Scorpion House

by Maria Hudgins

  Lacy turned and dragged the pillow over her head. Her dream, in which she was taking a critical exam but the answers kept changing and water from somewhere was flooding the floor, didn’t match what she was hearing.

  From the hall outside her door, she heard another door open, the thud of something soft hitting the wall, and Graham’s groggy voice. “What? What’s going on?”

  “Oh my God! Oh my GOD!!” Horace Lanier’s voice rose to a squeak.

  Footsteps padded and shuffled down the hall and through the door to the antika room. A door slammed. Muffled, excited voices from beyond the hall door were joined by more voices.

  Lacy rolled out of bed and groped around for the clothes she wore yesterday. She ran down the hall and through the door to find that everyone in the house had beaten her there.

  Roxanne held a comforting arm around Horace’s shoulder. The old man was bent forward, both his hands covering his face. “The papyrus is gone! It’s gone!”

  Graham looked at Lacy, questioningly. Bay stood in the archway holding a spatula aloft. Kathleen, her grey hair hanging down her back in a single braid, said, “What papyrus? What papyrus? Roxanne, what is he talking about?”

  “It was there last night. I checked! How could this happen!!” Horace cried into his hands.

  “Is your back door locked, Horace?” Roxanne grabbed Horace’s wrists and tried to pull his hands away from his face.

  Horace’s head swung back and forth as if he’d gone blind and was searching frantically for light. “Yes! Oh! My! God!”

  Roxanne and Lacy turned Horace around and bundled him back down the hall to his lab. “I might as well kill myself. This is the end. It’s all over,” Horace turned to Lacy, his eyes bulging from his spider-veined face.

  The others followed along behind. Lacy wanted to tell them all to go back to whatever they were doing—that this didn’t concern them—but she couldn’t. It would sound insulting and besides, they already knew that something about a papyrus was dreadfully wrong. That cat was out of the bag.

  “There! See here, Horace? It’s not locked!” Once inside his lab, Roxanne ran to the exterior door and flipped the Yale lock with her hand. It dangled from a metal loop on the door frame.

  “But I swear! I checked it last night before I went to bed!”

  Roxanne looked around. Kathleen, Bay, Graham, and now Paul, who had slipped in behind the rest, all stood staring at her and at Horace. “Let’s go back to the antika room,” she said. “We’ve got some ‘splaining to do.”

  * * *

  “I intend to make it clear I knew nothing about this,” said Kathleen, when Roxanne finished telling the group about the herbal papyrus. Most of them in bathrobes, they sat along the built-in bench in the antika room. Paul, wearing only cargo shorts, sat on the floor.

  Roxanne said, “That won’t be a problem, Kathleen.”

  “Who else knew about this?”

  “Only Horace and myself … and Lacy.”

  “Lacy? Lacy knew about this?” Graham looked at her as if he’d been sucker-punched.

  “Horace had to tell me because Joel Friedman forgot he wasn’t supposed to mention it to me. I asked Horace about it so he had to tell me.”

  “And I told Lacy to tell no one else,” Horace said.

  “But Joel Friedman knew about it,” Graham added.

  “Right.”

  “Did Susan know?”

  “No,” Lanier answered quickly.

  “What time do the offices open up at the SCA?” Kathleen asked, referring to the Supreme Council for Antiquities in Cairo.

  “Don’t even think about it, Kathleen. I’ll do the calling.” Roxanne looked at Lanier. “Or perhaps Horace will do it himself.”

  “It’s too early to call anyone, now,” Lacy said. From the hint of light at the windows, she estimated it was about six a.m. “I think we should look for the papyrus first. The longer we wait, the colder the trail.” Without meaning to, Lacy came off sounding like the detective in charge, a role for which she felt distinctly unfit.

  “Good idea.”

  Lanier cleared his throat and croaked, “Would any of you object to letting us search your rooms?”

  His words fell on the group like a lead blanket. Eyebrows lifted, foreheads furrowed, but no one objected. To have done so would have looked suspicious.

  “So it’s come to this, has it?” Kathleen glared at Horace. “One of us is a thief, and now we’re all thieves!” But even so, she consented to letting someone search her room.

  * * *

  Graham and Lacy took the outside of the house. They started with the east end around the door to Horace Lanier’s lab. In the dry sand and rocks, shoes left only indistinct prints at best. Graham’s feet, Lacy noticed, left only shallow, conical depressions. Having had not one drop of rain in the entire time they’d been here, they had no way to estimate the age of a print if they found one.

  They walked a complete circuit of Whiz Bang. Cigarette butts of indeterminate age, scraps of paper, old temple tickets, and cash register receipts. Nothing interesting. Near the trash bin in back, Graham squatted to get a close look at a small area of darker sand. It looked as if tea leaves had been dumped there. Tea leaves or shredded tobacco? He marked the spot with a twenty piaster coin from his pocket.

  “If they came out this way, they’d have to climb that cliff in order to get away,” Graham said. He pointed to a wall of rock, fifteen feet high, which ran roughly parallel to the back of the house and about fifty feet removed from it. The flat area between house and rock wall contained the shower, the water tank, and the trash bin. The rock curved around the east end forming a natural, L-shaped niche into which the house nestled. The rock itself was irregular and composed of several vertically-eroded chunks which, from a distance, looked like a cluster of robed monks. Along the west side stretched a flat area large enough to accommodate delivery vans. At this hour, it was vacant except for two old bicycles.

  “If this happened after Horace went to bed, it was done in the dark so they must have known the area.” Lacy said. “They could have come out Horace’s door and slipped around the house. Gone off down the road toward the temple.”

  “That would have taken guts. Carrying that big pot? If anyone had seen him, he’d have been caught dead to rights.”

  “Fat lot of good we’re doing out here. I don’t see a thing.”

  “Let’s go back inside.”

  * * *

  Kathleen stood with her arms at high alert, ready to pounce on the first threat to her treasury. Hers was the only room that Horace needed more than five minutes to search. Shelley, Graham, and Lacy had little more than the luggage they’d brought over and none of their rooms had a closet. Paul and Roxanne also had few personal possessions.

  And besides, Lanier wasn’t looking for anything that would fit in a drawer or a suitcase. He was looking for a whole pot.

  “It’s about twenty inches tall and twelve inches across at the widest part.”

  “I know perfectly well the kind of pots you keep under your work bench.”

  “I kept the papyrus in the seventh one from the left end. There’s a gap there now, so they took the whole pot, not just the papyrus.”

  “It should have been locked in a vault. In Cairo!” Kathleen was still livid. “I am absolutely appalled, Horace, and I don’t mind telling you …”

  “I’m sure you don’t.”

  “Don’t touch the faience with your bare hands, Horace. You know better.”

  Horace put the little blue figurine down on a stack of folded linen and lifted the whole stack. Under it, he found a box full of shards, a future gluing project for either Roxanne or Kathleen. Even in this repository of antiquities he soon determined that none of the vessels was the one he wanted, and every cranny large enough to stick the papyrus roll into had been searched.

  By nine o’clock Horace was certain, and all agreed, neither the papyrus nor the pot was anywhere on the premises.

  * * *
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  Roxanne followed Horace back to his lab. She could tell he was anxious to get rid of her so she seated herself on a tall stool at his workbench to make it clear that she was staying awhile. Horace was not only bereft at the loss of the papyrus and fearful of what the SCA would do to him, he was also embarrassed. How many times had she warned him?

  “I can’t keep Kathleen away from the phone for long, Horace. I can keep an eye on the phone for an hour or so, but what’s to keep her from borrowing Graham’s mobile? You must call before she does.”

  “Oh God, she’s gloating. Did you notice how she’s gloating? She loves other people’s pain.” Horace paced the length of his workbench. “That’s one evil bitch, that one! I wouldn’t put it past her to’ve stolen it herself—just to see me in pain.” His jowls shook as he groused.

  “You’re avoiding the subject.”

  “I’ll call.”

  “Brilliant!”

  “Roxanne, they didn’t get the whole papyrus.”

  “What?”

  “I still have two feet of it.” He walked over to the cabinet in which he kept the section he had uncurled with a wet spray and pressure. He opened one drawer and waved Roxanne over. “I had to cut this part off because it was on the inside of the roll and I couldn’t straighten it out enough to read it without cracking it.”

  “You cut it?” Roxanne jumped up and threw both hands to the sides of her face.

  “I had to.”

  “Had to? Had to? I don’t understand ‘had to’ used in this context, Horace. I understand, ‘wanted to.’ I understand, ‘didn’t think anyone would catch me,’ but I don’t understand, ‘had to!’ Did the scissors take control of your hand?”

  Horace looked at her but said nothing.

  “Or did you use an axe? Or a hacksaw? Oh, Horace, how could you?”

  * * *

  In the late morning, Graham, Paul and Lacy escaped the tension of the house by heading for the tomb. The last thing Lacy saw before she walked out was Roxanne, holding the phone receiver out toward Horace and tapping her foot. Lacy had no desire to be in the house when Horace got through to the SCA office.

  “What’s happening with Shelley?” Paul asked Graham.

  “I talked to that guy, Myerson, last night and again this morning. He’s arranging bail for Shelley and he’ll call me when he’s ready for me to come over.”

  “Will they let you see her?”

  “No, but there’s an American woman they’re letting in to see her for brief periods.” Graham stepped ahead of them on the narrow path uphill to the tomb, walking backward to face them. “I couldn’t sleep last night. I kept imagining where they’re keeping her. What it’s like.” He stepped off the path and let Paul and Lacy pull up even with him. “I kept thinking about that movie. You know? The one about the American guy in the Turkish prison? Rats, roaches … filth! They can lose you in a place like that and you’re never heard from again! Of course, this is Egypt, not Turkey, but it’s probably about the same.”

  “I wouldn’t dwell on it if I were you. Just work on getting her out.”

  They approached the entrance to the tomb. Akhmed, the night watchman, waved his Kalashnikov rifle at them and, now relieved of duty, headed south.

  “I’ve analyzed the goo from a couple of those unguent jars,” Graham said. “You wouldn’t believe how hard it was without Joel to help me. I was counting on him to identify pollen grains. The aromatic compounds are long gone, you know. The only way I can tell what plants they used to make it smell good, is to look for pollen. The base is mainly animal fat, no surprise there, but I also found myrrh resin, beeswax, and honey. Also bits of lotus.”

  “Lotus?” Lacy said, absently. “And honey.”

  But her mind was on the theft of the papyrus. She looked back toward Whiz Bang. If the papyrus was no longer in the house, then the route by which it left had to be some part of the sandy space before them. The thief would have had to cross a half-mile of open terrain carrying a huge clay pot. Lacy couldn’t imagine it. But the thief could have had a car waiting for him at the foot of the drive. This seemed the most likely scenario. The only other option would have been to scale the sheer cliff behind the house. Again, she couldn’t imagine doing that while carrying the pot.

  Of course, assuming the thief knew that the value lay in the contents and not the pot itself, he might have simply pulled the papyrus out and dropped the pot. But he hadn’t, at least not near the house, or they would have found it. Or broken pieces of it. Would they recognize its shards if they saw them?

  * * *

  Lacy found it a great relief to turn her attention to the paint on the walls in the burial chamber. She was still curious about the brilliant reds and yellows. These Eighteenth Dynasty painters had used a pigment called realgar for the red and another called orpiment for the yellow. Both were oxides of arsenic. The white paint contained high levels of lead. No face masks and no gloves in the Eighteenth Dynasty. Had the painters suffered from arsenic or lead poisoning? If they had, they would have had no clue as to what was making them sick.

  Using a battery-powered ultraviolet light, she examined the painting of the green-faced Osiris. When she swung the light around the burial chamber and saw blue-white smudges glowing along the lower margin of the hole in the wall, she caught her breath. Blood, she recalled, fluoresced under UV light. The glow was her own blood.

  * * *

  The Luxor police returned to Whiz Bang for a more thorough search of the premises since they now had a better idea what they were looking for. Mike Myerson followed in his American Embassy car and explained to Roxanne what they were doing. Without a word, the policemen set to work.

  “They’re looking for a deodorant tube loaded with nicotine or anything else with nicotine in it. Suspicious labware, nicotine patches, cigarettes, whatever. And they’re going to search Mrs. Clark’s room with a fine-tooth comb.”

  Roxanne nervously twiddled the brush she’d been using to clean pottery, and it went flying off across the room.

  “Where is Dr. Clark?” Myerson asked.

  “At the tomb, I think.”

  “That’s good. He’s a hot-head, isn’t he?” When Roxanne responded with nothing but a crooked grin he added, “Understandably so, of course. I’d act the same way if they arrested my wife. Actually, he was pretty decent about it. But we’re trying to keep him out of this as much as possible. Don’t want to create an international incident.” His tone and his eyebrows set virtual quotes around those last two words.

  * * *

  Lacy walked straight through the house and out the lab door to the back yard. She searched the area for the brown spot she and Graham found in the sand that morning. It was probably nothing, but it occurred to her that someone might have poured something out. A nicotine solution with cigarette tobacco in it? Given the fact that she hadn’t been right about anything else so far, she doubted it. More likely, it was something Horace had dumped out. Willow bark or hibiscus leaves. Whatever it was, she couldn’t find it now and the coin with which Graham had marked the spot was now missing.

  The pillars of weathered rock that formed part of the cliff looked different now. Lacy stepped back from the trash bin and studied them. The late morning sun was casting shadows at a different angle and they looked more like gnarled fingers than robed monks. It seemed as if there might be a space behind them—between the pillars and the rest of the cliff.

  She saw how the theft could have been pulled off.

  Striding across the back yard, she slipped between two of the pillars. A space, just large enough to hold a pot like the ones in Horace’s lab, separated the three pillars from the more solid part of the cliff face. No pot there now, unfortunately, but there were footprints. They looked fresh, but in this climate, who could tell? Lacy spotted another space between the westernmost pillar and the cliff face and, peeking through, found it continued on. Back into the rock. Barely wide enough for her to squeeze through by turning sideways, what appeared at firs
t to be a narrow crevice widened out into an actual passage.

  She paused and gaped. This was no natural formation. A little sunlight seeped in from behind her, but above—solid rock. She waited until her eyes adjusted and scanned the rock overhead. Hack marks and squared corners betrayed the hand of man. How long had this secret chamber been here, a decade or a millennium? Or three millennia?

  She crept forward beyond the region of dim light into total darkness. At this point, she knew she should turn back, but she didn’t. There was no dank, wet odor such as she’d smelled in caves back home. Instead, it smelled musty—like a room closed up too long. Feeling her way along with both hands touching the walls on either side, she followed the passage around a right turn. She stopped and listened. She heard small burbling and scratching noises. Some twenty feet beyond the turn, a shaft of light slanted in from the left. Air rushed from her lungs in an audible sigh of relief. Until then, she hadn’t realized she was holding her breath.

  Something slithered across the back of her hand.

  She forced herself to keep moving forward, her hands still grazing the walls, until she reached the light and an opening that led out to a dirt road. Ahead, she saw a pair of children, one applying a stick to the rump of a goat. They were heading the other way, and Lacy felt sure they hadn’t seen her. She ducked back into the shadow of the passage and peeked out so only a sliver of her face would be visible to someone in the road.

  On the far side of the road, the land rose sharply into a cluster of houses. A narrow path ran up, around a donkey pen, and past a dilapidated green door in a mud-brick façade. Brightly colored rugs hung from open windows. She started to turn back, and then noticed she hadn’t yet reached the end of the passage. It continued beyond the opening.

  Steeling herself to reenter the dark, she looked down as a speckled lizard skittered between her feet and disappeared into the gloom. Lacy hoped it had been a lizard she’d felt on the back of her hand a minute ago. Lizards didn’t bother her.

  She made sure no one was looking her way and then hurried across the space that was visible from the road. Ahead, it seemed, although it was quite dark, a flight of stairs led downward. She waited again for her eyes to adjust and to bring the stairs ahead into better focus. She spotted a dark band near the bottom—possibly a snake.