Scorpion House

by Maria Hudgins

  * * *

  Roxanne seethed quietly, biding her time until Lacy was cleaned up and treated. Lacy was lying on her bed, knees raised to keep them off the cover and a towel beneath her shoulders, when Roxanne barged in. “Whatever possessed you? You knew better than to go in there. Didn’t I specifically tell you not to go in there?”

  Lacy agreed.

  “You could have been killed. It would have served you right, but if you had been killed, all our projects here—mine, Horace’s, Kathleen’s, everything—would have come to a screeching halt until the authorities investigated. And the authorities here are slower than treacle in January. Whatever possessed you?”

  “I—I’m so sorry. I have no excuse, Roxanne.” Wincing, Lacy rose up on one elbow. “I saw something inside that I thought might be …” Might be Nefertiti’s leg bone? She couldn’t say that. It sounded silly. So she repeated, “I’m sorry.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  The after-dinner porch scene was a dud because Selim had driven Roxanne and Susan to a community meeting at which the fate of the locals’ houses was to be discussed. Paul and Graham had KP duty but Lacy volunteered to sub for Graham with his splinted thumb because she felt responsible for its being broken. As soon as Paul declared the kitchen clean enough, they joined Shelley, Kathleen and Horace on the porch. Graham, Shelley told them, had gone to his room to read.

  “You didn’t want to go to the meeting, I take it,” Lacy said, directing her question toward Horace.

  “They never settle anything at those so-called meetings.” Horace glanced at her, then out toward the flood-lit temple. “Someone pretends he’s in charge, and they all yell at each other in Arabic, English, and French. There are always a few European or American women there and the Egyptian men don’t like having women at a business meeting, but they can’t throw them out without starting a riot.”

  Lacy squinted out toward the temple, looking for Bay. There she was. She could see her backing off of the middle tier, pausing and sweeping after each step, sweeping her own footprints away. She wondered if the old woman ever fell down the steps. The thought of falling down anything right now made her wince. The bruises all over her body were turning sore, and she was still smarting from Roxanne’s rebuke. Not because she hadn’t deserved it—but because she had. She pulled up a chair and sat.

  Shelley said, “How do you feel about them tearing down the local folks’ houses, Paul? I know Susan is all for it, but I can’t help feeling sorry for the people who are being forced to move.”

  “Exactly … but there are two sides to it.”

  “Here they come, now,” Lacy said.

  The Jeep pulled up to the front, its dust cloud billowing out and engulfing the porch. Lacy and Shelley threw their hands over their faces. One door opened and Roxanne stepped out, but Susan jumped out of the back seat and over the side.

  “Don’t even start with me!” Susan shouted as her feet hit the ground. “Somebody had to say it!”

  “Sounds like things are about to get interesting,” Horace muttered.

  Susan banged the screen door open and tramped inside, but Roxanne took the chair Paul offered her. “We very nearly got thrown out tonight, thanks to Susan.” She tilted her head back. Her eyes glistened in the porch light. “Akhmed came along to interpret for us, but he stormed out in a huff. Selim didn’t speak to us all the way home.”

  Susan popped back out. She paced back and forth across the west end of the porch. “Someone has to deal with the sugar cane problem. It’s more of a threat than the houses and you know it is, Roxanne! Look what’s happening to the water table with all the irrigation. These tombs will be full of water to the ceilings, and soon!”

  “You can’t grow sugar cane without water.”

  “They can grow sugar cane anywhere along the Nile! They’ve got a thousand miles where they can put their sugar cane! They don’t have to plant it right next to the tombs.”

  “But this is where they live. They can’t walk but so far every day to tend their crops,” Roxanne said in a deliberately modulated tone.

  “Then they shouldn’t live here! They should move up river or down river—I don’t give a crap which way they go—and put their sugar cane and their houses and their goats and their friggin’ camels, put them someplace where they can dump water without flooding a tomb!” Susan stomped into the house and slammed the door behind her.

  Roxanne leaned back and looked toward the stars. “It’ll be a bloody miracle if we don’t all get thrown out of here.”

  * * *

  As Lacy was undressing for bed that evening, Roxanne slipped into her room. Lacy’s heart leaped at the creak of the door because her first thought was that it was Graham. What would she do if it was? She felt both eager anticipation and dread. Eager anticipation at the thought of lying in his arms. Dread at the thought of telling him to go away. As she must. As she would. She knew she had some serious thinking to do in relation to Graham. How much of what happened in the tomb was her doing and how much was his? Fifty-fifty probably, but her fifty percent must steel itself not to let it happen again.

  “I came to apologize for the verbal attack this afternoon,” Roxanne said, her fingers laced at the level of her waist.

  “No need. I deserved it.”

  “I can understand how you must have felt. The mystery of a tomb can so easily become an unreasoning obsession. The first time I was told I couldn’t enter something—it was in Saqqara, years ago—I felt like I simply must, or I would die.”

  “I thought I saw something inside. I’m sure I was wrong.”

  “You’re very lucky Graham was nearby. He risked himself to save you, you know.”

  “I know. I don’t know how to thank him.”

  * * *

  The next morning Lacy rounded up all the Pyrex beakers in the house and placed a pulverized sample of dye material in each: madder root, safflower, cochineal, and alkanet. She cut the linen Roxanne had given her into six-inch squares. Bay let her commandeer the kitchen and turn it into what looked like an Easter egg-dyeing ritual. She dissolved her newly purchased alum in five gallons of water and heated it to boiling, then poured an equal amount into each beaker except for the one containing the powdered alkanet. She had already discovered alkanet would dissolve only in oil or alcohol. She added alcohol from her lab to the alkanet, stirred, and was rewarded by a less-than-impressive pink solution so she decided to try again using some of Bay’s cooking oil and a fresh batch of alkanet. Lifting a pan of hot water with alum from the burner of the kerosene stove, she poured a portion into the first three beakers.

  Susan slipped through the swinging door. In her arms she held a stack of folded linen in shades of pink, lavender, yellow, and blue. “I just got a phone call,” she said. “Guess who?”

  “Where did you get that material?”

  “From Dave.”

  “Who?”

  “Dave Chovan.”

  “Who’s he?”

  “The American doctor we met at the hospital. Remember?”

  “He gave you that linen?”

  “No, dummy, he’s who the phone call was from. He asked me out. To dinner.”

  Lacy made a T, time out, with her hands and repeated her earlier question. “Where did you get this material?”

  “From Kathleen.”

  “She let you take it out of her room?”

  “She doesn’t know about it. She’s at the tomb.”

  “You stole it?” Lacy tried but failed to imagine what the cat fight would look and sound like if Kathleen came back and found her linen missing.

  Susan snorted, spun around, and thrust the stack of material into Lacy’s arms. “You know as well as I do, how anal Kathleen is about protecting her stuff. And it’s not even her stuff! We’re all supposed to have access to the tomb and everything in it. How else can we study it?” She moved closer, forcing Lacy to look down at the outrage in Susan’s bulging eyes.

  Lacy showed her the dye solutions, hoping to ca
lm her down.

  Susan took the cloth, held up various samples of the linen beside the beakers and compared. “It’s hard to tell. When you finish dyeing your cloth and drying it, I’d like to see your results.” Susan seemed to have transmuted from red-faced anger to scientific objectivity with no ill effects.

  “Some of these reds are anthraquinones,” Lacy said. “And the cochineal has carminic acid. These colors, I’ll bet, are pH dependent.”

  “Whatever you say. I know very little about chemistry.”

  “I’m saying that these colors may be like pH indicators. Like litmus. Different colors depending on whether they’re in an acidic or basic solution.” Lacy grabbed a spray bottle of 409 cleaner that Bay had left on the back of the sink and spritzed the cochineal solution.

  It turned from magenta to dark purple.

  Susan’s eyes widened and her mouth fell open. She lowered her face to the same level as the beaker while Lacy stirred the solution of powdered, freeze-dried bugs and 409. It looked like grape juice.

  “Where can I find something acid?” Lacy asked. “I wonder what color that will turn it?” In her lab were several acids as well as several bases much stronger than the 409 cleaner, but for a quick and dirty test, Lacy grabbed a lemon from the refrigerator and sliced it in half. She squeezed it, juice, seeds, and all, into the purple liquid.

  Like magic, it turned strawberry red.

  “This is going to be fun,” she said, “but I’ve just tripled my work. Now I have to do three batches of each dye. One acidic, one basic, one neutral.” She stood back from the counter and patted her hands against her thighs. “I don’t have enough beakers so I’ll have to do two runs.”

  “Do you want to hold onto this cloth for a while?”

  Lacy wanted nothing less than to be caught with Kathleen Hassan’s linen, or rather, the linen Kathleen considered hers, but it was too late. Kathleen burst through the door and screamed.

  “There they are!” The veins in her ostrich neck popping out, she snatched the stack of cloth from Susan’s hands. “One would think I could leave my room unlocked when the only people here are my so-called ‘trusted associates’. But obviously it’s those trusted associates I have to protect myself from!”

  Lacy smelled the cooking oil. She pulled the pan off the burner, set it on the counter, and turned off the burner. It was a kerosene stove so the flame did not immediately go out but only gradually diminished.

  “If you weren’t so overprotective we wouldn’t have to sneak in and swipe stuff!” Susan shot back. “We could walk in and ask, like the professionals we’re all supposed to be.”

  Kathleen whipped around toward the door as if to leave in a huff, but slipped on the tile floor. She toppled forward, her hands flying out to break her fall. There was nothing for her hands to grab except the kerosene stove, and the burner Lacy had turned off a few seconds earlier had not yet gone completely out.

  The tomb’s thirty-five-hundred-year-old linen fell onto the flame and caught fire.

  Kathleen grabbed the stack and fell to the floor, smothering the flames with her own body. She grabbed stray pieces, tucked them under her chest. It was a full minute before she turned onto her side, pulled out the cloth, and began to examine it, emitting strange little animal-like noises as she ran her fingers along the blackened edges.

  Lacy could see that the linen was not terribly damaged, the flame having scorched only the folds along the leading edge of the stack, the part that had actually touched the flame. But the front of Kathleen’s shirt was scorched and the V of bare skin above her collar was already reddening.

  Kathleen, she thought, might never be the same again.

  * * *

  When her dyed cloth samples had dried, Lacy took several to Susan’s room. She found her poring over an array of reference books, her ever-present steno pad on her lap. Now Lacy could see why Susan had wanted to switch rooms. The built-in bench along one wall, a feature not found in the other bedrooms, was covered with large picture books. The sort that some call “coffee table” books. Susan sat in a straight-back chair, scooting along the row from book to book as she made notes.

  When she first looked up and saw her visitor, Susan bristled as if arming herself for another confrontation. Then her face softened and she stuck her pencil behind one ear. She studied the samples Lacy handed her and asked if she could keep them until the next day.

  “Only if you promise me you’ll ask Kathleen’s permission before you compare them to the ones in her room.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  After dinner that evening the gin-and-tonics were going down easily and often. The air, hot and still, made coffee sound unappealing. Only Kathleen opted for something non-alcoholic. She had iced hibiscus tea. They sat in a rough semicircle on the porch with Paul sitting on the floor, his back against a column.

  “Where’s Susan? Why wasn’t she at dinner?” Lacy asked, fanning the back of her neck with the latest issue of Archaeology magazine.

  “She has a dinner date,” Roxanne said. “With a doctor from the hospital across the river.”

  “Oh right. He called her this afternoon.”

  “His name’s Dave and he’ll be here shortly.” Susan appeared in the doorway. “Anyone want me to make them a drink while I’m making one for myself?”

  Graham raised his eyebrows and his empty glass. Thus far, he hadn’t mentioned the kisses in the burial chamber to Lacy and she hadn’t mentioned it either. Was she imagining it, or was Shelley looking daggers through her whenever she turned her back? She decided it was probably her imagination. Graham’s broad shoulders and lean torso, silhouetted in the temple light, tempted her cruelly.

  “Those vases in the transverse hall,” Lacy said, forcing her mind onto a new path. “I’m finding cobalt in the blue paint. The blue on the wall and in all the other pottery contains copper.”

  Roxanne said, “Those vases must be from Amarna, then. We suspected as much. In Amarna they used what we call ‘Amarna Blue’ but most everything painted here in Thebes was done with what we call ‘Egyptian Blue’.”

  “So those vases aren’t local.”

  “No. And what does that tell us?” Roxanne went on. “It tells us that the tomb was open during or after the Amarna Period of the Eighteenth Dynasty.”

  Graham leaned forward, his elbows resting on his knees. “Didn’t you say you found Nefertiti’s cartouche on a jar in the new chamber?”

  “What’s Nefertiti’s jar doing in Kheti’s tomb?” Shelley asked.

  “That’s what we’d love to know.”

  “Maybe he and Nefertiti were closer than anyone thinks,” Paul said.

  “Not likely,” Roxanne said. “The best we can figure, Kheti would have been an old man when Nefertiti married Akhenaten, and she married in her teens.”

  “They didn’t pay much attention to little things like age or kinship when it came to coupling. In fact, they married their own brothers and sisters.”

  “Yes, and their own fathers, sometimes,” Roxanne said.

  Susan returned to the porch with fresh drinks for herself and Graham. She took control of the discussion. “Nefertiti outlived her husband by a number of years. After his seventeen-year reign, she became pharaoh herself, using the name Smenkhkare.”

  Light from Hatshepsut’s temple reflected off the tight-lipped grimace on Roxanne face.

  Susan went on. “Nefertiti was the power behind the throne, anyway. Monotheism wasn’t Akhenaten’s idea, it was hers. She changed her name to reflect her devotion to the sun god, Aten, before her husband changed his. He followed her.”

  “Where do you think her mummy is?” Graham asked.

  “It’s probably the one they’ve found in tomb KV 35.”

  “Then why is her canopic jar here, in our tomb?” Kathleen asked. Her voice sounded as if she wanted a confrontation, not an answer. Roxanne had spent the hour before dinner in Kathleen’s room, talking her down from her white-hot fury over the scorching of the tomb linen
s.

  Susan answered in a sarcastic tone. “That’s what we’ll have to find out, isn’t it? That is, if we’re ever allowed to actually see it!”

  Kathleen answered that blatant slam with, “I don’t intend to let these canopic jars suffer the same fate as everything else from Amarna. Wall inscriptions hacked off, statues smashed, building blocks used for fill.”

  “Too bad you weren’t there when the place was abandoned. You’d have had the whole city shrink-wrapped.” Susan muttered.

  Lacy noticed the warning glare that Graham shot Susan.

  “Nefertiti was not Smenkhkare.” Roxanne said. “Nefertiti probably died before her husband. She’d borne six daughters, after all, and in those days a woman was lucky to survive one birth, let alone six. Smenkhkare was probably Akhenaten’s son-in-law. I believe he was married to one of Akhenaten and Nefertiti’s daughters.

  “And monotheism was clearly Akhenaten’s idea. Nefertiti went along with it because she had no choice. Those who give Nefertiti credit or blame for everything—and they’re all women—are simply on a girl-power trip.”

  Susan jumped up, kicking over her drink as she stood. “That does it! I’m going to my room.” With that, she clomped away knocking over her chair, slamming the screen door, and leaving her overturned glass on the porch floor.

  Graham nodded a silent message to Shelley. He curved his mouth into an O and tilted his head toward the door. Shelley got up and followed Susan in but she returned to the porch shortly. “She vants to be alone,” she said in a deep, Greta Garbo voice.

  Roxanne went on. “At any rate, it fell to Tutankhamen to restore the old gods, move the capital from Amarna to Memphis, and begin to rebuild the country’s infrastructure.

  “What?” Paul interjected. “He was ten years old! Are you telling me a ten-year-old boy says, (Paul deepened his voice, raised one hand) ‘We must bring back the old gods that for so many centuries have served us well. We must leave this place and establish a new capital. Let us move to Memphis!’ Are you kidding me? That’s not what a ten-year-old boy says. A ten-year-old boy says, (Paul raised his voice up an octave) ‘When can I drive the chariot all by myself?’ “