[Give me the bloody mic.]
Hullo. Sadie here. My brother’s a rubbish storyteller. Sorry about that.
But now you’ve got me, so all is well.
Let’s see. The explosion. Rosetta Stone in a billion pieces. Fiery evil bloke. Dad boxed in a coffin. Creepy Frenchman and Arab girl with the knife. Us passing out. Right.
So when I woke up, the police were rushing about as you might expect. They separated me from my brother. I didn’t really mind that part. He’s a pain anyway. But they locked me in the curator’s office for ages. And yes, they used our bicycle chain to do it. Cretins.
I was shattered, of course. I’d just been knocked out by a fiery whatever- it-was. I’d watched my dad get packed in a sarcophagus and shot through the floor. I tried to tell the police about all that, but did they care? No.
Worst of all: I had a lingering chill, as if someone was pushing ice-cold needles into the back of my neck. It had started when I looked at those blue glowing words Dad had drawn on the Rosetta Stone and I knew what they meant. A family disease, perhaps? Can knowledge of boring Egyptian stuff be hereditary? With my luck.
Long after my gum had gone stale, a policewoman finally retrieved me from the curator’s office. She asked me no questions. She just trundled me into a police car and took me home. Even then, I wasn’t allowed to explain to Gran and Gramps. The policewoman just tossed me into my room and I waited. And waited.
I don’t like waiting.
I paced the floor. My room was nothing posh, just an attic space with a window and a bed and a desk. There wasn’t much to do. Muffin sniffed my legs and her tail puffed up like a bottlebrush. I suppose she doesn’t fancy the smell of museums. She hissed and disappeared under the bed.
“Thanks a lot,” I muttered.
I opened the door, but the policewoman was standing guard.
“The inspector will be with you in a moment,” she told me. “Please stay inside.”
I could see downstairs—just a glimpse of Gramps pacing the room,
wringing his hands, while Carter and a police inspector talked on the sofa. I couldn’t make out what they were saying.
“Could I just use the loo?” I asked the nice officer.
“No.” She closed the door in my face. As if I might rig an explosion in the toilet. Honestly.
I dug out my iPod and scrolled through my playlist. Nothing struck me. I threw it on my bed in disgust. When I’m too distracted for music, that is a very sad thing. I wondered why Carter got to talk to the police first. It wasn’t fair.
I fiddled with the necklace Dad had given me. I’d never been sure what the symbol meant. Carter’s was obviously an eye, but mine looked a bit like an angel, or perhaps a killer alien robot.
Why on earth had Dad asked if I still had it? Of course I still had it. It was the only gift he’d ever given me. Well, apart from Muffin, and with the cat’s attitude, I’m not sure I would call her a proper gift.
Dad had practically abandoned me at age six, after all. The necklace was my one link to him. On good days I would stare at it and remember him fondly. On bad days (which were much more frequent) I would fling it across the room and stomp on it and curse him for not being around, which I found quite therapeutic. But in the end, I always put it back on.
At any rate, during the weirdness at the museum—and I’m not making this up—the necklace got hotter. I nearly took it off, but I couldn’t help wondering if it truly was protecting me somehow.
I’ll make things right, Dad had said, with that guilty look he often gives
me.
Well, colossal fail, Dad.
What had he been thinking? I wanted to believe it had all been a bad
dream: the glowing hieroglyphs, the snake staff, the coffin. Things like that simply don’t happen. But I knew better. I couldn’t dream anything as horrifying as that fiery man’s face when he’d turned on us. “Soon, boy,” he’d told Carter, as if he intended to track us down. Just the idea made my hands tremble. I also couldn’t help wondering about our stop at Cleopatra’s Needle, how Dad had insisted on seeing it, as if he were steeling his courage, as if what he did at the British Museum had something to do with my mum.
My eyes wandered across my room and fixed on my desk. No, I thought. Not going to do it.
But I walked over and opened the drawer. I shoved aside a few old mags, my stash of sweets, a stack of maths homework I’d forgotten to hand in, and a few pictures of me and my mates Liz and Emma trying on ridiculous hats in
Camden Market. And there at the bottom of it all was the picture of Mum.
Gran and Gramps have loads of pictures. They keep a shrine to Ruby in the hall cupboard—Mum’s childhood artwork, her O-level results, her graduation picture from university, her favorite jewelry. It’s quite mental. I was determined not to be like them, living in the past. I barely remembered Mum, after all, and nothing could change the fact she was dead.
But I did keep the one picture. It was of Mum and me at our house in Los Angeles, just after I was born. She stood out on the balcony, the Pacific Ocean behind her, holding a wrinkled pudgy lump of baby that would some day grow up to be yours truly. Baby me was not much to look at, but Mum was gorgeous, even in shorts and a tattered T-shirt. Her eyes were deep blue. Her blond hair was clipped back. Her skin was perfect. Quite depressing compared to mine. People always say I look like her, but I couldn’t even get the spot off my chin much less look so mature and beautiful.
[Stop smirking, Carter.]
The photo fascinated me because I hardly remembered our lives together at all. But the main reason I’d kept the photo was because of the symbol on Mum’s T-shirt: one of those life symbols—an ankh.
My dead mother wearing the symbol for life. Nothing could’ve been sadder. But she smiled at the camera as if she knew a secret. As if my dad and she were sharing a private joke.
Something tugged at the back of my mind. That stocky man in the trench coat who’d been arguing with Dad across the street—he’d said something about the Per Ankh.
Had he meant ankh as in the symbol for life, and if so, what was a per? I supposed he didn’t mean pear as in the fruit.
I had an eerie feeling that if I saw the words Per Ankh written in hieroglyphics, I would know what they meant.
I put down the picture of Mum. I picked up a pencil and turned over one of my old homework papers. I wondered what would happen if I tried to draw the words Per Ankh. Would the right design just occur to me?
As I touched pencil to paper, my bedroom door opened. “Miss Kane?” I whirled and dropped the pencil.
A police inspector stood frowning in my doorway. “What are you doing?”
“Maths,” I said.
My ceiling was quite low, so the inspector had to stoop to come in. He wore a lint-colored suit that matched his gray hair and his ashen face. “Now
then, Sadie. I’m Chief Inspector Williams. Let’s have a chat, shall we? Sit down.”
I didn’t sit, and neither did he, which must’ve annoyed him. It’s hard to look in charge when you’re hunched over like Quasimodo.
“Tell me everything, please,” he said, “from the time your father came round to get you.”
“I already told the police at the museum.” “Again, if you don’t mind.”
So I told him everything. Why not? His left eyebrow crept higher and higher as I told him the strange bits like the glowing letters and serpent staff.
“Well, Sadie,” Inspector Williams said. “You’ve got quite an imagination.”
“I’m not lying, Inspector. And I think your eyebrow is trying to escape.”
He tried to look at his own eyebrows, then scowled. “Now, Sadie, I’m sure this is very hard on you. I understand you want to protect your father’s reputation. But he’s gone now—”
“You mean through the floor in a coffin,” I insisted. “He’s not dead.”
Inspector Williams spread his hands. “Sadie, I’m very sorry. But we must find out why he did this act of…well…”
“Act of what?”
He cleared his throat uncomfortably. “Your father destroyed priceless artifacts and apparently killed himself in the process. We’d very much like to know why.”
I stared at him. “Are you saying my father’s a terrorist? Are you mad?” “We’ve made calls to some of your father’s associates. I understand his
behavior had become erratic since your mother’s death. He’d become withdrawn and obsessive in his studies, spending more and more time in Egypt—”
“He’s a bloody Egyptologist! You should be looking for him, not asking stupid questions!”
“Sadie,” he said, and I could hear in his voice that he was resisting the urge to strangle me. Strangely, I get this a lot from adults. “There are extremist groups in Egypt that object to Egyptian artifacts being kept in other countries’ museums. These people might have approached your father. Perhaps in his state, your father became an easy target for them. If you’ve heard him mention any names—”
I stormed past him to the window. I was so angry I could hardly think. I refused to believe Dad was dead. No, no, no. And a terrorist? Please. Why did adults have to be so thick? They always say “tell the truth,” and when you do, they don’t believe you. What’s the point?
I stared down at the dark street. Suddenly that cold tingly feeling got worse than ever. I focused on the dead tree where I’d met Dad earlier.
Standing there now, in the dim light of a streetlamp, looking up at me, was the pudgy bloke in the black trench coat and the round glasses and the fedora— the man Dad had called Amos.
I suppose I should’ve felt threatened by an odd man staring up at me in the dark of night. But his expression was full of concern. And he looked so familiar. It was driving me mad that I couldn’t remember why.
Behind me, the inspector cleared his throat. “Sadie, no one blames you for the attack on the museum. We understand you were dragged into this against your will.”
I turned from the window. “Against my will? I chained the curator in his office.”
The inspector’s eyebrow started to creep up again. “Be that as it may, surely you didn’t understand what your father meant to do. Possibly your brother was involved?”
I snorted. “Carter? Please.”
“So you are determined to protect him as well. You consider him a proper brother, do you?”
I couldn’t believe it. I wanted to smack his face. “What’s that supposed to mean? Because he doesn’t look like me?”
The inspector blinked. “I only meant—”
“I know what you meant. Of course he’s my brother!”
Inspector Williams held up his hands apologetically, but I was still seething. As much as Carter annoyed me, I hated it when people assumed we weren’t related, or looked at my father askance when he said the three of us were a family—like we’d done something wrong. Stupid Dr. Martin at the museum. Inspector Williams. It happened every time Dad and Carter and I were together. Every bloody time.
“I’m sorry, Sadie,” the inspector said. “I only want to make sure we separate the innocent from the guilty. It will go much easier for everyone if you cooperate. Any information. Anything your father said. People he might’ve mentioned.”
“Amos,” I blurted out, just to see his reaction. “He met a man named Amos.”
Inspector Williams sighed. “Sadie, he couldn’t have done. Surely you know that. We spoke with Amos not one hour ago, on the phone from his home in New York.”
“He isn’t in New York!” I insisted. “He’s right—”
I glanced out the window and Amos was gone. Bloody typical. “That’s not possible,” I said.
“Exactly,” the inspector said.
“But he was here!” I exclaimed. “Who is he? One of Dad’s colleagues?
How did you know to call him?”
“Really, Sadie. This acting must stop.” “Acting?”
The inspector studied me for a moment, then set his jaw as if he’d made a decision. “We’ve already had the truth from Carter. I didn’t want to upset you, but he told us everything. He understands there’s no point protecting your father now. You might as well help us, and there will be no charges against you.”
“You shouldn’t lie to children!” I yelled, hoping my voice carried all the way downstairs. “Carter would never say a word against Dad, and neither will I!”
The inspector didn’t even have the decency to look embarrassed.
He crossed his arms. “I’m sorry you feel that way, Sadie. I’m afraid it’s time we went downstairs…to discuss consequences with your grandparents.”
