Scorpion House

by Maria Hudgins

  “Joel had the hots for you.”

  Lacy made a derisive puffing noise. “He loved me like a daughter.”

  “You are so naïve.” Graham turned to face her, cocked his head to one side. “No you’re not. You aren’t naïve, you just choose to keep it simple, don’t you? We’re all just friends, aren’t we? Partners, buddies and pals.”

  “Have it your way.”

  “Seriously, Lacy. When you were going out with that guy, Bart, Joel was unbelievably pissed. He talked to me about it a couple of times.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He said the guy was a jerk. Not good enough for his sweet Lacy.”

  “The guy was a jerk. The fact that Joel was smart enough to see it when I couldn’t doesn’t mean he had the hots for me. It only means he was smart.”

  Lacy left the porch, went straight to Joel’s bedroom, and stole the top sheet.

  * * *

  Lacy lay on her own bed trying to figure out how Lanier’s wrinkle concoction could have wound up smeared on the selvage edge of Joel Friedman’s top sheet. She had examined the smudge again, smelled it and compared it to the scent of the cream in the bowl still sitting on the table in the antika room. Same grassy smell. Tucking the soiled sheet into the bottom drawer of her dresser, she recalled the blob she’d seen on the outside of Joel’s elbow the evening before. On his left arm. Joel had used his right hand to turn Lacy’s chin, and, looking downward, she had glimpsed Joel’s left arm.

  The smear, a translucent greasy spot, was on the side of the sheet that had been facing up. About a foot from the margin and halfway between the top and bottom edges. As Joel had lain on top of the sheets, that spot would have been down between the bed and the wall. Had he gone to bed on top of both sheets, or had he slipped between them and decided it was too hot? Face up or down? Either way, the outside of his left elbow wouldn’t contact that part of the sheet. It would have had to be pulled up and over him. And he would have had to be facing down.

  Could someone have wrapped the sheet around him, pinning his arms to his sides, then sat on him and smothered him with his own pillow? That would explain why Joel hadn’t cried out.

  She experimented. She turned and twisted every direction in her own bed, pulling her top sheet this way and that. She scrambled through her makeup bag until she found a tube of aloe gel and smeared some on her left arm. She found she could get smudges on the center of the sheet, the pillow, or the top margin, but not on the left edge. No way. Pulling Joel’s sheet out again, she held it up to the light slanting through her window. The spot where the unguent had contacted the sheet had turned translucent. She shook it out preparing to fold it up again, then stopped. There was another spot—lighter but almost the same size and shape as the first. Laying the sheet out flat, Lacy folded the two sides over until they coincided, and a small cry slipped from her throat. Now the sheet formed a sort of burrito-shaped envelope just large enough to accommodate a man’s body. It was so obvious it made her sick to her stomach. Someone had wrapped Joel in the sheet, face down, his arms trapped by his sides, and held him there until the pillow took his life. No scream. No noise.

  Slipping back into Joel’s room, she looked around one more time. Was anything else out of place? Strange? A suitcase lay open on the floor beside the dresser, not completely unpacked. On the writing table, a manila folder. The same one he’d brought to the greenhouse on Friday? On the outside, Joel had written “Selim Hamdy,” and “Jody Myers.” Who was that? She opened the folder and found Joel’s itinerary, flight insurance forms, a photocopy of his passport photo page and a page, in Joel’s own handwriting, of addresses and phone numbers, mostly folks back home. For postcards probably. She spied a red smear on the back and recalled the tomato juice spill on the plane. Lacy closed the folder, took it across the hall to her own room and stuck it in her bottom drawer on top of the sheet.

  As crazy as it sounded, Lacy couldn’t think of a more likely scenario than that Joel had been pinned face down, wrapped in his own sheet. The evidence? She had nothing but two smudges of greenish goo and if she told anyone else, they’d laugh. But the more she thought about it the more certain she became. Joel was murdered.

  CHAPTER NINE

  In the late afternoon, Roxanne suggested a trip to the tomb. “We’ll go daft sitting around here,” she told them.

  Lacy, from her seat on the built-in bench in the antika room, said, “I don’t want to leave the phone.” She had commandeered a spot near the dining room door because the house phone was just around the corner.

  “Horace will be here and Bay’s in the kitchen. One of them will come and get you if there’s a call.”

  Shelley stood up, unfolding her knobby limbs, as if she was anxious to get out of the house. She turned to Horace, who had been pacing the tile floor for the past hour. “Aren’t you coming?”

  “I’ve been inside that tomb twice in the past six months and that’s twice too many. I’ve seen it.” Lacy figured her mouth must have been hanging open because Lanier looked at her and added, “I’m a bit claustrophobic.”

  “We have an hour until dinner. Shall we go?” Roxanne led the foursome out the front door and across a hill toward the west. “We’re really quite lucky. Kheti’s tomb was rediscovered only about five years ago. I say ‘rediscovered’ because it had obviously been entered and plundered in ancient times. Almost all tombs were. Many of them served as shelter for early Coptic Christians and Muslims throughout the years. Their cooking fires ruined the ceilings in some cases.”

  Shelley and Graham followed Lacy and Roxanne up the path, close enough that they could hear what Roxanne was saying. Lacy turned, shielding her eyes from the sun, and spotted Susan, tramping along a good twenty yards behind. With her short, spiky hair and skinny frame, the biggest part of Susan was her desert boots. Out of all proportion to her size, the boots made her look as though she would automatically spring back up if knocked down. Like a well-rooted sapling. She struggled along behind them, weighted down with equipment she insisted on carrying herself.

  Roxanne continued. “What we believe happened is, the entrance to Kheti’s tomb got hidden behind a wall built in the Nineteenth Dynasty at the entrance to a newer tomb. Also, there are some cliffside houses, still lived in, that sort of wall it off from the other direction. At any rate, when it was rediscovered a few years ago, it wasn’t thought to contain anything particularly exciting, so we were awarded the right to excavate and document. We had enough grant money behind us to convince the Council we could do a good job.

  “At first, we only knew about the transverse room, but we soon found stairs that led down to a long hall and from there, to a burial chamber. Absolutely magnificent! We found dyed linen, undyed linen, a coffin, funeral cones, dried funeral bouquets, and dozens of storage jars. We were ecstatic!”

  “A coffin?” Lacy asked. “Was anyone in it?”

  “Unfortunately not.” Roxanne stopped. They had reached the entrance to the tomb.

  A large, turbaned man descended the hill on their left, the leather strap of a semi-automatic rifle slung over his shoulder.

  A panicked little squeak escaped Shelley’s throat.

  “Akhmed,” Roxanne called out to the armed man, “these are the American scientists I told you about.” She introduced each of them to Akhmed Hosni, the tomb’s night watchman. Akhmed was a brown man with a thick black mustache and a couple of days’ growth of beard. The untucked edges of his turban were frayed. He stepped forward and acknowledged each visitor with a dip of his head.

  “Akhmed comes along at six every evening and stays here all night. During the day, we’re in and out so often we don’t need security.”

  “Akhmed!” Susan had finally caught up. She stepped forward, smiling, and Akhmed bowed to her. “Look what I’ve brought you.” She pulled a large cellophane pack of ballpoint pens from one of her bags and handed them to him. “For your children.”

  Lacy assumed Susan and Akhmed had become acquainted d
uring her stay at Whiz Bang the previous winter.

  “Ah, thank you very much, Dr. Donohue. Inshallah, my children will have no more excuses for not doing their schoolwork.”

  Roxanne turned to the new arrivals and whispered, “Schools supplies are so hard to come by, here. Pens and pencils are like gold to the locals.”

  “Wait, Dr. Donohue,” Akhmed said, slipping Susan’s gift into a pocket of his gallabeyah. “I have something for you, too.” He dug around in another pocket and pulled out a pack of Marlboro cigarettes. He handed them to her. “Your own special brand.”

  Susan thanked him, and stuffed the cigarettes in her pocket. She turned slightly and shook her head at the rest of the group, a silent warning not to mention she had quit smoking. She waited until they were inside the tomb’s entrance. “It was nice of him to remember me. We needn’t tell him I’ve kicked the habit.”

  Shelley said, “Have you really kicked it? You’ve been wearing the nicotine patch for what, two weeks?” She glanced warily at Susan, then at Graham.

  Lacy said, “I’ve heard that Egyptian cigarettes are harsher than ours, even if the brand name and the package are the same.”

  “Right. They aren’t the same at all.” Susan pulled the Marlboros out and looked at the pack. “I promise you, if any of us were to smoke one of these right now, we’d go weak in the knees.”

  They were standing in what Roxanne called the Transverse Hall. Extending left and right from the tomb entrance, its walls were covered in low relief carving except in places where the original surface had fallen off. A dozen or more clay vessels, most of them decorated with a powder-blue paint, leaned against the wall at one end of the hall. The ceiling, blackened in spots and crumbling in others, was covered in a multi-colored geometric pattern of overlapping circles.

  At first, Lacy thought the wall reliefs had not been painted but when she looked closer she found remnants of blue and black pigment still stuck in the grooves. The reliefs directly in front of her appeared to show a man, a woman, and some stylized birds. Hieroglyphic writing in all the spaces between figures. A long row of girls, their hands raised, appeared to march along in single file toward the arched doorway opposite the main entrance.

  “When we first started,” Roxanne said, “this room was all we knew about. The hall we are about to enter had yet to be excavated.” She led them through, down a few steps, and into a long, sloping hallway.

  Lacy was overwhelmed. She had to stop for a moment to keep from falling. The colors on the walls and over her head couldn’t have been sharper or more dazzling on the day they were painted. Except for the floor this narrow passage was completely covered in art. Palm trees, men with heads like jackals, men with heads like birds, stylized flowers, long snakes. Hieroglyphics overhead.

  Roxanne stopped them. “Along this wall we have a scene that shows the process of dyeing cloth. This, plus the fact that we’ve found a lot of dyed linen in the inner chamber, is why we believe Kheti had something to do with the dyeing process, probably as a supervisor. Here, you can see two men pulling cloth from a vat, two others wringing it out and stacking it in wet piles.”

  Roxanne turned to the opposite wall. “This entire wall is like a garden. You see birds and insects flitting in and out. You see rows and rows of plants. This is obviously a formal garden. Here is an olive tree in a pot. Here is a pond with lotus blossoms floating and fish underneath. You see?” Roxanne ran her finger along, close to but not actually touching the wall.

  Lacy saw browns, blacks, blues, whites, and greens. The reds were red-browns rather than bright red. The yellows were more of a chamois than pure yellow.

  “But I digress. Lacy, you and Graham are to tell us what the substrate is and what the paints are made of. Did they use egg as a binder? Have the original colors changed?”

  Graham shot Lacy a small grin and an ambiguous thumbs-up.

  Lacy was so absorbed by the colors on the walls that when they came to a set of steps she tumbled completely down them, landing on her left shoulder in the burial chamber. Roxanne rushed over and knelt beside her. Susan laughed. Lacy insisted she was okay even though her shoulder hurt quite a bit.

  This room, roughly twenty feet square, had a barrel-vaulted ceiling covered with figures and hieroglyphs. It smelled of must and chemical solvent. The yellows in this room gleamed like gold. Orangey-reds popped out as if they’d been painted yesterday. The figure of a green-faced man wearing a tall crown dominated one wall. On either side of the green man were large brown eyes, heavily outlined in black and with strange, curved black lines extending downward.

  Roxanne pointed to this figure. “I realize that, except for Susan, the rest of you know very little about Egyptian mythology, and there’s no reason you need to for the work you are doing. But this is Osiris, the god of the underworld. He’s always colored green, because he’s dead.”

  “I don’t get it,” Lacy said, rotating her shoulder in its socket.

  “You don’t have to.” Roxanne barked it out, as if Lacy’s comment was an unwelcome interruption. She pointed to one of the huge brown eyes. “This is an Eye of Horus, or wedjat eye, and it’s a protective symbol. You’ll see them in lots of places. At the far end of the chamber, we have Anubis, the jackal-headed god of embalming.”

  This chamber was littered with pots of all sizes and strange wooden items lying helter-skelter among the pots. A stack of pink cloth. Several bowls. Along one wall, a brightly painted coffin.

  “This coffin is our pride and joy, but we can’t move it until Kathleen completes her task of stabilizing the wood. I’m afraid that termites have done their nasty work to the point that, if we lifted it, it would crumble. We’ve already had a peek inside and we know there’s no mummy. It appears to be filled with linen and embalming materials. The most interesting question is, ‘Who was it made for?’ The cartouche bearing the name of the intended inhabitant has been chiseled off, but the face on top is obviously female.”

  Lacy, still sitting on the floor, picked at some of the litter around her. She spotted what she knew were paint flakes mixed in with the sand and silt. “Excuse me, Roxanne. Is it okay for us to pick up and test anything we find on the floor?”

  “Ah, yes. Glad you mentioned it. Yes.” Roxanne grabbed Graham’s arm for his attention. “There’s a good bit of plaster, paint flakes, et cetera, on the floor. Since there’s no way we can know where it fell from or how to stick it back up, you can take anything you find that’s of interest to you. If some of your tests are destructive, and I know some are, you may use this material as you see fit. But please, please, don’t chip anything off the walls.”

  “Of course we wouldn’t,” Graham said.

  “There’s also the tailings pile,” Roxanne added. “Outside the tomb, you’ll find a pile of dirt where the workmen screen the loose material they haul out in buckets. We take everything of interest back to Whiz Bang and anything that’s left is yours to do with as you want.”

  Lacy amassed a small collection of colored chips in her left hand and looked around for something to put them in. Failing that, she stuck them in her shorts pocket.

  Shelley stood over the stack of neatly folded pink cloth that lay on one end of the coffin. “What about this linen, Roxanne? What am I allowed to do with it?”

  “Oh, dear. You’re not supposed to destroy or cut it, but we’ve found so much linen. There’s a lot more back in Kathleen’s room. Various colors. I see nothing wrong with your cutting off a few small samples. How much would you need for the tests you want to do?”

  Roxanne and Shelley went on establishing ground rules for analyzing the textiles. Lacy and Graham headed for the wall to get a closer look. Graham clasped his hands together behind his back apparently to remind himself not to touch. Lacy noticed and followed suit.

  “Thank God, Susan got that hand-held x-ray spectrometer,” Lacy said. “Without it, I don’t know how we’d ever do what they want done.”

  “Where is Susan?” Graham looked around, w
alked to the end of the hallway and called back. “She’s setting her equipment up at one of the walls in that first room. The one Roxanne called the transverse room. Are you hot? I am.”

  Lacy suggested the tomb’s internal temperature probably crept up as the day wore on and this might be the hottest time. Late afternoon.

  “I’m going out for some fresh air,” Graham said, backing up the hall.

  Lacy turned and caught an anxious look on Shelley’s face. Almost fear, she thought, as if she had stopped breathing for a moment. What was she frightened of?

  She stood facing the wall, struggling to put her tasks in order. First, she should learn how to use the hand-held spectrometer and that would involve (horrors!) reading the instruction manual. She would work with Shelley to obtain some of the cloth and attempt to extract the dye. What would that tell her? Should she read up on ancient dye techniques so she’d know what she was looking for, or should she proceed with the empty mind of ignorance? Last night at Whiz Bang she had found a whole room full of reference books. She assumed she could use whatever was there.

  What effect would time have had on the dyes? Would they have chemically degraded? Would she find degradation products, different from the original dye, or would there simply be less of it? She knew the paint on the wall would be largely mineral in origin—not her specialty but with the spectrometer she should be able to handle it. The dyes would be extracts from plants. But wait. Some early people used kermes insects for red dye, didn’t they? And a certain species of sea snail for purple?

  She noticed a hole in the wall, about three feet in diameter and a bit higher than her own head. “Roxanne, what’s this hole? It looks like it goes way back.”

  “Oh, that’s our new discovery! I meant to tell you about it. Where’s Graham? Never mind. You must bring a stepstool in here sometime soon and have a look. We’ve cleared out some of the debris, and, as I told you last night, we found those canopic jars and shabti figures and took them back to the house. We’re still clearing and we don’t know how large the whole room is, but Yasser Saleh, our surveyor-slant-engineer, told us we had to improve ventilation in there before we go any further. He says it’s not very far from the ceiling inside to the surface of the ground up above, so they’re installing a duct that will bring in fresh air. Then we can safely work inside.”