Maria Hudgins - Lacy Glass 01 - Scorpion House (21 page)

“Lotus?” Lacy said, absently. “And honey.”

But her mind was on the theft of the papyrus. She looked back toward Whiz Bang. If the papyrus was no longer in the house, then the route by which it left had to be some part of the sandy space before them. The thief would have had to cross a half-mile of open terrain carrying a huge clay pot. Lacy couldn’t imagine it. But the thief could have had a car waiting for him at the foot of the drive. This seemed the most likely scenario. The only other option would have been to scale the sheer cliff behind the house. Again, she couldn’t imagine doing that while carrying the pot.

Of course, assuming the thief knew that the value lay in the contents and not the pot itself, he might have simply pulled the papyrus out and dropped the pot. But he hadn’t, at least not near the house, or they would have found it. Or broken pieces of it. Would they recognize its shards if they saw them?

* * *

Lacy found it a great relief to turn her attention to the paint on the walls in the burial chamber. She was still curious about the brilliant reds and yellows. These Eighteenth Dynasty painters had used a pigment called realgar for the red and another called orpiment for the yellow. Both were oxides of arsenic. The white paint contained high levels of lead. No face masks and no gloves in the Eighteenth Dynasty. Had the painters suffered from arsenic or lead poisoning? If they had, they would have had no clue as to what was making them sick.

Using a battery-powered ultraviolet light, she examined the painting of the green-faced Osiris. When she swung the light around the burial chamber and saw blue-white smudges glowing along the lower margin of the hole in the wall, she caught her breath. Blood, she recalled, fluoresced under UV light. The glow was her own blood.

* * *

The Luxor police returned to Whiz Bang for a more thorough search of the premises since they now had a better idea what they were looking for. Mike Myerson followed in his American Embassy car and explained to Roxanne what they were doing. Without a word, the policemen set to work.

“They’re looking for a deodorant tube loaded with nicotine or anything else with nicotine in it. Suspicious labware, nicotine patches, cigarettes, whatever. And they’re going to search Mrs. Clark’s room with a fine-tooth comb.”

Roxanne nervously twiddled the brush she’d been using to clean pottery, and it went flying off across the room.

“Where is Dr. Clark?” Myerson asked.

“At the tomb, I think.”

“That’s good. He’s a hot-head, isn’t he?” When Roxanne responded with nothing but a crooked grin he added, “Understandably so, of course. I’d act the same way if they arrested my wife. Actually, he was pretty decent about it. But we’re trying to keep him out of this as much as possible. Don’t want to create an international incident.” His tone and his eyebrows set virtual quotes around those last two words.

* * *

Lacy walked straight through the house and out the lab door to the back yard. She searched the area for the brown spot she and Graham found in the sand that morning. It was probably nothing, but it occurred to her that someone might have poured something out. A nicotine solution with cigarette tobacco in it? Given the fact that she hadn’t been right about anything else so far, she doubted it. More likely, it was something Horace had dumped out. Willow bark or hibiscus leaves. Whatever it was, she couldn’t find it now and the coin with which Graham had marked the spot was now missing.

The pillars of weathered rock that formed part of the cliff looked different now. Lacy stepped back from the trash bin and studied them. The late morning sun was casting shadows at a different angle and they looked more like gnarled fingers than robed monks. It seemed as if there might be a space behind them—between the pillars and the rest of the cliff.

She saw how the theft could have been pulled off
.

Striding across the back yard, she slipped between two of the pillars. A space, just large enough to hold a pot like the ones in Horace’s lab, separated the three pillars from the more solid part of the cliff face. No pot there now, unfortunately, but there were footprints. They looked fresh, but in this climate, who could tell? Lacy spotted another space between the westernmost pillar and the cliff face and, peeking through, found it continued on. Back into the rock. Barely wide enough for her to squeeze through by turning sideways, what appeared at first to be a narrow crevice widened out into an actual passage.

She paused and gaped. This was no natural formation. A little sunlight seeped in from behind her, but above—solid rock. She waited until her eyes adjusted and scanned the rock overhead. Hack marks and squared corners betrayed the hand of man. How long had this secret chamber been here, a decade or a millennium? Or three millennia?

She crept forward beyond the region of dim light into total darkness. At this point, she knew she should turn back, but she didn’t. There was no dank, wet odor such as she’d smelled in caves back home. Instead, it smelled musty—like a room closed up too long. Feeling her way along with both hands touching the walls on either side, she followed the passage around a right turn. She stopped and listened. She heard small burbling and scratching noises. Some twenty feet beyond the turn, a shaft of light slanted in from the left. Air rushed from her lungs in an audible sigh of relief. Until then, she hadn’t realized she was holding her breath.

Something slithered across the back of her hand.

She forced herself to keep moving forward, her hands still grazing the walls, until she reached the light and an opening that led out to a dirt road. Ahead, she saw a pair of children, one applying a stick to the rump of a goat. They were heading the other way, and Lacy felt sure they hadn’t seen her. She ducked back into the shadow of the passage and peeked out so only a sliver of her face would be visible to someone in the road.

On the far side of the road, the land rose sharply into a cluster of houses. A narrow path ran up, around a donkey pen, and past a dilapidated green door in a mud-brick façade. Brightly colored rugs hung from open windows. She started to turn back, and then noticed she hadn’t yet reached the end of the passage. It continued beyond the opening.

Steeling herself to reenter the dark, she looked down as a speckled lizard skittered between her feet and disappeared into the gloom. Lacy hoped it had been a lizard she’d felt on the back of her hand a minute ago. Lizards didn’t bother her.

She made sure no one was looking her way and then hurried across the space that was visible from the road. Ahead, it seemed, although it was quite dark, a flight of stairs led downward. She waited again for her eyes to adjust and to bring the stairs ahead into better focus. She spotted a dark band near the bottom—possibly a snake.

Lacy decided to return to the house and get a flashlight before she went any farther. She turned and retraced her steps. On her way back, she thought about scorpions.
I’d better get my UV lamp, too.

The scene back at the house was bizarre. As Lacy traversed the antika room, she saw Horace, Roxanne, Graham, and Paul sitting in a row on the bench next to the dining room door. No one spoke when they saw her, no one even moved. They were like strangers waiting for a bus. The house telephone, plugged into a jack on the other side of the wall behind them, lay on Horace’s knees. Perhaps Horace had already made the dreaded call to the SCA, and this was the result—universal catatonia. First things first. She decided to let it wait until she’d finished her exploration of the passage.

She grabbed a flashlight from her bedroom and tramped back across the antika room to her lab to pick up the UV lamp she’d left there earlier. Her four housemates were still sitting on the bench, like a row of bowling pins.

Hurrying down the first leg of the passage again, this time with her lights on, she passed a couple of lizards and several pigeons. She recalled the burbling noises she’d heard the first time through and had attributed to her own imagination. It must have been pigeons. She was glad none of them had flown past her head because claws or wings in her hair, in the dark, would have freaked her out for sure.

Entering the new terrain beyond the opening, Lacy played her light all along the stairs searching for the dark band she’d seen earlier. She found it. A piece of rope. The fact that pigeons clucked calmly in and out of the passage was a good sign because birds raise a commotion when a snake is near. She directed her UV light into the corners of each stair, checking for scorpions, then stepped carefully down.

At this point she was at least twenty feet below the top of the ridge, and the corridor made a sharp turn to the left. Ahead was another flight of steps but, thankfully, these went up. And up. A ninety degree turn to the left and yet another flight of steps. At the top of these, Lacy stopped and turned off both her lights. She saw daylight ahead. Approaching the light slowly, she stopped. She was looking into a room. The entire space was hacked out of the native rock. A rough-hewn room with blue-painted walls, rugs on the floor, a poster for an Arabic language movie on the wall over a table covered with a multi-colored cloth. Leaning against the wall, a clay pot.
The
clay pot, Lacy knew, because it sported a band of Amarna blue paint around its neck. By now, she could tell the difference between Egyptian blue and Amarna blue from a distance of twenty paces. Her gaze returned to the cloth-covered table. It held a portable TV, its picture flipping over and over, a coffee mug, and a set of keys. From the key chain, a miniature model of a Pepsi bottle dangled over the edge of the table.

The last time Lacy had seen those keys, they were in the ignition of the Jeep.

B
ack at Whiz Bang, Lacy spotted the same four—Roxanne, Horace, Graham, and Paul—on the porch. They had moved a few yards and gone immobile again, as if a giant child, playing dollhouse, had decided they’d have tea on the porch, picked them up and moved them, their bodies remaining frozen in a sitting position.

Lacy pulled up a chair for herself considering, as she did so, whether she should wait for one of them to speak first or blurt out her own news. She waited. After several seconds she said, “Bad news, I take it.”

“Not as bad for you as it is for me. You have less to pack up,” Horace said.

“What? We’re leaving? Why?”

“We’ve been thrown out.”

“No way!”

“I’m afraid so,” Roxanne said. “Horace called the SCA as I insisted he must before you-know-who,
Kathleen
, did. At first they thought it was just an ordinary papyrus and it had probably been stolen from the antika or Kathleen’s room, but Horace had to tell them what it really was because it’s likely to show up on the black market any day now.”

“If it does, how would anyone know it came from here? From Kheti’s tomb?” Lacy couldn’t understand how the papyrus, even if examined and found to be genuine, could be linked to them.

Roxanne, Horace, and Paul looked at each other. Roxanne answered, her left hand twisting the ring on her right. “It’s a bit hard to explain to anyone but another archaeologist—why we had to tell. Why we had to admit we’d found it, we’d hidden it, and we’d let it get stolen. The knowledge that would be lost as a result of Egyptology never knowing where or when it was found, near whose body, in what sort of vessel, along with what other artifacts, is far more important than what happens to us as a result of Horace’s deception.” She looked at Horace, her eyes glistening with tears.

“When I finally made them understand exactly what it was that was missing, all hell broke loose,” Lanier said. “They left me hanging on the phone for a good fifteen minutes and finally the director came on the line and said, ‘The tomb of Kheti is closed. Closed to you and closed to everyone else until we come to the Valley and assess the situation.’ I said, ‘But what about the others? What about the Americans who knew nothing about this? What about Paul and Kathleen? They’ve done nothing wrong!’

“He told me it didn’t matter. The tomb must be closed until they visit. Then somebody else took the phone and said, ‘The house belongs to Egypt. It was built with English, American and Egyptian money, but the Egyptian government holds the title.’ It’s true. We work here only with their permission, and, at their discretion, they can throw us out.”

“How long before we have to be out?” Lacy asked.

“They haven’t told us. With any luck, it’ll be a while. Things in Egypt don’t happen as quickly as they do back home.”

“But still, we must prepare to leave,” Roxanne said. “They may drop by at any time and say, ‘Out! Now!’”

Lacy leaned one elbow on the arm of her chair and, one by one, studied the eyes of the other four. She paused for dramatic effect before she spoke.

“I have good news. I know where the papyrus is.”

Roxanne jumped up and dashed into the house. Horace followed her as far as the front door, peered in, then turned back to the others. “I think she was about to pee her pants.”

“You
know
where the
papyrus
is?” the other two echoed.

Horace returned to his chair, his face glowing red.

Lacy told them about her spelunking adventure and what she’d found at the end of the tunnel. “It’s Selim’s house. I’m sure of it. He showed us where he lived our first day here when we drove past the houses. I saw some of the same demolition equipment today that I noticed then. Plus, who else has a toy Pepsi bottle on his key chain?”

“Selim!” Paul said. “I can’t believe it.”

Roxanne popped back out and rejoined the group. “I can’t believe we’ve been living right next to a secret passage through the ridge for all these years and known nothing about it!”

Lacy had to repeat most of the story for Roxanne’s benefit. When she finished, she added, “What now? Do we sneak through the secret passage again and steal it back, or do we go up to his front door and confront him?”

“If we confront him he can deny having it and, unless we barge past him and grab the pot, he can hide it before police can go in with a search warrant and get it legally.”