Chapter Text
The wind had picked up so much in the past hour that the rain was falling horizontally. Even though it was nearing ten, the sky was almost white—a testament to the force of the gale. Every few minutes, a bolt of lightning would illuminate the sky, and followed by wall-shaking boom of thunder.
Richard Gold sat at the desk in the backroom of his pawn shop, drinking tea by candlelight. He was lucky that the power had waited until he had boiled his water to fail, but he had not been lucky enough to escape the shop before the weather turned violent, and now he feared he would be stuck there until morning. The only food he had was a granola bar and some lemon wedges, but at least he had a couch.
He hadn’t bothered to lock the shop, or flip the sign to closed. Anyone braving the streets tonight was likely to get hit by a stray projectile, so he saw no need to get up from his perch.
An old, battery-powered radio sat on the corner of his desk. After tinkering with the dial for a few minutes, he’d managed to pick up on the senior center’s private radio station, broadcasting old radio shows for all of the seniors to listen to while they weathered out the storm in the reinforced building. His building was not as reinforced as theirs, though, and it made it difficult to hear the low-quality broadcasts. Even with the volume all the way up, it was hard to make out much more than every other word.
The loudest part of the broadcast was the dramatic music that played every time a scene ended. It was loud enough and clear enough to mask the sound of the door opening, along with the accompanying ding. He supposed that this was why he didn’t notice that there was a woman in his shop until he heard her voice over the radio.
“Hello? Hello, is anybody here?”
He frowned, flicking the radio off. When she continued to speak, he knew it wasn’t background noise.
“We’re closed,” he called.
“Well, your door says open—and also it was open.”
He couldn’t argue with that. Not wanting her to come to the back, he set his tea down, and heaved himself out of the chair. The weather was making his leg ache more than usual.
“Shall I come back there, or are you coming out here?” The woman’s voice had an accent he couldn’t place, but he could hear the note of desperation in her tone, and he wondered what she could possibly need of a pawnbroker/loan shark in the middle of the worst storm in years.
“I’m coming.” He picked his candle up, bringing it out with him.
He didn’t know what he expected to see, but it wasn’t what was in front of him when he entered the shop. For some reason, it hadn’t occurred to him that the woman would be too wet, because he assumed that she must have driven there. He could see through the window that there was no car outside, though, and her only protection against the rain seemed to be a useless umbrella and a shiny pink raincoat that came to her thigh.
“I’m sorry to bother you, Mr. Gold,” she said, clutching a bag tightly to her chest, above her dripping umbrella. It didn’t look like any of her rain precautions had helped. There was no end to the water rolling down her ghostly legs, trickling from the soaked hem of her dark blue skirt and pooling in the gaps around her white pumps. Her mass of chestnut hair was plastered to her neck, sticking up out of the collar of her raincoat like it had tried to escape into it, and then peeked out when she stepped inside. She was shivering, but looked to be making an effort to keep it under control. He expected her to have pneumonia within the hour, being as impracticably dressed as she was for Maine in February, during storm.
She was waiting for him to speak, just shivering and dripping on his floor, so he said the first thing that came to mind.
“Are you crazy?”
It was a less composed thing than something he would usually say, but even Gold had visceral reactions at times, and he figured that she would chalk it up to him being the town beast. He waited for her to flinch, or lash out, but all he got was a tiny smile. It was pained and forced, but it was more than most people gave him. His curiosity was piqued.
“I hope not.” Her whole body shook, as though she’d just stepped through a gust of icy wind. She hooked the umbrella over her wrist, then crossed her arms tightly over her petite frame, crushing her bag to her.
“What can I do for you, Miss…?”
“French. Belle French.” She shook again, and he had the insane urge to offer her a blanket. If word got out that he was being hospitable, though, he would be ruined.
“The librarian,” he said, flicking his eyes up and down her once more. In the candlelight, she looked even more like a ghost.
She nodded, unsurprised that he knew who she was. He also knew that she had only been in town for a few months, and that her father was Moe French.
“How may I help you, Miss French?”
She stepped closer to him. “You’re the only one here, right?”
His hand clenched around his cane. She didn’t seem dangerous, but he was starting to get a bad feeling about this whole situation. The storm was the perfect cover for her to come here and kill him—though he couldn’t imagine why she would want to. Other people, certainly, but not the librarian.
“Do you see anyone else?”
She smiled again, this one a little less forced, and her pale cheeks colored. “Right, sorry. I just—well, things have been hectic. I—I want to hire you.”
He frowned. “Hire me? You mean, you need to borrow money? Or are you looking for someone to show you around apartments?”
She shook her head. “You’re a detective, right?”
He froze. No one had asked him that in years, and it had been even longer since he’d advertised the fact. “No, I’m sorry, I’m afraid you’ve come to the wrong place.” No longer caring about the soaked, freezing woman in front of him, he turned on his cane and started for the back room again.
She followed him.
“Wait, don’t go! I can pay you!”
He didn’t stop, even when he heard her slip, and then trip, and then fall into the counter. By the time he was leaning on the front of his desk, she had taken her shoes off and was stalking toward him like she thought she was fearsome. She slowed when she looked at him, probably because she realized he had stopped his retreat.
“Please. I don’t have much money, but I have some jewelry I can pawn.” She bit her lip, looking up at him with eyes that looked too blue to be natural.
“If you have a serious problem, you should go to the police.” He wasn’t the law enforcement’s biggest fan, but this woman was making him nervous. He was starting to think he would be okay with kicking her back into the rain.
“I can’t go to the police. That’s why I came to you.”
She had almost stopped dripping, but she was by no means dry, and when another violent shiver tore through her, he couldn’t take it anymore.
“Why don’t you have a seat?” He gestured to the couch in the corner, setting the candle on the desk between them.
“Oh, I don’t want to get your couch all wet.” She looked more upset about this than she did about needing his help.
“It’s just a couch.” He limped around to the other side of his desk, trying to look deliberately slow as he lowered himself into his chair, so that she wouldn’t suspect that he was in as much pain as he was. Cursed storm.
Instead of taking the hint, she followed him, setting her bag on the ground by his desk before coming to stand in front of it. Gold sighed.
“I don’t know who told you that I was a detective, but they were wrong. Again, if you have a real problem, I suggest you go to the police, Miss French. I can’t help you.”
“Well, okay, forget the detective thing for a minute.” She waved her hands. “You specialize in artifacts and weird things, right?”
He eyed her. Something was off about this interaction, and he wished that it wasn’t all but hurricaning outside so that he could make a hasty retreat. In this weather, though, they were both stuck here.
“You could say that, yes.”
She licked her lips, eyes darting around like she was checking for hidden cameras before they rested back on him. “Can I show you something?”
Being as unlikeable as he was had given Gold a heightened sense of paranoia, and this encounter was making all of his extra senses tingle. Showing fear might make it far worse, though, so he clenched his teeth together and forced a polite smile, nodding.
She reached for the buttons on her raincoat, and then paused. “Do you mind if I take my coat off?”
Curious now, and a little worried that she was going to strip, he nodded his assent again. To his relief, all she did was take the coat off, revealing a red blouse. The collar was drenched, but the rest was otherwise dry, and he was almost sad that it didn’t cling to her like the skirt and her hair.
“Where did you park your car?” he asked, watching her settle the coat on the floor.
“At the library.” She was still on the floor, rummaging around in her bag.
He drew his eyebrows together. “Did you walk from there?”
“Mmhmm. It’s not that far, and I didn’t want to be followed. I figured now was the perfect time to come to you, since no one in their right mind would be out in this storm.”
At least she knew that she was doing something crazy. It gave him a little bit of relief—although it did nothing to quell his fear that she was going to pull out a knife and stab him.
What she instead emerged with was a shoebox. It was the driest thing in her possession, and she must have gone to great lengths to ensure this. He leaned forward, craning his neck to see.
“Someone sent this to me on Monday.” She lifted the lid, and for a second, he was distracted by the flash of a ring on her left hand. Then, the lid was off, and he wasn’t sure what he was looking at.
At first glance, it looked like a gnarled tree root nestled in tissue paper. It looked like that at second glance, too, and even when he squinted, it was hard to make anything of the strange object in the dark.
“Here.” Belle picked up the candle and brought it closer, casting the flickering light over the thing in the box.
He leaned even closer, lifting himself from the chair and bracing himself on the desktop. With the light, he could see that it was humanoid. “What am I looking at?”
“Well.” She set the candle down, and wrung her hands together. “It’s a mummy.”
He blinked, and stood fully to lean over the box. “Is it real?”
“I was hoping you could tell me.”
He looked up at her. She was chewing her lip, running a finger along her necklace chain while she watched him.
“There are candles on the shelf behind you. Bring me some.”
She turned to do so, and he sat back in his chair, dragging the box and the one candle over toward him. From his desk, he pulled a magnifying glass, some tweezers, a pair of gloves, and a box of matches. Belle came back with six candles in her arms, and arranged them around the box like they were setting up an exorcism. He pushed the matches toward her, and she set about lighting the candles while he pulled his gloves on.
“Now, keep in mind that I am not a scientist, and that I do not have the proper tools to tell you much about this mummy.”
“I know.” She blew out the last match, waving it to let the smoke dissipate. “But I was hoping you could at least identify it, and then tell me about the curse.”
He looked up from where he was about to peel off a bandage, forehead creasing. “Pardon?”
She reached forward and unearthed a small card from the tissue paper. “Whoever sent me the mummy sent this, too.”
In the dim light, he could hardly make out the tiny block lettering. After a few seconds, he gave up and went back to the mummy.
“Read it to me.”
“‘The Unnamed Capacocha Mummy. It is said that any person who gazes upon the face of the mummy will be cursed, and ultimately face an untimely death, as the unnamed child who was mummified.’”
Gold looked up. “That sounds ridiculous.”
Belle, however, was chewing her lip, rubbing the card between her fingers. He narrowed his eyes. “Are you trying to curse me?”
Her eyes widened, and she shook her head. It was almost comical how still her hair remained, but he didn’t laugh. “Oh, no. I don’t believe in the curse.”
He couldn’t find it in him to make a facial expression. Anything she said was going to surprise him, he realized, and this was not something that had happened in a long time. It would have been refreshing, if not for the mummy.
“Then why do you want me to tell you about it, Miss French?”
“I think someone wants me to think that I’m cursed.”
He was getting nothing done in regards to mummy identification, so he set the tools down and leaned back, regarding Belle with cool interest. “And what exactly do you mean by that?”
“Well—I think I’m being stalked.”
He didn’t know when he had actually decided to reinstate himself as a private detective—because he realized that the decision had happened long before that moment—but when she looked up after that and bit her lip, he knew that this was a case he did not want to pass up.