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constructed with a second floor, a much-frequented high school hangout. Dozens of kids would see them together and listen in. If the weather was bad … well, she would deal with that tomorrow. She nodded.
    Jack and Maris walked away, leaving Emlyn standing alone in the music room doorway. She felt like a walking exhibit of pride smashed.
    And then she remembered.
    She was the one with the master key.

Six
    E MLYN’S PARENTS LIKED TO know where she was but had long ago stopped checking. On a weeknight, Emlyn was expected home by ten and must let her parents know her destination. On a weekend, she could be out till one A.M. as long as her parents had a phone number and knew who was driving.
    But they did not check.
    After all, she was a high school senior and she had never let them down. And they had the boys to worry about.
    Emlyn lived in an apartment building roughly halfway between her high school and the museum. The eight-story building was about fifty years old, and Emlyn and her family lived on the seventh floor. Emlyn and her brothers routinely ran up and down the seven flights instead of using the elevator, because the family was very fitness oriented.
    Although there were parts of the city where school buses were used, Emlyn lived in an area where everybody walked. She rode in buses when she had an away game, and she did occasionally use city buses, but since she always felt the need for more exercise, she tended to walk or jog. Her own sports were crew, field hockey, volleyball, track, and swimming. She also had marching band, debate, and high school academic bowl. It was not possible to do all these every year. And this—her senior year—she had broken her wrist. The cast was off, but forget rowing or volleyball. Forget hockey sticks.
    It was wrenching to be a nonparticipant. There was only so much pride you could feel in handing around water bottles. More than once, Emlyn had claimed a physical therapy appointment and extricated herself from a practice in which she could not join.
    How incredible that she had been upset about a college application that would imply she could not play on a varsity level—but she was considering being criminal on a varsity level.
    Emlyn tried to arrange her thoughts, but her mind was flying about like pieces of shrapnel. It had been years—middle school, probably—since she had felt such relief to have a school day end. She found her coach, who just nodded when she said she didn’t feel well enough to sit on the bench, and then she left school and headed for the city library.
    If Maris and Jack and Lovell and Donovan had decided on tomorrow for a strategy meeting, Emlyn had precious little time to gather more facts.
    The reference desks were so busy that nobody on the staff paid attention to anybody not lined up and pleading for help.
    She would check out no books. The computer system saved checkout information. Emlyn did not want to be on record as having taken every mummy book just prior to the theft of the city’s only mummy.
    In the children’s room, she found four excellent, highly illustrated books about mummies and one, unexpectedly, about the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
    It turned out that mummies had always been snatched. The concept of a mummy prank was not new. In Shakespeare’s time, people ground up mummies and used them for medicine. Emlyn imagined being in bed with the plague or tuberculosis and having the doctor say, “Here, tincture of mummy.”
    It just went to show that people had always been sick and twisted; it hadn’t started with Emlyn’s generation.
    It was Napoleon who set off the mummy craze. When he invaded Egypt in 1798, his staff sent back to France such exciting drawings that everybody in Europe must have rushed to Egypt to bring home a souvenir mummy.
    Travelers to Egypt could buy mummies in the bazaar as easily as people bought sunglasses today. There were thousands of mummies because for hundreds of years the Egyptians, and