The Vandemark Mummy Read Free Page B

but one should never scorn a sinecure out of hand. It may even, once the real work is done, enable scholarship. I have always admired scholarship.
    The Collection, as you will find, is a hodgepodge. There will be some pleasant surprises for you, or so I like to think. The mummy, which is its centerpiece, has a certain wistful appeal, being from the Roman era. I have neglected the Collection, distracted as I became by other interests. I hope it will find a better home at Vandemark College than the cellars where it has spent its time with me. I hope it will find a better curator in you than it had in me. Should any article of the bequest be unfulfilled, then the Collection will return to the disposal of my son and grandson, as joint executors of the entire estate which I will have left behind me, when I have left this world.
    I have, I trust, been quite clear. The president will also have been informed of the bequest, and its conditions. I have, I think, foreseen all contingencies, to the best of human abilities.
    Yours from the brink of mortality ,
    Felix K. C. Vandemark II
    â€œWill I be able to help out?” Althea asked. “Do you notice? He assumes you have to be a man.”
    Phineas noticed what his sister always thought of first—sexist stuff.
    â€œI don’t know if I’m qualified,” Mr. Hall said.
    And that was what his father always thought of first.
    â€œI don’t think this guy cared about qualifications,” Phineas pointed out.
    â€œIt’ll give me something to write your mom about.”
    â€œShe’ll be jealous,” Phineas said.
    â€œThere’s nothing to be jealous of,” Mr. Hall said. “It’s just something a scholar would enjoy.”
    â€œWell I can see why Mrs. Batchelor is angry at you,” Phineas said. “Who would want a mummy around permanently? Dirty, probably smelly, it’s just an old dead body.”
    â€œThat’s really dumb, Fin,” Althea said. “It’s a collection, the letter says. That means antiquities.”
    â€œYeah,” Phineas agreed. He’d been to the Metropolitan Museum on more class trips than he cared to remember. “Broken jars. Pieces of stone with things carved on them in a language nobody has spoken for hundreds of years. Statues with pieces missing.”
    â€œWhy don’t you two wait and see what it is, before you start fighting about it?” Mr. Hall asked.

CHAPTER 3
    The next ten days were busy ones for Mr. Hall, who, along with his summer school classes, also had frequent meetings with President Blight to discuss how to store the Egyptian Collection until the Building and Grounds Committee could have the proposed addition designed and built, and frequent meetings with Mrs. Batchelor to discuss her objections to everything President Blight and Mr. Hall had agreed on. Mrs. Batchelor was throwing up roadblocks at every point, Mr. Hall told his children.
    If, Mrs. Batchelor said, the collection needed temporary housing, why not in McPhail Hall? If the terms of the will forbade that, then why not in the gym? If the gym was open to the public over the summer, couldn’t it be closed? The library cellars were already used forfaculty offices, and the Sports Department office, and general storage, why did they have to take even more space for nonlibrary purposes? If they were going to go to the expense of an air control system, why couldn’t they put it in the rare book room, where there were irreplaceable books and holographs, acknowledged treasures? If they were going to go ahead and ride roughshod over her opinions, they couldn’t expect her to like it, could they? If they said that they agreed with her that a library was the heart of any educational institution, they didn’t expect her to believe them, did they? Not if they went ahead and did this.
    Mrs. Batchelor was not happy. Mrs. Batchelor was not satisfied that the library cellar was the right place for the