Scorpion House

by Maria Hudgins

  Lacy decided to return to the house and get a flashlight before she went any farther. She turned and retraced her steps. On her way back, she thought about scorpions. I’d better get my UV lamp, too.

  The scene back at the house was bizarre. As Lacy traversed the antika room, she saw Horace, Roxanne, Graham, and Paul sitting in a row on the bench next to the dining room door. No one spoke when they saw her, no one even moved. They were like strangers waiting for a bus. The house telephone, plugged into a jack on the other side of the wall behind them, lay on Horace’s knees. Perhaps Horace had already made the dreaded call to the SCA, and this was the result—universal catatonia. First things first. She decided to let it wait until she’d finished her exploration of the passage.

  She grabbed a flashlight from her bedroom and tramped back across the antika room to her lab to pick up the UV lamp she’d left there earlier. Her four housemates were still sitting on the bench, like a row of bowling pins.

  Hurrying down the first leg of the passage again, this time with her lights on, she passed a couple of lizards and several pigeons. She recalled the burbling noises she’d heard the first time through and had attributed to her own imagination. It must have been pigeons. She was glad none of them had flown past her head because claws or wings in her hair, in the dark, would have freaked her out for sure.

  Entering the new terrain beyond the opening, Lacy played her light all along the stairs searching for the dark band she’d seen earlier. She found it. A piece of rope. The fact that pigeons clucked calmly in and out of the passage was a good sign because birds raise a commotion when a snake is near. She directed her UV light into the corners of each stair, checking for scorpions, then stepped carefully down.

  At this point she was at least twenty feet below the top of the ridge, and the corridor made a sharp turn to the left. Ahead was another flight of steps but, thankfully, these went up. And up. A ninety degree turn to the left and yet another flight of steps. At the top of these, Lacy stopped and turned off both her lights. She saw daylight ahead. Approaching the light slowly, she stopped. She was looking into a room. The entire space was hacked out of the native rock. A rough-hewn room with blue-painted walls, rugs on the floor, a poster for an Arabic language movie on the wall over a table covered with a multi-colored cloth. Leaning against the wall, a clay pot. The clay pot, Lacy knew, because it sported a band of Amarna blue paint around its neck. By now, she could tell the difference between Egyptian blue and Amarna blue from a distance of twenty paces. Her gaze returned to the cloth-covered table. It held a portable TV, its picture flipping over and over, a coffee mug, and a set of keys. From the key chain, a miniature model of a Pepsi bottle dangled over the edge of the table.

  The last time Lacy had seen those keys, they were in the ignition of the Jeep.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Back at Whiz Bang, Lacy spotted the same four—Roxanne, Horace, Graham, and Paul—on the porch. They had moved a few yards and gone immobile again, as if a giant child, playing dollhouse, had decided they’d have tea on the porch, picked them up and moved them, their bodies remaining frozen in a sitting position.

  Lacy pulled up a chair for herself considering, as she did so, whether she should wait for one of them to speak first or blurt out her own news. She waited. After several seconds she said, “Bad news, I take it.”

  “Not as bad for you as it is for me. You have less to pack up,” Horace said.

  “What? We’re leaving? Why?”

  “We’ve been thrown out.”

  “No way!”

  “I’m afraid so,” Roxanne said. “Horace called the SCA as I insisted he must before you-know-who, Kathleen, did. At first they thought it was just an ordinary papyrus and it had probably been stolen from the antika or Kathleen’s room, but Horace had to tell them what it really was because it’s likely to show up on the black market any day now.”

  “If it does, how would anyone know it came from here? From Kheti’s tomb?” Lacy couldn’t understand how the papyrus, even if examined and found to be genuine, could be linked to them.

  Roxanne, Horace, and Paul looked at each other. Roxanne answered, her left hand twisting the ring on her right. “It’s a bit hard to explain to anyone but another archaeologist—why we had to tell. Why we had to admit we’d found it, we’d hidden it, and we’d let it get stolen. The knowledge that would be lost as a result of Egyptology never knowing where or when it was found, near whose body, in what sort of vessel, along with what other artifacts, is far more important than what happens to us as a result of Horace’s deception.” She looked at Horace, her eyes glistening with tears.

  “When I finally made them understand exactly what it was that was missing, all hell broke loose,” Lanier said. “They left me hanging on the phone for a good fifteen minutes and finally the director came on the line and said, ‘The tomb of Kheti is closed. Closed to you and closed to everyone else until we come to the Valley and assess the situation.’ I said, ‘But what about the others? What about the Americans who knew nothing about this? What about Paul and Kathleen? They’ve done nothing wrong!’

  “He told me it didn’t matter. The tomb must be closed until they visit. Then somebody else took the phone and said, ‘The house belongs to Egypt. It was built with English, American and Egyptian money, but the Egyptian government holds the title.’ It’s true. We work here only with their permission, and, at their discretion, they can throw us out.”

  “How long before we have to be out?” Lacy asked.

  “They haven’t told us. With any luck, it’ll be a while. Things in Egypt don’t happen as quickly as they do back home.”

  “But still, we must prepare to leave,” Roxanne said. “They may drop by at any time and say, ‘Out! Now!’”

  Lacy leaned one elbow on the arm of her chair and, one by one, studied the eyes of the other four. She paused for dramatic effect before she spoke.

  “I have good news. I know where the papyrus is.”

  Roxanne jumped up and dashed into the house. Horace followed her as far as the front door, peered in, then turned back to the others. “I think she was about to pee her pants.”

  “You know where the papyrus is?” the other two echoed.

  Horace returned to his chair, his face glowing red.

  Lacy told them about her spelunking adventure and what she’d found at the end of the tunnel. “It’s Selim’s house. I’m sure of it. He showed us where he lived our first day here when we drove past the houses. I saw some of the same demolition equipment today that I noticed then. Plus, who else has a toy Pepsi bottle on his key chain?”

  “Selim!” Paul said. “I can’t believe it.”

  Roxanne popped back out and rejoined the group. “I can’t believe we’ve been living right next to a secret passage through the ridge for all these years and known nothing about it!”

  Lacy had to repeat most of the story for Roxanne’s benefit. When she finished, she added, “What now? Do we sneak through the secret passage again and steal it back, or do we go up to his front door and confront him?”

  “If we confront him he can deny having it and, unless we barge past him and grab the pot, he can hide it before police can go in with a search warrant and get it legally.”

  “Right. What are the chances the pot or the papyrus would still be there?”

  “If we steal it back, what do we steal? The pot? How do we know the papyrus is still in it?” Paul brought everyone up short with that simple question.

  “He’s right,” Lacy said. “We steal the pot, run back through the passage, open it up and, guess what? Empty. Then what? We’ve tipped him off we’re onto him and we still don’t have the papyrus.”

  The discussion continued until they saw Kathleen clomping down the hill from the tomb. Kathleen knew nothing about Lanier’s phone call to the SCA or any of the afternoon’s other developments, but as she approached the house, the group on the porch quickly agreed that she should be told of the phone call and of the impending
eviction but not about Lacy’s discovery of the papyrus in Selim’s house. Kathleen, they all agreed, would call the SCA herself if she thought no one else had done so.

  And now they had a plan.

  * * *

  Shelley’s cell was six feet by ten feet and her bathroom was a bucket. She kept her feet curled up on the narrow, smelly cot and tried to avoid touching the wall because of the bugs. She had vomited twice into the bucket, which had not been emptied since she came here. The black-clad woman assigned to watch her had been staring at her continuously from the other side of the bars for the past eight hours without, as far as Shelley had noticed, even blinking. Last night Shelley had tried unsuccessfully to sleep on the cot. It was five inches shorter than she was.

  At some unseen and unheard signal, the woman stood, unlocked Shelley’s cage, and shepherded her toward the interview room.

  Myerson, the American Embassy man, and the police chief were there but the American woman who had sat in and helped her yesterday was not. Myerson rose when Shelley entered and seated her. The black-clad woman took her usual chair against the wall. Chief El-Alfi, on the opposite side of the table, thumbed a sheaf of notes but did not look directly at her.

  “Now that you have had a night to think it over, Mrs. Clark, is there anything else you want to tell us?” El-Alfi leaned back and threw one arm over the back of his chair. What you told us yesterday, you know, we do not believe it. Because it does not make sense.”

  Shelley just looked at him, her face drained of color, her eyes dead.

  “You have no idea who put your lady’s deodorant in Susan Donohue’s room. You didn’t do it, you say. I suggested to you that your husband could have done it. He came frequently to your room. He is your husband after all. If anyone had seen him coming or going from your room, they would have thought nothing of it. But you say your husband couldn’t possibly have done it.”

  “He couldn’t. He didn’t.”

  “But you can’t tell us why. Explain, please, how you know he couldn’t have done it.”

  Shelley said nothing.

  “It’s a simple question, Mrs. Clark.”

  Myerson looked at Shelley’s face as if trying to see what was behind those lusterless eyes.

  El-Alfi stuck one hand into his briefcase, pulled out a generic brand of solid-type deodorant inside a transparent evidence bag and slapped it on the table. “Have you ever seen this before, Mrs. Clark?”

  “No.”

  “We found it in the trash bin behind your house this morning.”

  “So?”

  “One of my men brought it to me. I do not know what has been done to it but our laboratory people will test it and find out.” He paused and looked up at Shelley, then Myerson, then back to Shelley. “However, I did not want to wait for the laboratory report because they take too long. So I made a little test of my own. I took off the top and rubbed the deodorant on a piece of paper. Then I found some little ants.” With his fingers El-Alfi mimicked the sprinkling of ants, like salt, onto the desk. “I put the ants on the paper and they went …” He flipped one hand over, palm up, and flopped it on the table.

  * * *

  Selim dropped Bay off as he normally did, so she could start preparing dinner. Roxanne was waiting for them on the porch. She called to Selim, asked him to come in, and drew him into a pre-planned discussion of Whiz Bang, its budget, and the possibility he might be due for a pay raise. She knew that would hold his attention. Kathleen had retired to her room for a rest, and Bay went straight to the kitchen.

  * * *

  Graham and Lacy approached the hill dwellings from the south. The dirt road turned abruptly to the left and took them past a donkey pen and a clay oven, a crumbling mud-brick wall on their right. They stopped at the first door they came to.

  “What do we do now?” Graham looked around, then up to the open windows above them. “Do we yell, ‘Mrs. Hamdy! Come out, come out wherever you are!’?”

  Lacy squared her shoulders, gathered her courage and looked around. On the trek over, she and Graham had practiced the Arabic phrases Roxanne had taught her. Lacy was glad for the language practice because it meant she and Graham had no time to talk about the still-unbroached topic of the kisses in the burial chamber. Lacy did want to know more about the argument she overheard between Shelley and Graham, but this was no time to bring it up. She didn’t know how to, anyway.

  A teen-aged boy came toward them, down the road to their left.

  “Men fadlak, Abahto an … Halima Hamdy?” Lacy spoke slowly, the words falling awkwardly from her lips.

  “Assayeda Hamdy? Selim Hamdy?” the teenager responded.

  “Na.”

  He led them back down a few yards and up to a door with peeling green paint. He knocked and waited.

  “Shukran,” Lacy said, thanking him.

  A minute or so later, the door was opened by a short, round woman with two small children clutching the fabric of her tunic. Her green headscarf and dark blue tunic were of different patterns, apparently no thought having been given to coordination for a put-together look. She held up one arm to shield her eyes from the glare.

  “Alloo, esmee Lacy.”

  * * *

  Paul slipped down the secret corridor, his light zig-zagging from one side of the floor to the other. The dusty smell brought back Jericho to his mind. The excavation. The snipers. Melanie’s blood all over his arms. He blocked it out. Every few feet he stopped and ran the light over the walls and ceiling, checking for suspicious-looking or moving objects. When he came to the opening at the road, which Lacy had told him was about thirty yards from Selim’s northernmost room, he stopped and looked out.

  Luckily, he could see Graham’s curly head just beyond a cane roof near a donkey pen. Graham looked as if he was engaged in a conversation, Paul decided, based on the frequent nodding of his head and the fact that he was standing still.

  Paul ducked back into the tunnel, directed his flashlight down the stairs, and glanced around for anything threatening. His light was dimming and he knew his batteries were about to go. To save them, he switched the light off and descended the steps by feel. Tapping his heel against the vertical face of each step as he went, he could tell where the edges were and avoid a nasty fall. At the bottom, he shuffled his feet along until the toe of his boot hit the base of the stairs leading up. About fifteen steps up, Lacy had estimated.

  He had a moment of panic when he hit a solid wall. Flipping on his light for a second, he remembered Lacy telling him these stairs made a hard left turn about half-way up. More steps.

  Daylight ahead, and then he saw the blue room, the table with the cloth exactly as Lacy had described. The pot from Lanier’s lab was still there, still leaning against the wall.

  He pulled Shelley’s cell phone from his shorts pocket. Thank you, Shelley, for getting your own SIM card and for leaving it behind when they arrested you. He punched a speed-dial number that went straight to Graham’s phone, resulting, Paul hoped, in a vibration Graham would notice against his leg. He waited for a response. Meanwhile, he shifted side to side in his narrow passage, checking out as much of the room as possible. No one was there but the room was hardly unoccupied. Seven or eight pigeons wandered around on the floor, waddled down the corridor at his feet, perched on the window sill. A doorway on the opposite side appeared to lead to another room.

  Shelley’s phone vibrated. This was the signal they had agreed upon, meaning that Selim’s wife and two children were outside with Graham and Lacy. It was Lacy’s unenviable job to keep them engaged until Graham got a second phone signal from Paul. She had brought a large supply of brand-new yellow pencils with her, to ply them with when the conversation ran thin.

  Paul dashed into the room, looked into the clay pot, ran his hand around inside it. As he had feared, the papyrus wasn’t there. Now what? He slipped past the curtain that served as a door on the opposite side of the room and found himself in a space open to the sky above and flanked by several doors
at several different levels. Stairs, built into the walls themselves, ran up and down to each level. Hell! This could take forever! What if these doors lead to more stairs and more doors, and …

  At the bottom of the stairwell a door was open. Through it, Paul could see the back of a woman in a dark tunic. She shifted to one side and he got a quick glimpse of a red Converse tennis shoe. An hour ago Paul had seen Lacy putting on her red Converse shoes. He felt a little better now because he had a vantage point from which to see what was going on and decide when he needed to duck for cover. More pigeons and more pigeons fluttered along the stairs and around his feet.

  He sneaked around the foyer in a counter-clockwise direction and opened a door. Inside was a kitchen with a small refrigerator and a stove. Cooking utensils hung from a rack beside the stove and an armload of green onions lay on what might have been a bird coop. He saw no cabinets, nothing with doors behind which a papyrus could be stashed. After a quick look around he closed that door and moved along to the next one.

  The next room was more dimly lit and Paul couldn’t tell at first if it was a sitting room or a bedroom. Then he spotted a narrow bed along one wall. A small child, no more than four or five, pushed himself up from his pillow and looked squarely at Paul. It was too late to escape. He’d been caught.

  The child’s big brown eyes widened in shock, then narrowed to the sort of pucker that precedes a loud yowl.

  Paul pulled a yo-yo from his pocket and grinned. Careful not to enter the room abruptly, he stood in the doorway and threw the toy down, let it spin, and popped it back up into his hand. He did it again. Grinned. He executed a rock-the-baby and an Eiffel Tower. Grinned again.

  The child was hooked. Paul rolled the yo-yo along the floor, let the string slip from his finger, and grinned again. “You want to try it?” he whispered to the child who, of course, understood no English.