The Egypt Game

In the days that follow, the children continue to puzzle over the mystery of the oracle’s message and where it came from. They also spend an equal amount of time contemplating the murderer still at large in the neighborhood. The police haven’t caught a suspect yet. No new rituals are performed in Egypt as the Christmas season approaches. One night, the Rosses go to a concert and ask April to babysit Marshall while they’re away. She happily agrees, thinking she can get some homework done at the same time. After arriving at the Ross apartment, April realizes that she’s left her math book in Egypt. It’s already after dark, but she wants to dart out and retrieve it. Despite her objections, Marshall insists on tagging along.

It's now about eight o’clock, and even the familiar alley feels sinister to April. As she lifts the loose board to let them into the storage yard, she pulls it the wrong way, causing a rusty nail to squeak loudly and announce their presence. She quickly finds the missing math book in the yard and pulls up the board to exit. April intends to usher Marshall through first when a hand grabs her from out of nowhere. April clings to the loose board as someone tries to drag her away. Marshall remains in the yard, holding a flashlight and looking back over his shoulder.

Suddenly, a pane of glass in the back window of A-Z Antiques shatters. The Professor shouts for help. People in the neighborhood hear the ruckus and instantly respond. April’s attacker flees before he can be captured.

April and Marshall are taken to the police station to answer questions. The Professor has been taken into custody on suspicion of being their attacker. At first, Marshall remains silent until April coaxes an eyewitness account from him. Marshall explains that he tried to yell, but his throat was stuck until the Professor helped. The boy says that he recognized April’s attacker as the clerk from Schmitt’s store: “When the men came in for the lineup, there was the big stocky man with red hair and blotchy red-brown freckles from Schmitt’s Variety Store, the one who was the stockboy, and Marshall pointed to him right away” (193).

The Professor is exonerated, and April’s grandmother comes to claim the children. Both April and Caroline cry with relief once the ordeal ends, and April calls Caroline “Grandma” for the first time. Marshall is regarded as the hero of the hour for identifying the murderer who has been terrorizing the neighborhood. The man is Schmitt’s cousin. Schmitt had been providing an alibi for his mentally unstable relative even though he suspected that the man was behind the local murders. Schmitt diverted suspicion by pointing the finger at the Professor instead. Now that Marshall has given a positive identification, Schmitt has no choice but to admit that he can’t corroborate his cousin’s whereabouts during the other crimes. In the days that follow, the story of the capture makes the local papers with Marshall’s photo.

The neighborhood finally quiets down just as the Christmas school break begins. When the children reassemble to resume the Egypt Game, they find themselves locked out of the storage yard: “Someone had replaced the loose board and nailed it into place with big, long nails, and some fresh strands of barbed wire had been strung around the top. The consensus of opinion was pretty much, ‘That’s that!’ (196)

A few days later, April visits the Professor to thank him for saving her life. When she enters his shop, she finds that the interior is cleaner and many more customers are there. Mrs. Chung, Elizabeth’s mother, has become an employee. She tells April that the Professor will soon be leaving on a buying trip and that she will run the shop in his absence.

April and the Professor chat briefly as he shows her some small curios, or intriguing objects, from Egypt. After she leaves the shop, April wistfully realizes that the Professor has kept all the objects the children accumulated during the Egypt Game, but he doesn’t offer to give them back. At home, April receives a letter from her mother. Dorothea invites April to fly to Palm Springs to spend the holiday with her and Nick. April is annoyed by the short notice and writes a polite response saying that she and Grandma already have plans and that April will also be spending time with friends.

On Christmas Eve, Caroline instructs April to assemble the entire Egypt crew at their apartment because the Professor will be visiting. When they’re all together, the Professor tells them his life story. His name is Dr. Julian Huddleston, and he once taught anthropology. That was how he met his wife, Anne. She was an artist interested in studying indigenous cultures. They eventually married and went on expeditions to acquire art objects for Anne’s shop, A-Z Antiques. On one of these trips, she was killed in a native uprising. Afterward, the Professor shut himself inside his wife’s shop to keep the world at a distance.

Over time, he became interested in watching the Egypt Game from his back window. The Professor confesses that he was the one who left the oracle note about Security because he hid the octopus to protect it from the rain: “I felt obligated to let you know what I had done with Security, and the oracle offered a way to do it without any direct contact. And contact, involvement, was what I had spent years eliminating entirely from my life” (209).

Marshall’s mute plea has forced him to come out of his self-imposed isolation. He confesses that he is grateful for the Egypt crew. As a reward, the Professor distributes keys to the padlock on his storage yard. There are six of them, each suspended on a chain with the engraved name of the key’s owner. He invites the children to use the yard for their games whenever they like.

After Christmas dinner, April and Melanie discuss the group’s next outing to the lot. They agree that Egypt may be played out, that they need to invent a new game: “They lay there, staring into the future gloomily for a while, their chins on their hands. Then April turned towards Melanie, slowly and thoughtfully. ‘Melanie,’ she said, ‘what do you know about Gypsies?’” (215).