

  We tied together all the clothes we could find. And really, I wanted to wear my jeans and sweatshirt, but they were some of the sturdiest clothes we had—ones I knew wouldn't tear once I started climbing down—so I was stuck in a dress.

  You'd think a pair of jeans and a sweatshirt would stretch out to make a pretty good length of clothes, but by the time you've got a knot that you're sure won't slip, all you've really got is the knot. But Marissa had done a great job of overpacking, and we just kept on knotting everything together, starting with the sturdiest and working our way down to the flimsiest.

  Then we tested every section. Really yanked on every section. And when we were sure it wasn't going to slip on us, we went to tie it to the window crank. Trouble is, I couldn't get a decent knot on the crank. It was too small, and the jeans leg kept slipping off.

  So I unlaced my high-tops, doubled up the laces, and wrapped them tight around the knot to keep it from slipping. And when I was sure it was going to hold, I said, “Ready?”

  Marissa nods, then stops me. “What are we going to do afterward? Climb back up?”

  I look down at the mattress and then back at her. “Actually, I don't think we can stay here.”

  Marissa digs through her purse, saying, “I don't know if I've got enough money for a hotel….”

  And that's when I remember my mother's clutch bag. I go over and open it, thinking that she won't mind if I borrow some money from her. In the long run, anyway. So I click the purse open, and inside there's a lipstick and a small wallet. I pop open the wallet, and the first thing I see is my mother. And even though it's a mug shot—and not a very good one—I stop and look at it a second because, well, it's my mother.

  The way she used to look.

  And then it hits me that this is her phony ID. It looks real. Very real. But the name is Dominique Windsor,
and the address is one I'd never heard of. And even though the information on her eyes and height and weight is all accurate, she's got a brand-new date of birth. February fourteenth.

  “Does she have any money?”

  “Huh? Oh.” I dig through the wallet. “Fifty- …three dollars.” I fold it up, then put it in the pocket with Max's key and say, “Ready?”

  She wasn't, I could tell, but she said, “Ready,” anyway. So I grabbed the top of our clothes ladder, gave it one last tug, then climbed out the window and into the night.

  TWENTY

  The clothes ladder held together just fine. And even though I heard something rip a little as I got near the bottom of it, I didn't worry about it. I just pushed off from the wall, let go, and landed with a nice soft thud on the mattress.

  Marissa whispers out the window, “You okay?”

  I roll up and off the mattress, then stand beside it and motion her to come down.

  Instead, she disappears. And when she pops back in the window a minute later, she says, “Catch” and tosses something down that looks like a black brick on a string.

  What she should've done was toss it onto the mattress. And really, I don't know how it slipped through my fingers—maybe it was the lack of light, or maybe I'm just not used to fielding flying objects without my catcher's mitt—but one second it's hurtling right at me, and the next, well, Marissa's purse lands crack! on the ground right in front of me.

  “Oh, no!” she whispers from the windowsill. “Did it break?”

  “It didn't sound too good,” I whisper back up to her. “I'm sorry! I didn't know what it was!”

  “Does that mean you couldn't catch it?”

  “I'm sorry! What's in it?”

  “The phone!”

  Oops. Well, there was nothing I could do about that now. What I could do something about, though, was the fact that we were standing around in party dresses with a mattress on the ground and a rope of knotted clothes dangling from a window, arguing. “Marissa, you've got to come down. Now!”

  Marissa is unstoppable at certain things, like video games and softball. But then there are things Marissa McKenze is not good at. Like cooking—even toast is beyond her. And giving people a ride on her handlebars— she looks like she can handle it, always says she can handle it, and you really believe that she is going to handle it… until you find yourself paving the road with epidermis. Then you realize it's a lot like the toast—once again, you've been burned.

  And I knew that Marissa wasn't big on heights. Or climbing fences. And believe me, being in a party dress doesn't exactly boost your confidence when rappelling tall buildings with a clothes rope, but this was not the time to worry about underwear showing. This was a time to move.

  Fast.

  So finally, as she's hanging on to the top knot like a kitten in a tree, looking down at me, whimpering, “I can't…I don't think I can… How did you—” I say, “Marissa! She's in there! I saw the pitchfork! Quick!” and you've never seen someone fly down a building faster. She pushes off and lands on the mattress, and the first thing she does is look up at the window. “Where? Where is she?”

  I help her up, saying, “Sorry. But you were stuck, you know?”

  She snatches her purse from me. “You mean she's not up there?”

  “Nope.”

  She shoves me down on the mattress. “Give me a heart attack, why don't you?”

  “I'm sorry, but I didn't have time to call the fire department!” I get up, grab her by the wrist, and say, “Come on!”

  We hurried to the back door, where I made the sign of the cross at the Altar of Stucco, and we let ourselves right back into the house we'd just snuck out of. Then we tiptoed through Little Egypt, past the fountain, and ducked into the reception room. And really, after you've been attacked by a mummy, after you've hurled a mattress out a window, after you've climbed a tree to break into one room and climbed down a clothes ladder to escape from another, using a key to get into someone's office doesn't seem very risky. I had it in and the deadbolt turned back before Marissa could finish saying, “Are you sure we want to do this?”

  Once we were inside, I flipped on the light and shut the door, and then click, I locked us in, safe and sound.

  The tapestry was a lot heavier than it looked and I had trouble pulling it off the wall, but in seconds I knew I was right. “Marissa, look! There's a door!”

  “But it's got a deadbolt, too!”

  “It'll use the same key, don't you think? He only wears the one.”

  I guess leaping tall buildings in a single bound didn't have the same effect on Marissa that it had on me. She helps me hold the tapestry back so I can shove the key in the lock, but let me tell you, she is doing the McKenze dance and biting a thumbnail, and between all that squirming and gnawing she manages to say, “Sammy, this is not right. We have no business doing this. When Inga finds out we're gone—”

  The deadbolt turns back with a snap. And my heart is starting to speed up a little, but I push the door open and whisper, “It's too late, Marissa. We're here, and I'm not leaving without that contract.”

  “But what if it's not in there?”

  We're both behind the tapestry by now, and there's very little light coming in from Max's office. “It's got to be,” I say, then push back on the tapestry with my foot to try to let some more light inside the secret room.

  Now all I can see is a little tunnel straight ahead of me, but that's all I need. The light falls across a desk against the opposite wall, and I can tell that this desk isn't just there in storage. It's got a piano bench in front of it, a wooden mantel clock and a lamp on top of it, and a large open book with a portable phone lying sideways across it. But what really gets my heart pumping is that the desk has a drawer.

  A filing drawer.

  I whisper, “Hold back the tapestry until I can switch on that lamp, okay?”

  She pushes it back some more and says, “I see what you mean about the smell, but I kinda like it. It's like pipe tobacco or something.”

  So maybe Max Mueller was a closet smoker. At this point, I didn't care. I went inside, turned on the lamp, and got straight to work. And the minute I yanked open the file drawer, I knew I was in the right place. “Marissa!” I hissed. “I found the files!”

  I pawed straight for the end of the alphabet, and when I found the W's, there was only one manila folder inside. A big fat one with DOMINIQUE WINDSOR typed along the tab.

  I held up the file and cried, “Eureka!”

  Now, what I was expecting was for Marissa to squirm around and say, “Great, now let's go!” but what I get instead is a quiet little “Oh, good.” And she's not even looking at me or at what I'm doing. No, she's fawning over a rack of evening dresses. She touches a white one with ostrich feathers and murmurs, “Man, aren't these something?”

  So okay, if she's got time to ogle ostrich, I've got time to make sure my mother's contract is one of the things in the folder. I start to lay the folder open on the desk, but as I'm doing that I realize that the book on the desk is a phone book and that the section it's open to is PHYSICIANS. And right there, staring up at me, is the section heading for OBSTETRICS & GYNECOLOGY. Baby doctors.

  I stopped cold. Something about the thought of Max calling baby doctors made me feel creepy. Did this have something to do with him wanting to marry my mother after all?

  I really couldn't tell much of anything from looking in the phone book. There were so many listings. And there were other sections—he could've been looking up any one of them. But all of a sudden I wanted to know—just had to know—which doctor Max had called from inside the security of his little vault.

  Then it hit me. The phone. I picked it up and looked at the keypad, and sure enough, there was the button I was looking for.

  Redial.

  So I pressed it, and waited through five rings, my heart whacking away, faster and faster.

  A woman answered, “Good evening, Dr. Kundaria's exchange.”

&nbsp
; “Oh, sorry,” I said. “Wrong number.” I hit the off button and searched the yellow pages, muttering, “Kundaria … Kundaria … Kundaria …”

  Marissa takes a break from ogling to say, “What are you doing?”

  “Kundaria … here it is!”

  “Here what is?”

  “The doctor Max called.”

  “Sammy, what are you talking about?”

  “Max called someone from here. A doctor. I thought it was a baby doctor, but it's not. This Dr. Kundaria guy does hematology and oncology….” I turn to her. “What's that?”

  Marissa comes over and looks at the phone book, then points to the section heading. “Oncology—Cancer.”

  Cancer? I stared at the heading a second, then looked up at Marissa. “You think Max has cancer?”

  She shrugs. “I don't know. Maybe that's why he's so hot to marry your mother, you think?”

  “Because he's got cancer?”

  “The whole mortality thing… you know.”

  Well, no. I didn't know. And it didn't make a whole lot of sense to me, but I almost didn't care. I had my mother's file, and that's what really mattered. And I was going to switch the light off so we could get out of there when Marissa says, “You've got to check this dress out, Sammy. It's metal. Like mail—you know, that knights used for armor?”

  “Marissa, I don't care about—”

  She grabs me by the arm and yanks. “Would you just look?” she says, then forces me to pick up the skirt of a metal dress. “Heavy, huh? It'd be like wearing an anchor!”

  Now, I'd been so intent on getting my mother's file that I hadn't been paying much attention to anything else. But standing there with a metal dress in my hands, I saw that beyond the dresses was darkness. Deep, cool darkness. Then I remembered the fan that I'd seen outside. I could hear it purring, but I couldn't see it. Where was it? And the burglar-barred window? Where was that?

  The dresses completely filled a pole that ran from one end of the room to the other, and a lot of them went clear to the floor, even though the pole was mounted pretty high. It was like a dense curtain of clothes—a curtain I wedged apart and stepped through. I bumped into something hard, but I couldn't really see anything because the only light coming through was a glowing strip above the clothes.