What's the Name of That Book??? discussion

My 7th grade teacher started reading us this book near the end of the school year, so she never finished it.

The story starts with two (maybe more, but feels like two) children looking at an old spooky looking house. A man comes by and starts to tell them a story about the house.

A boy has just moved into the new house with his mother. I think the mother is recently married to the guy that owns the house. The owner keeps either mummies or artifacts in the basement and tells the boy not to go near them. The boy goes to his room to explore it and finds a small triangle near the baseboard in his room. We get the impression this is an important clue to a mystery in the house. He is then called down for supper.

That is as far as she got. She read it to us in 1992, so it has to be at least that old.

Gosh, There are a lot of books that meet your criteria:

http://www.goodreads.com/search/searc...

I know this one, because someone was looking for it a year or so ago and she made it sound so intriguing that I bought it!

This is The House On Hackman's Hill by Joan Lowery Nixon

-- there are two storylines, a contemporary one in which two kids decide to explore a creepy house to find a lost mummy, and a long flashback in which an old man tells them what happened when he was a little boy living in the house with his mother and his creepy Egyptologist stepfather. Then the flashback portion ends and we join the modern children in the house.