Scorpion House

by Maria Hudgins

  * * *

  Paul was forced to go by the overland route which meant Graham could see him coming from a hundred yards away. He paused a few seconds at the tunnel’s entrance to let his eyes adjust to the glare. He felt the lump on his head and drew back bloody fingers. The first leg of this trip went fast. Across the parking area near the kitchen and halfway down the driveway, he raced at top speed, then took the most direct route across rocky outcrops and the stone wall. His head pounded. The terrain slowed him down but this route was still faster than running to the end of the driveway. Soon he heard the rhythmic chug of the generator. Up another hill and up the dirt path to the tomb.

  The first thing he saw when he reached the tomb was the chair Akhmed always sat in, now empty. He scrambled up and around the tomb entrance, past the tailings pile to the generator, the noise from its rotors growing louder as he approached. He prepared himself for a fight, looking up and forward as he climbed. The polyurethane tube he had seen Graham carrying was duct-taped to the exhaust of the generator. The tube led from the exhaust to the vent over the new chamber and more duct tape sealed the pipe to the vent so that nothing but exhaust gases could enter the tomb. The fan used for pulling fresh air through the tomb lay flat on the ground a few feet away. There was no sign of Graham, and Paul had no doubt the monster had seen him coming and fled.

  This was a gas chamber.

  “Shelley!” Where was she?

  Paul shouted her name again.

  No answer.

  He shouted again, so loudly that felucca sailors on the Nile must have jumped off their seats.

  Nothing. Was she inside?

  Paul ripped the tube from the vent in one heave, trailing strands of duct tape between the two. He ran down the slope and into the tomb, down the long hall, and fell off the bottom step into the burial chamber.

  “Lacy!”

  Lacy stood, wobbling, on the stepladder throwing rocks over her shoulder like John Henry laying track. “She’s in here, Paul. I don’t know where the little boy is but I can’t hear anything!”

  Paul grabbed her and threw her off the stepladder. He couldn’t take the time to do it gently because silence beyond the wall of debris meant that Shelley was either dead or unconscious. He took over, yanking out one huge boulder Lacy had been unable to move.

  The boulder crashed onto the tomb floor, a cloud of dust rose, and a hole appeared. He jerked back, knowing that a torrent of invisible, odorless gas, a mixture of deadly poisonous carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide was pouring out. Dashing away from the hole, he sucked in a lungful of air and attacked the blockage again.

  When his lungs burned for another breath, Paul saw hair. The top of a head dusted with powdered plaster. He ducked away from the opening for another breath, then grappled through the remaining blockage, but he couldn’t get purchase on the body. The height of the hole forced him to bend his elbows to reach in.

  He needed something taller to stand on but the burial chamber was empty except for the hallowed coffin now lying on top of its protective tarp. What the hell. He motioned to Lacy and together they shoved the entire coffin across the room and beneath the hole. He balanced the stepladder shakily on top of the woman’s face on the carved lid and climbed up. He heard a crunch that sounded like the prelude to a larger crunch.

  Returning to the ground, he motioned Lacy to take his place and held the ladder steady while she climbed up. Her lighter weight precipitated a pop or two, but the lid held up. She reached in and grabbed the inert body by its shirtsleeves. “Grab my waist, Paul. Let the ladder go.” When she felt his firm grasp, she gave one huge pull and the head and shoulders emerged.

  It wasn’t Shelley. It was Graham.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  Shelley sat on her bed, cocooned in her sleeping bag, shivering, but she wasn’t cold. Her own husband had tried to kill her and killed himself instead. Roxanne brought her “a nice cup of tea,” the English panacea that doesn’t work on Americans. Lacy sat at the end of the bed, silently watching her.

  Paul stood near the door. “It was an accident, Shelley. He didn’t intend to kill himself.”

  “What did he intend to do?” Her voice quivered. “Never mind. I know what he intended to do. He intended to kill me.”

  Lacy made a small move toward her, but Paul stepped across and pulled her to him. He examined the tips of her bandaged fingers and kissed the palms of her hands. “Where were you when you got Lacy’s call?” he asked Shelley.

  “I was walking into the burial chamber. Roxanne said we could go into the new chamber now and I thought it might be my last chance. When I put my backpack on the floor I felt my phone vibrate through the material.”

  “Was the hole blocked with rubble?” Paul asked.

  Shelley looked at the wall, vaguely. “I can’t remember.”

  “It was when I got there,” Lacy said. “I can’t figure out whether Graham had already blocked it up … no he couldn’t have. How else could he have climbed in? He must have crawled in to check on the vent from the under side and set off a rock fall, then turned around and tried to claw his way out but the carbon monoxide got to him first.” Lacy knew she’d never forget the raw, bloody fingers she saw on the body she pulled out.

  “So I went outside where I could get some reception before I answered it, and that’s when I saw that adorable little boy. I said, ‘What are you doing here?’ and you know what he said to me?”

  “How now, brown cow?”

  “He said, ‘Itsy-bitsy spider,’ and he showed me his yo-yo.”

  It was more than Lacy could take. She dissolved in a shaking, sniveling fit of sobs, soaking Paul’s shirt as he held her until she gave herself the hiccups. Selim had taken Yasser home, promising to talk to the child’s parents about keeping a closer eye on their son.

  Shelley’s phone, now lying on the dresser, rang. Paul handed it to her. After a minute, she said, “It’s Mike Myerson. He’s found us two tickets to New York.”

  “Tell him to hold off a bit.”

  “If it’s all right with you, I need to be by myself for a while.”

  They left her alone with her pain.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  Roxanne hogged the house phone the rest of the afternoon. She talked to the police, to her friend at Chicago House, and to Dave Chovan, explaining to each as much as she knew about Susan’s murder and why Horace Lanier was the wrong man. Meanwhile, Marcus, in a Seattle hospital with his new daughter and peacefully-snoozing wife, was getting nothing but busy signals. When he finally did get through, Roxanne let out a whoop. “Great news! I can’t wait to tell Horace!”

  * * *

  Late that evening, Shelley joined her housemates on the porch. “I owe you all an explanation,” she said, leaning back against a column. “Lacy? Thank you … and Paul, too. You saved my life.” She looked at each of them, then at the floor. “I don’t know where to start.”

  “Was Graham Jody Myers?”

  “His birth name was Myers. They changed his name to Clark, his aunt and uncle did, when they adopted him. I don’t know if he was ever called Jody.

  “In the last few days I’ve discovered how much I didn’t know about Graham. Some of what he had told me about his childhood was a lie. Some of it, he refused to talk about and I didn’t press him. I can only tell you things from my own viewpoint. When Susan died, you remember, the police came the next day and Dave Chovan told us it was nicotine poisoning and the probable entry point was under her arms. I nearly passed out when he said that because Graham had told me once, a long time ago, how easy it would be to commit murder by lacing someone’s deodorant with nicotine. It was too coincidental. I knew Graham had done it. I had suspected him and Susan of having an affair, but now I think that was all paranoia on my part …” She paused and took a deep breath. “I imagined they’d had a lover’s quarrel. Graham has a nasty temper …” She looked out toward the temple and her voice trailed off. “Anyway, I went into her room and switched my own deodo
rant with the tube on her desk. That was dumb, I know, but I was just trying to protect my husband. I should have known he’d be too smart to leave damning evidence right there in the room. I never thought that damning evidence was exactly what he wanted left in the room. I threw the poisoned tube out back in the trash.

  “I was truly gobsmacked when they came and arrested me. I hadn’t realized how, with my fairly obvious jealousy of Susan, I was setting myself up. I never once thought about fingerprints. I wondered if Graham would confess and get me released. That’s awful, isn’t it? I didn’t even trust him enough to believe he wouldn’t let me hang for his crime.” This was no longer Shelley the “one-upper” talking. This was a new Shelley, stripped of all pretension.

  “What did you think when they arrested Horace?” Roxanne had been sitting in a rocking chair, her arms folded tightly at her waist.

  “I thought Horace had really done it.”

  Paul said, “When did you find out otherwise?”

  “Not all at once, actually. The first thing was when he told me we were leaving that very day for a three-day felucca trip. I thought, ‘Huh? What’s going on?’ We’re finally back in our rooms, I can get a good night’s sleep for a change, and he says we’re taking off in a wooden boat where we have to sleep in sleeping bags.’ He practically had to drag me out of here.

  “On the felucca, I was fighting what I hoped was morning sickness, or it may have been sea-sickness, so I planted myself on the bow where I could look at the horizon, and I thought. I realized we were there for one reason. To avoid meeting Marcus Lanier. Things started to fit. I recalled the conversation we all had out here our first night. About how Joel Friedman had known Graham’s aunt when they were in high school. Somebody said something like, ‘Small world, isn’t it?’ I thought about things Graham had told me about his childhood, things his aunt had told me from time to time. She never mentioned how his parents had died, but why not? Graham had never taken me to his parents’ graves. I thought about Graham and that pent-up anger I could never quite understand. The way his ears pricked up when any mention was made of the murder of Cheryl Lanier—or any mention at all of Horace Lanier. Things began to come together in my mind. Graham’s idea for the perfect murder using pure nicotine.”

  “Okay. How could he have known Susan would be quitting smoking and wearing a nicotine patch? She didn’t start until a few days before our trip and he must have been planning this murder to frame Horace since the very beginning.” Paul stretched, tipped his chair backward on its two back legs.

  “His plan would have worked just the same if she was still smoking,” Lacy said.

  “Damn! You’re right.” Paul went silent for a minute. “All he needed was a body you’d expect to find some nicotine in, and let the autopsy reveal the level of poison was much higher than you could possibly get from smoking. He’d never have predicted the rash, I mean, who would? I bet he’d already planted his evidence in Lanier’s lab and tampered with Susan’s notepad. When they came and arrested you instead of Horace, he went nuts but he wasn’t faking. He was really shitting his pants!”

  “So, he had to tip the police off and lead them straight to the clues they were supposed to find to begin with.”

  “Shelley, you were a last-minute addition to the group, weren’t you?” Paul asked. “Seems to me like he’d have wanted you to stay home. Why did he let you get mixed up in this?”

  “I insisted on coming. Jealousy. The old green-eyed monster.”

  “Lacy told me, weeks ago, that she thought Dr. Friedman had been murdered. Had he?” Paul glanced from Shelley to Lacy and back again.

  Shelley looked confused.

  Lacy’s eyes lit up and she raised a bandaged hand. “Definitely. It all fits now. Horace had probably told Joel about the family’s problems with a kid named Jody Myers, but neither of them had seen the kid since he’d grown up. Graham knew that Horace didn’t recognize him or he would have said so five years ago, before he hired him.

  “When we were standing in the visa line in Cairo, Joel saw the name Joseph Graham Clark on Graham’s passport. He knew Graham had been raised by his aunt, knew her maiden name was Myers, because they went out together in high school. So he must have thought, Joseph … Jody. Clark … Myers. Ohmigod!”

  “You said he got a strange look on his face,” Paul added.

  “He did. That’s probably when he wrote the name on his folder. We’ll never know for sure, but in all likelihood, Joel intended to bring this up with Horace whenever they got a private moment together. Or maybe he meant to bring it up first with Graham. Maybe he did, or maybe Graham went into Joel’s room and saw the name on the folder. Knew he was screwed. Went into Joel’s room in the middle of the night and pushed his head into the pillow until he stopped breathing. Joel couldn’t have cried out, and his death would look as much like a heart attack as anything else.”

  Shelley didn’t appear to have been listening the last few minutes. Instead, she had sunk to the floor, her back still against the porch column. Tear tracks from her eyes to her chin glistened in the temple’s light. “I told Graham everything I knew when we were on the felucca. I told him I wanted to go straight home. What else could I do? I couldn’t possibly stay here while Horace Lanier rotted in jail. I didn’t think I had the courage to rat on my own husband. Or maybe I did. I had to think. I had to get away from here and think.

  “And to tell the truth, I didn’t know what Graham would do if I did rat on him. If I were at home I could get away from him more easily than I could here. There, I have friends. Family. They would help me.”

  “But when Graham heard you say you were going home, he says, ‘No way. I’m going with you.’ “

  “And then he must have decided, ‘I can’t risk it. Back in America, I’d still have to watch her. Every day for the rest of our lives.’ “

  Shelley raised her head, snuffled back tears. “I’d better kill her right here.”

  * * *

  When everyone had gone to bed, Lacy saw light seeping under Shelley’s door. She knocked and entered. “It’s probably presumptuous of me, but did Graham have any life insurance?”

  “Yes. A couple hundred thousand, I think.”

  “That’s good.”

  Shelley sat on the floor, cross-legged in front of her open and empty suitcase. Her face was a pale grey-green. “I’ve been thinking, Lacy. What if Graham didn’t intend to kill me? What if he meant to kill himself? It wasn’t really like him to do a stupid thing like climb into a little chamber filled with carbon monoxide.”

  “It would be easier for you to deal with if it were suicide, wouldn’t it?”

  “Probably.”

  Lacy flashed back on the hat with the yellow scarf at the base of the blocked opening. The sheer luck of her phone call coming through at exactly the right moment. “I’m afraid you have to deal with the fact that you were his intended victim. I’m sorry, but it’s better this way.”

  “Better?” Shelley’s dead eyes looked up at her.

  “He meant to kill you, but he accidentally killed himself. Remember that, when the insurance adjusters come around. And they will come around. Life insurance doesn’t pay off for suicide. It does pay off for an accident.”

  * * *

  Before she went to bed, Lacy dialed Joan Friedman, realizing that it was nearly cocktail hour in Virginia and Joan might be thoroughly in her cups. She dreaded hearing Joan’s slurred hello.

  Instead, she answered with a bright, “Lacy! Oh, I’m so glad you’ve called!”

  After exchanging the normal queries, Lacy said, “I’m afraid to ask about Otto. How is he?”

  “Otto? He’s watching Meercat Manor at the moment but I’ll call him to the phone if you want.”

  Lacy laughed. “He made it! That’s great.” She hadn’t heard anything about the greenhouse mouser since the vet intervened in Otto’s second poisoning episode.

  “Oh, Lacy, I’ve been so busy of late. Otto’s new doctor and I talked about
a problem he has with his post-op patients. So many of their owners work, all sorts of hours, you know. And some don’t spend much time at home. He hates to let cats and dogs go home with owners he knows aren’t going to watch them closely and he doesn’t have enough room to keep them with him as long as they need to be watched.

  “So! He was impressed with how well Otto recuperated and I told him I got up several times each night to check on him. Anyway. To make a long story short, my house is now a nursing home for recovering kitties. I have two poor little things with me now. Plus Otto, of course. He helps me keep an eye on them. I’m serious!”

  Lacy smiled at the phone. Joan’s voice sounded alive. Eager.

  “I’m lonely, Lacy. I miss Joel every minute, every day.”

  “I have a lot to tell you, Joan. But I’m going to let it wait until I get home.”

  * * *

  The next morning Lacy and Shelley strolled down the road past the Ramesseum and around to the foot of Selim Hamdy’s cliffside village, now more than half gone. The crane with its dangling wrecking ball lurked behind the donkey pen, ready for its next assault. Lacy looked northward to the ridge between them and Whiz Bang.

  Roxanne had prepared for a nasty battle over getting Horace released from police custody and was shocked by how easy it was. In fact, she got a call from Major-General El-Alfi before the morning call to prayer telling her to expect Horace on the morning ferry. She left immediately for the ferry dock to meet him. Paul suggested the Egyptian police were more than happy to get the whole problem off their hands. They could let Lanier go and they didn’t have to arrest anyone else. Americans could be so picky about their rights.

  “Let’s go look at the opening in the tunnel at the end of this road. Paul said he couldn’t get through yesterday because something was blocking it. In fact, something in the blockage fell on him because he got knocked out for a minute.”

  “That’s why he has the bandage on the crown of his head?”

  “I told him it needed stitches, but Paul wanted to skip it and avoid the insurance hassle. Instead, he let Roxanne treat it with one of the ointments Horace makes with lotus and wild honey.” When they came to the tunnel opening they found it was crammed with chairs, boxes of clothing, kitchen items. A large metal box was jammed on an angle between a camel saddle and long-handled oven scoop. Lacy said, “It must’ve been something like this that knocked Paul out.”