Scorpion House

by Maria Hudgins

  Opening Susan’s door, gently, she peeked in. The room, as she expected, was exactly as they had left it last night. The luggage tag Dave had used as a tongue depressor still lay on the floor. Her gaze swung around to the built-in bench and stopped on the dyed linen swatches she had left there yesterday. She would need them today. But Graham said nothing should be touched because this might be a crime scene and it should be left exactly as it was.

  But that wouldn’t apply to her linen swatches, would it? It wouldn’t matter if she took those back. She picked up the swatches, then found another one, a stray, on the floor. She grabbed it, shook it out. Did a double take.

  It looked as if it had been tie-dyed, with purple streaks on a tomato-red background. Nothing she had given Susan yesterday looked like this. By process of elimination, she determined this was the sample from the acidified cochineal solution, but when she’d given it to Susan it had been a uniform tomato red. Where had this purple come from? It was in haphazard streaks, as if someone had swiped the cloth across … what? The color of cochineal, she recalled, was pH dependent and it turned purple in a base. Someone had rubbed this swatch against something alkaline, but what?

  As she was closing Susan’s door Shelley Clark ran past, one hand over her mouth. Graham stepped out from the door adjacent to Shelley’s, yawning and scratching his stomach. “What’s up with Shelley? Is she barfing again?” he mumbled, then yawned again.

  * * *

  “This is very difficult for me, but I must tell you. Susan died last night. She was pronounced dead about four this morning.” Roxanne had called them together and they all sat around the computer table in the antika room.

  Bay, who had overheard the talk around the sparsely populated breakfast table, threw her knotty hands in the air and called out in a shivery voice, “Selket! I told you someone was going to die. Now, two people are dead! Selket will have her way!”

  “Who?” Shelley asked.

  “The scorpion goddess,” Roxanne muttered. “Pay no attention.” She cleared her throat and went on. “Do any of you know Susan’s family? We were fortunate that Lacy took care of notifying Joel’s wife, but unless one of you knows Susan’s parents—I know her parents are still alive. I’ve heard her mention them—the job will fall to me.”

  No one said anything.

  Roxanne heaved a sigh. “All right. I’ll do it. Now. There will be an autopsy to determine what happened. We still don’t know. Dr. Chovan—Dave—will call us as soon as he has anything to report. For now, he asks that we leave Susan’s room as we left it last night.”

  “Why?” Kathleen barked.

  “I don’t know. I’m just telling you what he told me. Oh, one more thing. Did any of you notice a rash on Susan’s arms, in the area around her …” Roxanne doubled her arms up, chicken-style. “Under her arms?”

  Everyone at the table looked confused.

  Paul said, “The last we saw of her she was wearing nothing but a bra above her waist. I was very close when I was giving her CPR. If she’d had a rash under her arms I think I’d have noticed.” He glanced around the table.

  Shelley Clark looked as if she’d been punched by Mike Tyson.

  * * *

  Lacy fooled around in the lab for a while but couldn’t concentrate. Graham sat at the bench on the opposite side of the room, writing notes in a composition book. A couple of times, Lacy glanced up and caught Graham looking at her, but neither of them said a word. At length, she walked out, found Paul in the antika room, and asked him if he’d take a walk with her. Both went to their own rooms for hats.

  Roxanne stood at Susan’s door, fumbling with a double handful of keys. “Oh dear. Dave told me to lock this room, but we so seldom lock anything inside, I haven’t the vaguest idea which key goes to which lock.”

  * * *

  Lacy and Paul headed north down the drive, both with their fists jammed awkwardly in their shorts pockets. The soreness in her chest was lessening, her brush with disaster in the tomb now reduced to a large bruise on her shoulder and several long but healing scrapes. At the bottom of the hill the driveway ran into the road leading left to Hatshepsut’s Temple and right toward the house Howard Carter lived in when he was exploring King Tut’s tomb. They turned right.

  “Do you know anything about Susan’s family?” he asked.

  “Not a thing. You?”

  “I did talk to her a few times when she was here last winter. I was staying in Saqqara then, but coming here fairly often to use the library at Chicago House. It’s a strange family. Susan told me her parents didn’t like her. They never had. She said she has an older sister who is pretty and musically talented. She plays piano and sings. And let’s face it, Susan was never a knock-out. Not particularly feminine, either.”

  “Don’t be unkind, Paul.”

  “That wasn’t unkind, was it?” Paul paused in his tracks. “What I mean is, Susan was good in school. She had a full scholarship to college and she even went to Oxford for graduate work, but scholarship was not what her parents valued.”

  “That’s a shame.”

  “Her pretty sister is now married and has children which her parents adore. But Susan is an Egyptologist! What good is that?”

  They had come to the domed house of Howard Carter. To Lacy, it looked like a smaller version of Whiz Bang. “Who lives there now?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe no one,” Paul said. “Let’s turn back. The Ramesseum is back this way.”

  They headed south, the sun now beating down on Lacy’s hat. With her long blonde hair pulled back and held by a rubber band, her canvas hat shielded most of her face. Paul stumbled on a rock. Lacy glanced at him and grinned, fairly certain the stumble wouldn’t have happened had he not been staring at her.

  “Lacy, did you notice the cigarettes on Susan’s desk last night?”

  “They were the same ones Akhmed gave her, weren’t they?”

  “I guess so. But I feel bad about it.”

  She stopped walking and looked at him. “Why?”

  “Because I’m afraid she died of nicotine poisoning and I caused it.”

  “How?”

  “She was wearing the patch. Trying to break the habit. She had no intention of smoking those cigarettes. She only took the pack because she didn’t want to hurt Akhmed’s feelings. If I hadn’t been shooting my mouth off about Akhenaten and Nefertiti, she wouldn’t have become upset and stormed off the porch. That must’ve been when she grabbed the pack and lit up.”

  “That won’t do, because there was no smell of smoke in the room. Remember? You mentioned it yourself. If Susan smoked the cigarettes in that saucer, she must have done it elsewhere. But that makes no sense either. If she’d gone out behind the house to smoke, she wouldn’t have taken the saucer with her.” The sand behind the house was full of old cigarette butts. And the long, relatively intact ash left in the saucer could not have been carried far, unless it was done very carefully. It made no sense. “You can’t blame yourself, Paul. Susan left before you told us your theory. She left when Roxanne said that thing about Susan being on a girl-power trip.”

  “Good. I’m glad it wasn’t me.”

  “What did happen, Paul? Why did Susan die?”

  “Graham thinks it was a deliberate criminal act.”

  “Murder?” She stopped and looked at him.

  The light brown eyes behind his glasses were dead serious. “Has to be. There’s no other possibility, is there?”

  “Does Graham think the cigarettes were poisoned?”

  Paul put his hand behind Lacy’s neck and gave it a little squeeze. He bent forward and looked her straight in the face. “Poisoned?”

  “Akhmed and Susan have had some big fights about the local housing problem.”

  “So you think he gave her poisoned cigarettes?”

  “It’s possible.”

  “The pack he gave her hadn’t been opened, Lacy. If it had, she’d have been able to tell.”

  “What if he shot poison insid
e with a needle?”

  “Aren’t we suspicious?” Paul stopped. They had come to a large temple ruin. “This is the Ramesseum. Built by Ramses the Great who ruled for sixty-seven years and fathered hundreds of children.”

  “What does that tell you about the lead in his pencil?” Lacy grinned slyly, reminding him of the remark he made on the porch last night.

  * * *

  Graham and Shelley found Lacy in her room. “We need to talk about the project.”

  “Right. What do we do now?”

  Graham pulled out the only chair in the room and sat. Shelley sat on the end of Lacy’s bed, shifting a fan of books to make a spot for herself. Lacy stayed where she was, at the head of the bed with her back against the wall.

  “Shelley’s wondering how we can go on with only three of us left,” Graham said. “But I told her we have to. The grant money has already been allocated and half of it’s already been spent on supplies and equipment, on our plane tickets, et cetera. We can’t just quit.”

  “I think we should go home,” Shelley said, her chin firm.

  “We’ll need to drastically modify our plans,” Lacy said.

  “Maybe not as much as you’d think.” Graham leaned forward, his elbows on his knees, and clapped his hands together. “Horace Lanier has already agreed to help us identify the plants and the pollen. How about if we ask Roxanne to help us with the hieroglyphs and hieratics? We really only need to get translations of the parts that refer to the physical aspects of the tomb. We could care less about Kheti’s personal life.”

  “If we expect to publish in Archaeology, or any other prestigious periodical, we need to prove we finished what we started. I know this from personal experience with my articles on Mohave yucca weaving techniques. We can’t submit a paper with names different from the ones on the grant.”

  “Your name isn’t on the grant either, Shelley,” Graham said. “You joined us late.”

  They went on for some time, discussing whether to ask, whether to offer payment to Horace and Roxanne, whether to credit them in subsequent papers they’d publish, whether to allow them to publish their own articles using the Wythe group’s data. Whether, indeed, the proposed project could be done at all without Joel and Susan. They agreed to ask Roxanne for help. Graham said he’d call the grant foundation and ask how to handle the legalities and the paperwork.

  “Good,” Graham said, heading for the door. “I’m glad that’s settled.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Mid-afternoon, with no warning, Dave Chovan’s car pulled into Whiz Bang’s parking area followed by a police car. Three men in black uniforms, silver epaulets on their shoulders, posted themselves in a row along the porch while Dave announced he needed all residents together. Paul ran up to the tomb to fetch Lacy and Kathleen while Roxanne, flustered to a splotchy pink, dashed around shifting potsherds and brushes to one place and another.

  When they were all present, Dave did the talking. “Awfully sorry about this, folks, but our Police Chief, Major-General El-Alfi, wanted to make sure we talked to y’all before anything got tampered with.” He clasped his hands behind his back and rocked up on his toes, then went on in his broad Texas drawl. “We’ve got a problem, I’m afraid. A big problem. The autopsy on Susan Donohue is done. Toxicology has some more work to do, but the bottom line is this: She died of nicotine poisoning and the main entry point for the poison was under her arms.”

  Through the gasps all around the room, Lacy’s voice penetrated. “Under her arms?”

  “The most likely scenario is that someone put nicotine, probably in a highly concentrated form, in her deodorant. The skin under the arms is thin and easier to penetrate than any other part of the body. This was a deliberate act of pre-meditated murder.”

  The policemen’s eyes darted from one face to the next.

  “Major-General El-Alfi, do you want to take over from here?”

  “No. You do it, please. Explain to them what we were talking.” His English was hard to understand.

  Dave nodded. “Here’s what we need. First off, we need to get everyone’s fingerprints. One of the junior officers will take care of that. The chief needs to talk to y’all individually and I’ll sit with you to help with the language thing. Until we talk to you, don’t go into the east wing of the building and don’t talk to each other about anything related to the events of last night. You can go back to work, or hang out on the porch, but while you’re waiting, I’d like for you to try and remember anything odd you’ve noticed or anything at all that will help these men with their inquiries.”

  Stunned, they all drifted to the porch, as if no one wanted to miss what anyone else might say. Two of the policemen headed for the east wing, and Dave called Horace Lanier to the computer table for the first interview. The porch was awkwardly silent at first. If they couldn’t talk about last night what could they talk about?

  Roxanne looked at Lacy’s legs. “Your cuts are healing nicely.”

  “Yes, thanks to Horace’s unguent. It really worked.”

  “And Graham, where is your thumb splint?”

  “I took it off. Thumb’s good as new.” Graham wiggled the relevant digit to prove his point. “When will the workmen be finished with the new chamber so we can go in?”

  “Soon, I think.”

  The porch heated up as the afternoon sun slid under the eave on the western end.

  * * *

  When Lacy’s turn came, she told the police chief about the purple streaks on the dyed linen swatches. At El-Alfi’s request, she ducked into her lab, picked up all the swatches, and handed them over.

  “When did you take these from her room?”

  “This morning. About eight.”

  “Did you move anything else?”

  “No. I looked around, but I didn’t touch anything. I just picked these up and left.”

  “You were making an effort not to touch anything? Why?”

  Lacy refused to go on the defensive. “Last night, we were talking after the paramedics took Dr. Donohue away. We noticed the cigarette butts in the saucer on her desk and Dr. Hannah mentioned he could smell no smoke. We thought that was odd. Then Dr. Clark …”

  “A moment, please!” El-Alfi stopped her, jotted some notes on a pad. After a minute or two he said, “Go on.”

  “Dr. Clark knows a lot about biochemistry. That’s his field. He described the symptoms of nicotine poisoning and suggested this might be a crime scene. If so, we shouldn’t touch anything.”

  “Those were his exact words?” Dave asked. “This might be a crime scene?”

  “I don’t know if those were his exact words, but something like that.”

  El-Alfi nodded at Dave.

  “Go on,” Dave said. “When you went to her room this morning did it look like anything had changed since last night? Had anything been moved?”

  “No. It looked the same. The luggage tag you used to hold Susan’s tongue down was still lying on the floor where you dropped it.”

  Dave seemed to shudder. He stared past Lacy to the east hall door, as if he was recalling the last time he went through that doorway, following the stretcher that bore his date for the evening.

  The rest of the police chief’s questions dealt with the earlier events on the porch and why, in Lacy’s opinion, Susan had stormed off. Lacy wished she’d had less gin because she was a bit foggy about the sequence of events. Her hesitancy and back-tracking made her appear, she thought, to be lying. She caught a questioning glance as it passed from Dave to El-Alfi. At length, they dismissed her and asked her to fetch Graham.

  * * *

  The house phone in the dining room rang and Roxanne answered it. The caller identified himself as Mark Myerson, from the American Embassy in Cairo. He asked to speak to Roxanne Breen.

  After a lengthy conversation that Lacy listened in on while sipping an iced tea at the dining table, Roxanne hung up, took Lacy’s arm, and steered her to the porch where they found Graham, Shelley, and Horace.
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  “We’re becoming quite the cause célèbre,” Roxanne told them. “The American Embassy is sending a representative here to insure fair play. The Luxor police are in charge of the investigation, but to be perfectly frank, the Egyptian methods of interrogation have garnered a reputation for harshness in the international community.” She paused. “No one wants to see this spark a feeding frenzy in the press, so they feel it’s best if they keep an eye on things. Just to make sure.”

  “Make sure none of us get beaten up?” Horace, in a rocking chair facing the temple, tossed his head back and looked at Roxanne standing behind him.

  “Christ!” Graham said. “This is making me nervous.”

  Roxanne said, “But I’m sure we all want to find out what happened, don’t we?

  “Of course,” Shelley said.

  Lacy looked at the faces of her four colleagues. But there’s a good chance one of you hopes we won’t find out.

  * * *

  Paul and his Hyper-Warp Strobe Light Yo-yo waited on the roof for Lacy to finish KP duty in the kitchen. She came, carrying two cups of coffee and set one on the retaining wall for Paul. “No cream, no sugar,” she said.

  “You remembered how I like it.” He grinned, turning his head to one side. He tucked the yo-yo in his pocket, picked up his coffee, and began walking slowly toward the east end of the roof, motioning for her to follow him.

  “What’s your take on this, Lacy?”

  “My take?” she asked, wondering why he had led her over here.

  “If one of us killed Susan, who was it?”

  She took a sip of her coffee, looked up at a nearly full moon hovering above the Nile. “It didn’t have to be one of us. It could’ve been Selim or any of the people she pissed off at that meeting the other night.”

  “How could he have come in?”

  “Through the kitchen door, through the back door from my lab, through Horace’s door.”