When Alex went to bed that night, his mother wasn’t home.

When he got up for a glass of water two hours later, she still hadn’t returned.

He checked the living room table for a note. No note, but he found a gold-paint pen and a few scraps of what looked like old cloth. As he bundled up the scraps to toss out, he saw the faded cover of a book underneath, Legend of the Death Walkers.

He wasn’t that tired — he’d hardly been tired at all since he’d returned from the hospital — and he was determined to wait up for his mom. He flipped open the book. He was expecting a novel and was surprised to discover that it was a very old history book. He flipped to chapter one: “Who Were the Death Walkers?”

According to legend, the Death Walkers were a group of evil men with strong spirits. They knew they would fail the weighing of the heart, so after death, they used their powerful wills to cling to the edge of the afterlife. There they remain, the tales say, struggling to hang on and desperately waiting for an opportunity to escape.

Evil men with powerful wills … it reminded Alex of something, and he flipped to the table of contents. And there it was, chapter four: “The Stung Man.”

Cool, he thought, and settled down on the couch to read as he waited for his mom.

He woke up to the sound of someone knocking on the door: DONK! DONK! DONK!

Alex looked around the apartment in the dim morning light.

“Mom,” he called. “Door!”

No response. He looked around again. Nothing had been moved. The keys weren’t on the peg by the door.

DONK! DONK! DONK!

“Anyone home?” a man called from the other side. The sound mixed with the neighbor’s corgi barking its head off.

Alex stumbled toward the door.

“Uh, who is it?” he shouted.

“Police!” came the voice.

Police? he thought. What’s going on?

Half asleep still, he wasn’t afraid, only confused.

Alex looked through the peephole and saw another eye looking in. The eye pulled back and a man’s head came into view. He had Middle Eastern features that Alex thought might be Egyptian. He wasn’t wearing a uniform, but then he flashed a badge in front of the peephole.

“MOM!” Alex called again.

No answer.

The confusion was turning to fear.

No, Alex thought. Oh please no.

“Open the door, please,” called the man. He sounded either tired or annoyed, possibly both.

Alex undid the first lock: click! “Do you know where my mom is?”

“That’s what we need to talk about.”

His name was Detective Hussein, and as soon as he told Alex he regretted to inform him that his mother had disappeared from the museum, the investigation began. As he did a thorough sweep of the small apartment, he peppered Alex with questions.

“So she just got up and left for work, and that was the last you saw of her?” the detective asked.

“Yeah,” said Alex. “Pretty much.”

“And you’re sure she didn’t call? Email? Text? Anything?”

Alex shook his head. But just to be sure he checked his email. And his phone. And his voice mail. And his email again.

Nothing. Not a word.

He felt helpless and collapsed onto the couch.

“Where is she?” Alex asked. His voice broke on the last word, but he didn’t care.

“We don’t know,” said Hussein. “Something happened yesterday. We have your mom on video entering the museum.”

Alex fired off the questions as fast as he thought of them: “What do you mean ‘something happened’? What happened? You saw her entering the museum, so when did she leave?”

Hussein put his hand up in a stop sign, and for some reason that made Alex angry. Are you a traffic cop or a detective? he wanted to yell. Tell me where she is!

“We don’t know. Cris Duran says he saw her in the Egypt wing yesterday afternoon. But it’s not on the cameras. We don’t have her leaving, either. We’ve been going over it for hours.”

“Yesterday afternoon?” said Alex. He’d been waiting all that time. He could have been looking for her. They could have been looking for her! “Why’d you wait so long?”

“It was Saturday. People just thought she went home to be with you. But that was before we knew something else was missing.”

Alex got a bad feeling.

“What?” he managed to say.

“A scroll. Very old. Some kind of spells.”

“The Lost Spells,” said Alex. His anger had turned to dread now, like hot water suddenly running cold.

“Yeah, those.”

“She didn’t take them,” said Alex. “She wouldn’t.”

“We don’t think she did. She had plenty of opportunities before that.”

“Wait, you mean …?”

“I’m sorry, Alex.”

The cold water turned to ice.

If he hadn’t been sitting down, he would have fallen.

“Did you hear me?” said Hussein.

Alex looked at him closely. For a second, he didn’t even remember who this man was. “Hear what?”

“What I just said.” The detective repeated himself, very slowly: “We think she’s been taken.”

Alex rode to the museum like a tranquilized animal.

He remembered getting in the detective’s car and getting out of it, but nothing in between except the smell of old coffee. He was operating in the same sort of steady low-grade panic that people report after tornadoes or earthquakes. He started to come out of it as they headed up the broad front steps. “What are you going to do?” he asked Hussein.

“We’re going to find your mom.”

Alex looked up at the detective and nodded. “Okay,” he said. “Good.” They reached the front doors, manned not by museum employees but by a pair of beefy uniformed NYPD officers.

“Detective,” said the closest one, nodding to Hussein.

“Officer,” said Hussein, nodding back.

They took a sharp right toward the Egyptian wing. Alex saw bright yellow police tape in front of the entrance. It took him another five or six steps to spot the man standing behind it, because he was wearing all black.

“Detective,” Alex said, stopping in his tracks, a memory rushing back to him.

“Yeah?” said Hussein, stopping half a step farther on.

“My mom got a phone call before she left yesterday.”

Alex couldn’t believe he hadn’t mentioned that yet. He gave his head a vicious shake — like a dog with a chew toy. He needed to get it together, for his mom.

“She was speaking German,” he said with a look toward Todtman. “And she was really upset.”

“Right,” said Hussein. “Interesting. You can tell me about it later.”

Later? And just like that, it hit Alex. The detective didn’t consider him a partner in this case. He considered him baggage. Babysitting. Alex’s head dropped, his shoulders slumped.

Hussein lifted up the yellow tape so Alex could get through. As he ducked under, Todtman walked toward him, lowering his phone from his ear.

“I’m sorry, Alex,” Todtman said, addressing him as if he were a longtime friend instead of a near stranger. “I should have been here.”

Alex stared at him, his suspicion growing. Of course he was claiming he wasn’t here.

“Anything new, Detective?” said Todtman.

Don’t tell him anything! thought Alex.

“Nothing yet,” said Hussein.

“Well, let me know if I can help in any way,” said Todtman.

“I will, Doctor. And do me a favor?”

“Yes, Detective?”

“Don’t go anywhere.”

“I don’t intend to,” said Todtman. He looked down at Alex and bent his face into something like a sympathetic smile. Then he put his phone back to his ear and turned away. As he did, something swung into sight under the open collar of his shirt. It wasn’t much, just a flash of old copper and a hint of blue stone, but Alex recognized it immediately.

His mom’s scarab.

He was sure of it.

Hussein headed into the Egyptian wing, and Alex had no choice but to follow. He shot one more look at Todtman, still whispering mysteriously into his phone.

They reached the room where the Lost Spells had been. It reminded Alex of Grand Central Terminal. Forensics investigators were walking back and forth across the room in purposeful, crisscrossing paths. Their legs made shush-shush sounds in their baggy plastic suits. They were collecting evidence — and there seemed to be plenty of it.

“What have you got?” said Hussein to the nearest plastic suit.

The woman inside shook her head. “What haven’t we got?”

“That’s not an answer, Barb,” he said.

“Okay,” she said. “First off, some psycho moved a mummy. Moved. A. Mummy. Then there’s the information plaque on the floor. No prints, but we sent the swabs on ahead.”

“DNA?”

“Yeah, as near as we can tell, dog DNA.”

Hussein shook his head and frowned. “We’re gonna have to rerun that.”

“Sure,” said Barb. “We can do that right after we source the scorpions.”

“Scorpions?” said Hussein, quickly scanning the floor.

“Yeah, two of them, in the next room.”

“Exhibits, you mean.”

“Living,” she said, “and aggressive. I’ve got ’em in specimen jars if you want to see ’em.”

“This is crazy,” said Hussein. “Okay, what about the case? How’d they get the scroll?”

Alex looked over at it. His brain was reeling again. Dog DNA? He stared at the case, trying to focus on something.

“That’s the weirdest part,” said Barb.

Hussein raised his eyebrows. “I find that hard to believe.”

“The case is completely intact — still locked, still sealed. And utterly empty.”