Maria Hudgins - Lacy Glass 01 - Scorpion House (25 page)

The little boy tried it standing on level ground, looked up and smiled at Paul. The sweetest smile, it tugged at Lacy’s heart. Offering the yo-yo back to Paul, he said, “How now, brown cow.”

“Time for a new word,” Paul said, closing the child’s hand around the toy and indicating by signs that it was a gift. “Thank you. Say that. Thank you.”

“Thank you.”

“Good-bye,” Paul said, and waved one hand.

“Good-bye,” the child said and scurried away.

* * *

Had it been a panoramic photo, Whiz Bang itself, with its dun-colored domes and arches, would have been the focal point with the palm tree-lined Nile on the left, the small village of Qurna and Hatshepsut’s temple on the right. Lacy sat alone on a rock half way up the cliff and watched Paul’s retreating form as he trudged back to the house, his fifteen minutes now up. A blue water truck pulled into their parking area and a couple of men pulled a thick black hose from the truck around the back of the house.

They had heard almost nothing about Horace Lanier since the police took him away. Roxanne had gone across the river and done her best, but she wasn’t a relative or an official of any sort and hadn’t been allowed beyond the front desk. Lacy couldn’t decide whether she believed Horace had killed Susan or not. The man had a motive. If Susan had indeed discovered the herbal papyrus, she probably threatened to turn him in. She certainly would have done so, Lacy thought, since there had been no love lost between them before. But if he did do it, it meant that Lanier had sat idly by as Shelley was arrested, carted off, and held in the Luxor jail for two days, all the while knowing she was innocent. Could he have been that cruel?
How odd, that it should seem more evil to let an innocent person be arrested for murder than to commit the actual murder
.

Lacy considered the concept of evil. Good and evil. Did they exist as actual forces, or was it all, as psychologists insisted, a matter of people—inherently neither good nor evil—doing what made sense to them? Was everyone simply doing what seemed best given the rules by which they thought the world operated? If that were the case, why should one bother making an effort to do good? If you, like everyone else, were nothing but the sum of your nature plus your nurture, it was a clockwork universe after all. Good and evil either didn’t exist or else were beyond clockwork man’s sphere of influence.

If Horace Lanier murdered Susan, would he stick at watching an innocent Shelley get arrested? If
anyone
murdered Susan,
and someone did
, would he or she care whether Shelley was arrested or not? Suppose it was Shelley after all. No one in the house would have seen an injustice being done, since none was
being
done. Was it possible Graham had made up evidence against Horace in order to spring Shelley? He had, after all, been in Luxor at the time of her release.

She spotted a man struggling up the slope toward her, his face obscured by the brim of his hat.

One thing Lacy now knew for sure. Roxanne was in love with Horace. Until yesterday, she’d maintained a façade of being his good friend, but now she had come unglued. Ever since she returned from the police station, she had been unable to talk about anything else, including the fact that they all really ought to be packing up. They were evicted. The officials could come around at any moment and pop a padlock on their door. Roxanne seemed to have forgotten about that, about firing Selim, about where she would go from here, about everything except Horace.

The man scrambling up the cliff turned out to be Graham, the climb doubly hard for him because, unlike Lacy, Graham couldn’t catch himself with his hands when his feet slipped on the thin sheets of calcite that littered the slope. Instead, he stopped every few feet, studied the terrain ahead, placing his feet at an angle and testing his balance before proceeding.

“How are your eyes today?” Lacy asked as Graham picked his way up the last few feet and looked around for a rock to sit on.

“Much better. I still need sunglasses and a hat, though.”

“Arms?”

“Better. I still get those electric shocks now and again, when I accidentally hit something, but I’m over the worst. Definitely.”

“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, saying, “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!”