Scorpion House

by Maria Hudgins

  Lacy wondered if Joel Friedman would agree.

  Paul looked around the table, his gaze stopping at each face.

  Susan swallowed hard and said, “I hope you’re right, Roxanne, because if anyone deliberately put it in that bed, it’s me they’re after. That bed was mine until Lacy and I switched rooms right before bedtime.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Horace Lanier thought, wrongly, that the others had left for the tomb. He’d heard Susan, her voice seeming to come from the far end of the hall, call out to Graham to hurry. Since then, silence. He checked the recipe taped to the wall behind his lab table, his head tilted back far enough to see the writing through the bottom of his bifocals. His next step in making the lily perfume was to macerate lily roots with an equal amount of the beaten palm tops and balanos oil he’d left to steep in a copper bowl for the past two days.

  He crammed a double handful of lily roots into his blender. If anyone had suggested to Horace, even last year, that he use an electric blender, he’d have considered it blasphemy. He used only the techniques, materials, and utensils the ancient Egyptians would have used. Earthenware pottery, glass, copper, alabaster, and granite. Grinding by hand, straining through linen cloth, boiling over open fire. Nothing electrical. But for the last few months, his arthritis had made the grinding more and more painful, and a blender had become a necessity.

  He used no ingredients except those which grew wild and could be gathered locally. He would sometimes make exceptions for certain exotic items such as galbanum, a resin which was known to have been imported into ancient Egypt from Persia, and balanos oil which now had to be brought from South Africa. His search for the right raw materials pushed him to the fringes of the desert, to the fertile Nile Delta, to the banks of the Nile itself. He was sometimes forced to buy from the spice shops in Luxor but only if he knew where their stock came from. The shop owners knew Lanier well and they knew what to keep an eye out for and what Lanier would have them purchase at any price. When they found it they would call him with the good news. He made monthly trips south to Aswan, to Kitchener’s Island, where scores of plants which had no place in the modern landscape still thrived under cultivation, but these he only observed.

  He had let the boiled liquid sit in the copper bowl for two days and two nights, as the ancient recipe dictated, but here he was, dumping it into an electric blender with a pound of wild lily roots. Lanier looked at the recipe again. It told him to strain the concoction before blending it with the lily roots. He pulled a large funnel from his glassware cabinet, set it on an iron ring stand and draped a linen cloth across the top. He set a glass beaker under the stem of the funnel. As he poured, the greenish slurry pressed the linen down, sticking it to the sides of the funnel. A thin rivulet of oil began to slide down the funnel stem and into the beaker. This was going to take a while. He left it alone to drip.

  Lanier washed his hands and dried them on a towel. He threw a fresh towel on his lab table and donned a pair of latex gloves. If the gloves had been for protecting the artifact he was preparing to handle, he would have used cotton gloves as they did in museums, but these gloves were for the sole purpose of avoiding fingerprints. Sooner or later, he knew, the papyrus would have to be handed over to the authorities, and when that time came he hoped to get away with telling them he’d only recently discovered it. He didn’t want fingerprints all over it.

  But that possibility had been pretty much eliminated by what he’d done to the papyrus yesterday. He had cut it in two—with scissors. He had to, he decided, because the first three feet or so of the papyrus had been relatively easy to unroll and lay flat. He’d done that some time ago and had photographed the exposed portion with a digital camera. The last two feet, on the inside of the roll, were more tightly wrapped and couldn’t have been laid flat without cracking. He couldn’t consult Kathleen about the best method for dealing with the problem because Kathleen would have called the Supreme Council in Cairo immediately and recommended Lanier’s arrest. No one but Roxanne knew about the papyrus and he couldn’t confer with her about this because even she would draw the line at cutting with scissors, so he’d had to forge ahead using a method he found in a reference book he filched from Kathleen’s bookshelf when she was out of the house.

  He had used a solution of distilled water and alcohol to moisten the tightly-wrapped portion of the paper then carefully unrolled it as the papyrus softened. He left it overnight between layers of blotting paper and now it was time for the big reveal. His camera was ready. He intended to photograph, then re-roll the document to approximately the shape it had been in before, and let it dry. Then it would, hopefully, fit back inside the outer segment of the papyrus strip. There’d still be the cut of course. There was no way to hide that.

  He used his towel to swipe clean a section of lab table, opened a long drawer in his wooden storage cabinet and slowly lifted out a Plexiglas board holding the papyrus and the two layers of blotting paper. He set it on the clean spot and lifted the top layer of paper. The faint smell of alcohol rose from the layer beneath.

  He stared, overwhelmed, at the drawings and script that lay before him, unseen for more than three thousand years. Like the first three feet of papyrus, it had three horizontal rows of drawings of plants alternating with hieratic script. Hieratic was a quicker method of writing than the hieroglyphs of formal documents and tomb walls. It made perfect sense that this papyrus should be written in hieratic because it was intended to be used as a reference work only. The world’s oldest plant catalog.

  The amazing, wonderful thing about this find was that the plants were drawn accurately and precisely, each one accompanied by a drawing of its fruit or flower, if any, and by its ancient Egyptian name. Not with the precision that would be found in a modern botanical atlas but a quantum leap better than the stylized vines and fruits which were all anyone had found to date. It was as if the hand that drew them had no interest in following artistic conventions but only in producing an accurate record for the generations that followed. At that he had certainly succeeded. Lanier wondered what the scribe would think if he knew his work wouldn’t be discovered until the world had long since forgotten the ancient language itself.

  Some parts of the plants had even been colored with red or brown ink. Was it brown to begin with? Might it have been green? For that, he needed Lacy Glass’s help. Should he show Lacy the papyrus, or could he find another way of picking her brain? Lanier wondered if Lacy already knew, given the fact that he had told Joel Friedman about finding the papyrus. He couldn’t remember whether he’d cautioned Joel to keep it strictly under his hat or if he’d said he could tell Lacy. If Lacy knew, she hadn’t mentioned it yet. His main concern was that Susan Donohue not find out. Susan, like Kathleen, would sic the authorities on him in a heartbeat.

  He decided he had probably told Friedman to tell no one, and that Lacy did not know.

  As he gazed down at the newly-exposed length of papyrus, a smile crept across Lanier’s face and widened into an open grin. Here was, obviously, a drawing of a liquorice plant. A plant whose ancient Egyptian name was, until now, unknown. But there it was, along with its name. And the Egyptian plum—ditto. And the cornflower. He saw drawings of safflower, Cannabis, and dôm-palm, all already known but here labeled clearly, boosting his confidence that the document was entirely accurate. This was great. At least three new identities.

  “Aren’t you coming with us to the tomb?” Susan’s voice sprang up behind him.

  A cold spurt of adrenalin rushed to the tips of Lanier’s fingers. He hadn’t heard his door open. He thought they’d all been gone for a quarter of an hour. He grabbed the towel he’d stuck on the back of the lab table and threw it over the exposed papyrus. What possible reason could he give her for doing what he’d just done? He knew she was going to ask.

  “What’s that all about?” she said.

  “I’m pressing some fresh-cut papyrus,” he began, not knowing exactly where the rest of this lie was going. He bou
ght himself some time with a cough. “I’m attempting to impregnate blotting paper with papyrus juice.”

  “Whatever for?”

  Good question. Whatever for?

  “There’s some evidence that the liquid from papyrus stems was used during the Old Kingdom as a balm for wounds,” he said, hoping Susan didn’t know any different. “I have to keep it weighted and covered for a day or so.”

  Susan looked at him, quizzically. She lowered her head, raised one eyebrow.

  He could tell she didn’t believe him. He reasoned that, if he stood firmly between Susan and the towel-covered papyrus and refused to budge, she couldn’t look under that towel no matter how strong her suspicions. This was his lab after all and she had no business interfering with his work or touching anything without his permission.

  “Your face is as red as a beet, Horace. What’s wrong?”

  Lanier’s hands itched to pick up Susan Donohue by her scrawny little neck, give it a good squeeze, and throw her out into the hall. He felt the same old impulse to throttle her that he hadn’t felt since the last time she was here.

  “Nothing’s wrong, but I have to get back to work,” he said, keeping his tone even and low. He turned back to the table, picked up a jar of fennel for no reason other than to look as if he were busy. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll see you at lunch.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  No one had thought to bring lunch to the tomb although Roxanne had told them Bay put out sandwich fixings and such in the kitchen right after breakfast. This gave them the option of staying in the tomb until evening or coming back midday.

  Lacy lost track of time until Graham walked by and pointed to his watch. It was after one o’clock. On their way out they found Susan seated at a wall of hieroglyphs, a steno pad on her lap.

  Peering down past Susan’s spiky hair, Lacy noticed the notes were written in a strange sort of shorthand. Susan looked up, answering her quizzical expression with, “I write notes to myself in hieratic script, to keep myself in practice. I even write some of my lecture notes in hieratic. But what I’m doing now is,” she flipped back a few pages in the steno pad, “I’m translating these hieroglyphs for publication in English and for that, I need to see what it looks like in English.”

  Lacy looked more closely and found that she had written English on the left side of the page and, on the right, something that looked like one of the weirder fonts on a computer. She sat on the floor beside Susan to watch her work. Graham left without her.

  Susan worked in silence for a few minutes, her head bobbing up and down from wall to pad and back again. Then, without looking at Lacy, she said, “Lanier’s up to something.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know.” She scribbled a word on her steno pad. “He’s working on something in his lab and he won’t let anyone see. I went in there this morning and when he heard my voice he threw a towel over whatever was on his table. He was obviously hiding whatever it was. Something flat. He told me he was squeezing papyrus juice or some such shit.”

  “Did you ask him what it was?”

  “I already told you. He said he was squeezing papyrus juice. But that’s ridiculous.”

  “Maybe he thinks he’s on the verge of concocting a long-forgotten cure for something. Cancer or something. Maybe he wants to keep it a secret, get a patent on it, and he’s afraid someone will steal it.”

  “What do you know about Lanier?” Susan stopped her work and looked straight into Lacy’s eyes, her stiff brown hair framing her street-urchin face.

  “I just met him yesterday.”

  “But Joel Friedman talked about him, didn’t he?”

  “Joel said he was a good department head and he was sorry Lanier felt like he had to give up the job. That’s why Joel came to Wythe University to begin with. To take Lanier’s place as head of the biology department.”

  “Do you know why Lanier had to leave?”

  “Something to do with his wife’s murder, wasn’t it? Joel only told me there was ill feeling and gossip among the faculty and Horace didn’t think he could be effective any more.”

  “A word to the wise, Lacy. Don’t put too much faith in anything Horace Lanier says. Or Roxanne Breen either for that matter. She’s covering for him.” Susan stood up. She laid her steno pad on her stool and dusted off the seat of her shorts. “And find out what he’s hiding in his lab. You can do it because he’s not on his guard against you.”

  Lacy left the tomb alone but soon caught up with Paul, clambering down the rocky path. “You said you aren’t actually working in the tomb, right? So what are you doing—actually?”

  Paul turned and held out a hand to help her over a low wall. “I’m looking everywhere I can think of for evidence of contact between the Hyksos and the people of Thebes. I want to know who the Hyksos were and where they came from.” He gave her a condensed version of the mysterious Hyksos invaders who had ruled in the 15th dynasty. Keeping a step ahead of her as they descended the hill, he turned every few seconds and glanced at her. He had nice teeth and remarkably smooth lips.

  “What about family? You said you were from California, didn’t you?”

  “My parents and brother still live there.”

  “You’re not married? No children?”

  “No.” He stopped and pointed to the north. “Over that way a couple of miles is the burial site of the queen who routed the Hyksos and sent them packing. Back to wherever they came from.”

  “A queen?”

  “Right. She got the Medal of Freedom for bravery.”

  Okay. He was kidding to some extent, but how much? Realizing Paul had slammed shut the topic of his personal life, she asked him to tell her more about this ancient queen.

  * * *

  After lunch, Lacy decided to spend the afternoon in the lab she shared with Graham and Shelley. She read all she could stand of the instruction manual for the x-ray spectrometer. Having the device itself in front of her helped her learn the parts quickly. It didn’t seem too complicated.

  She set up the video microscope and looked at some of the paint chips she had brought back from the tomb. It was as amazing as Lanier had said. With it, she could see where more than one layer of paint had been applied, where the paint had pulled away from the underlying plaster, and where it had flaked off. With a mouse click she could magnify one tiny flake to fill the whole TV screen.

  She picked up one of the linen strips Shelley had given her. How could she possibly extract enough pigment to analyze? Aha. Lights. She’d start by looking at the material under different wavelengths of light. That would tell her whether the piece had been decorated or treated with anything other than a simple dip in the dye vat. Whether some areas were richer in pigment than others. She could ask Kathleen, hoarder of all material found in the tomb, to let her scan some larger pieces with ultraviolet, infrared, far red, fluorescent—in fact all her lights. She had put at least a dozen types of bulbs on the wish list she submitted to Susan last summer. She hoped Susan had bought them and that they were here.

  Graham walked in and plopped a napkin-wrapped sandwich on the workbench near the colorimeter. He had donned a white lab coat. He began pulling bottles of chemicals out of a storage cabinet.

  “Did you find the ether?” Lacy asked.

  “Sure did. See? Your little friend has already gone to that great desert in the sky.”

  She crossed the room to the section of work space to which Graham had laid claim. The scorpion lay, dead, in the bottom half of a Petri dish. Its tail was missing.

  “What did you do, cut off its tail?”

  “Right. I don’t know how much neurotoxin I’ll be able to extract from one tail, but I hope I’ll get enough to analyze.” Analysis of scorpion venom was not in Graham’s job description here, but they certainly weren’t expected to spend all their time on grant-related work.

  Lacy checked all the cabinets and drawers in the room until she found one that held an array of lights. Susan had indeed fi
lled her order. Most of them were tubes rather than bulbs so she spent the next half-hour tracking down the correct kinds of lamps and batteries. She snapped a seven-inch ultraviolet tube into one and played it around the room. A brief spark of blue flashed, she thought, from somewhere near Graham’s elbow.

  “Hold on!”

  “What is it?” Graham looked up from his work.

  “I don’t know. Let’s turn off the lights for a second.”

  Graham returned a test tube to its rack, preparing for the dark. Lacy clicked off the overhead lights—two bare bulbs hanging from cords along the midline of the room. With one small window the only remaining light source, the lab was plunged into near-darkness. She switched on the ultraviolet beam and directed it toward Graham’s side of the room.

  “Move to your right, Graham.”

  She directed the beam at the Petri dish.

  The scorpion lit up like a ghost in a haunted dungeon. It glowed blue-green with every joint, every segment of its many appendages clearly delineated. Lacy was speechless.

  Graham, through the sandwich in his mouth, said, “I forgot to tell you. Scorpions fluoresce under UV light.”

  Yeah, forgot! You probably didn’t know it until now. Lacy didn’t want to let this slide so she teased him with, “UV-A or UV-B?”

  “You’ll have to try both and see.” Graham wasn’t about to be caught so easily.

  She carried the Petri dish to the table at her end of the room. She toyed with it, flashing the lamp on and off. This was great. Did this mean scorpions had the same cellular chemistry as so many sea creatures had? Where was it? In the exoskeleton or in the tissue beneath? She reminded herself that, like Graham, she wasn’t here to study scorpions.

  “Hey, wait!” She said it so loudly it made Graham jump. “We can use this to make sure we have no scorpions in our rooms. I was worried about that. I could see myself with a flashlight, searching my whole room every night. I’d have to stir every drawer with a stick before I stuck my hand in to get my socks. This is so cool. I’ll keep the lamp in my room, but whenever you want to do a scorpion check you can borrow it. I’m definitely going to do a scorpion check every night. This is so cool!” She returned to her chair and did a little wiggle dance with her shoulders.