Maria Hudgins - Lacy Glass 01 - Scorpion House (26 page)

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.”

T
he 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.

* * *

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.

Lacy had no idea she had been sitting at her computer for three hours until she heard the front door slam, tried to stand up, and fell sideways. Her left leg had gone to sleep, possibly quite some time ago. Roxanne called out a greeting and disappeared into the dining room, her voice drifting around the corner. “Have you eaten lunch yet?”

When Lacy walked into the kitchen, Roxanne looked up from the sandwich board on the counter. The smell of mayonnaise and pickles made Lacy’s mouth water but she waited for Roxanne to finish, resting her butt against the rim of the cool sink, punching her leg to wake it up.

“I’ll probably stay in the tomb until dinner,” Roxanne said, “unless you hear from Horace or Marcus. If either of them calls, come and get me.” She seemed jumpy. Lacy decided she had ample reason but it was a different sort of jumpiness than she’d seen in her before. As if the air around her was electrified. Roxanne stuffed her sandwich into a jacket pocket, grabbed a bottle of water, and slammed the screen door on her way out.

Lacy made herself a sandwich of cheese and pickles, grabbed a bottle of water and retreated to the roof. She felt it now, too. Something was changing. The sky had become a grayer shade of blue and in the west—clouds. She couldn’t recall seeing a cloud since she’d been in Egypt. Could it be that they were about to get rain? Rain?

She had wasted half the day on the computer. Half of what could be the last day of work before the authorities came and closed the tomb. She should be wrapping up her investigations and making certain she had enough data for a paper worthy of publication.

She had stood on this very spot her first evening here and thought about those two scuttled projects back home. The pigment solution that had poured out across the cold room floor in the middle of the night because the automatic test tube changer was off-center. Probably because she had kicked it herself. The phosphate-dissolving granules that had fallen into her seaweed tanks when Otto’s aerial gymnastics knocked the bottle off the shelf. She couldn’t blame the cat. The blame rested squarely on her own shoulders. Only an idiot puts a bottle on a shelf and doesn’t screw the lid on first. A sophomore chemistry student would know better. Basic lab procedure that, by now, was second nature to her.

In a flash, she knew she had unconsciously sabotaged both projects. She saw it now so clearly she wondered why she hadn’t seen it before. Following swiftly on this revelation, her mother’s words rang out from somewhere behind her ears. The letter from home, from a mother who truly loved her daughter and wanted only happiness for her.
Your father and I will be proud of you if you decide to go for a PhD, but please bear in mind one simple but inescapable fact: Few men want a woman with more degrees than they have. Remember this, if marriage and children are your goal.
At the time, her mother’s letter made her so mad, Lacy tore it to shreds and vowed to get that degree or die trying. Now, ten years later, she was still unmarried and wondering if her mother had been right. Hadn’t Bart dumped her for a bimbo?

L
acy grabbed her hand-held spectrometer and a notepad, then wheeled around on the porch and returned to her room for a camera. Until now, saving photos of the walls in the tomb hadn’t seemed important but since they’d all been evicted, every visit might be her last. She started in the long hall, photographing the garden scene along one wall in three-foot segments. A luxury not permitted in the Valley of the Kings, taking pictures was one of the perks enjoyed by researchers on this side of the hill.

She lay on her back to shoot the ceiling, used her boots to scoot herself along. The opposite wall, its dye vats and dyers frozen in time, reminded her of the linen swatches still in police custody. As she descended into the burial chamber she passed Roxanne, headed out with an armload of equipment. “When you leave, Lacy, would you bring those two jars back to the house?” She indicated a couple of clay vessel leaning against the wall.

Lacy stood in the center of the chamber for a moment, savoring the colors around her. The brilliant reds and yellows. The electric blue in the brows of the Eye of Horus. She closed her eyes and concentrated on the claylike smell of the room, the stillness. She started photographing the walls in three-foot segments as she had done in the long hall, then stopped. She peered down the long hall, saw Roxanne’s retreating body silhouetted in the daylight at the tomb’s entrance, slipped over to the big, green, dead Osiris and
touched the wall
.

* * *

Lacy spotted a small brown lizard perched on a rock and stepped around it, careful of the bulky clay vessels she was carrying back to the house. A dragonfly vanished from the air a few inches above the rock. The lizard, a passable imitation of a smile on its face, chomped down, swallowed, and drew the tag ends of two iridescent wings into its mouth. This reminded her of wasps. And scorpions. And ether. An idea occurred to her. She set the pots down in the antika room, tramped straight to her own lab, and pulled out the one-liter bottle of ether from beneath the cabinet. The bottle was more than half empty. She had used no more than twenty milliliters when she anesthetized the scorpions in Graham’s dresser. Graham wouldn’t have used more than twenty when he’d done the same to the scorpion from Lacy’s room. So what happened to the other five-hundred-plus milliliters? None of Graham’s work and none of her own had required any ether at all. She was certain of this because, the room lacking a fume hood, if Graham had used any he would have had to jerry-rig something to vent the fumes outside and Lacy would have known about it.

She looked at the window.

She crawled up onto the counter, the laminate cool against her bare knees, and examined the window. It was a casement-type, hinged on the left side and opened by a handle at its base. She cranked it open. At the top, it opened onto the mud dauber’s nest. Dead wasps still lay along the sill at the bottom. From her undergraduate experiments with fruit flies, she recalled that a few seconds exposure to ether would anesthetize insects and a few minutes would kill them. What she saw in this window was consistent with what one would expect if a tube venting ether fumes had been led up to this window, perhaps held in place by cranking the window in until the tube was caught between the pane and the frame.