Scorpion House

by Maria Hudgins

  Paul waited until it looked as if the tot was completely engrossed, then surveyed the room. Storage cartons lined the walls but they all seemed to be filled with clothing. He reasoned that Selim would not have stashed the papyrus in a place where a child might find it and draw on it or tear it up. He backed out of the room, still grinning like Bozo the Clown (let me entertain you!) and shuffled up a short flight of stairs to the next door.

  Here, he struck pay dirt. As soon as his eyes adjusted to the gloom, he spotted a regular bed such as a husband and wife might share. Along one wall sat a row of cardboard boxes, most of them filled with clothing. One, however—the smallest one—was taped shut. Paul pulled the tape off, looked in, and found a mocha-tinted roll. The herbal papyrus.

  Safely back in the secret corridor, he stopped and took a deep breath. The claustrophobic space that had seemed so frightening before now felt like home. The pigeons burbling at his feet were now his little friends. He kissed the cardboard box containing the papyrus, pulled Shelley’s phone from his pocket, and sent Graham a vibrating call to announce “All Clear.”

  * * *

  Graham was mounting one of Whiz Bang’s bicycles, intending to cycle to the ferry dock, when his cell phone rang again. It was Mike Myerson informing him there had been a glitch in Shelley’s bail negotiations and advising him to stay put. Graham had a fit. Paul, eavesdropping, deduced from Graham’s half of the conversation that Myerson preferred to handle the delicate situation with the hot-headed husband safely on the other side of the river. At length, Myerson persuaded Graham to sit tight, assuring him he was doing everything possible to spring Shelley and promising he would call back the minute there was a breakthrough.

  * * *

  Roxanne called a summit conference in the antika room after dinner. They pulled the computer table out from the wall and arranged chairs around it. Even Bay, having nbeen persuaded to delay her evening temple rites, was there.

  “I think Lacy deserves an academy award for her performance today,” Graham said, cracking his knuckles nervously. “She kept Selim’s wife and kids, total strangers you understand, engrossed in conversation outside their house for eighteen minutes. And she did it in Arabic, which she doesn’t even speak.”

  “I think I promised them a block party with balloons and free food,” Lacy muttered. “But I’m not sure because I don’t speak Arabic.”

  Paul guffawed, but let his laugh trail off when no one else joined him.

  Lacy reached over and laid a feather-light hand on Paul’s shoulder. “Paul deserves the award, for breaking into a child’s bedroom and putting on such a show the child forgot to scream.”

  “Yeah, who was that kid? Selim said he had two kids, but we had two kids outside with us.” Graham looked around the group.

  “I lost a good yo-yo.”

  “You will have your laugh, won’t you? This is serious, so let’s get started,” Roxanne placed the papyrus roll on the center of the table, and then laid another strip beside it. “Which of these is the real herbal papyrus?”

  Everyone except Horace Lanier looked confused.

  “They both are.” She answered her own question. “Unbeknownst to me or anyone else, Horace saw fit to cut the original five-foot strip in two.”

  Kathleen Hassan rose from her seat, her fingers frozen into talons. “What?”

  “Let me finish,” Roxanne said, leaning across the table and gently grasping one of Kathleen’s rigid hands. “I have already confessed to you that I knew about the papyrus, as did Lacy, but neither of us knew about the cut.

  “We now have both segments of what is possibly the most important document discovered in Egypt in the last hundred years, but we also have, unfortunately, an eviction notice! We’ve been advised that the tomb is closed and that we have to leave.”

  “When?” Kathleen asked.

  “I don’t know. They might show up here tomorrow with a large padlock or they might not. They might take a week. You know how this place is. Everything happens Inshallah, God willing. Whenever.”

  “Has Akhmed been told to close the tomb?” Graham asked.

  “As of an hour ago, he hadn’t. Of course, when I went up there, I didn’t say, ‘Have you been told to close the tomb?’ I said, ‘Is everything all right?’ If he’d been told to close the tomb, he’d have mentioned it.”

  “I vote we don’t mention it either,” Graham said. “What about our work? Lacy and I are at critical points right now. We can’t just leave it, and I certainly can’t leave town without Shelley.”

  “I understand. This is a real can of worms, but I repeat: They can lock us out if they want to. It’s their house.”

  Lanier said, “There is a chance—a small one—if I take the papyrus to Cairo and hand it over, they may give the rest of you a reprieve. I’m history. No question about that. But if I throw myself on their mercy, maybe they’ll let the rest of you stay.”

  “The papyrus?” Kathleen barked. “You mean the papyri? I see two of them!”

  “Could they be put back together?” Paul asked.

  “What would you suggest?” Kathleen fired back, her lips tightened into a thin, white line. “Duct tape?”

  “Wait a minute,” Paul said, throwing up both hands defensively. “I’ve read somewhere that it can be done.”

  “It can be done using methyl cellulose, but it takes an expert and the patience of Job to do it, even on a small piece,” Kathleen said. “Every single fiber has to be coated, placed, and secured individually. This is an eighteen-inch cut. I can’t imagine even trying it.”

  “You could do it, Kathleen,” Lacy pleaded.

  “If anyone could do it, you could.”

  “You’re the best conservator in Egypt, Kathleen. None better.”

  “Think what it would mean to have the whole five feet in one piece, cleaned and ready for display, when we hand it over.”

  “You’d be famous, Kathleen.”

  “Your name would go down in archaeology.”

  As if by some secret signal, they all stopped before their praises of Kathleen’s expertise crossed the line between the sublime and the ridiculous.

  “It would take time, and I’d need the best brushes, the best magnification.” Kathleen’s eyes glistened as she looked at each face around the table. She pursed her lips but a grin peeked out of one corner. “I couldn’t even use the compound microscope for the center, the strip is too wide.”

  “You can use our video microscope,” Lacy volunteered.

  “I’ll need an assistant.”

  “I’ll do it,” Paul said, “I’ll be your assistant.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  At eleven o’clock the same night, Paul and Lacy were on the roof as had become their nightly habit. Paul and Kathleen had spent two hours hovering over the papyrus strips and discussing how they might possibly be rejoined. They had assessed the materials and equipment in Kathleen’s room and in the labs. It was going to be a major task.

  Lacy could hear the excitement in Paul’s voice. She didn’t understand this man—knew so little about him. What drove him to spend his life in the Middle East, where he had no friends and no family? How long had it been since he had last seen California, his home? Like Roxanne and Horace, he lived here year round, through killer summer heat, with no plumbing, no place for a swim, nothing but dust and dunes. Why?

  Scuffling noises from down below interrupted Paul’s treatise. Scuffling, a shout from a man’s throat, a crash like a piece of furniture hitting the floor. They both dashed for the stairwell and clattered down to the antika room.

  “Scorpion! No, scorpions! I’ve been stung! Help me!” Graham stood in the middle of the room holding his left arm in his right hand.

  Roxanne ran in from the dining room. “What shall I do? Shall I call a doctor? The hospital?”

  “No time for that! Help me make a tourniquet. I got at least three stings.”

  Lacy ran into the lab she shared with Graham and pulled a length of rubber
tubing from a drawer. Wasting no time cutting it to a reasonable length, she ran back to Graham trailing a good ten feet of tubing behind her. Luckily, this tubing was almost identical to what a hospital would use. Roxanne snapped it around Graham’s left bicep muscle and pulled it tight, then cut off the extra length hanging to the floor.

  “Where’s the Jeep?” Graham’s voice sounded as if he was consciously pushing panic to the back of his throat.

  “Selim has it.”

  “Oh, Christ! Call him!”

  Roxanne pointed to a small black object on the computer table. “That’s his mobile over there, I’m afraid, and he has no phone at his house.”

  “You’re shitting me.”

  Lacy thought about the secret passage. A quick way to Selim’s house if one didn’t mind popping into the back room of the very man they were in the process of firing and perhaps bringing theft charges against. In the middle of the night. With wife and children there. “I can get to Selim’s house in ten minutes, but it may be messy.”

  “Forget it,” Graham’s eyes darted wildly, his breath coming in rasps. “What time does the last ferry go across, Roxanne?”

  “It runs all night.”

  “I can take one of the bikes to the dock. It’ll be faster than finding Selim. He might not even be home. Can you take bikes on the ferry?”

  Paul said, “I’ll go with you.”

  They all ran to the bicycles the house kept in the parking area near the kitchen door. There, they found two bikes but one had no handlebars.

  “Nevermind. I can do this by myself,” Graham said. He kicked up the kickstand of the good bike and took off down the drive, steering with one hand, wobbling.

  “Wait! Where is this scorpion? I need to kill it!” Paul called after him.

  “Scorpions, man! Plural! In my top dresser drawer!”

  * * *

  Lacy grabbed her UV light and ran to Graham’s room. Lanier, who had been asleep when the shouting started, followed her and Paul inside. He held out a pair of suede gloves.

  “Put these on before you open that drawer,” Lanier said.

  Paul took the gloves and looked at the top dresser drawer. It was open a couple of inches. If there were several scorpions, would any of them have crawled out? Were they all in the drawer to start with or were there more elsewhere? With a sinking feeling, they began to understand the scope of the problem.

  Paul pulled the drawer out slowly and Lacy shone the UV light inside. At first, they saw only the glowing lint on Graham’s socks and underwear. He shifted the clothing to one side and there, shining like some luminescent deep-sea creature was a hefty scorpion about 10 centimeters long, Lacy estimated. With a gloved hand, Paul shifted the drawer’s contents to the other side and found two more. Shoving the drawer shut, he turned to Lanier. “What’s the best way to kill them?”

  Lacy said, “We have ether in the lab. We could stick some in and shut the drawer on them.”

  “Use your shoe. Much faster,” Lanier said.

  “I don’t know how many are in there,” Paul said. “Some might escape while I’m whacking them.”

  They decided to use the ether. Lacy, holding her breath, saturated a cloth with ether, stuck it into the drawer and jammed it shut. They waited a few minutes, then opened the drawer and took out the clothing, one item at a time.

  They found five scorpions, anesthetized or perhaps dead. Lanier applied the heel of his shoe to the inert animals while Paul and Lacy searched the other drawers and all of Graham’s room. Oddly, they found no more.

  They passed the UV light along to each of their housemates and gave their own rooms a thorough search as well. No more scorpions were found. It was well past two a.m. when they finished, now convinced the scorpion threat had been eliminated.

  * * *

  “This defies all logic, you know,” Paul said.

  He, Lacy and Lanier stood on the porch cooling off after the night of hectic activity. “Five scorpions and they all decide to walk or hitch a ride into the same house and camp out in the same dresser drawer. No scorpions all over the place. No strays in the back room or under the kitchen counter. Five. All in the same place.”

  “Obviously, someone did this. Somebody opened up Graham’s top dresser drawer and dumped five scorpions in.” Lanier stepped off the porch, turned, and looked up at the roof. His gaze swept the length of the roofline twice. He yawned. “Now, if they’d been dumped in my room … I’m the persona non grata around here. That would make sense. But Graham? Que pasa?” Climbing back onto the porch, he reached for the screen door handle, gave his porchmates a sleepy, nonsensical salute and slipped inside.

  Lacy walked to the far end of the porch and located the moon. Her footsteps on the concrete seemed louder now, the house nearly deserted. What was happening? Was all this the work of one person with one aim in mind, or several people, perhaps working at cross-purposes? Which events, if any, were simply bad luck? No evil intent. Getting trapped by the tomb roof collapse was nothing but than an accident, she was sure. Joel’s heart attack may have been brought on by the stress of the trip. There might be another explanation for the smear of unguent on the sheet.

  Roxanne had slipped up behind her. “Can’t sleep?” she asked. “Neither can I.” Paul had apparently gone inside.

  “Just me now, Roxanne. Five of us came over here and I’m the only one left. What’s happening?”

  “Are you thinking, me next?”

  “It has occurred to me.”

  “Not to treat this too lightly, because it’s truly frightening, but I’m reminded a bit of that Agatha Christie mystery novel where ten people are on an island and one by one all ten die. Until none are left. In fact, I believe that’s the title. And Then There Were None.

  “So the last person committed suicide?”

  “No, I don’t think so. I’ve forgotten how it worked out, but I know they all ended up dead. It was all a diabolical scheme.”

  “So whose diabolical scheme is this?” Lacy did in fact feel as if she was in a mystery. Inside a puzzle. Wrapped in an enigma. No, it wasn’t quite like that. It was more like a spider’s web. A three-dimensional spider’s web made of sticky threads.

  “I don’t know, my dear, but truly, before you arrived we were a happy family.”

  * * *

  Dawn found Lacy still at her computer. Dimly aware of stirrings in the west wing hall beyond the dining room, she wished she could have a few more hours before the others woke up.

  In fact, Paul and Kathleen had been up since five transforming Kathleen’s bedroom into an operating room for the herbal papyrus. Paul had tramped in and out of the lab several times without Lacy’s noticing. Her chair at the computer table sat only a couple of feet from the door to the lab, but she was submerged in her work. She and Google were as one.

  The five dead scorpions, now in a box at her feet, were four Androctonus australis and one Leiurus quinquestriatus. Both species were native to Egypt and both packed a wallop with their stings.

  From a dozen procedures she found online for isolating and purifying nicotine from tobacco, she discovered, once again, that the Internet is full of baloney, misinformation, and some truth. She quickly clicked away from sites in the first two categories and scouted the ones that seemed to fit the third. Nicotine was a vegetable alkaloid so it was logical that it could have turned her cochineal-dyed swatch purple.

  The simplest extraction method she could find was one which involved boiling dried tobacco in water, distilling it, discarding the tars left behind, and combining the distillate with ether. The nicotine would migrate into the ether, which could then be evaporated leaving almost pure nicotine behind. Lacy made note of the equipment and chemicals required. This house had everything one would need to take a pack of cigarettes and turn it into a poison so deadly two drops could kill a person.

  There was another possibility, one she couldn’t eliminate. Susan’s killer could have scraped the backs off a number of nicotine patches and di
ssolved out the adhesive or concentrated it from one of the nasal sprays now on the market. Problem? Local stores carried nothing so sophisticated as smoking cessation preparations. In fact, no one in Egypt seemed to be trying to quit. If the nicotine had been obtained in that way, it would logically have been brought in from elsewhere, most likely in the luggage of someone in the Wythe University group. That would mean Susan’s killer had been planning her murder for at least a month.

  Third possibility. Pure laboratory grade nicotine from a pharmaceutical supply house. Dave? Dr. Chovan, on staff at the hospital, could have done that more easily than anyone else, but where’s the motive?

  Why haven’t we heard from Graham yet? Lacy sat back, stretched, and returned to the present. She checked her watch. Graham had been gone for nearly eight hours. Why hadn’t he called? Then she recalled seeing Graham’s cell phone lying on top of his dresser after he left last night. In his panic, he had left without it. It was about time for someone to head across the Nile and find him. As soon as Selim dropped Bay off, Lacy could ask him for a lift.

  That would be a bit sketchy, she thought, given the fact that Selim was about to get fired, if Roxanne hadn’t already done it. Lacy remembered she had a hospital extension number for Dave. If Graham was there, Dave could find him. If not, he’d probably know where to try next.

  She made the call and persevered until the reluctant switchboard operator revealed that neither Graham Clark nor Dr. Chovan was there. Dr. Chovan was expected in later, but at no specific time. Graham Clark had not been admitted but may have been treated and released in the emergency room earlier. Suppose Graham hadn’t made it to the hospital? He might be lying now, somewhere between the ferry dock on the east bank and the hospital. Would anyone see him? Find his bicycle, take it, but not bother to help the man lying near it? The thought of it brought tears to her eyes.

  Lacy headed for Kathleen’s room and heard the back kitchen door open as she crossed the dining room. Bay staggered in puffing, sweating, and out of breath. “I had to walk. Selim called me at five and said he was sick, but I don’t believe him. I think Dr. Breen should settle things with him before he disappears with the Jeep!”