Scorpion House

by Maria Hudgins

  It became a good opportunity to examine each other’s passports and see who had the worst photo. They grimaced and chuckled as they passed their blue booklets up the line to Susan.

  Susan looked at Lacy’s first. “Lawrencia Clarissa Glass?” she shouted so loudly nearby men in turbans turned to look. “Your parents named you Lawrencia Clarissa?”

  “After my grandmothers. My parents didn’t want either of their mothers to feel left out. I was in third grade before I learned how to spell my whole name.”

  “Graham doesn’t use his first name either, I see.” Friedman held Graham’s passport out at arm’s length, studying the photo page. “Joseph Graham Clark. Born April 1, 1965, Wythe, Virginia.”

  “I don’t much like Joseph, so I use Graham.”

  “I don’t use my first name either,” Shelley said.

  Susan opened Shelley’s passport and read, “Kimberly Ward Clark. Where does the Shelley come in?”

  “Ward was my maiden name. Kimberly Michelle Ward. When Graham and I got married I changed from Kimberly to Michelle, and Graham shortened that to Shelley.”

  “Why did you drop the Kimberly?” Lacy asked.

  “Kimberly Clark? Sounds too much like toilet paper.”

  Everyone laughed except Joel Friedman. Joel, Lacy saw, was staring ahead with a haunted look in his eyes.

  “What’s wrong?” Lacy asked.

  “Nothing,” he answered. “Nothing.”

  * * *

  They had a two-hour wait for their flight to Luxor. Not permitted to leave the security area, Lacy left Joel Friedman in charge of watching her luggage and climbed a flight of stairs that led up to an observation deck. She pushed up her sweater sleeves and did a few stretching exercises, then stepped closer to the deck’s glass wall. Another world. Cairo spread out as far as she could see, the crescent-shaped finials of mosques piercing the purple haze of pollution. Seventeen million souls in the greater metropolitan area, she had read somewhere. It was greener here than she’d expected. She turned at the sound of Graham Clark’s baritone.

  “You didn’t bring a hat? We’re in Egypt, for God’s sake, Shelley. The sun will burn you to a crisp!”

  “I thought I could buy one here.” Shelley emerged at the top of the stairs, a few feet behind her husband.

  Graham turned and held out one hand to her. “Shades.”

  Shelley plunged her arm into the side pocket of her tote bag, drew out a pair of dark glasses and handed them over. “Lacy! What happened to your arms?” Shelley grabbed Lacy’s left wrist and caught Graham’s eye, pointing with her free hand.

  “Cat,” Lacy said. She recounted the greenhouse battle between Otto and herself while Graham picked up each of Lacy’s arms, lifted his sunglasses, and studied the scabbed-over scratches.

  “Neosporin,” Graham said. “These could get infected.”

  “You didn’t bring a hat? Neither did I.” Lacy addressed this comment to Shelley, but with a glance toward Graham to convey the message that Shelley wasn’t all that stupid for having brought no hat. “There’s a shop downstairs, but the prices are probably high.”

  “Forget it. We’re not paying airport prices,” Graham said. Wait ‘til we get to Luxor.”

  “I started to bring the hat I wore every single day at Mesa Verde, but my bag was jam-packed.” Shelley approached the glass wall with her arms spread wide. “Egypt! We’re here!”

  Lacy glanced from Shelley to Graham and back again. “We’re obviously not in the Chesapeake Bay anymore.”

  “Can you handle three months without your seaweed?” Graham asked.

  “This may be good. I need a break from my seaweed.”

  Graham launched into a long description of Lacy’s research to the upturned face of his attentive wife.

  Lacy interrupted him with a “time-out” hand signal. “Use the past tense, Graham. The whole project went down the drain yesterday.”

  * * *

  Their plane skidded into Luxor’s small airport in mid-afternoon. Luggage was carted in and, as they each claimed their own, Susan called out for their attention. Behind her lurked a dark, curly-haired man in a gallabeyah, the long, loose garb worn by most Egyptian men. He shifted his weight from one sandaled foot to the other.

  “This is Selim. He’s very kindly come to pick us up.”

  Lacy extended her hand to the new man, hoping it wasn’t a breach of middle-eastern etiquette. Her guidebook warned against men sitting with legs crossed or showing the soles of the feet, but wasn’t clear on whether those taboos applied to women. She didn’t recall any mention of hand-shaking. “Lacy Glass,” she said.

  “Selim Hamdy,” the man answered, smiling and bowing without taking her proffered hand.

  Outside, Susan exploded when she saw the topless Jeep Selim proposed to take them all away in. “The Jeep! You brought the Jeep? Look, Selim! How many people do you see? I see five plus you, that’s six! Do you see our luggage?” She swept her arm toward their massive assortment of bags. “Do you notice that the total volume of us plus our luggage is greater than the volume of this Jeep by a factor of about ten?”

  “This is all we have, Dr. Donohue. This Jeep.”

  “You could have borrowed something larger! Or rented something.” She twirled around and let out a scream that turned heads all across the parking lot.

  Joel Friedman took her by the arm. “Calm down, Susan. I think I see a rental place just over there.” He pointed to a sign written in both Arabic and English.

  Selim interrupted them, saying that he had a friend with a truck who could help them. He pulled a cell phone out of his gallabeyah and punched numbers with his thumb. Within a half-hour they had their baggage loaded onto a rusted-out flatbed truck and themselves into the Jeep. Joel got to ride shotgun and the other four shoe-horned themselves into the back, each with his or her precious laptop behind their legs or between their knees.

  They bumped and careened southward down several miles of road, a little toy Pepsi bottle on Selim’s key chain swinging in circles around the ignition hole, clacking against the gearshift knob. The road took them to a bridge that spanned the Nile. The land changed abruptly from tan to green as they approached the river, then back to tan in the hills beyond the strip of green after they’d crossed over and onto the West Bank. Selim and Susan provided a continuous travelogue while they bounced past temple ruins and villages. Lacy couldn’t make much sense of either, with Selim tossing heavily accented words over his shoulder and Susan vying to out-shout him over the wind and the roar of the Jeep’s engine.

  They headed north along a road that divided the green on their right from the beige sand and rock on their left. Lacy did a double-take and punched Shelley when they bumped past the Colossi of Memnon. A sight she never expected to see in real life. For some reason, it transported her back to a high school English class.

  Selim stopped at an intersection bounded by alabaster shops and waited for a chance to turn left. He pointed to a cluster of boxy shanties clinging to the hills beneath a row of holes dug straight into the slope. “My house.”

  “You live up there?” Lacy wondered that people actually lived in what looked, to her, like a ghost town.

  “Yes.”

  “Are you married?”

  “Yes. Wife. Two children.” Selim smiled and held up two fingers. “Very good for me. Short walk to expedition house.” He made his turn, following close behind a minibus belching black fumes that enveloped their Jeep and forced all but Selim to clamp their hands over their noses. Selim appeared unfazed. “But not for long,” he said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “The government is tearing our houses down. They already tear down some. See?” He pointed to a couple of backhoes and graders parked near a pile of rubble, then turned and pointed southward. “They move us to new village they build … down there.”

  “Is that okay with you? Do you want to move?” Friedman asked.

  “No! New place is too small! No room for m
y animals.”

  Susan reached forward across the back of Joel’s seat and grabbed his shoulder. “It’s absolutely necessary to protect the tombs. You have no idea how much damage has already been done! Tombs of the nobles are all over these hills in front of us,” she yelled over the roar of motors and the clatter of horses’ hooves. “Some haven’t even been discovered yet. Those houses are dug back into the ridge. All you see from here is the front façade. Some of them cut right into tombs!”

  Selim turned to Lacy as he pulled into the intersection, heedless of horns and oncoming traffic. “Our houses have been there, like you see now, for hundreds of years. My grandfather was born in house I live in now We do not destroy the tombs. We protect them!”

  “Protect them? Hah!” Susan shouted. “You protect them by selling off everything in them, right down to the paint on the walls!”

  “We do not sell the paint on the walls!” Selim’s jaw muscles tightened.

  “Your sewage and waste water is undermining the whole area.”

  “We guard the tombs with our lives.”

  “Right! And you charge admission, too.”

  Joel, in the front seat, turned to Susan and shot her a look that said, “Shut up.” Lacy also thought this was becoming quite uncomfortable for all of them. Graham and Shelley glanced at each other.

  Susan sat back and shoved the briefcase on her lap into the back of Joel’s seat. “The sooner they get those people out of there, the better.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  A wood sign at the foot of the drive said: WHIZ BANG.

  And at the top of the drive, a long, low, sand-color building with two domes on top and an arched breezeway along the front. It reminded Lacy of the sand castle she sculpted last summer using a frappacino lid as a mold.

  They had seen the Jeep coming. Three people waved from the breezeway. A grey-haired man, pot-bellied and bulbous nosed, a middle-aged woman with frizzy hair, and a short, elderly woman. The elderly woman wore the standard Egyptian garb, a long loose tunic. She apparently wasn’t a Muslim woman, Lacy decided, because her head wasn’t covered, her hair chopped off even with the bottom of her ears in a Sphinx-like do.

  “Welcome to Whiz Bang!” The middle-aged woman approached the Jeep and opened Joel’s door for him. She flashed them a crooked smile. “I’m Roxanne Breen.” She had a British accent.

  Susan stood on the back seat, jumped over the side and hugged her, then did the same for Roxanne’s two companions. “Roxanne Breen, Horace Lanier, and Bay, our wonderful cook,” she said. Lacy wondered if Susan had simply neglected to tell them Bay’s last name or if she didn’t remember it. She suspected that Susan didn’t consider hired help to be worthy of last names. She’d done the same thing back at the airport in introducing Selim.

  Joel Friedman stepped out and slowly straightened his legs and his back. He and the pot-bellied Dr. Lanier stood for several seconds staring at each other, nodding, their faces intent. At length, Lanier said, “You old son-of-a-gun!” He spread his arms and the two men embraced, thumping one another on the back.

  Friedman turned to his travel mates and said, “This is Graham Clark.”

  “I know Graham,” Lanier said. “Remember? I hired him.”

  “I forgot. And Lacy Glass.”

  “Lacy.”

  “I’ve heard a lot about you,” Lacy said as she shook Lanier’s hand.

  “And Graham’s wife, Shelley.”

  Introductions complete, Roxanne Breen said, “Bay has been so looking forward to your coming, since she’s American as well. From Chicago originally, aren’t you?” She nodded toward Bay. “She’s planned a special all-American dinner for us tonight, so I do hope you haven’t eaten yet.”

  They all assured her they hadn’t. Deep twilight had fallen and Lacy’s watch, now set to local time, said six o’clock. Her body clock said “mid-morning after a sleepless night.”

  Dr. Lanier led the group into the house. They followed him across the long porch, through an arched doorway and into a large, square room. “This is our main work room and storage room. We call it the antika room, for lack of a better term,” he said. “This is where we keep artifacts from the tomb.”

  Lacy looked around and saw that a concrete bench of a comfortable seating height, actually built into the walls, ran all around the room with gaps only where there were doors. Most of it was lined with pots and lump-filled burlap bags.

  “First things first, Horace,” Roxanne took over. Her crisp English accent contrasted starkly with Lanier’s American drawl. “I’m sure you’re all quite weary. Would you prefer to choose your bedrooms first or take a tour of our laboratory facilities? Selim will bring your luggage in and Bay has informed me that dinner will be served in an hour.”

  Susan clapped her hands. “Lab first! Lab first!”

  Shelley rolled her eyes.

  Lanier led the way through a door on the side opposite the front entrance and into a long, narrow room. The whitewashed wall facing them was punctuated by one small window and a door. Overhead, two bare light bulbs hung from cords. All four walls were lined with lab benches and equipment that shined as if it was brand new.

  To Lacy’s left, she saw a refrigerator, two binocular microscopes and one compound microscope. A tall glass chromatography column, a colorimeter and some other electronic instruments sat atop the bench. Beside the refrigerator stood a spectrophotometer, an instrument about the size of a clothes dryer. She hadn’t expected anything as sophisticated as this. She stepped over and ran her hand across its smooth top. It looked brand new, it’s three-prong plug still wrapped in shipping tape.

  “Golly.”

  Graham headed for the chromatography column and fingered the other equipment nearby. “Colorimeter … melting point apparatus …” He opened the wooden doors under the counter and revealed a dozen or more gallon bottles of reagents. “Acetic acid, methanol, ethanol, diethyl ether … The acids need to be stored separately. We’ll have to find another place for them.” He closed the door, straightened up, and looked around. “Where’s the fume hood?”

  “We had to make some concessions to the electric supply,” Roxanne said. “We’re actually lucky to have as much power as we do have running to the house. Even so, it isn’t sufficient to run things like fume hoods and such without blowing the circuits. And now that you’ve brought it up, I must caution you to run only one major appliance, excepting the fridge of course, at a time. Don’t run the spectrophotometer and the centrifuge at the same time.”

  “You’re all gonna love this, though.” Lanier directed their attention to a flat-screen monitor at the far end of the room. Beside it were a tangle of wires and fiber optic cables. “This is a video microscope and we’ve got light filters you can use and a digital camera attachment. It’s amazing. You’ll have to play with it when you get a chance.”

  Lacy picked up a device that looked somewhat like a police radar gun for nabbing speeders. “What’s this?”

  “Oh! Oh!” Susan pushed past the others and snatched the gun-like instrument from Lacy’s hand. “It’s an X-ray spectrometer. You just point it at a wall in the tomb and it analyzes the composition of the paint, the plaster, or whatever it’s pointing at.”

  “An X-ray spectrometer?” Lacy snatched it back. “I’ve heard of these but I’ve never seen one. How did you get this, Susan?”

  “By groveling. We have it on loan from the University of Chicago. They’re letting us use it for the next three months.”

  “Very cool. This’ll make working on the walls a piece of cake. I was wondering how I was going to analyze the paint without damaging it.”

  “Be careful with it, Lacy. It cost more than your car. And read the instructions before you go off half-cocked and zap the walls into a pile of dust.”

  Roxanne spoke up. “We’ve been positively dazzled over the past month with delivery trucks driving up and bringing us all these marvelous things. I haven’t the vaguest idea what half of it’s for. It’s all Susan’s
doing.”

  Susan accepted the compliment with an exaggerated bow.

  * * *

  Selim and his friend with the truck had lined up the luggage neatly in the big antika room.

  Roxanne, standing between the newcomers and their luggage, waved them into a bunch with her arms, indicating she wanted to tell them something before they grabbed their belongings. “Since the subject of our limited electric power has already come up, let me tell you a bit more about our house.

  “From the very start, we decided that this place would, first and foremost, do no harm to its surroundings. As you’ve already seen, we’re smack in the middle of the Valley of the Nobles but what you can’t see is the honeycomb underground. Most of the tombs, we think, have been found and mapped, but notice I said ‘most’ and ‘we think.’ There are certainly more tombs and they could be anywhere. Even under our feet. Another problem is the rising water table, which is partially due to poor sewage and drainage systems.

  “For these reasons, Whiz Bang has no underground plumbing and no sewage system. You’ll find the loo out back. It’s a chemical toilet that’s serviced periodically. Our water supply is quite fresh and clean, but it’s in a large tank outside behind the kitchen. For washing water, you will need to go outside to the tank and fill your basin. Every room has a basin.”

  “Is it clean enough to drink?”

  “I wouldn’t go that far. We have bottled water for drinking and brushing our teeth.”

  Shelley said, “How do we take showers?”

  “We have a small cubicle out back, behind the lab, with a drain that carries bath water into a holding tank. To shower you take one of the large plastic bags filled with water—you’ll find them beside the cubicle—hang it up on the hook inside and adjust the nozzle on the hose to open. Don’t forget to close the curtain, first.” Roxanne paused, grinned crookedly. “One bag will give you about three minutes of streaming water, so I’ve found that it helps to wet yourself, turn the nozzle to ‘off’, soap up, then turn it back on to rinse.”

  Shelley looked at Graham and then turned toward Lacy, whispering from the side of her mouth. “Did you know about this?”