Maria Hudgins - Lacy Glass 01 - Scorpion House

by Maria Hudgins

“Oh, that’s our new discovery! I meant to tell you about it. Where’s Graham? Never mind. You must bring a stepstool in here sometime soon and have a look. We’ve cleared out some of the debris, and, as I told you last night, we found those canopic jars and shabti figures and took them back to the house. We’re still clearing and we don’t know how large the whole room is, but Yasser Saleh, our surveyor-slant-engineer, told us we had to improve ventilation in there before we go any further. He says it’s not very far from the ceiling inside to the surface of the ground up above, so they’re installing a duct that will bring in fresh air. Then we can safely work inside.”

  Lacy examined the walls, made a few notes on paper she borrowed from Susan, and stuck more sloughed-off paint flakes in her pocket. Taking a break, she sat cross-legged beside the coffin, admiring the workmanship, and Shelley joined her.

  “Want some linen strips?” Shelly handed her a couple of one-by-two-inch strips of the pink cloth. “Roxanne says there’s cloth at the house that’s been covered with hieroglyphics and magic charms. She wants to know whether they used paint or ink or what.” She glanced down the hall toward the entrance. “Hadn’t we better go back?”

  CHAPTER TEN

  After dinner that night it was Lacy and Susan’s turn to do the dishes. Susan helped her fill the large plastic basin with water from one of the kitchen’s five gallon jugs, add a squirt of detergent, and enough hot water from the kettle on the stove to warm it up. She tied a towel around Lacy’s thin waist and grabbed a drying towel for herself.

  She watched Lacy dunk wine glasses into the suds. “We’re going to miss Joel, of course,” Susan said, “but I think Lanier will be able to identify the material in the bouquets and garlands for us. It’s the pollen Graham’s bound to find in the unguent jars that’ll be the biggest problem.”

  The responses flashing through Lacy’s head ranged from Is that all Joel was to you? A resource? to “You obstinate, myopic bitch!” Nothing she could think of came close to being adequate. What she actually said, through clenched teeth, her soapy hands clamped on the rim of the basin, was, “Joel was my best friend.”

  “Oh, of course. I didn’t mean … That must have sounded awfully callous to you.”

  “I want to go to the airport with Selim when he picks up Joan tomorrow.”

  “You’d better let him know. Tell Roxanne. She’ll tell him.”

  Roxanne pushed through the swinging door between the dining room and kitchen. “Telephone, Lacy. I think it’s the doctor from the hospital.”

  * * *

  “Dave Chovan here. They’ve done the autopsy. I thought you’d like to know.”

  “Thanks. I would.”

  “Heart attack. That’s what they put down as the cause of death, but I believe you suggested asphyxiation? That he may have smothered?”

  “Right.”

  “It’s possible, but there’s no way for us to know. He had a heart attack, but what caused the heart attack? He had a history of heart problems, so we know the tendency was there. We can’t determine why it occurred at that particular time.”

  “So how can we find out?” The scientist in Lacy rebelled at the phrase can’t determine why. The idea was unacceptable. No way for us to know sent ants crawling up her back.

  “As I just told you, we can’t find out. Not in an autopsy. Only the circumstances surrounding his death could tell us whether the death was natural or not.”

  “The circumstances surrounding his death,” Lacy repeated, seeing the unguent-stained sheet in her mind.

  “If you know someone was trying to kill him, or if you discover anything incriminating, that would be the only way.” He paused as if searching for something more to add. “The only way I can think of.”

  “Thanks for calling, Dr. Chovan.”

  * * *

  Back in the kitchen, Susan had taken over the washing. She tossed the drying towel to Lacy and said, “Would you mind switching bedrooms with me?”

  “Why?”

  “Your room has a built-in bench along one wall. It’s handy for spreading out the large photo books I use. Besides, if we switch you’ll be getting a bigger room.”

  “I don’t care which room I have.” Lacy’s room was next door to Susan’s and she figured it would take less than ten minutes to make the switch. She finished drying, wiped down the counter tops and walked to her room where she found Susan already moving her junk in.

  * * *

  By the dim light of the bedside lamp Lacy stowed her clothes in the top two dresser drawers saving the bottom one for the sheet she’d swiped from Joel’s bed. She placed her laptop on the tiny writing desk and dumped her toiletries into the wash basin. She could sort them out in the morning. What would Mom think of this? Lacy tried to imagine what her mother would say if she were here. Her mother’s idea of a vacation was a suite at the Ritz. Shelley’s reaction to the news that the shower was out back was nothing compared to what Mom’s would have been. Lacy could see her, dashing out to the Jeep and begging Selim to take her to a normal hotel. Lacy felt sorry for people who didn’t simply like, but actually required comfort. This place, Whiz Bang, had an air about it reminiscent of Lawrence of Arabia, the romance of the golden age of exploration, men in white linen suits and pith helmets. Her mother could never know this or, for that matter, any of the world’s most awesome sights and sounds and smells because finding them also meant being uncomfortable.

  A long ago family trip to SeaWorld in Florida flashed into her head. The fury she had felt when, instead of catching the last dolphin show of the day, they had to pack up their stuff at the motel room that hadn’t met her mother’s standards and drive around for hours looking for one that did. How both parents’ heads jerked around when she, from her place in the back seat had said, “If you weren’t so persnickety we’d be watching the dolphins right now!”

  She could hardly believe Joel wasn’t going to share all this with her. In all her imaginings about this trip, she’d seen herself and Joel traipsing across dunes, brushing dirt from artifacts, descending on ropes into uncharted pits. Together.

  She laid the instruction manual for the hand-held spectrometer on her bedside table. Dull reading to put her to sleep. She turned back the covers, fluffed the pillow and ran her hand between the sheets.

  Later, she would shake when she wondered what made her hand stop where it did.

  She ran her hand between the sheets and down to about the place where her waist would be if her head were on the pillow, then she lifted the spread and the top sheet with her other hand. There seemed to be something small and dark in there.

  She looked around the room and spotted her flashlight on top of the dresser. She flicked it on, crept back to the bed, and studied the bump the thing made in the cover. She lifted the spread and the top sheet again.

  The small, dark thing was a scorpion. Was it alive? It darted a couple of inches toward the foot of the bed. It was alive, all right. Its tail curled over its back, its stinger in striking position.

  Lacy lowered the sheet and thought. To kill it or not to kill it? She knew little about scorpions or any other arachnids, for that matter. If she squashed it on the sheet, would the poison smear onto the sheet? Would it still be toxic? She considered calling for help but it was late and she didn’t want to wake the whole house. If she left the room, she might lose the scorpion and never find it again. If she killed it, would anyone believe it had been alive when she found it? Did that matter?

  She snatched up her boarding pass sleeve from yesterday’s flight and the drinking glass she had left, inverted, over her water bottle. Directing the flashlight’s beam toward the middle of the bed, she lifted the sheet. The scorpion scurried toward the edge of the bed against the wall. Now I remember. Somewhere, I’ve heard that scorpions avoid light. That’s why they hide under rocks. If this thing gets away from me, I’ll never find it and I won’t be able to sleep in here at all. Jamming the thin mattress hard against the wall so that, hopefully, the scorpion coul
dn’t escape by that route, she set her flashlight on the bedside table, angling the beam along the wall. She scooted the boarding pass sleeve under the animal, bending the middle down with her thumb into a U shape, and popped the glass on top of it, inched the sleeve and the glass together to the middle of the mattress, then slid the spectrometer instruction booklet under the sleeve to make it stiffer. Lifting the whole thing carefully off the bed, she set it on top of her dresser, slipped the instruction booklet out from underneath, and returned to her bed, but not before checking under the bed and all around the room in case the little guy had brought friends with him.

  Now she was too keyed up to concentrate on the instruction booklet, so she threw off the covers, took the shade off the lamp to flood her bed with maximum light, and got down to the iffy business of sleeping with the light on when her body clock still said daytime.

  Following so close on the heels of Joel Friedman’s death, this was too coincidental to be believed. She lay on her bare mattress, considering what to do next. To whom could she confide her fear that Joel was murdered? No one. Should she tell the police of her suspicions? Why would they take her any more seriously than Dr. Chovan had? She probably couldn’t even talk to them without an interpreter. Of the residents of Whiz Bang, she certainly couldn’t confide in anyone who might be Joel’s killer. That would put her in jeopardy, too.

  Who could it be? Lacy divided the residents into two groups: the four new arrivals and the four who were already here. Could someone have slipped in from outside and done it? Probably not, given the likelihood of being discovered on this hall where Paul, Horace, Shelley, Graham, Susan, Joel and herself were all lodging. If it was one of the new arrivals, why wouldn’t they have done the heinous deed back home where they could have bided their time and waited for the right opportunity? Where the pool of suspects could extend to anyone at Wythe who might have had a grudge against him? Students he had failed, faculty members he had slighted or passed over for promotion when he was department head, personal acquaintances—lots of possibilities.

  If it was one of the four already here—why? Roxanne, Kathleen and Paul had supposedly never met Joel until yesterday, and Horace Lanier greeted him like a long-lost friend. She recalled how the two men had embraced. Lacy longed for someone she could talk to about her suspicions, but of all the residents of this house she could eliminate only one person as a suspect. Herself.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Breakfast was buffet-style. Bay lined up bowls of scrambled eggs, fruits, fried potatoes, toast, juice—all the items of a regular American/English breakfast—on the sideboard. A tub of butter and a small crockery pitcher of honey joined the salt and pepper on the dining table. The entire party sat around the table in the subdued atmosphere of mourning. Roxanne, Paul and Kathleen sat quietly, buttering their toast and sipping their coffee in polite deference to the death of a man they hadn’t actually known.

  Lacy walked in and plopped her glass-imprisoned scorpion in the middle of the round table. She’d taken the precaution of taping the glass to a sturdier board backing from a pack of AA batteries. The scorpion raised its claws and pivoted around, threatening the whole group.

  Graham’s face brightened. “A scorpion! It’s huge!”

  “Ohmigod.”

  “Where did you get it?”

  “Androctonus australis,” said Roxanne, sloshing a bit of tea into her saucer as she shakily lowered her cup. “Commonly known as the fat-tailed scorpion.”

  Lanier slid his chair back and left without a word.

  “Is it a bad one?” Lacy asked.

  “Very bad. It’s responsible for most of the deaths due to scorpion stings,” Graham said. He reached over and placed his hand on one of Lacy’s. “Where did you find it?”

  “Between the sheets of my bed.” She looked quickly around the table to catch the initial reaction of each person. Did any of them seem not to be surprised? They all, Lacy thought, had expressions that were appropriate for the situation: concern, fascination, shock. Knitted brows and open mouths. Except for Kathleen Hassan, their conservator. She stretched her ostrich neck up a little higher and one corner of her mouth quivered in a thinly-disguised smile. Shelley’s gaze was fixed on her husband’s hand, still clasped over Lacy’s.

  Lacy glanced toward the door. “What’s wrong with Dr. Lanier?”

  “Horace is inordinately put off by bugs. Insects, spiders, ants.” Roxanne shivered. “God forbid he should ever see a cockroach, but I didn’t realize his phobia extended to creatures as big as that thing.”

  “How did you happen to find it before it stung you?” Susan asked.

  Before Lacy could explain, Bay burst in from the kitchen with a tray of warm toast. She spotted the crusty animal under the glass, threw the toast tray into the air, and screamed.

  “Selket! Selket!”

  The tray clattered around in circles on the tile floor and toast flew across the room. Roxanne jumped up and ran to Bay, muttering as she gathered the old woman in her arms.

  “Selket! Selket!” Bay repeated, her eyes wild. “Someone is going to die!”

  Roxanne bundled her out of the room.

  Paul explained. “Bay believes in Egyptian mythology to the extent that she knows it, which isn’t a lot. She’s sort of made up her own version. Selket was the goddess of scorpions and of magic in ancient Egypt. She’s usually depicted as a woman with a scorpion on her head.”

  “I’ve seen pictures of that,” Shelley said. “One of the treasures from King Tut’s tomb …”

  “Right.” Roxanne, returning to her seat, cut her off. “She was the protector of the embalmer’s tent and guardian of women during childbirth.”

  “So she was a good goddess.”

  “Tell that to Bay.”

  “If this thing had stung me, would I be dead now?” Lacy asked.

  “Hard to say, but probably not,” Graham answered in a professorial tone, removing his hand from Lacy’s and slinging one arm over the back of his chair. “You’re a healthy, physically-fit, adult woman, but you don’t weigh much. When a scorpion sting kills, it’s usually an older person, a small child, or someone in poor health. If it had stung you, you’d be in severe pain, like you’d been impaled on a hot poker, and you’d be begging for a doctor, but you’d probably survive.”

  “Probably,” Lacy repeated. “I wonder how it got there?” She reached out to the center of the table and turned the glass, the scorpion along with it. She lowered her head until she was eye to eye with the wary little animal. “What should I do with it?”

  “You could step on it or you could keep it as a pet.” Susan glanced around. All the other faces were somber.

  “May I have it?” Graham asked. “I can dispatch it with ether. I’ve never had a chance to study the scorpion’s neurotoxins. They have more than one kind, and I’ve heard that a scorpion can choose how strong a dose to deliver, depending on whether it wants to stun, subdue, or kill.”

  “Are you serious?” Lacy said. “A scorpion is smart enough to make snap decisions like that? Its brain can’t be as big as a pea.”

  Roxanne laughed. “How is it you know so much about these neurotoxins, Graham?”

  “I’m a biochemist. It’s my job.”

  “While we’re on the subject,” Lacy asked, “what creatures other than scorpions do we need to watch out for? I mean, we’re going to be hiking all around, through tombs and whatever, and we’re not always going to have someone with us.”

  Roxanne said, “Don’t worry about the Nile crocodile or the hippopotamus. They’re gone from this area. But that doesn’t mean the river’s safe. Schistosomiasis is almost guaranteed if you take a dip. The only cobras you’ll see will be carved on the walls of tombs. Around these hills, I’d say the venomous snake you’re most likely to run into would be the saw-scaled viper.”

  “Hemotoxin. Deadly.” Graham glanced around the table, his blue eyes capturing those of both Susan and Lacy. The hat he wore all day yesterday had molded a ci
rcular groove in his curly hair.

  “Yes,” said Roxanne. “But I wouldn’t worry too much about any of these. We haven’t lost a resident yet. Just be careful when you’re moving rocks. There could be something underneath.”

  “Where are you going to get the ether to do this … dispatching, as you call it?” Paul tilted the honey pitcher upright, used his knife to cut off the stream with which he had sweetened his toast.

  “There should be a one-liter bottle of it in the cabinet. I put it on the list of supplies I sent to Susan.”

  “I remember ordering it.” Susan said. “What did you think you’d need it for, anyway?”

  “As a solvent, of course.”

  Graham had a way of responding to questions about chemistry that implied the asker was an idiot. He would divert his eyes and end his response with a sort of snort. Lacy had noticed this quirk often and it struck her as a touch of arrogance. She said, “Yes, I use ether sometimes myself.”

  “But how did the scorpion get into Lacy’s room?” Shelley asked.

  “That’s a good question,” Roxanne said. “They can’t fly. They can only crawl and they usually avoid open spaces. Is the window in your room closed, Lacy?”

  “Yes.” She remembered checking it last night.

  “A scorpion might be able to crawl up the rough outside of our building, but I can’t see how it could have entered your room.”

  Paul, licking honey from his thumb, said, “It could have come in on a grocery bag or on someone’s luggage.”

  “It could have, but I’ve never known it to happen before,” Roxanne mused. “Scorpions around here stay hidden under rocks in the daytime. I’ve never seen one out running about in the daylight, and no one brought anything in after dark last evening.”

  “Then someone must have deliberately put it there.” Kathleen said, pursing her lips, her head tilted back.

  Roxanne scolded her. “Watch your mouth!” Turning to the others, she said. “Pay no attention to her. Nobody put a scorpion in anyone’s bed, you can be sure! Honestly, Kathleen, you must remember that we have three new people who have no idea what to expect in a place like this.” She leaned across and patted Lacy’s hand. “Don’t worry about scorpions, or anything else for that matter. We’re all friends here.”