Mystery Stories

by Elizabeth Peters

  After we had gone a short distance, I said, “There is one more thing to tell, Amenhotep.”

  “There is much to tell.” Amenhotep sighed deeply. “Of a good man turned evil; of two women who, in their different ways, drove him to crime; of the narrow line that separates the virtuous man from the sinner. …”

  “I do not speak of that. I do not wish to think of that. It makes me feel strange. … The gold, Amenhotep—how did Minmose bear away the gold from his mother’s burial?”

  “He put it in the oil jar,” said Amenhotep. “The one he opened to get fresh fuel for his lamp. Who would wonder if, in his agitation, he spilled a quantity of oil on the floor? He has certainly removed it by now. He has had ample opportunity, running back and forth with objects to be repaired or replaced.”

  “And the piece of linen he had put down to look like the mummy?”

  “As you well know,” Amenhotep replied, “the amount of linen used to wrap a mummy is prodigious. He could have crumpled that piece and thrown it in among the torn wrappings. But I think he did something else. It was a cool evening, in winter, and Minmose would have worn a linen mantle. He took the cloth out in the same way he had brought it in. Who would notice an extra fold of linen over a man’s shoulders?

  “I knew immediately that Minmose must be the guilty party, because he was the only one who had the opportunity, but I did not see how he had managed it until Wennefer showed me where the supposed mummy lay. There was no reason for a thief to drag it so far from the coffin and the burial chamber—but Minmose could not afford to have Wennefer catch even a glimpse of that room, which was then undisturbed. I realized then that what the old man had seen was not the mummy at all, but a substitute.”

  “Then Minmose will go unpunished.”

  “I said he would be punished. I spoke truly.” Again Amenhotep sighed.

  “You will not denounce him to Pharaoh?”

  “I will tell my lord the truth. But he will not choose to act. There will be no need.”

  He said no more. But six weeks later Minmose’s body was found floating in the river. He had taken to drinking heavily, and people said he drowned by accident. But I knew it was otherwise. Anubis and Osiris had eaten his heart, just as Amenhotep had said.

  Author’s note: Amenhotep Sa Hapu was a real person who lived during the fourteenth century B.C. Later generations worshiped him as a sage and scholar; he seems like a logical candidate for the role of ancient Egyptian detective.

  THE RUNAWAY

  The younger girl was fifteen. She told people she was sixteen when they asked, but usually they didn’t even bother. They just looked at her narrow shoulders and flat chest and skinny legs, and shook their heads. Mary knew they probably thought she was about twelve or thirteen. Nobody would hire a kid that age, and she couldn’t show any proof she was older. The problem was that she wasn’t old enough.

  Some of the men would have hired Angie. She was almost seventeen and she was pretty. “Angie is the pretty one,” their mother always said. Angie’s best feature was her hair, long and smooth and shiny as yellow silk. Flat and skinny were words nobody would apply to Angie. The cloth of her tight jeans was straining at every seam. That was where the men looked—at the seat of Angie’s jeans and the lush curves that pushed out the front of her shirt. Angie couldn’t understand why Mary wouldn’t let her take jobs from the men who looked at her that way.

  Though she was the younger of the two, Mary had always been the one who looked after Angie, instead of the other way around. Angie was … sensitive. Angie didn’t understand some things. And when she was scared or unhappy, she stuck out her lip and made whimpering noises, like a homesick puppy.

  She was whimpering now. Mary didn’t blame her. She was scared, too, but she couldn’t let Angie see that she was. One of them had to be tough.

  It was so dark! Nights in town were never like this. There were always streetlights, lighted windows, cars passing by. They hadn’t seen a car for a long time, not since they’d turned off the highway onto the narrow country road. The last house had been at least a mile back.

  To make matters worse, there was a storm coming on. Heavy clouds obscured moon and stars. So far the rain had held off, but lightning and thunder were getting closer, louder. The wind made queer rustling noises in the bushes along the road. There were other noises that couldn’t have been made by the wind, but Mary didn’t mention them. Angie was upset enough already. She couldn’t go much farther; she was scared to death of lightning. They had to find shelter soon.

  As Mary looked anxiously around her, she tripped and fell. Gravel stung her palms, and something sharp, a stone or a piece of broken glass, ripped into her knee. She bit her lip and managed not to cry out.

  Angie was the one who yelled. “Mary, what’s the matter? Get up, get up, I can’t—”

  “I tripped, that’s all.” Mary staggered to her feet and reached for Angie’s hand. “Shut up, Angie. Someone will hear you.”

  “I don’t care if they do. I don’t like this. We should have gone to that house back there.”

  “And have them call the cops?” Mary forced herself to limp forward. Angie hung back, dragging at Mary’s arm, and Mary lost her temper. “Damn it, Angie, this whole thing was your idea. You want to give up?”

  “No, I won’t go back. You know what he’ll do. You promised! You said you’d take care of everything—”

  “I’ve done all right so far, haven’t I?” Mary demanded, stung by the note of criticism in her sister’s voice.

  “It was fun at first. But I told you we shouldn’t’ve gone down this road.”

  “We wouldn’t have had to if you hadn’t come on to that sleazy character in the pizza place,” Mary said. “He was following us—you, I mean.”

  “He was kind of cute,” Angie said.

  Mary was about to reply when a bolt of lightning split the sky and thunder rolled over them. Angie screamed.

  “It’s okay,” Mary said, trying to steady her voice. “But we’d better walk faster. I don’t want to be caught in the rain any more than you do. This damned road has to end up someplace.”

  Angie was genuinely terrified by lightning. She stumbled on, sobbing noisily, clutching Mary’s hand till it ached.

  Her distress softened Mary, as it always did. She got mad at Angie sometimes, but it was impossible to stay mad at her, she was so damned helpless. Giggling and grinning at that guy in the pizza place … Angie didn’t know any better. She trusted everybody, even men whose eyes held that cold hunger when they looked at her. But she had a stubborn streak. When she had threatened to run away from home, Mary knew she meant it, and the thought of Angie out on her own, with no one to look after her, was too awful. She had had no choice but to go along. She wasn’t all that crazy about what was happening at home, either.

  Two hundred dollars—the savings of several years of baby-sitting—had seemed like a lot of money. But the bus fares had taken a big chunk; Mary wouldn’t hitchhike, although Angie wanted to. And food cost a lot more than she had expected. Angie ate such a lot. As soon as they got jobs, everything would be all right, but so far they hadn’t had any luck. Either people turned them down cold or the men looked at Angie in that hungry way.

  And now, thanks to Angie’s dumb stunt, they were lost on a dark country road with a storm about to cut loose. Mary wondered what time it was. It had been almost ten when they left the pizza place. It must be the middle of the night now. Her knee burned, and Angie kept dragging at her hand. She felt as if she weighed a ton.

  Another flash of lightning won a squeal from Angie. Mary stopped. “There’s a house over there. I saw it in the lightning. Come on, Angie.”

  But when they reached the gate, Angie’s mulish streak surfaced. “The people who live here will ask questions,” she whined. “I told you, Mary, I won’t go back. You’ll have to think of a story to tell them. Something smart.”

  “I won’t have to be smart,” Mary said wearily. “The house is empty, Angi
e. There’re no lights, and everything is kind of falling down. Look.”

  Another flash of lightning proved her correct. The house was a farmhouse, of a type common in that part of the country—two stories high, with a steep-peaked roof. Children or tramps had broken most of the windows. The few remaining panes of glass reflected the livid flashes like blind white eyes.

  Angie didn’t like the look of the place, and said so in no uncertain terms. The first drops of rain spattering in the dust alongside the road ended her hesitation. Hands over her head, she ran with Mary. Before they reached the crumbling porch steps, the drops had thickened into a downpour.

  Mary fell for the second time on the broken steps. She squatted on the porch, rocking back and forth in silent pain. Finally she got up, with Angie’s help, and limped toward the door. It hung drunkenly on one hinge. It was so light, so rotted by time and weather, that they were able to push it back far enough to enter.

  Angie took her comb from her purse. She started to run it through her damp hair. Soothed by the familiar gesture and by shelter, however poor, she spoke calmly.

  “It smells funny.”

  “I guess it’s been abandoned for a long time,” Mary said, squinting into the darkness.

  The house shuddered with every thunderclap. Rain trickled in through holes in the ceiling. Mary started as a chunk of wet plaster thudded to the floor. Anyhow, it was better than being outdoors.

  The room was long and narrow. It was empty of furniture, but the floor was covered with debris. There was a fireplace on one wall.

  “I’m hungry,” Angie said.

  “We’ve got those hamburgers. But I meant to save them for breakfast.”

  “We’ll find a restaurant tomorrow. Let’s eat now. But the hamburgers will be cold.”

  “I can’t do anything about that,” Mary said irritably.

  “We could build a fire.”

  Mary looked at Angie in surprise. She came up with an idea so rarely that people tended to forget she could.

  “Hey, yeah. There’s lots of wood on the floor, and you have your lighter.”

  They cleared an area next to the fireplace and piled the scraps onto the hearth. Angie lit the heap. At first a lot of smoke billowed back into the room, making them cough, but finally the fire blazed up. The light was almost as welcome as the warmth, although it showed nothing but desolation—peeling wallpaper, rotted floorboards, and an ankle-deep layer of debris. Most of the latter burned nicely.

  “It’s funny,” Mary said after dumping another load of scraps onto the fire.

  “What is?” Angie was on her second hamburger. She was forced to eat it cold, after all, since her attempt to spit the first one on a stick had broken it apart.

  “A lot of this wood looks like pieces of furniture,” Mary said. “Like everything in the house has kind of fallen apart.”

  “I don’t see what’s so funny about that.”

  “Well, people don’t leave their furniture when they move, do they? There’s a table leg here, and enough pieces to make up a dozen chairs.”

  “Lucky for us,” Angie said comfortably. “We can keep the fire going a long time.”

  “It’s old wood,” Mary said. “Dry. It burns fast.”

  It did burn fast, and it gave off a lot of heat. The part of the room near the fireplace was almost too warm. But a chill ran up Mary’s back when she spoke those words. Dry … old … The syllables seemed to echo for a long time.

  Angie finished her second hamburger and ate a candy bar. She wanted another, but Mary wouldn’t let her have it. That was their emergency supply. If the rain continued, they might have to depend on it for longer than she had expected.

  Angie accepted the decree without too much grumbling. She combed her hair again. The silky strands shone in the firelight; she spread them out across her hands, ran her fingers through the shimmering web.

  “Where are we going to sleep?” she asked, stretching like a cat in the warmth.

  “Where else? Right here.”

  “Maybe there are beds upstairs.”

  “If the stairs are as rotten as everything else, I wouldn’t trust them. Besides,” she added craftily, as Angie started to object, “you wouldn’t want to sleep on any old mattresses. Mice.”

  “Ugh,” Angie said.

  After finishing her hamburger, Mary stretched out her leg and rolled up her jeans. It was no wonder her knee hurt. Angie exclaimed sympathetically. “You’ve got a million splinters in there.”

  “Yeah.” Mary pulled out a couple of the longer ones. She hated things sticking into her. Mother always said she was an absolute baby about shots. Pulling out the splinters made her skin crawl. But it had to be done, and the dirt ought to be washed off. She didn’t want to risk infection.

  “Oh, damn,” she muttered.

  “Want me to pull them out?” Angie asked cheerfully. “I don’t mind.”

  “That’s not why I said damn. All that rain outside and we don’t have any way to catch the water.”

  “I’m thirsty,” Angie said promptly.

  “Me too. And I’d like to wash my knee. Think of something.”

  “Who, me? You’re the thinker in this family. ‘Mary, she’s the smart one,’” Angie mimicked their mother’s voice.

  “What about the cartons the hamburgers were in?”

  “I threw them in the fire.”

  Mary said “Damn” again. “Go look in the kitchen, Angie. If the people who lived here left their furniture, maybe they left dishes too.”

  “I’m not going in there alone,” Angie said. “There are probably rats and everything.”

  Mary glowered at her sister with sudden dislike. Angie looked so fat, sprawled out on the floor. Her thighs filled her jeans like sausage stuffing. It seemed as if she could do something for somebody once in a while, instead of expecting to be waited on all the time.

  There was no use arguing about it. Stiffly Mary got to her feet. She found a splintered chair leg and lit one end of it. It sputtered and smoked, but gave enough light to let her see where she was going. Angie trailed along. She said she was afraid to be alone, and in a way Mary didn’t blame her.

  The kitchen wasn’t hard to find; there were only four rooms downstairs. It was in a state of ruin that made the living room look tidy by comparison. Part of the ceiling had fallen, half burying the massive bulk of an old cookstove. There was no refrigerator, unless a heap of rusty metal and rotting wood had once served that function. An icebox, Mary thought—the kind that had big chunks of real ice, instead of electricity, to keep things cold.

  In the debris along the wall, where shelves had collapsed, spilling their contents onto the floor, she found one unbroken cup and a dish with a chip out of the edge. They were black with grime, but the rain would wash them out.

  When they reached the porch, she threw the burning stick onto the soggy grass and licked her singed fingers. The storm was passing, but it was still raining heavily. Mary washed the dishes as well as she could, and let them fill with rainwater.

  It felt rather cozy to stretch out in front of the fire again. Mary began working on her knee. She got the biggest splinters out, but some of the smaller ones, deeply imbedded, were hard to get hold of, even with Angie’s eyebrow tweezers. Mary was concentrating, her eyes blurred with tears; Angie was half asleep. Neither of them heard the boy coming. He was simply there, as if he had materialized out of thin air.

  When Mary saw him, she let out a yelp of surprise. Angie woke up. Mary expected she’d scream, too; but when she saw Angie’s mouth curve in a smile, she realized that Angie wasn’t afraid of anything young and male. That was part of her trouble.

  Anyhow, this boy didn’t look frightening. As her pounding heart slowed, Mary saw that he was as startled as she was. He was tall and thin; his ragged clothes hung in limp folds, as if he had lost a lot of weight, or as if they had originally belonged to somebody bigger. His shaggy hair was shoulder-length; his feet were bare. He had raised his arms in fro
nt of his face, as if to shield it.

  “It’s okay,” Mary said. “I guess you came in to get out of the rain, like us, didn’t you? Come over to the fire.”

  The boy obeyed. His bare feet, stepping lightly, made no sound on the dusty floor. His eyes were fixed on Mary. They were dark eyes—she saw that as he came closer, out of the shadows; saw that his face, exposed when he lowered his protecting arms, was long and thin, with cheekbones that stood out sharply under the sunken pits of the eye sockets. His mouth was a clown’s mouth, too long for the framework of his hollow cheeks, curving down at the corners.

  He stopped a little distance from Mary; his eyes narrowed as he continued to study her. Then, as if some silent message had passed from her to him, he smiled.

  Mary caught her breath. That was why his face had looked wrong. The wide lips were generously cut, designed for laughter. When his mouth curved up, all his other features fell into their proper places and proportions. But he was awfully thin. …

  “My name’s Rob,” he said. His voice was soft, with a queer little hesitation.

  “I’m Mary. This is Angie.”

  But Angie, disconcerted by a boy who looked at Mary instead of at her, had turned her back.

  “Hello,” Rob said gravely.

  “Sit down if you want to.”

  “Thank you.” Rob sat, crossing his legs. The soles of his feet were covered by a thick, hardened layer of skin. He must have gone barefoot for months, maybe years, Mary thought.

  “You hurt yourself,” he said, looking at Mary’s knee.

  “I fell down.” Mary laughed self-consciously. “I’m the clumsy one, always falling over my own feet.”

  Rob did not laugh. “I bet it hurts. Why don’t you pull out them splinters?”

  “I’m chicken,” Mary admitted. “I got out as many as I could, but …”

  He took the tweezers from her hand. It was the lightest, gentlest movement; she scarcely felt the touch of the metal tips as he plucked out the splinters.