Scorpion House

by Maria Hudgins

  “How’s Shelley?’

  “Not well at all. It’s going to take her a while to get over going to jail. Being treated like a murderer, can you imagine?” Graham found a suitable rock, thrust his arms out for balance, and sat. “I’m going to take her away from here for a couple of days.”

  Lacy almost missed that announcement. “Away? Where?”

  “Just for a few days. We’re going upriver to Kom Ombo and sail back down to Luxor on a felucca. Shelley and I talked about it before we left home. We thought we’d like to do the sailboat thing if we got the chance, and now it doesn’t seem to make much difference, does it? We’ve joined up with a group of five, leaving early tomorrow morning, so we’ll split this afternoon.”

  “What if they come and throw us out while you’re gone?”

  “We’ll take our clothes with us.” Graham paused and adjusted his broad-brimmed hat. “Actually I hadn’t thought about that … but they could, couldn’t they? If they do, would you grab my laptop and Shelley’s on your way out the door?”

  “Isn’t this kind of dangerous with your scorpion stings and all? I’ve heard those felucca trips are basic.”

  “Dangerous?” Graham laughed. “You mean, compared to living over there?” He nodded toward the house. “Where two out of nine people have died in the last month and I’ve come real close to buying the farm myself? Compared to that, a felucca trip will be like riding in one of those teacups at Disneyworld.” He illustrated with a spinning finger.

  They sat silently for a minute. Lacy watched as the water truck pulled away from the house and wondered if they’d have a chance to use any of the fresh water now in their tank.

  “I’m sorry about what happened in the tomb that day, Lacy. I was out of line.”

  Lacy’s heart jumped. She turned toward the temple, certain her face had flushed bright red. “It was as much my fault as yours. No apologies necessary.”

  “Thanks. Didn’t want any ill feelings, you know.”

  “Ill feelings?” She laughed, a laugh she’d hoped would come out sounding more mirthful than it actually did. “After you saved my life? I promise you I had no ill feelings toward you that day or any other. I’m very grateful.”

  An awkward silence fell between them.

  “Murder,” Graham said, his gaze wandering along the Nile. “I’ve never been this close to it before. And they think Horace did it.” He lifted his sunglasses, swiped the sweat off the bridge of his nose with his shirt sleeve.

  Lacy said, “I’ve been thinking about Horace’s wife. You knew she was murdered, didn’t you? Were you at Wythe when it happened?”

  “Yep. I’d only been there about a month though, and I didn’t know his wife.”

  “Her name was Cheryl, he told me.”

  Graham nodded. “Wow. What a mess. That was five years ago. I did my graduate work in Texas, you know, and Lanier hired me right after I got my PhD. So I’d just got there and started working in the biology department when it happened.” Graham picked up a rock and flipped it down the slope. “Stupid cops never did solve it, but they should have. Have you heard about it?”

  “Not much. Tell me.”

  “Mrs. Lanier was at their summer house up in the mountains somewhere and Horace was there too, but he was allegedly in Charlottesville at the time of the murder. About an hour’s drive from the house.”

  “Allegedly?”

  “He had spoken to a group at UVa that day, so he was definitely in Charlottesville at least part of the day. Mrs. Lanier was found in the potting shed, rigor mortis was already well established, no more than an hour after she probably died. There was a phone call, I believe, that narrowed down the time. Somebody slipped her a lethal dose of strychnine, so of course, rigor set in almost immediately. That’s what strychnine does, you know.”

  “No, I didn’t know, but go on.”

  “Whoever did it tried to make it look like suicide by leaving a cup of coffee laced with mole poison containing strychnine on the table. But here’s the dumb part. Strychnine hasn’t been legal for sale in pesticides for years, but sometimes you can find an old can of mole or gopher poison lying around that has it. But it’s only point five percent. She’d have had to pour the whole can into her coffee to kill herself with it. It took the cops a month to figure that out. They didn’t even know it was murder until the forensic lab report came back.”

  “Any suspects?”

  “Horace, of course. But the time it would’ve taken to drive there from Charlottesville was a problem. They couldn’t see how he could have made the trip that fast. Their son, Marcus, was somewhere else at the time as well.”

  “A lover?”

  “Have you seen pictures of her? I guess not. Her picture was in the paper every day for months, but that was before you came to Wythe. She looked like a female version of Horace. I can’t imagine her having a lover.” Graham stood up as if to leave. “They questioned Joel Friedman, I remember.”

  “Don’t tell me they suspected him!”

  “No, I don’t think so. That would be ridiculous wouldn’t it?”

  Lacy followed Graham down the slope and back to the road. “What brought you back home to Wythe from Texas? Did you already know Lanier?”

  “No. I applied to several schools including Wythe. My aunt put in a good word for me to Lanier. You know my Aunt Joanne?”

  “Our registrar? Sure. I’ve met her, of course.”

  “My parents were killed in a car crash when I was six. She was my father’s sister so she and my Uncle Warren took me in and raised me. They adopted me when I was ten.”

  Lacy envisioned Joanne Clark, the thin, silver-haired woman whose office was on the first floor of the administration building at Wythe University. They had to deal with each other at least once a semester, usually because Lacy had failed to fill out some form or other. “Didn’t Joel tell us he used to go out with her?”

  “Right. In high school.”

  “Did she have any opinion about the Lanier murder?”

  Graham trudged along several paces before he answered and, when he did, his voice had taken on a vague tone. “I do recall her getting furious at the old cats in the Faculty Women’s Club. They all thought Horace had done it. You know how they gossip. My aunt told them they had their heads up their asses.”

  “I’ll bet she didn’t put it exactly that way.”

  “You don’t know my Aunt Joanne. I’m sure she did.”

  * * *

  Late that afternoon Marcus Lanier arrived in Luxor’s version of a taxi. He wore jeans, cowboy boots, and a plaid cowboy shirt with pearlized snaps on the pockets. While his driver pulled his suitcase out, he settled a black felt rolled-brim hat on his head and reached for the tooled leather wallet in his hip pocket. The driver, paid and apparently handsomely tipped, drove off. Marcus stood in the driveway and scanned the length of Whiz Bang, “Looks exactly like the old man described it,” he said.

  Lacy, celebrating happy hour alone with a gin and tonic, greeted him and showed him into Joel Friedman’s old room. “It’ll be just you and me on this hall tonight, I’m afraid. Paul Hannah is too busy to sleep right now. Graham and Shelley Clark have the other two rooms on that side of the hall, but they left earlier today for a felucca trip down river.”

  Marcus stepped back into the hall and stared at the yellow crime scene tape the police had tacked across both Susan’s door and the door to his father’s lab. “What is this, CSI?” he said, then shook his head. “I’ll take you up on that drink you were about to offer me.”

  Lacy told him all she knew about Susan’s murder, the arrest and release of Shelley Clark and the arrest of Horace. A half-hour later Roxanne joined them, taking both Marcus’s hands in hers as if they were meeting at a funeral.

  “It’s been a long time,” Marcus said. “Five years or more, hasn’t it been?”

  “Yes,” Roxanne said, her eyes welling up. She drew a tissue from a pocket and blew her nose.

  Marcus seated her, say
ing, “I was telling Lacy I’ve hired a lawyer for Dad, contingent upon their getting along when they actually meet. He’s flying here from Cairo tomorrow. He’s Egyptian, but he speaks fluent English.”

  “How did you get his name?” Roxanne asked.

  “A Seattle firm I’ve used before recommended him.”

  “You’ve talked to him by phone?”

  “Actually, he met me at the Cairo airport today. We had time to talk before my flight here.”

  “That’s good.”

  “What’s not good is my father.” Marcus pulled off his hat and rolled the brim in his hands. He cleared an obstruction in his throat. “They’ve got him on suicide watch.”

  “What?” Roxanne’s face went dark.

  “Suicide watch. He tried to hang himself last night.”

  “Oh, no!” Lacy said.

  “They let me see him for a few minutes today. I stopped in at the police station before I came over here.” Marcus cleared his throat again and looked out toward the hills as if he was scraping together the determination to continue. He looked at Roxanne through his eyebrows. “You know Dad. Have you ever seen a neater man? Mister Clean. He’s a fanatic about dirt.”

  “I’ve never seen a cleaner lab,” Lacy said.

  “My father can’t stand bugs. Ants, flies—any bugs.”

  “I know,” Roxanne said in a bare whisper. “Lacy, you remember how he reacted when you brought the scorpion to breakfast. He left the room, didn’t he?” She reached over and touched Lacy’s arm. Tears had by now run down both of Roxanne’s checks and she wasn’t bothering to wipe them away.

  “Yes. I remember.”

  “Now, where are you likely to run into lots of bugs? In jail,” Marcus went on. “Any jail anywhere in the world, you’ll find cockroaches, water bugs, spiders, rats, you name it. Even in the U. S. where we like to think we’re pretty clean, jails are full of vermin and in third world countries it’s worse. But my father has another phobia. Know what it is?”

  “Claustrophobia,” Roxanne whispered, then groaned. “He gets the willy-willies in the tomb. That’s why he hardly ever goes in.”

  “So what do you think a six-by-ten-foot cell with four other men, no air-circulation, and all sorts of vermin is going to do to him?” Marcus’s eyes and brows contracted into an X. “And that’s jail. If he’s convicted, he’ll go to a prison and they’re worse!”

  Roxanne buried her face in one hand.

  “A fate worse than death! There are a few things, you know, that are worse than death and for my father an Egyptian prison is a fate worse than death.”

  There was an awkward silence as Marcus looked at the two women, waiting for a response. Roxanne choked on a sob. Lacy couldn’t think of a thing to say.

  “I know he’d kill himself,” Marcus added. “He’d find a way … and I might help him.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  The herbal papyrus was whole again. Lacy couldn’t believe it. She set their dinner tray on Kathleen’s desk and stepped gingerly toward the long work table, giving Kathleen plenty of notice that she was approaching. The room smelled of alcohol.

  “You can’t even tell where it was cut!” she said.

  Kathleen coughed, not quite hiding the smile behind her cupped hand.

  “We’re not finished yet,” Paul said. His hair stuck up at odd angles as if it had been glued. “We’re letting the methyl cellulose set, then we’re going to dampen it so we can roll it back up.”

  “Why not leave it flat?”

  “How could we take it to Cairo, flat? Have two people carry it on a board the whole way?”

  “I see the problem.”

  “Kathleen wants to roll it up very loosely.” Paul illustrated the size of the roll with his hands. “But how can we take it there? Driving it in the Jeep would be far too dangerous and I don’t know if we’re still speaking to Selim. We haven’t been keeping up the last few days.”

  The two had, in fact, taken off only thirty minutes’ work when Lanier was arrested. Lacy recalled seeing them standing on the porch and staring mutely until the police car took him away. Kathleen had sort of shrugged, nudged Paul’s back, and nodded toward the door.

  “We need to take this to Cairo but how can we do it? A round trip plane ticket costs a thousand pounds.”

  Lacy thought for a second. “A thousand Egyptian pounds? That’s only about two hundred dollars, U. S. Tell you what. If Roxanne can’t foot the bill with grant money, you can use my credit card. We can sort it out later.”

  Paul looked at her as if he was making an effort to show gratitude but couldn’t keep his mind focused.

  “You need to get some sleep before you go anywhere,” Lacy said. Until then, she hadn’t considered Paul’s financial situation. Apparently, his budget didn’t allow for flights to and from Cairo. “I’ll make the arrangements. You two get some sleep.”

  Kathleen blushed.

  Paul looked at Lacy and burst out laughing. “We did it! We did it!” He rushed forward and crushed her in his arms. “Thanks, Lacy, you stuck with us all the way.” Turning to Kathleen, he hugged her and said, “You’re the best!”

  Kathleen’s eyes, red and fuzzy, welled up. “Go to your room and get some sleep.”

  * * *

  The next morning, Lacy made flight arrangements while Roxanne called the SCA in Cairo with the news that the papyrus had been found and was on its way to them. She bought an extra seat for the papyrus so they wouldn’t have to risk it in the luggage section or an overhead compartment. Kathleen and Lacy carried it outside, packed in a wooden box and cushioned with bubble wrap. Selim and the Jeep took Paul, Kathleen and Marcus Lanier to the Luxor Airport.

  “Marcus is meeting the lawyer at the airport. Hopefully, he and Horace will hit it off,” Roxanne sighed as they watched the Jeep drive away.

  “Horace is hardly in a position to be picky,” Lacy said. “I hope he realizes that.”

  Roxanne stretched her arm around Lacy’s shoulder and hugged her. “Just you and me now, kid. We’re the only ones left.”

  “Temporarily. Please!”

  “I’m going to the tomb.”

  “I’ll come up later.”

  * * *

  Lacy climbed the stairs to the roof. She wished there were some way to find out what was in Susan’s steno pad but the police had it now. If Susan was onto Horace, did she write about it in her notes? She might well have, but would those notes be in English or hieratics? If hieratics, how could the police read them? They’d have to get an Egyptologist to interpret. Lacy had learned that hieratic and hieroglyphic writing were no more closely related to modern Arabic than they were to English. There was something ironic about that.

  What evidence had they gleaned from the pots or bowls or whatever they’d taken from Horace’s lab? Traces of nicotine? Surely Horace, the neat freak, wouldn’t have stuck dirty bowls back in his cabinet, but good lab work, she knew, could find traces of a substance on a bowl that looked clean, particularly if the bowl was made of a porous material. Lacy couldn’t recall what labware had been taken or what material it was made of, but she had seen copper, glass, ceramic, and clay bowls in Horace’s cabinets.

  A puff of wind lifted Lacy’s canvas hat and floated it over the roof’s low retaining wall. Peering over the side, she spotted the hat lying on a stack of plastic water bags outside the shower, and then noticed the window directly below her. Its concrete sill was littered with dead wasps. Why would so many wasps decide to go to a spot like that to die? Strange. This was the lone window of the lab. She descended the stairs, walked through the lab and out the back door. The window was too high to see the surface of the sill, so she slipped inside, grabbed the stool Graham kept on his side of the room, set it under the window outside, and climbed up.

  A mud dauber’s nest, attached to the upper left corner of the concrete sill appeared to be of recent construction but empty of wasps. Lacy counted eight wasp corpses lying, mostly feet up, at the base of the glass.
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  * * *

  The place was dead quiet. Alone in the big house for the first time, the only sound the hum of the refrigerator in the next room, Lacy found herself wishing for a Muslim call to prayer, the bray of a donkey, anything to slice through the silence. She considered calling Joan Friedman and asking after Otto’s health until she looked at her watch. It was three a.m. back home.

  She checked her email, then clicked open a Google page and typed “Cheryl Lanier.” She found several newspaper articles about Cheryl’s murder. They reinforced what Graham had told her, but since the pieces were dated over a period of several months, they gave her a clearer picture of the fumbling, the false assumptions, and the misleading statements that had delayed the investigation until it mired down completely and ground to a halt. There seemed to be incontrovertible evidence, though, that Horace Lanier had been in Charlottesville, an hour’s drive from his mountain retreat, at the moment Cheryl met her grim fate.

  She tried “Horace Lanier” and got a number of references to Cheryl’s murder. Articles she had already read. She found a reference or two about Horace’s resigning his chairmanship of the biology department at Wythe University and his decision to go to Egypt.

  She checked the name Susan Donohue, clicking out of the sites that dealt with a different Susan Donohue. Papers she had written, speeches given at archaeological conferences—all dealing only with her professional life. The names of a couple of Egyptologists with whom she had running arguments cropped up in more than one place, but none constituted anything remotely like a motive for murder. She jotted the names down anyway.

  Dr. David Chovan, the last name being rather unusual, yielded nothing. Lacy tried spelling it different ways but Dave was apparently under the Internet’s radar. She Googled the name Jody Myers. The search engine referred her to a dozen people with that name, several of whom had accomplished great things, but none appeared to have any connection to Joel Friedman, Egypt, or Virginia.

  Lastly, she sought the World Wide Web’s stored knowledge of Dr. Paul Hannah—or Linus Pauling Hannah. She had seen the name on Paul’s passport. Why had his parents named him for the great biochemist? Were they related to him or merely admirers? Paul Hannah, she found, was married—or had been until his wife was killed by sniper fire on the west bank of the river Jordan, near Jericho . The couple had been working at a dig site and were caught in crossfire. The articles about Melanie Hannah’s death were a bit less than three years old. Why had Paul never mentioned any of this? Why should he have? It was none of Lacy’s business and Paul probably didn’t want to talk about it, she supposed. Lacy found a few papers Paul had published dealing with artifacts from Catal Huyuk, Turkey and from Jericho.