Scorpion House

by Maria Hudgins

  * * *

  Lacy met Paul on the roof that evening while Joan and Lanier, now drinking vodka and orange juice, reminisced on the porch and while Roxanne, Kathleen, and the Clarks listened silently. The dreary and delicate business of arranging for the transport of Joel’s body home, of signing papers, of deciding this and that had dragged on through the dinner hour but Joan hadn’t been interested in grabbing a bite in Luxor. She preferred going straight to Whiz Bang. She hadn’t touched the food Bay left for them in the kitchen.

  The night air on the west bank was energizing. A light breeze drifted across the roof, softly playing with Lacy’s hair. Absent the humidity the air always held along the shores of the Chesapeake Bay, she felt ten pounds lighter. Paul had brought her a cup of coffee, cream and no sugar, when he came up. She was surprised he’d noticed how she liked it.

  “Shelley and I took a long walk today. She told me all about Wythe University,” Paul said. He tested the spin time of a brushed aluminum yo-yo, dangling it over the edge of the roof. “She talks about her husband a lot, doesn’t she?”

  “I haven’t talked to her that much. We don’t work in the same building.”

  “She’s scared.” Paul jerked the yo-yo back into his palm and pocketed it.

  “Funny you should say that,” Lacy said. “I was thinking the same thing just yesterday. What’s she afraid of?”

  “Losing Graham.”

  “Why?”

  “Insecurity, I guess. I don’t know. You’re a woman, you should know better than I.”

  “If she didn’t want competition she shouldn’t have married such a hunk.”

  “She can’t help comparing herself to you and Susan. I mean, Susan’s not that attractive, but you …” Paul ducked his head and left the sentence unfinished. “Plus, you and Graham work in the same building. She’s stuck across campus in the social studies building and she can’t keep an eye on him.”

  “That’s stupid.” Lacy paused a moment and studied the planes of Paul’s face in reflected temple light. “Graham doesn’t fool around. He has his hands full with his research. If he wanted to stray he’d only have to stretch out a hand and grab one of the sophomores hanging around his office, begging for help they probably don’t even need.”

  Lanier’s head popped up from the stairwell. “Psst. Lacy. Come here.”

  She turned and headed for the middle of the roof where the stairs from the ground floor emerged.

  “Joan Friedman is three sheets to the wind, running off at the mouth something fierce. I don’t know whether Joel told her about the …” he paused, lowered his voice to a whisper, “the papyrus, but if he did, she’s liable to tell everyone on the porch.”

  “You want me to come and get her?”

  “Yes.”

  * * *

  Lacy managed to get Joan ensconced in her husband’s former bedroom and explained the water system to her — a useless exercise, since Joan had already passed out. She had intended to ask her about the enigmatic name Joel wrote on his manila folder then realized Joan wouldn’t have been able to give her an articulate answer, anyway. Lacy pulled off Joan’s shoes for her and lifted her legs onto the bed.

  * * *

  By Thursday, Christmas Day, arrangements for shipping Joel’s casket to America had been finalized and Lacy accompanied Joan back to the Luxor airport. She tried to talk to her about dealing with her grief and had gingerly touched on the drinking problem, but it had been awkward. She also called Virginia Swain and asked her to keep an eye on Joan.

  Joan and her luggage were in the Jeep when Lacy came out with Joel’s manila folder. “This was Joel’s. I don’t know if you want it or not. There’s only flight information and so on in it.”

  Joan took the folder and opened it. “I don’t need anything in here.”

  “What about this name he wrote on the back? Jody Myers. Mean anything to you?”

  Joan paused for a long moment. “No. I don’t believe it does.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  For the next few days the researchers, absorbed in their work, withdrew into their own little worlds. Susan drawing and recording in the tomb, Kathleen dabbing the coffin in the burial chamber with bits of cotton and a sticky fixative, Lacy shuttling back and forth from the tomb to the lab with chips and flakes from the floor and from the tailings pile. Graham launched an ambitious round of organic analysis to determine the composition of the residue in unguent jars from the burial chamber. He filled his side of the lab with glass chromatography columns, coils, porcelain test plates and rubber tubes.

  Graham asked Lanier to take over the task of pollen analysis that was to have been Joel’s job. Much to Susan’s chagrin, he also promised Lanier Joel’s portion of the grant money and that his name would appear as a contributor in the publications that would follow. Susan and Graham had a heated argument in Susan’s room that was heard throughout the house.

  Lacy was seduced by her work on the walls and on the cloth. Constantly reminding herself that this was all done a millennium-and-a-half before Christ, she felt humbled to have the honor of helping to shine light on what Kheti’s tomb could tell them. The more she learned, the more questions she had.

  In a corner of the antika room, Roxanne toiled over pottery shards, twisting, turning, and occasionally fitting two pieces together. Gluing them into their correct alignment, she would nestle them to dry in a box of sand and, with a little clap of her hands, flash a crooked smile. Horace Lanier, when he wasn’t secluded behind his own lab door, often sat near her, his hands laced over his pot belly, prattling on and on about herbal medicines. Roxanne’s response was rarely more than an occasional, “Yes, I see,” or, “Indeed.”

  * * *

  Lacy felt as if she had to confide in someone. Her suspicions about Joel’s death still gnawed at her. But to whom could she talk? If Joel was murdered, who could she be certain was not his killer? She decided not to say anything to Susan, Shelley, or Graham. Since they had known Joel, they might have had motives of which Lacy was unaware. Horace Lanier had known Joel well. The two old men had greeted each other warmly that day when they arrived, but Joel had died (or been murdered) the same night. Coincidence?

  Roxanne, Paul, and Kathleen could be nothing but sounding boards if she talked to them. They hadn’t even known Joel Friedman. Roxanne and Lanier were tight. If Lanier had some reason for wanting to do away with Joel, Roxanne might know of it, but she probably wouldn’t tell Lacy.

  Kathleen was beyond talking to. A colder, more distant woman Lacy had rarely met.

  Paul. Maybe.

  * * *

  Shelley discovered the video microscope was perfect for studying the weave and fibers of the linen cloth and reed matting. Lacy showed her how to operate it, and then had to take turns with her. They negotiated, daily, which of them got to use it and for how long.

  Graham’s work revealed the binder in the wall paint was gum acacia, and that bees’ wax, applied over the paint in a few places, had crystallized with time and darkened the surface.

  Lacy found the yellow paint in the long hall was not the same pigment as the yellow in the burial chamber and on the coffin. Strangely enough, the brighter yellows and reds contained arsenic. She made herself a chart of which metallic ions she found where, and in what colors of paint.

  But it was in the dyed linen that Lacy faced her biggest challenge. She found she could extract enough pigment to scan in the spectrophotometer, but it still didn’t tell her what the original pigment had been. She needed to know more about the process of dyeing cloth and for that, she had to read. The house had Internet access and on her hard drive she had the text of a paper she herself had written dealing with the degradation products of pigments. Unfortunately, this paper dealt with the plant pigments that are most useful to plants. Not those useful to man. Plants use pigments to trap sunlight and to survive. Man uses them for his own vanity and pleasure.

  She found the books in Whiz Bang’s library helpful. A book on ancient Egypt
ian herbs contained a chapter on plant dyes. She learned they had extracted red from alkanet and from madder root. Yellow from pomegranate rind and possibly from chamomile or safflower. Blue dye from indigo. Blue ink from cornflowers. Bright reds from kermes, not a plant at all but an insect. She reminded herself to keep an open mind and not allow herself to be unduly influenced by modern sources that might be mistaken about ancient Egyptian methods.

  This called for experiments. Lacy bummed small amounts of madder root, alkanet, cornflower, pomegranate, and chamomile from the neatly labeled jars in Horace Lanier’s lab. For the indigo and safflower, Lanier suggested a raid on the spice shops in Luxor. The kermes insects were a problem. Lanier didn’t know where to get them, but Lacy found an online source for cochineal bugs which, from her reading, she figured would yield similar results. The shipping charge on an ounce of freeze-dried bugs was outrageous but there seemed to be no alternative.

  She talked Roxanne out of some linen table napkins and negotiated with Bay for the use of the kitchen as long as she gave her a day’s notice. Bay wouldn’t let Lacy use her pots, though, because she didn’t want them stained. Graham gave her a mortar and pestle, a hot plate, and all the lab’s large Pyrex beakers. Lacy was then able to boil water in Bay’s cookware on the stove, pour it over macerated dyestuff in a beaker, and keep it hot on the hot plate.

  She soaked strips of the linen in the various hot dyes for several hours, moving the hot plate to the back of a counter and out of the way when Bay ran her out of the kitchen. She ran into problem after problem, none of the dyes yielding a color that anyone could get excited about.

  “You need a mordant,” Shelley suggested.

  “What?”

  “A mordant. The material won’t grab the dye without a mordant to make them snuggle up. Alum is the most common one.”

  Lacy checked their chemical cabinet for alum, chemically known as potassium aluminum sulfate, but found none. Lanier didn’t have any either. She added alum to her shopping list.

  * * *

  After a week of intense work, Susan suggested a field trip. The new people—Shelley, Graham, and Lacy—had never seen the Valley of the Kings, whereas the others knew it so well they could conduct their own tours. One of the most visited tourist spots in the world, it lay on the opposite side of the escarpment less than a mile from Whiz Bang as the crow flies but several miles by road.

  Selim drove the four of them as far as the Visitor’s Center early that morning and dropped them off. Susan advised them to leave their cameras in the Jeep. “Absolutely no photography inside the tombs. If they catch you taking pictures, they confiscate your camera and you will not get it back.”

  “That’s not fair,” said Graham.

  “Their tombs, their rules.”

  American tourists seemed to have materialized out of nowhere. More Americans than Lacy had seen since they came here, plus a lot of Japanese and French. Pale folks in plaid shorts and tennis shoes with white socks. Tour guides walking backwards, reciting their spiel to their assigned charges. A ticket was good for three tombs. When a visitor entered a tomb, an attendant would rip off one corner of the ticket and when three corners were gone the ticket was used up. Lacy stood, bewildered, on the long walkway through the valley floor. She saw smaller paths branching off left and right at odd intervals. Beside the entrance to each tomb stood a sign with vital statistics and a diagram of the interior. She asked Susan’s advice.

  Susan recommended the tombs of Ramses IX and Amenhotep II, and then headed off on her own, turning back once to point out the visitor’s shelter to Lacy, “in case you need to rest.”

  As she watched Susan tramp up the path, taking long strides in her big desert boots, Lacy thought again of how much she resembled one of those wind-up toys. She might possibly weigh as much as ninety-five pounds counting her boots. She’d noticed how the little woman seemed unfazed by the heat in Kheti’s tomb as if she was ideally adapted to the desert environment—like that scorpion.

  The tomb of Ramses IX overwhelmed her. Lacy remembered the tumble she’d taken down the steps in Kheti’s tomb and proceeded carefully. The walls, the ceiling, the lintels, the pillars, were covered with color. Scenes from the Book of the Dead, from the Book of Caverns. She tried to take it all in while at the same time consulting the leaflet she’d picked up at the entrance. The scenes told stories. She could follow them as she walked down one sloping corridor after another and wished she had time to dwell on each one. But Susan had cautioned them about the fifteen-minute time limit for each visit.

  Overhead, bright yellow figures on a dark blue background illustrated the Book of the Night with boats, soldiers, cobras, and kings like stars in a nighttime sky. Lacy stopped and laughed when she spotted a hippopotamus with a crocodile on its back. It looked for all the world like a drawing by Maurice Sendak in Lacy’s favorite childhood book, Where the Wild Things Are. She was reminded of what Pablo Picasso said when the great artist saw the Neolithic paintings in the Cave of Lascaux. He said, speaking of modern art, “We have discovered nothing.” And the ancient Egyptians had wild rumpuses, too, Lacy thought, recalling a phrase from Sendak’s book.

  Lacy spotted Susan clomping down a slope toward her. Grabbing her arm, Susan steered her to the side of the path. “What have you found out about Lanier? What’s he up to?”

  Lacy bought herself a little time by bending over and pulling her socks up and out of her boots. Susan had a way of catching a person off-guard and Lacy wasn’t ready for that question. “Believe it or not, he’s doing exactly what he told you he was doing,” she lied. “He’s squeezing papyrus juice into blotter paper.”

  Susan spun around on one clunky heel. She jammed her hat down to her ears and exhaled disgustedly.

  “I’m serious. He says the ancient Egyptians used papyrus to heal wounds and blisters and such. He told me he couldn’t figure out how to keep it on long enough to do any good, so he thought of the blotter paper. In the old days they may have sliced strips of papyrus stalks and tied them onto the wound, but these days, people wouldn’t go for it. I mean, who’d want to walk around with swamp plants on their legs?”

  Susan glared at her.

  Lacy tried not to avert her eyes, a dead giveaway. “But if he makes the papyrus-soaked blotting paper into a sort of poultice,” she illustrated by pressing her hands together, “he might talk one of us into wearing one the next time we get hurt.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Seriously.” Lacy veered away from the subject by saying, “Lanier has helped me a lot with the plants I need for the dyes. He had most of the material I asked him about right there on his shelf, alphabetized.”

  “That’s a bit anally retentive, don’t you think?”

  “I’m not complaining. Makes things easy for me, but there are a few more items I need. Lanier suggested I might find them across the river in Luxor.”

  “Luxor. I need to go over there, myself.” Susan brightened. “Give me your list and I’ll do your shopping for you.”

  Lacy thanked her and backed away. She was eager to see another tomb. The tomb of Tutankhamen, a few yards from where they stood, had a line stretching from its entrance all the way down to the main path. “I think I won’t do King Tut’s tomb, the line’s too long.”

  “There are plenty of better ones,” Susan said.

  “Where is Tut’s father? Akhenaten, wasn’t it?”

  “Not here. They haven’t found Akhenaten’s mummy, although his sarcophagus is allegedly at the Cairo Museum.”

  “What about Nefertiti?”

  “Several mummies have been tentatively identified as Nefertiti, but which one, if any, is the real one?” Susan’s big eyes popped. “I have my opinion and Roxanne has another. Remember, they moved the capital down river to Amarna, so they were probably entombed there.”

  “What about Tut’s mother? Didn’t Roxanne say that Tut’s mother was not Nefertiti, but another one of Akhenaten’s wives?”

  “Yes. Her name was
Kiya, we think. No one knows what happened to her. She may have fallen out of favor in the royal household.”

  Lacy was beginning to feel a bit sorry for Tutankhamen. What a dysfunctional family. Here was his tomb and those of his predecessors and successors, but none of his immediate family. She tried again. “How about his grandfather?”

  “Now there, I can help you.” Susan pointed roughly westward. “His paternal grandfather was Amenhotep the Third and his tomb is on the other side of the hill, in an area they call the West Valley.”

  “Too far to walk?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where are his grandmothers?”

  Susan shrugged.

  * * *

  That afternoon, Lacy immersed herself in research. Not about pigments and dyes, but about Tutankhamen and his father, Akhenaten. The freeze-dried cochineal insects had been delivered that morning and she reminded herself she wasn’t being paid to study ancient history but this strange family intrigued her. The library at Whiz Bang had an entire shelf of books about the Amarna Period of the Eighteenth Dynasty. Many of them had full color photos of tomb walls and sculptures, upon which Lacy had a tendency to get side-tracked. In particular, she found pictures of three sculptures riveting.

  The first two were of Nefertiti. There was the world-famous bust—the beautiful woman with the swan-like neck, red lips, and one eye missing. The other, a limestone full-body sculpture, showed a middle-aged Nefertiti, her belly now rounded from child-bearing, her shoulders and breasts sagging a little, but still beautiful. In her face, Lacy could see determination, sadness, and great intelligence. It was as if the lovely young woman whose name meant “the beautiful one has come” had walked through hell and emerged on the other side, strength and serenity intact, determined to deal with whatever came next.