Good morning friends and readers!
Welcome back to Story Orgy. I'm late by over a week with this post! Late seems to be my middle name for this whole story. Ready to see what happens next?
Welcome back to Story Orgy. I'm late by over a week with this post! Late seems to be my middle name for this whole story. Ready to see what happens next?
Mum's the Word
Chapter Thirteen
Oct 26: "So...it has come to this?"
“So it has come to this has it?”
Owen stirred groggily. The voice was familiar… his eyes opened reluctantly. His whole head throbbed, worse than the time he’d downed an entire fifth of whiskey freshman year. But he hadn’t gotten drunk… not in a long time. Certainly not since he and Izzy had been on such a tight budget all summer. Then why did he…
The memory of the blow to the head returned quickly along with the general impression of getting the shit kicked out of him by a mummy. Which couldn’t be right, and might just be a sign that he’d finally reached his limit in terms of how many B movies a man could watch without going completely insane.
“What…” His tongue seemed swollen and unwilling to do its work. Owen could sympathize, but felt imminent danger too keenly to allow any slacking. “What’ s going on?” He tried moving and discovered that it wasn’t possible. His toes wiggled, his fingers clenched, but his ankles and wrists seemed to be bound with something.
“I might ask you the same question, but I really don’t care to hear the answer.” Because the speaker stood between Owen and the candle, he appeared to be all shadow, a bulky, masculine shadow.
“Professor Gamez?” The identity of the speaker dawned on him in a rush. “You’re not supposed to be here.” He’d been banned from the campus following the allegations of sexual misconduct the year before.
“I’m not the only one. Those idiots think they did me a disservice by firing me? Ha.”
A cautious glance at his feet revealed that the duct tape he and Izzy had left in the hallway after rigging the door that afternoon had been put to good use. “You could have fought for your job.” Owen wiggled. It was the best he could do. The duct tape ripped hair out of his wrists. The pain of that allowed him to focus more, to get out of the throbbing in his head and think more clearly.
“Fought for my job? Teaching idiotic teenagers about Howard Carter and demolishing their dreams of becoming Indiana Jones? Whatever for? No. No. I was nearly done there anyway. I just needed a little more time.”
“Time?” Owen rubbed his wrists together, trying to loosen the tape enough to squeeze his hands through. “But…”
“Time to cover my tracks, and to make sure that there wasn’t anything else left.”
The professor moved, and the candlelight flickered over features that Owen had once considered friendly, genuine. He didn’t know whether it was his current situation or a new clarity of vision that revealed a less than amiable aspect of his favorite… former favorite… professor’s appearance. his eyes appeared to be dark and cold, his lips were twisted in a derisive sneer.
“Cover your tracks?” The truth… or a possible truth… dawned on him in a flash. “You’ve been stealing the museum’s artifacts?” Selling antiquities on the black market… or even eBay was probably quite lucrative. Especially if the professor had been hand picking the most valuable items for his entire tenure.
Which explained why Izzy and Owen hadn’t found anything of much interest in all the storage rooms they’d swept and inventoried. Gamez had most likely been removing all reference and records related to each item he’d taken as he’d taken it, leaving piles of the sorts of things that people all over the country probably had in their own attics. Like arrowheads, family journals, and civil war memorabilia.
Of course, taking all the bloody arrowheads would have been just as good a money making scheme, and probably less noticeable. More time consuming though, Owen conceded. Why make your money two dollars at a time when a single Egyptian artifact… with provenance, might bring you a hundred thousand dollars?
“Stealing? The museum had no right to those things.”
“Most of them were donated by alumni,” Owen pointed out. Right now he really wished he’d adhered to Izzy’s demand that they stick together. The tape on his hands was getting less sticky, and his wrists smarted where the hair had been ripped out.
“Who misappropriated them from their land of origin.” The professor picked up a shoe box that Owen recognized as the one he’d taken home the other day. So Gamez had the Egyptian artifacts too.
“That doesn’t make you stealing them right.”
The professor picked up the candle, illuminating his face in full for the first time. “Ah… your nursery school morality is so… useless. Two wrongs don't make a right, do they? Well, Owen, it’s been nice chatting, but I must be off.” He blew out the candle and disappeared into the resulting darkness. “I’d wish you well, but… I’m afraid that’s probably not going to work out for you in the circumstances.”
At least, that’s how it seemed as Owen’s eyes struggled once again to adjust to the change in lighting. It didn't take as long this time, and if he’d paid attention in biology class he might have known why. Instead, he was just left with gratitude for the fact.
If he could reach the swiss army knock off in his pocket, he’d be able to escape easily. If he didn’t… then it sounded like Gamez’s threat had a solid basis in reality. No one knew this door was here, just him and Izzy.
Izzy.
Izzy would come looking for him, and find the hidden door for sure.
Unless he was off somewhere making out with the sexy professor he’d been making eyes at all semester.
“Izzy!” He shouted, jerking at his bound wrists. “Izzy!” Somehow the idea of rotting in this hidden room while Izzy and the Professor went about their lives, wondering occasionally what ever happened to Owen, why he’d disappeared while taking a piss in a museum that had been as looted as Tut’s tomb, really pissed him off.
Because.
Izzy was his, wasn’t he?
And Owen as an only child with few possessions, had never really learned to share.
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