Egypt Game (9781439132029)

by Snyder, Zilpha Keatley; Raible, Alton (ILT)

  A store of that type always offered an interesting possibility for exploring, but April was really looking for something else at the moment. A drugstore might do or perhaps a beauty shop. When Dorothea and Nick, Dorothea’s agent and good friend, had put April on the bus the morning before, they had each slipped her some money. It added up to quite a bit more than April was used to having all at once, and she wanted to make some purchases before Caroline found out about it. Not that she really thought that Caroline would take the money away, but it would be just like a grandmother to insist that it be spent on something “sensible” like new shoes or a school dress.

  A few minutes later April was taking the old-fashioned elevator, with its door like a folding iron fence, down to the lobby. It wasn’t until she was out on the sidewalk that she remembered what Caroline had said about reporting to Mrs. Ross before she left the building. She paused long enough to decide that reporting wouldn’t be possible until that afternoon. After all, Caroline hadn’t even told her where the Rosses lived, at least not exactly. With that settled to her satisfaction she went on up the street.

  The girl in the drugstore looked surprised, but she didn’t make too much of a big deal out of April’s purchases. When she got out the false eyelashes, she did ask if they were to be a present for someone. But when April made her smile poisonously sweet and said, “Oh no,” she seemed to get the point and stopped asking questions. On the way home April decided that since there was still plenty of time before twelve o’clock, she might as well explore the store she had seen from the balcony.

  The store was called A–Z, and its dusty show windows were crammed with a weird clutter of old and exotic-looking objects—huge bronze oriental vases next to some beat-up old pots and pans. An old-fashioned crank telephone, a primitive-looking wooden mask and a treadle sewing machine. Two kerosene lamps and a huge broad-bladed knife with a carved ivory handle. April felt a tiny tingle of excitement. She always felt that way about old stuff. It had been one of the few things that she and Dorothea didn’t agree on. Dorothea always said, “I’ll take mine new and shiny.”

  It was dusky inside the store after the outdoor brightness. There didn’t seem to be any clerks at all. Not that it mattered, because April was only looking. She squatted down in front of a glass case full of small objects: vases and jars, some partly cracked or broken, crudely made jewelry and tiny statues. All of it looked terribly ancient and interesting. She was pressing her nose to the glass when suddenly she knew she was being watched.

  An old man was leaning over the counter right above her head. “Oh hello,” April said and went on looking at a tiny statue with broad shoulders, short legs and a hole in the top of its head. It looked almost Egyptian and April had always been especially interested in Egyptian stuff. After a moment she looked up again and the man was still there. “What’s that?” she asked, pointing to the tiny figure.

  “That is a pre-Columbian burial figure. It was made in Mexico about two thousand years ago.” The old man’s voice was slow and rusty.

  April looked up again quickly. “Two thousand—you’re kidding,” she said. But on second glance she was sure he wasn’t. He wasn’t kidding and he wasn’t quite like anyone she’d ever seen before. He had a strange skimpy-looking little beard and his eyes were deep set and as blank as an empty well. He said nothing more, and not by so much as a flicker did his face reveal what he was thinking.

  April was impressed. A deadpan was something she’d cultivated herself, and she knew from experience that such a perfect one was not easily come by. “I mean,” she said with respectful caution, “is it really that old?”

  The old man only tilted his stone face downward in a stiff nod. April went back to studying the objects in the case, but now her interest was divided. The old man was almost as unusual as the strange things behind the dusty glass. In a few moments she stood up and smiled at him. It was a real smile, small and quick, not the gooey kind she usually used on grown-ups. Somehow she had a notion he wouldn’t fool easily.

  “My name is April Hall,” she said. “I’ve just come to live in the apartment house next door, with my grandmother. I used to live in Hollywood with my mother.” She paused. For a moment it looked as if the old man wasn’t going to answer at all, but at last his craggy face cracked enough to allow the escape of two small words, “I see.”

  April regarded him with grudging admiration. It usually wasn’t very hard to pick the real meaning out of things people said, if you watched them closely. But this one wasn’t going to be easy. The “I see” said nothing at all. It wasn’t friendly, or angry, or curious, or even bored. In fact, there was something about the absolute nothingness behind it that was a little bit frightening, like putting out your hand to touch something that wasn’t really there. April began to chatter a little nervously. “I’m a nut about things like that.” She motioned towards the case. “I’m always reading about ancient times and stuff like that. You know, Babylonia and Egypt and Greece and China. It’s kind of a hobby of mine. As a matter of fact, I’m even planning to be an archaeologist when I grow up. Some people think that’s a pretty kooky ambition for a girl—but I like it. You see, I have this theory about how I was a high priestess once, in an earlier reincarnation. Do you think that’s possible?”

  “Possible?” The old man’s voice quavered the word into a whole flock of syllables. “Many things are possible.”

  “That’s what I think, too. A lot of people don’t think so, though. When I told Nick—he’s my mother’s agent—about the high priestess thing he just laughed. He said, ‘I don’t know about those other reincarnations, kiddo, but in this one you’re a nut.’ ”

  Before the old man could answer, if he was going to, a couple of ladies breezed in the doorway. Of course, they interrupted right away when they saw that April was just a kid.

  As she drifted out the door and back to the Casa Rosada, April wondered why she’d gabbed so much. It wasn’t really like her. She’d started out just trying to get the old man to talk and then somehow she couldn’t quit. It was almost as if the old man’s deadly silence was a dangerous dark hole that had to be filled up quickly with lots of words.

  Enter Melanie—and Marshall

  ON THAT SAME DAY IN AUGUST, JUST A FEW MINUTES before twelve, Melanie Ross arrived at the door of Mrs. Hall’s apartment on the third floor. Melanie was eleven years old and she had lived in the Casa Rosada since she was only seven. During that time she’d welcomed a lot of new people to the apartment house. Apartment dwellers, particularly near a university, are apt to come and go. Melanie always looked forward to meeting new tenants, and today was going to be especially interesting. Today, Melanie had been sent up to get Mrs. Hall’s granddaughter to come down and have lunch with the Rosses. Melanie didn’t know much about the new girl except that her name was April and that she had come from Hollywood to live with Mrs. Hall, who was her grandmother.

  It would be neat if she turned out to be a real friend. There hadn’t been any girls the right age in the Casa Rosada lately. To have a handy friend again, for spur-of-the-moment visiting, would be great. However, she had overheard something that didn’t sound too promising. Just the other day she’d heard Mrs. Hall telling Mom that April was a strange little thing because she’d been brought up all over everywhere and never had much of a chance to associate with other children. You wouldn’t know what to expect of someone like that. But then, you never knew what to expect of any new kid, not really. So Melanie knocked hopefully at the door of apartment 312.

  Meeting people had always been easy for Melanie. Most people she liked right away, and they usually seemed to feel the same way about her. But when the door to 312 opened that morning, for just a moment she was almost speechless. Surprise can do that to a person, and at first glance April really was a surprise. Her hair was stacked up in a pile that seemed to be more pins than hair, and the whole thing teetered forward over her thin pale face. She was wearing a big, yellowish-white fur thing around her shou
lders, and carrying a plastic purse almost as big as a suitcase. But most of all it was the eyelashes. They were black and bushy looking, and the ones on her left eye were higher up and sloped in a different direction. Melanie’s mouth opened and closed a few times before anything came out.

  April adjusted Dorothea’s old fur stole, patted up some sliding strands of hair and waited—warily. She didn’t expect this Melanie to like her—kids hardly ever did—but she did intend to make a very definite impression; and she could see that she’d done that all right.

  “Hi,” Melanie managed after that first speechless moment. “I’m Melanie Ross. You’re supposed to have lunch with us, I think. Aren’t you April Hall?”

  “April Dawn,” April corrected with an offhand sort of smile. “I was expecting you. My grandmother informed me that—uh, she said you’d be up.”

  It occurred to Melanie that maybe kids dressed differently in Hollywood. As they started down the hall she asked, “Are you going to stay with your grandmother for very long?”

  “Oh no,” April said. “Just till my mother finishes this tour she’s on. Then she’ll send for me to come home.”

  “Tour?”

  “Yes, you see my mother is Dorothea Dawn—” she paused and Melanie racked her brain. She could tell she was supposed to know who Dorothea Dawn was. “Well, I guess you haven’t happened to hear of her way up here, but she’s a singer and in the movies, and stuff like that. But right now she’s singing with this band that travels around to different places.”

  “Neat!” Melanie said. “You mean your mother’s in the movies?”

  But just then they arrived at the Rosses’ apartment. Marshall met them at the door, dragging Security by one of his eight legs.

  “That’s my brother, Marshall,” Melanie said.

  “Hi, Marshall,” April said. “Hey, what’s that following you, kid?”

  Melanie grinned. “That’s Security. Marshall takes him everywhere. So my dad named him Security. You know. Like some little kids have a blanket.”

  “Security’s an octopus,” Marshall said very clearly. He didn’t talk very much, but when he did he always said exactly what he wanted to without any trouble. He never had fooled around with baby talk.

  Melanie’s mother was in the kitchen putting hot dog sandwiches and fruit salad on the table. When Melanie introduced April she could tell that her mother was surprised by the eyelashes and hairdo and everything. She probably didn’t realize that kids dressed a little differently in Hollywood.

  “April’s mother is a movie star,” Melanie explained.

  Melanie’s mother smiled. “Is that right, April?” she asked.

  April looked at Melanie’s mother carefully through narrowed eyes. Mrs. Ross looked sharp and neat, with a smart-looking very short hairdo like a soft black cap, and high winging eyebrows, like Melanie’s. But her smile was a little different. April was good at figuring out what adults meant by the things they didn’t quite say—and Mrs. Ross’s smile meant that she wasn’t going to be easy to snow.

  “Well,” April admitted, “not a star, really. She’s mostly a vocalist. So far she’s only been an extra in the movies. But she almost had a supporting role once, and Nick, that’s her agent, says he has a big part almost all lined up.”

  “Wow, that’s cool!” Melanie said. “We’ve never known anyone before whose mother was an extra in the movies, have we, Mom?”

  “Not a soul,” Mrs. Ross said, still smiling.

  During lunch, April talked a lot about Hollywood, and the movie stars she’d met and the big parties her mother gave and things like that. She knew she was overdoing it a bit but something made her keep on. Mrs. Ross went right on smiling in that knowing way, and Melanie went right on being so eager and encouraging that April thought she must be kidding. She wasn’t sure, though. You never could tell with kids—they didn’t do things in a pattern, the way grown-ups did.

  Actually Melanie knew that April was showboating, but it occurred to her that it was probably because of homesickness. It was easy to see how much she’d like to be back in Hollywood with her mother.

  While they were having dessert of ice cream and cookies, Mrs. Ross suggested that April might like to look over Melanie’s books to see if there was anything she’d like to borrow.

  “Do you like to read?” Melanie asked. “Reading is my favorite occupation.”

  “That’s for sure.” Mrs. Ross laughed. “A full-time occupation with overtime. Your grandmother tells me that you do a lot of reading, too.”

  “Well, of course, I’m usually pretty busy, with all the parties and everything. I do read some, though, when I have a chance.”

  But after lunch when Melanie showed April her library, a whole bookcase full in her bedroom, she could tell that April liked books more than just a little. She could tell just by the way April picked a book up and handled it, and by the way she forgot about acting so grown-up and Hollywoodish. She plopped herself down on the floor in front of the bookcase and started looking at books like crazy. For a while she seemed to forget all about Melanie. As she read she kept propping up her eyelashes with one finger.

  All of a sudden she said, “Could you help me get these stupid things off? I must not have put them on the right place or something. When I look down to read I can’t even see the words.”

  So Melanie scratched the ends of the eyelashes loose with her longest fingernail, and then April pulled them the rest of the way off. They were on pretty tight, and she said, “Ouch!” several times and a couple of other words that Melanie wasn’t allowed to say.

  “————!” said April, looking in the mirror. “I think I pulled out most of my real ones. Does it look like it to you?”

  “I don’t think so,” Melanie said. “I still see some. Is this the first time you’ve worn them? The false ones, I mean?”

  April put back on her haughty face. “Of course not. Nearly everybody wears them in Hollywood. My mother wears them all the time. It’s just that these are new ones, and they must be a different kind.”

  April put her eyelashes away carefully in her big bag and they went back to looking at books. Melanie showed her some of her favorites, and April picked out a couple to borrow. It was then that April took a very special book off the shelf.

  It was a very dull-looking old geography book that no one would be interested in. That was why Melanie used it to hide something very special and secret. As April opened the book some cutout paper people fell out on the floor.

  “What are those?” April asked.

  “Just some old things of mine,” Melanie said, holding out her hand for the book, but April kept on turning the pages and finding more bunches of paper people.

  “Do you really still play with paper dolls?” April asked in just the tone of voice that Melanie had feared she would use. Not just because she was April, either. It was the tone of voice that nearly anyone would use about a sixth-grade girl who still played with ordinary paper dolls.

  “But they’re not really paper dolls,” Melanie said, “and I don’t really play with them. Not like moving them around and dressing them up and everything. They’re just sort of a record for a game I play. I make up a family and then I find people who look like them in magazines and catalogues. Just so I’ll remember them better. I have fourteen families now. See, they all have their names and ages written on the back. I make up stuff about their personalities and what they do. Sometimes I write it down like a story, but usually I just make it up.”

  April’s scornful look was dissolving. “Like what?”

  “Well,” Melanie said, “this is the Brewster family. Mr. Brewster is a detective. I had to cut him out of the newspaper because he was the only man I could find who looked like a detective. Don’t you think he does?”

  “Yeah, pretty much.”

  “Well anyway, he just—that is, I just made up about how he solved this very hard mystery and caught some dangerous criminals. And then the criminals escaped and were going to
get revenge on Mr. Brewster. So the whole family had to go into hiding and wear disguises and everything.”

  April spread the Brewsters out on the floor. Her eyes were shining and without the eyelashes they were pretty, wide and blue. “Have they caught the criminals yet?” she asked. Melanie shook her head. “Well, how about if the kids catch them. They could just happen to find out where the criminals were hiding?”

  “Neat!” Melanie said. “Maybe Ted”—she pointed to the smallest paper Brewster—“could come home and tell the other kids how he thinks he saw one of the criminals, going into a certain house.”

  “And then,” April interrupted, “the girls could go to the house pretending to sell Girl Scout cookies, to see if it really was the crooks.”

  From the Girl-Scout-cookies caper, the game moved into even more exciting escapades, and when Mrs. Ross came in to say that Marshall was down for his nap and that she was leaving for the university, where she was taking a summer course for schoolteachers, the criminals were just escaping, taking one of the Brewster children with them as a hostage. An hour later, when Marshall came in sleepy-eyed and dragging Security, several of the other paper families had been brought into the plot. Marshall seemed content to sit and listen, so the game went on with daring adventures, narrow escapes, tragic illnesses and even a romance or two. At last, right in the middle of a shipwreck on a desert island, April noticed the time and said she’d have to go home so she’d be there when Caroline got back from work.

  As they walked to the door Melanie asked, “Do you want to play some more tomorrow?”

  April was adjusting her fur stole around her shoulders for the trip upstairs. “Oh, I guess so,” she said with a sudden return to haughtiness.

  But Melanie was beginning to understand about April’s frozen spells, and how to thaw her out. You just had to let her know she couldn’t make you stop liking her that easily. “None of my friends know how to play imagining games the way you do,” Melanie said. “Some of them can do it a little bit but they mostly don’t have any very good ideas. And a lot of them only like ball games or other things that are already made up. But I like imagining games better than anything.”