Chapter 9

“Zak?” Celeste asked in an uncharacteristically small voice. I looked up, blinking a few times as my eyes came back into focus. I’d been sitting on the worn, faux-leather armchair in the living room, staring intently at my feet, for over an hour.

Celeste stood before me, holding Mom’s deskpad out and smiling hesitantly up at me. “I drew you this. To make you feel better.”

On the deskpad’s screen was your usual kindergarten masterpiece, a stick figure whose arms came out of their ears. But I recognized the characters as ones she’d drawn before—it was me and Abuelo, wearing matching Indiana Jones-style hats.

“You’re in the pyramid,” she explained. “You’re going to find the mummy and the treasure, and then you’ll be a famous arky-ologist, like Abuelo.”

I smiled in spite of myself. “Thanks. That’s pretty fresh. Can you send it to me? Remember how?”

She flashed her gap-tooth grin at me and nodded, running her fingers across the deskpad’s screen. The doorbell rang just then, and I nearly jumped out of my skin. Who would it be? The cops, come to ask Mom to ID the body? Or crazy Emil, come to finish the job?

“It’s Dr. Erick. I saw his blue truck out the window,” said Celeste, her eyebrows drawn. I could tell my reaction had worried her. She didn’t really understand what was going on, but Mom and I had been visibly upset all day, and it’d had an effect on her, too.

I never thought I’d find myself relieved to see Erick, but I was dying to know what had happened at the site after we’d left. I leapt to my feet and hurried into the entryway. The front door stood open, and Mom and Erick were embracing. I wasn’t sure who was comforting whom, honestly. They both looked as shaken as I felt.

When Erick saw me standing there, he quickly dropped his arms from around Mom. “Hey, Isaak. What a day, right?”

I couldn’t think of a sufficient response to that. I eventually just twitched up a corner of my mouth, noncommittally.

“Were the police able to figure anything out?” Mom asked, her hand on Erick’s elbow. “I mean, about the thing you found? It wasn’t…” She trailed off and looked over at Celeste, who was standing behind me, peering around my legs and solemnly watching everyone’s reactions. “Isaak, maybe you and Celeste should go watch flix in my room or something.”

“Mom, I’m not a kid!” I protested. “I was there, I deserve to know!”

“Isaak—”

“It’s okay, Jesica. It wasn’t him. Isaak can hear.”