Mummy Dearest: The XOXO Files, Book 1 (8 page)

To my relief, our dinners arrived. I’d forgotten how much I loved steak. Noah was pretty much off red meat, and I tried to respect that by not indulging in front of him. This was quality beef perfectly cooked. The first bite seemed to melt in my mouth.

“Good?” Fraser inquired, grinning.

“Oh my God.”

He laughed and unabashedly shoveled in a forkful.

I began to feel quite cheerful. Part of it had to be the drink. I knew that. I was more than half smashed, delicately balanced at the point where everything was bright and funny and things were moving fast but not so fast that I couldn’t keep up. We talked and we ate and we ate some more and we talked some more. We avoided the subject of Noah.

Instead Fraser talked about himself. He’d grown up in San Diego, attended San Diego State, majoring in TV production and broadcast journalism.

“How did you get interested in…?”

“In?”

“Reality TV.”

“We’re not exactly reality TV. That is to say, we’re a hybrid. Part documentary, part reality TV.”

“Okay. How did you get interested in that?”

“Ack.” He pounded his fist against his forehead.

“Ack?”

“I know what you’re going to say.”

“What am I going to say?”

“I grew up watching
The X-Files
.”

“Why would I say that?”

“No.
I
grew up watching
The X-Files
.”

“Oh. So?”

“So…the truth is out there. I want to know what it is.”

“You mean you love scary stories and scary movies and wanted to be Van Helsing
when you grew up.”

“Hell yeah!”

That struck me as one of the funniest things I’d ever heard. When I stopped giggling, Fraser said, “Hey, I’m not college professor, but I’m not the dumb schmuck you pegged me for the minute you laid eyes on me, either.”

“I didn’t peg you for a dumb schmuck.”

He chuckled good-naturedly. “Yeah, you did. You looked at me like a snail had just crawled out of your escargot.”

I was momentarily distracted. “Snail
is
escargot.”

“You know what I mean.”

“Arugula? Endive? Endigia?”

“You
know
what I mean.”

“You kind of put my back up,” I conceded.

“I tend to come on too strong when I’m…” He lost track of that thought in his apparent interest in capturing the last crumb of onion loaf.

“Too what?”

“Hmm?”

“You come on too strong when you’re too what?”

Fraser looked blank.

I realized belatedly that maybe I didn’t want to know. We finished our meal more quietly than we’d begun it, although we did relax again over the hot fudge brownie desserts.

When the bill arrived we argued briefly.

“
I
invited
you
,” Fraser insisted.

“Yeah, but this feels kind of one-sided.”

“I
invited
you.” He was scowling.

“Okay, okay. My turn next time.”

“Deal.” His eyes gleamed, and I played back what I’d just said.
Next time?
Was there going to be a next time?

Fraser paid the bill, and we pulled on our jackets and went outside.

The sidewalk sparkled with frost. A Volkswagen Beetle sped past, demons and goblins yelling out the window.

“What now?” Fraser’s breath was warm in the cold night air.

Our gazes tangled. I knew what I
wanted
to do, but sex seemed more complicated now that I knew Fraser and, well, liked him.

Fraser stared right back as though he could read my mind. “Well,” he said casually, “we could always see a movie.”

Chapter Six

Believe it or not, when I finished laughing, we went to the movies.

We arrived in time to catch the second feature, which was the 1932 version of
The Mummy
starring Boris Karloff. I bought a giant tub of buttered popcorn which Fraser and I shared as we watched the film.

“Did you know this was filmed in Mojave?” Fraser whispered.

I shook my head.

He snickered over Ardeth Bey’s “Excuse me… I dislike being touched,” and downright guffawed over “Maybe he got too gay with the vestal virgins in the temple.”

I watched him out of the corner of my eye and smiled. I liked that he shared my same loony sense of humor. I liked his lack of self-consciousness. And I really liked how much he was enjoying himself. I tried to remember the last time I’d had such an uncomplicated good time.

I didn’t let myself think about my article. I didn’t let myself think about Noah. I watched Ardeth Bey try to reclaim his reincarnated true love and concentrated on nothing but the warmth of Fraser’s shoulder pressing against mine, the occasional brush of our hands in the popcorn barrel.

It could have been any first date. But that was also something I didn’t let myself think about.

When the movie was over we walked back to the hotel along quiet and by then mostly deserted streets. The scent of wood smoke drifted in the sparkling night air. Every so often someone in costume appeared in the distant peripheral of our vision, as though at the far end of a telescope. Kids. Teenagers. Milking the last few minutes of the spookiest night of the year.

“What time is it?” I asked as we walked past a house where a jack-o’-lantern sat on the porch steps, eyes glowing eerily, yellow mouth laughing silently.

Fraser checked his wristwatch. “A quarter to midnight.”

“The witching hour.”

“Yep.”

After that we seemed to be out of things to talk about. I was coming down from the booze, and I felt tired and depressed when I remembered the fight with Noah. Which was every couple of minutes.

Fraser seemed preoccupied with his own thoughts.

It took a while for the dull, shuffling noise behind us to register. In fact, I don’t know that I would have registered it if Fraser hadn’t stopped walking.

“Did you hear that?”

“What?” I stopped too.

“That.”

I listened. I could hear the power lines buzzing softly overhead, leaves scratching along the sidewalk…

“I don’t hear anything.”

“It’s stopped.”

I expelled a long breath. “Not funny.”

“I’m not trying to be funny. I heard something.”

“Like what?”

“Like…something scraping, no…dragging along the sidewalk.”

I shook my head and started walking again.

Fraser caught me up in a few steps. “I’m serious!”

“No, you’re not.”

“Wait.” He hooked a hand around my arm, halting me. “Listen.”

Once again I listened. Once again there was nothing to hear but the whine of the power lines and the wind shaking the trees lining the street.

I made a sound of impatience. “
Not funny
, Fraser.”

“I’m not being funny!”

“You’re right about that.” But then I heard it too. A sound like a bag of wet cement being dragged along the sidewalk.

“Hear that?” Fraser exclaimed. “You hear that, right?”

I nodded.

We both stared through the tunnel of trees. The shadows wavered across the sidewalk. Moonlight and shadows…

The shuffling sound was moving toward us.

Fraser murmured, “What the hell.”

I shook my head, wanting him to be quiet. My eyes strained to see through the gloom.

“There.” I pointed at the pale form shambling toward us. “What the…”

“Fuck,” finished Fraser, and launched himself at the thing.

At the mummy thing.

Okay. At the mummy. The glowing-red-eyed, bandage-trailing mummy that was apparently following us down the quiet residential streets of Walsh, Wyoming.

As Fraser pounded down the sidewalk toward it, the mummy turned and sprinted away with un-mummy-like sprightliness. I raced after Fraser.

“Fraser!”

He gave no indication he heard, barreling along ahead of me like a TV cop in pursuit of a felon.

Where the hell were they going? What did Fraser plan on doing if he caught the thing?

The mummy cut through the trees, darted across a neatly trimmed lawn, flew down a driveway and scrambled up and over a wooden fence. I’ll be damned if Fraser didn’t fly right after him.

“What the hell are you doing?” I shouted after him.

Once again, if Fraser heard me, he gave no sign. He disappeared over the fence. I reached the gate a few seconds later, totally out of breath. I tried it. It swung open and I went through. I was in a backyard. An ordinary backyard with a large Doughboy pool and a lot of trampled flowerbeds.

From the other side of the brick wall at the back of the yard I could hear crashing sounds. I added my footprints to the flowerbeds and heaved myself up, scrambling over the wall as lights in the house behind me went on.

The lights were already on in the house next door. House lights and backyard lights blazed brightly, illuminating the bulky white form disappearing over yet another wall—and the soles of Fraser’s Converses diving after in close pursuit.

I swore and raced after them. The back door to the house slammed open. A voice bellowed, “You kids get the hell out of here before I call the cops!”

Imagine trying to explain this to the cops?

He was still yelling as I cleared the next fence.

I found myself in an alley. Weeds grew through what remained of the cracked pavement. Opposite me was a junkyard fenced by chain link. A particularly unfriendly dog was throwing itself at the fence and offering its unsolicited opinion of my behavior.

“Who asked you?” I told it.

It responded by trying to chew its way through the fence.

The alleyway ended in a tall brick wall without windows or doors. It opened onto a street. Fraser stood in the middle of the street swearing.

I went to join him.

“He got away,” he said by way of greeting.

“Where would he go?”

He shook his head. It was a good question though. The street was made up of storefronts. Mostly closed for the night, though a couple had Out of Business signs in the darkened windows.

In fact, the only thing open was a dive-looking bar called the Blue Moon. A neon cocktail glass containing a blue crescent moon blinked on and off above the battered door.

“There,” Fraser said. He elbowed me and started across the street.

“What? No way.”

“He sure as hell didn’t go in there.” He nodded at the junkyard where the Hound of the Baskervilles was still trying to saw through the fence. “So where is he?”

I looked up and down the empty street. Other than a few parked cars outside the bar—and us—there was no sign of life. No mummy fleeing down the sidewalk in either direction.

“He’s hiding.”

“He’s in
there
. I’m telling you.”

I caught up to him. “Did you see him go in there?”

“It’s the only thing that makes sense.”

“I would love to believe that something,
anything
tonight, makes sense, but I find it diffi—”

I was talking to myself. What else was new?

I followed Fraser inside the bar. It was dark and smoky—although no one had smoked there for years—and surprisingly crowded. Crowded with what appeared to be regulars, because everyone stopped talking and turned our way.

Okay, maybe everyone didn’t stop talking. Maybe it just felt that way after Fraser burst out, “Did anyone see a mummy come in?”

There was a pause—even the jukebox seemed to pause in the middle of a Patsy Cline song—and then all those hard, weather-beaten faces began to roar with laughter.

“Aw, he lost his mummy,” a guy in a straw cowboy hat called. “Maybe his daddy’s here.”

“Hey, it’s Abbott and Costello,” some other wit called.

“See the pyramids along the Nile…” sang Patty.

“Ha ha,” Fraser retorted.

Personally, I thought he could have tried a little harder in the retort department, but he was busy scanning the room for the, er, mummy. Because he was absolutely, utterly serious about finding that freak. You had to respect that. Even if he was turning us both into laughingstocks. And, after all, it’s not like we had to go on living in this town. So what if they laughed.

And kept laughing.

And wiped the tears from their eyes and took their cowboy hats off and blew their noses and stamped their boots and nearly fell off their barstools with pounding each other on the back as they kept building on the joke.

Fraser ignored them. He studied every inch of that little bar, from the winking, blinking jukebox to the elk horns half-blocking the exit sign.

“He went thataway, boys,” said one old hand gravely, seeing the way Fraser moved purposefully toward the exit.

“
Don’t
open that door,” the bartender yelled. “You’ll set the alarm off.”

Undeterred, Fraser reached for the panic bar, and I grabbed his arm. “We’d have heard the alar
m go off.”

“Not necessarily.”

I shook my head. “He’s long gone, Fraser. Even if he did come through here. We’re not going to catch him now. What would we do with him if we did catch him?”

“We’d ask him what the hell he thinks he’s up to.”

“It’s Halloween. What do you think he’s up to?”

“You don’t think this is a weird coincidence?”

“That we see someone dressed up like a mummy on Halloween? No, I don’t think it’s a weird coincidence. Mummies are popular these days. So are zombies.”

“That wasn’t a zombie.”

“I know.”

“It was definitely a mummy.”

“Agreed.”

The jukebox began to play Steve Martin’s “King Tut”. I said, “Now, I think
that’s
a weird coincidence.”

“What?”

“That song.”

He started laughing. The bartender leaned across and called over the music, “What can I get you two?”

Fraser looked at me with raised brows. I shook my head.

“Two zombies,” Fraser ordered.

I groaned.

“Come on. Live a little.”

“You’re going to have to carry me back to the hotel.”

He grinned. “I’d be happy to.”

By now the rest of the clientele had forgotten us and were back to grousing over their beer and peanuts. We got our drinks and found a little table in the corner.

“Alley-oop.” Fraser knocked his glass against mine.

“That’s a real possibility if I down this.” I took a cautious sip. “Mother of God. What’s in here?”