Maria Hudgins - Lacy Glass 01 - Scorpion House

by Maria Hudgins

  Lanier, his heart leaping into his throat, ran to the workbench along one wall, dropped to his knees and scanned the row of pots underneath. He counted down seven pots from the left end, pulled one out and snatched the plug from its neck. He turned the open pot so the light could enter.

  “Thank you, God!” he said aloud. The papyrus was still there.

  Lanier plugged the pot and replaced it in its usual spot. Seventh from the left end. Now it looked no different from the other twenty or so pots he kept under that bench. He rose shakily to his feet and hobbled across to the exterior door. He scanned the vista from north to south. Nothing. No one. And no one could have gone out that door recently or he would have seen them from the roof. There was nothing but sand, rock, dirt, and ruins for more than a mile in all directions. To the north lay a parking area for visitors to the temple, too far away for anyone to have run in such a short time.

  Inside, he checked his own bedroom. Lanier slept and kept all his earthly belongings in a Spartan room with one window over his cot and one door that opened onto his lab. His whole life was in these two rooms, but he was obviously not sharing them with anyone else at the moment. His bedroom was tidy, exactly as he had left it.

  He checked the kitchen, the storage rooms, the dining room, and peeked down the hall leading to the library and more bedrooms. He threw open the screen door to the veranda. Gazing through one of the arches that framed the distant hills and temple, he spotted a cloud of yellow dust. A dark green Jeep bounced up the rutted driveway and disappeared around the side of the house.

  CHAPTER THREE

  It was a short flight from Dulles to JFK.

  Lacy stuffed her pea coat into the overhead bin beside her carryon bag and shoved both aside to make room for Susan Donohue’s, then noticed Susan wasn’t wearing a coat. The walk from the parking lot to the terminal, with strong wind and temperature in the teens, had chilled Lacy right through her heavy coat.

  “No coat?”

  “We’re going to Egypt,” Susan said. “You’ll get sick of toting that pea coat around.” She struggled on tip-toes to loft her own bag into the bin.

  “I don’t plan to tote it around for three months,” Lacy teased. “I plan to leave it in my room.” She helped the shorter Susan push her bag back until it was safe from falling out.

  “Whew! They’ve really got the heat cranked up, don’t they?” Susan pulled off her knit cap and re-spiked her auburn hair by running her fingers through it. She was a little woman, about forty, and no more than ninety pounds. With a nose too long to qualify her face as pretty. Her big, brown eyes gave her a perpetually startled look.

  Lacy took a better look at her travel companion and realized that Susan was much rounder than usual. In fact her normally wiry frame was positively rotund. She watched as Susan stuffed herself between the armrests.

  “I had to wear most of my clothes and my desert boots because they wouldn’t fit in my luggage.”

  Lacy laughed.

  “You wouldn’t believe the paperwork I had to bring. Plus my laptop.” Susan was the project’s leader. She began peeling back layers of material at her waistline, counting the shells, shirts, and T-shirts as she peeled. They counted eleven layers. Next to her skin, the last layer was a plastic-coated nicotine patch.

  “You’ve quit smoking?”

  “I’m in the process of quitting. It’s too soon to brag. This is my twelfth day on the patch.”

  “Good luck,” Lacy snapped her own seat belt and pulled it tight across her lap. “I’ll bet it was a bitch, organizing this trip.”

  “You would not believe it.” Susan fanned her face. “Sorry, Lacy, I have to lose a couple of tops.” She shed a long-sleeved shirt and pulled two T-shirts over her head. “And I hope you realize how privileged you are to have been selected.”

  Lacy bristled inside at the implication that she was lucky to be a part of the expedition but kept her face neutral. “A lot of people wanted to go?”

  “Dozens.” Susan rolled the shed clothing into a ball and shoved it under her seat. “I got applications and queries from all over the country. Like, ‘I have a PhD in Egyptology and I’ve won three Nobel Prizes. May I please, please join you?’” Susan pressed her palms together in a mocking plea. Her eyes darted to Lacy’s as if she was expecting a laugh.

  “I’m honored. I hope I won’t let you down.” Lacy didn’t feel like laughing.

  “Oh, you were a shoo-in, actually. Joel Friedman thinks you hung the moon.”

  “Not today, he doesn’t. Yesterday he watched me and a cat trash my whole wavelength-versus-pigment project.” She recounted the debacle in the greenhouse.

  “We’ve got a great team, you know.” Susan gave her a sideways glance. The team’s only bona fide Egyptologist, Susan had spent the previous dig season working and living at the place they were going to now. She already knew the living quarters and the researchers with whom they would be staying. “You on pigments, Graham on chemical analysis, Friedman on taxonomic identification, and me on hieroglyphs and hieratics.”

  “And Shelley?”

  Susan gave her a blank look.

  “Shelley Clark? Graham’s wife?”

  “And Shelley on textiles.”

  “Was she your choice?”

  “No.” Susan pulled a magazine from her seat-back pocket. “If it hadn’t been for pressure from certain quarters, I’d have chosen someone with expertise in something other than Apache blankets.” She opened the magazine, raised her eyebrows at an ad for Seagram’s gin, then slammed it onto her lap. “I went to Graham’s lab yesterday and I told him, I said, ‘Anyone who doesn’t pull their own weight on this project will be sent home!’ “ She tapped the armrest between them for emphasis. “By me! We don’t have enough grant money to waste it on someone who’s there for a nice vacation.”

  “Meaning Shelley.”

  “Meaning Shelley.”

  “What did Graham say?”

  “Just shrugged, like he always does.”

  Lacy conjured a mental picture of that exchange: Graham, clueless and careless about the tug-of-war between two women, shrugging and returning to his bubbling flasks. “You don’t like Shelley, do you?”

  “I don’t dislike her, but she gets on my nerves. She’s a one-upper.”

  “A one-upper?”

  “You know the type. If you’ve been to Alaska, they’ve been to Antarctica. If your parents met the president, hers met the queen. Always thinking of a way to go you one better. You can practically see the wheels turning in Shelley’s head when you’re talking to her. She’s paying no attention to what you’re talking about, she’s thinking, Now, how can I top this?”

  “I know the type,” Lacy said. “I think I’ll tell her I have herpes.”

  * * *

  Lacy closed her eyes and relived the demise of her precious project. The project that might have revealed how plants adjust their colors to take advantage of whatever light was available to them but which would have at least assured her of tenure. She could set it all up again, of course. Probably faster this time since she’d already made all the mistakes. At the moment, she didn’t have the will to think about it. Perhaps it was best that she was going to Egypt. A three-month hiatus.

  Starting over would mean another road trip up and down the Eastern Seaboard collecting the right species of seaweeds. Before her last trip, in August, she had phoned ahead for reservations at quaint-sounding bed-and-breakfasts spaced at easy days’ driving distances apart from Cape May, New Jersey to Nova Scotia. Rooms for two with double beds because Bart was going with her. She had imagined days wandering rocky shorelines, snorkeling, playing with Bart in sunny waters. Nights in Bart’s arms.

  Bart had backed out at the last minute. Couldn’t leave work, he told her. The veterinarian who was to have filled in for him had a family emergency. So she went alone, filled the back of her SUV with coolers of sloshing seaweed, and curled up each night in a series of double beds, sometimes without even washing
the saltwater off her legs.

  When she returned home, Bart was engaged to somebody else. Someone he must have had a relationship with before she left, she figured, because Bart was not a fast worker. In October Lacy heard he had married a paralegal with a Jack Russell terrier.

  Returning in her mind to yesterday in the greenhouse, she worried that she should have watched Otto longer to make certain he suffered no ill effects from the Johnsongrass. Perhaps she should have taken him to the vet.

  Forget that. His vet was Bart.

  The eastern seaboard slipped smoothly under the belly of their plane until Lacy looked across the top of Susan’s magazine and saw the skyscrapers of Manhattan.

  * * *

  The EgyptAir plane with a red-and-gold logo of Horus the falcon god on its tail crouched on the tarmac, its wheels in furrows of dirty snow. Their five seats, they found, were scattered around the tourist section with Graham and Shelley Clark together on the left side, Susan on the right, Joel Friedman and Lacy a dozen rows behind Susan but with a middle-aged woman in the seat between them.

  “Excuse me! Are you two going to talk across me like I’m a backyard fence all the way to Cairo?” the woman griped.

  “We are traveling together,” Lacy said. “I don’t know why we don’t have seats together. Would you like to change with one of us?”

  The woman snorted, then looked at Joel’s aisle seat. “I’ll change with him.”

  The exchange was made. Friedman, now sitting in the middle, twisted his large mouth toward Lacy and muttered, “Thanks a bunch for relieving me of my leg room,” his long legs folded tightly into the scant space available.

  “I’ll trade with you,” Lacy said, noting that the outward curve of the bulkhead on her right afforded a little extra room beneath the window. Friedman’s legs were slightly longer and much older than her own.

  Friedman suggested they trade seats halfway through the flight.

  “Tell me about Horace Lanier. What’s this big thing he’s on to?” Lacy asked as soon as the roar of the plane’s take-off subsided.

  “I shouldn’t have mentioned it. I was sworn to secrecy. It’s a papyrus he’s discovered. It’s going to change a lot of ideas.” Friedman asked the flight attendant for a scotch and soda.

  “I’m sorry sir. We don’t serve alcohol.”

  “I forgot. Egyptian airline. Muslim. Make it tomato juice.” He turned to Lacy and raised an eyebrow.

  “Water, please. Why the secrecy?” Lacy nudged Friedman back to the subject.

  “He’ll tell you about it himself when he’s ready. For now, he doesn’t want certain people to know.” Friedman pushed himself up with an elbow against the back of his seat and peered forward. “Susan. He mainly doesn’t want Susan to know.”

  Lacy figured Friedman would explain that and, when he didn’t, tried another tack. “Dr. Lanier used to be head of our biology department, didn’t he?”

  “Right. He left five years ago and I took his place. I hired you the next fall, right? Yes. So he was gone by the time you came.”

  Friedman had served as department head for two years until a heart attack forced him to step down and take lighter teaching duties. Lacy thought back to that time five years ago when Friedman had recruited her from her California school, and she had moved to the East Coast.

  “There was some sort of scandal.”

  “A tragedy.” Friedman took Lacy’s water from the flight attendant and passed it over, but splashed a bit of his own tomato juice across the seat back in front of him and onto the middle-aged woman’s blue slacks. The woman shot him an evil look and took off for the bathroom. “Horace’s wife was murdered. Strychnine.” His chin jerked backward on that last word. “The case was never solved. That was the problem. They had no suspects, really. It happened up in the mountains. They had a summer place west of Harrisonburg.

  “With no suspects, suspicion naturally falls on the husband, although Horace was in Charlottesville at the time of the murder. Their son, Marcus, also got the third degree from the police but he had a pretty good alibi as well.”

  “Then what?”

  The woman returned to her aisle seat, still blotting a large wet spot above her right knee with a tissue. Friedman muttered apologies and got nothing but a glare in reply.

  “That was it. No other suspects, no arrests, but a lot of speculation.” Friedman drew in a breath. “The gossip got worse and worse, and finally Horace said, ‘Screw this.’ He resigned and moved to Egypt.”

  “Why Egypt?”

  “Because he’s interested in the herbology and medical knowledge of the ancient Egyptians and because he sees the Nile ecosystem undergoing changes that threaten to wipe out many of the species the ancients used.”

  “And he just happens to be living at the same place we’ll be staying?” Lacy sipped her water. “Or is he the one who invited us?”

  “Neither, actually. Roxanne Breen is an Egyptologist from England and she’s in charge of the expedition house. She and Susan have worked together before. It’s Roxanne who invited Horace and now she’s making room for us.”

  Lacy made a pre-dinner trip to the bathroom and returned to her seat by the other aisle, which took her past the Clarks. Graham, tall and lanky with curly hair the color of maple syrup and periwinkle blue eyes, had the brighter plumage of the pair. His wife, Shelley, reminded Lacy of a tall version of Susan Donohue. Large brown eyes, oval face, and a body that was all knobs and angles. They had no children. Both had taught at Wythe since before their marriage and both had grown up in the local area. Graham, much to his chagrin, had made the superlatives page in a fall issue of the Wythe University student newspaper as “Sexiest Science Geek.”

  “Have you heard about our equipment? Has it been delivered yet?” Lacy asked Graham, who was plugged into the armrest and watching the overhead TV.

  Graham pulled his ear buds out. “Haven’t heard a thing. We turned in the paperwork in July, but Susan says things in Egypt are on Inshallah time.”

  “Meaning whenever … ‘God willing’ “ Shelley added. “It’s one of the Arabic phrases you need to get around in Egypt.”

  Even more than Susan Donohue, Graham had been the prime mover of this project. The original idea—using physical scientists, rather than Egyptologists and archaeologists, to analyze a tomb—had been his. He had proposed the concept to Susan last spring when she returned to school after her dig season in Egypt. Hundreds of ancient sites had been explored in Egypt over the last century or two, but only by people with a pre-existing knowledge of Egyptian history. A history that often proved to be wrong and misleading. Had this knowledge colored the way they looked at what they found? Graham suggested that it must have. What if a tomb could be examined using twenty-first century techniques and by people who knew nothing about history? Mightn’t fresh eyes see what educated eyes couldn’t? Susan had agreed and, together, they had scrounged grant money, pitched the idea to the powers-that-be in Cairo, and decided who they wanted to join them.

  Graham settled back in his seat. “Those men standing by the bathroom door were checking you out when you walked back here.”

  Shelley’s swift glance up and down Lacy’s long, athletic body carried with it a flash of unabashed resentment.

  * * *

  When their dinner trays arrived, Friedman pulled a bottle from his jacket pocket and shook out one pill. “Did my wife tell you to make sure I take my digoxin?”

  “She did.” As a matter of fact, Joan Friedman had reminded Lacy to do just that when they had talked by phone yesterday.

  “You can relax until tomorrow,” he said, downing the pill with the last of his tomato juice.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Dr. Roxanne Breen, Egyptologist from Oxford, barged into Horace Lanier’s lab without knocking. Her frizzy hair shoved back by the reading glasses on top of her head, she approached him with her hands pressed together, prayerfully, in front of her. “You must put the papyrus back in the tomb, Horace. Now!”

/>   “It’s safe. Don’t you worry.”

  “Someone knows it’s here! Obviously, that’s what they were looking for—whoever it was.”

  “I’ve taken care of it.”

  “You’ve put it back?” The relief in her voice was palpable.

  “I didn’t say that. I said, ‘I’ve taken care of it.’ “ Lanier leaned forward, squinting at a handwritten recipe tacked to the corkboard above his worktable. An ancient Egyptian toothache remedy. Selecting a jar labeled “carob” from the row of powdered materials at the back of the table, he pointed to the label. “Thanks to the papyrus, we now know for sure that we’re supposed to use carob, not colocynth.”

  Roxanne shivered a little. “How have you taken care of it, Horace, if you haven’t put it back?”

  “Check the door. New lock.”

  The room’s only exterior door now wore a chain and padlock.

  “That’s not what you need to be worrying about, Horace. You need to worry about Susan Donohue. She’ll be here tomorrow and someone knows the papyrus is in this room. If Susan finds out, it’s all over for you. She’ll run straight to the Council and there goes your access to the museum. In fact, there goes your work visa!”

  “I can handle Susan.”

  “No one can handle Susan.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  A warm Cairo breeze swept them from the plane to the waiting shuttle and into the terminal, where they queued up at the back of a long line for the visa booth. Lacy felt groggy and jet-lagged. She needed a good run to work the kinks out of her legs.

  Susan held the paperwork for their three-month work visas. Now her normal size, she had peeled off several more layers of shirts and stuck them in a plastic bag.

  Shelley looked as if she had tried to apply fresh make-up to her sallow skin, and Graham’s jaw line had sprouted stubble. Friedman’s craggy face was craggier than ever and his eyes were red. They all looked the worse for their trip across seven time zones.