Scorpion House

by Maria Hudgins

  Lacy had to laugh.

  “Well, he may not have done it as soon as he took the throne. He didn’t die until he was about nineteen,” Roxanne said.

  “And he had plenty of advisors,” Horace said. “As a ten-year-old boy he may have simply rubber-stamped their suggestions.”

  Paul appeared to be feeling his gin. Lacy thought it looked as if he was deliberately trying to see how much it would take to send Roxanne flying off to her own room, as Susan had just done. If Susan was prone to pomposity on the subject of archaeology, Lacy thought, so was Roxanne. Paul asked who else, other than himself, wanted another drink and left the porch carrying three glasses.

  A strange car chugged up the drive followed by a cloud of dust. Dr. Dave had arrived. Dressed tonight in a shirt and tie, Lacy vaguely recalled meeting the red-haired man in the hospital emergency room the morning they’d brought Joel in. Dave had been wearing a white lab coat then.

  “Susan’s in her room. But you might want to wait a minute before you go in,” Shelley said.

  Briefly, Roxanne explained the circumstances that caused Susan to leave the porch in a huff. Paul, carrying three fresh drinks, kicked the screen door open with his foot, distributed the drinks, and shook hands with Dave.

  “Roxanne’s been telling me about your views on King Tut,” Dave said, with a slight grin.

  “I have a theory,” Paul said after resuming his chair. “I think Akhenaten was sterile. He had something seriously wrong with him—I read some names but I can’t remember what they are, Martin’s syndrome or Frommer’s or something—that made him sterile. Those six daughters were Nefertiti’s but they weren’t his. She had a lover on the side. Maybe more than one.”

  Roxanne drummed her fingers on the arm of her rocking chair.

  Paul leaned forward, his eyebrows raised. “King Tut wasn’t Akhenaten’s kid either. His mother was that little second-team wife, Kiya, but his father could have been anybody. Maybe Kheti. At any rate, all of Akhenaten’s wives either had lovers on the side or else they were childless.”

  “You aren’t the first to make that suggestion,” Roxanne said.

  “Damn! That’s disappointing.”

  “But it’s been pretty thoroughly abandoned by the real experts,” Roxanne added.

  Graham, who had gone into the house at the same time Paul had, came out and announced, “Horace, phone call.”

  Lanier jumped. He clearly wasn’t expecting a call. He got up and dashed into the house.

  Paul followed Roxanne’s put-down with, “On what grounds did the ‘real experts’ decide my theory wasn’t worth considering? I think it’s a damn good theory.”

  “For a number of reasons but most especially because of the simple fact that Akhenaten was the pharaoh. You didn’t fool around with the pharaoh’s wives. If you did, they chopped off your head.”

  “Oh, come on, Roxanne. If you’re the pharaoh and you’ve got dozens of gorgeous babes in your harem, are you going to let the world know you’ve got no lead in your pencil? Or maybe no pencil?”

  Lacy’s mind flashed on the photo of the sexless colossus.

  “What are you going to say when people notice none of your wives have any children?” Paul went on. “If it was just one wife, you could blame her, but if it’s twenty wives, they can’t all be barren!

  “So what do you do if you’re the pharaoh, a living god, and you don’t want your subjects to know you’re not all that omnipotent? At least you ought to be able to make a few babies. Here’s what you do. You order the guards at the harem door to pay no attention to late-night visitors. That’s what you do.”

  Lacy giggled to herself. This was fun.

  Horace Lanier tumbled out onto the porch, banging the screen door against the side of the house.

  “Something’s wrong with Susan! She needs help.”

  * * *

  In a cluster, they all rushed across the big antika room, through the door to the east wing, and into Susan’s room.

  Susan lay on the floor near her writing desk, curled up, her whole body jerking spasmodically. Paul got to her first and grabbed her up, cradling her upper body in the crook of his arm. She was pale and sweating so profusely her hair and shirt were soaked. A trickle of drool ran sideways from the left corner of her mouth to the angle of her jaw. Her throat made a grating, rasping noise as she struggled to breathe.

  Dave pushed him aside. He pried her mouth open, peered in and turned her onto her left side. He barked, “Call an ambulance!”

  His knee slipped on a smear of what looked like vomit. “I need something to …” He looked around the room, pointed to a brass luggage tag on a suitcase near the foot of her bed. “Rip that off. Give it to me.”

  The tag was attached to the handle by a buckled strap. Lacy unfastened it quickly and handed it over. Dave inserted it into Susan’s mouth. An emergency tongue depressor.

  Susan was wearing no blouse or shoes, only a thin, maroon skirt and a flesh-tone bra. On top of her bed lay a white blouse, silver earrings and bracelet, black sandals.

  Horace Lanier came in with a coffee mug. “Maybe she can keep a little of this down,” he said, kneeling beside her.

  “No!” Dave pushed him away.

  “It won’t do any harm and it might help.”

  “Take it away,” Dave’s voice was firm.

  Susan’s whole body shuddered violently, jerking completely out of Dave’s grasp. She stiffened. Her eyes opened wide for a second. Terror.

  She stopped breathing.

  Dave set to work applying CPR. After fifteen minutes he let Paul relieve him. After another fifteen minutes Graham took over for a while then Dave resumed the grim task. The ambulance had to be dispatched from Luxor Hospital on the east bank so it took three-quarters of an hour to get there.

  On Susan’s desk, make-up was strewn around a small mirror she had propped up against a stack of books. A saucer held one cigarette butt crushed into a V. Another one lay on the saucer’s lip, filter tip outward. The filter tip formed the caboose of an ash train that stretched across the middle of the saucer. Obviously, it had been set down and allowed to burn out by itself.

  No one spoke until Roxanne appeared at the door and announced, “The ambulance is here.” Paramedics carried Susan out and Dave stepped into the ambulance beside her blanket-wrapped body.

  “What about your car, Dave?” Roxanne asked.

  “Oh yes. I forgot I have a car here.”

  “I’ll ride in the ambulance and you can follow in your car.”

  “Actually, I think the EMTs need all the work space they can get. Why don’t you ride with me?”

  * * *

  Paul, Graham, Horace, and Lacy were left in Susan’s room, staring silently at each other.

  “Did you notice this?” Paul picked up the pack of Marlboros lying beside the saucer.

  “I thought she quit smoking,” Lanier said.

  “She’s wearing the patch.”

  “She was wearing one tonight. On her arm. I saw it,” Graham said. He pressed his palms together, raised them to his lips. “Nicotine poisoning. Absolutely.”

  “Would that be enough to kill her? Two cigarettes and a patch?” Lacy’s mind raced ahead. Surely, if that would do it, there’d be hundreds of deaths in the U.S. every day—people trying to quit, wearing the patch, weakening, giving in to temptation.”

  “Susan’s so small, though. It might not take as much.”

  “But as a smoker, she’d probably built up tolerance.”

  “I don’t know the symptoms of nicotine poisoning,” Paul said. He slid Susan’s top dresser drawer open and pulled out three boxes of nicotine patches. Three different colors and sizes. Three strengths. Seven, fourteen, and twenty-one milligrams.

  “I do,” Graham answered. “Nausea, difficulty breathing, pallor, sweating, drooling, seizures.”

  “Damn!” Lanier shook his head.

  “You know what else?” Paul asked. “What’s missing here?” When the others said
nothing, he raised his head and inhaled. “The smell of smoke. The window is shut. If Susan was in here smoking like a chimney, we’d still be able to smell the smoke. I smell nothing but stale ashes.”

  Horace Lanier went pale.

  Graham flung both hands out like a traffic cop. “My God. Don’t touch anything else. Let’s get out of here and shut the door. This is a crime scene!”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  They all headed for the porch. Lacy filled her lungs with the night air, closed her eyes, and tried to think. A crime scene?

  “A crime scene?” Paul broke the silence. “Isn’t that a bit drastic? You can’t know that for sure!”

  “I’ll bet you a thousand dollars. Bet?” Graham said.

  Lanier snorted. “I’m with Paul.”

  “A lethal dose of nicotine is point-five to one-point-oh milligrams per kilogram of body weight. Susan weighs about forty kilos, so it would take twenty to forty milligrams to kill her. Maybe ten to make her seriously sick. A cigarette delivers one or two milligrams, and a twenty-one milligram patch delivers about one milligram per hour. So even if she chain-smoked two while wearing the strongest patch on the market, she’d still have only about three, maybe four, in her bloodstream. Not enough to produce the reaction we just saw.”

  Horace Lanier grabbed the arm of a chair and sat down heavily. “What if she forgot she already had a patch on? Say, she put it on her back and forgot it was there, then smoked a couple of cigarettes, remembered she had a date, and slapped on another patch?”

  “That’s possible, I suppose, but it still wouldn’t be enough,” Graham said. “Did you see two patches on her?”

  “No, just the one on her arm. But I didn’t look at her back.”

  Paul cut in. “I heard about a case where someone had poked a hole in a nicotine patch, so the victim got the whole dose at once.”

  “Possible, I suppose.” Graham lapsed into a moment of silence. “I don’t think even that would do it. But I’m not certain.”

  “We need to call the hospital and make sure they don’t throw that patch away.” Paul said. He put his fingers to his temples as if he was struggling to stay focused. “Listen up. Does anyone but me think we’ve had too many crises too close together to chalk them up to coincidence?”

  “You mean first Joel, and now Susan?” Lanier tilted his head, looked at Paul.

  “I mean Joel and Susan and the scorpion in Lacy’s bed and then the ceiling collapsing on her.”

  “Are you suggesting these things are all connected?” Graham wheeled around, his voice crackling with alarm.

  “I’m suggesting we should think about it.”

  * * *

  Horace Lanier called the hospital and told them to save any nicotine patch or patches they might find on Susan. The nurse who took his call hung up and called out, in Arabic, “The American woman. Donohue. If you find any patches on her, do not remove them.”

  * * *

  Lacy needed something wet to take care of the gin-induced cottonmouth setting in after she normally would have been asleep. She slipped past the west hall door and saw a light coming from what she thought was Roxanne’s room. Since Roxanne was still at the hospital with Susan and probably would be until dawn, she would want someone to turn off her light for her, Lacy decided. She knocked first, in case Roxanne had returned without being noticed and thought she heard a soft answer but she couldn’t be sure. She cracked the door open and peeked in.

  She was wrong. This wasn’t Roxanne’s room. Kathleen Hassan, kneeling at a sort of altar or shrine along one wall, turned slowly, languidly, toward her intruder. She didn’t appear to be alarmed at the intrusion. A half-dozen candles burned on the altar or whatever it was. Kathleen, her hands folded and resting on its surface, looked at her but said nothing.

  “Excuse me,” Lacy whispered and closed the door.

  * * *

  Paul went to the roof with one of his yo-yos and found Lacy already there, huddled against the dome on the eastern end, her arms wrapped around her knees. The floodlights at the temple were out now, bringing forth stars by the thousands. He sat down beside her.

  Lacy spoke first. “So you think all this bad luck is connected?”

  “Just a thought.” He pulled the yo-yo from his shorts pocket and slid the string loop around one finger. “What do you think?”

  “We can scratch one item off. My accident in the burial chamber was just that—an accident. I knew better than to go in there. I knew it wasn’t safe but I saw something that looked like a bone and I didn’t stop to think. My head hit a ceiling beam that wasn’t very well supported and crash. It came down on my head. It was simply my fault. Nothing mysterious about it.”

  “Okay, three things. Let’s deal with those.” Paul turned the yo-yo, rubbing it between his palms. His wire-rimmed glasses slid to the end of his nose. “The scorpion in your room. How did it get there? Did it walk in or was it put there?”

  “I have a hard time believing it walked in.”

  “Me too. So somebody probably put it there.”

  “But who’d want to hurt me? I have no beefs with anyone here.” She thought of Shelley Clark who would certainly take exception to the scene between her husband and Lacy in the burial chamber, but the scorpion incident was long before that. “Don’t forget that my room had been Susan’s room until an hour or so before we went to bed and no one but Susan and I knew we’d switched rooms. Susan must have been the target. The scorpion wasn’t wandering around the room. It wasn’t hiding under the dresser. It was between the sheets.”

  “And tonight, again, Susan is the victim.”

  “So who’d want to hurt Susan?”

  “Are you kidding me? How about everybody?” Paul jumped up turned to face her. “Horace Lanier can’t stand her. He had a fit when he heard she was coming back again this year. And Roxanne! You heard her tonight. She was mad enough to strangle her. And the other night after the meeting with the locals, she was fit to be tied. Remember, Lacy, Roxanne lives here. This is her life. If Susan gets us thrown out, Roxanne is hurt more than anyone else.”

  “Kathleen is still mad about Susan stealing the linen from her room, although it was Kathleen’s own fault it got scorched on the stove.” Paul hadn’t heard about that scene, so Lacy explained. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but Kathleen seems like your resident nut case.”

  “No, Bay’s the nut case.”

  Lacy laughed, lowered her head to her knees. “A little while ago … maybe I shouldn’t be telling you this … I went into her room and found her kneeling at some sort of altar or shrine or something. Candles burning all over the place. What was that about?”

  “Don’t know. But Kathleen is a weird one. If she has any religious beliefs, I’ve never heard her say anything about them.”

  “There was that argument between Graham and Susan about Horace taking over Joel’s job identifying the plant species. Remember?”

  Paul backed up and sat on the roof of the retaining wall. He dropped his yo-yo, spinning, over the side a couple of times and then said, “Oh right. I remember. What was it he called her? A cartwheeling something?”

  “I don’t know.” Actually, Lacy did recall the c word, but preferred not to go there. “What about Shelley?”

  “Aha! Poor little scared rabbit, Shelley. Let’s see, now. Susan opposed her joining the group to begin with. Susan argued with her darling husband. Shelley gets jealous when a woman even looks at Graham. Maybe Susan looked.”

  Then she’ll for sure be out to get me, Lacy thought. “We haven’t talked about Joel Friedman yet. Who killed him?”

  Paul’s hand froze and the yo-yo dropped and rose on its string in ever-diminishing transits. “Who killed him? What do you mean?”

  “I haven’t told anyone before, and you’ll probably laugh, but I found a smear of Lanier’s special unguent on Joel’s bed sheet in a spot where it couldn’t have been unless it was wrapped around him. And I saw a blob of that unguent on Joel’s arm that nig
ht.” Lacy went on to explain the whole thing to Paul.

  Paul didn’t laugh. He walked over to where she was sitting and ran his hand over the top of her head. “Who would have wanted to kill Joel Friedman?”

  “Not a living soul, as far as I know.”

  * * *

  Dave Chovan sat beside Susan’s bed as dawn was breaking. She had been pronounced dead more than an hour ago, after a frantic night in which the entire emergency staff had done everything in their power to bring her back. At this point, her body was completely naked, and he pulled the sheet up to her shoulders. Somehow it seemed important to preserve her modesty even though, as a doctor, he paid no attention to such things. But this was the woman he had intended to take to dinner at the Old Winter Palace tonight. The woman who had charmed him with her big eyes and cheeky attitude. That woman deserved a bit of privacy.

  A nicotine patch still clung to her right arm, up near her shoulder. He’d noticed it earlier and was surprised no one had removed it. He pulled it off, examined the sticky side, folded it in half, and dropped it in the medical waste container.

  Roxanne Breen appeared in the doorway. “I can take a ferry back, Dave. You don’t need to drive me.”

  “I want to drive you. Give me a few minutes to check and see if there’s anything else …” He started to pull the sheet over Susan’s face, but stopped. “What the hell?”

  “What is it?” Roxanne approached the bed.

  “What the hell is this?” He lowered the sheet, raised Susan’s right arm. The armpit was a bright, angry red. He lifted the left arm. It looked the same. “I’ve never seen anything like this in my life!”

  “Is it a rash?”

  “I don’t know, but I’m definitely going to find out.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Lacy awoke to breakfast smells and wondered if Bay knew anything about the events of last night. She listened for sounds from her end of the building, heard nothing, and got up. Graham’s, Shelley’s, Lanier’s, and Susan’s doors were all closed. Only Paul’s door was open. She was certain Susan couldn’t have returned from the hospital last night. Even if they had revived and stabilized her, they’d surely keep her a few days. But she had to check.