Scorpion House

by Maria Hudgins

  Paul turned and faced the tomb. The tarp hung loosely from one side of the entrance, a muddy line marking the height of the water at its peak. On the slope above, the generator stood, high and dry. Still barefoot, he climbed up to see if it was okay. If water hadn’t leaked into the gas tank, he thought, this generator might be needed to pump out the burial chamber.

  * * *

  “How can I fire Selim when I need him so badly?” Roxanne smiled crookedly at the irony of her question, slammed the phone receiver down, and slid her arm around Paul’s waist. She looked at the paper on which she had jotted the pump requirements Paul dictated before she started her round of calls. Roxanne had lived in Luxor long enough to have seen one previous flash flood, in 1994, but that was before Kheti’s tomb was opened and before Whiz Bang was built. “I’ve called everyone I can think of who might possibly have a water pump. They’re all in use. Not only that, they all have a waiting list of people who need to pump something out.”

  Paul started to ask her about buying one, then realized Luxor had nothing like an American home improvement store. The nearest place to buy a pump would probably be Cairo.

  “So I broke down and called Selim. He knows everyone and if anyone has a pump, black-market or not, he can find it.”

  The front door swung open and a moist breeze with a hint of clay smell wafted through. Graham and Shelley crept in, each carrying a couple of duffel bags. Before Paul could even greet them, Shelley had skittered off and down the hall toward her room. He caught Graham, hurrying close on his wife’s heels, and welcomed him home.

  “Yeah. Bummer. Trip got canceled and we didn’t get our money back.”

  “Where did you spend the night?” Paul took one of Graham’s bags and followed him to his room.

  “Would you believe, at the Luxor Sheraton? Captain Marvel heard about the rain coming and scooted off home as soon as he pulled the boat ashore.” Graham stashed his clothes in the dresser while Paul filled him in on the flood, on his and Kathleen’s trip to Cairo, and on the sad state of Horace Lanier.

  Lacy walked in. Graham turned to her and said, “Let’s go to the porch, Lacy, I need to talk to you.” He tucked his passport into one side of the top drawer.

  Paul excused himself, saying he needed to see a man about a pump.

  * * *

  When they were seated, Graham began. “Shelley and I are going home.”

  “You can’t! How do you expect me to do everything by myself? I’d be the only one left, and I’m damned if I’m going home with nothing to publish!”

  “Look. We have all we’re ever going to get from Joel or Susan, right? If we can get Susan’s notes back from the police maybe there’s something in them we can use. Shelley and I will give you everything we’ve got. My notes on the unguents and the binders and all. Shelley’s notes on the fibers and the weaves. It’s all yours. We honestly don’t care if you credit us or not. How would that be? Your name alone on a dream paper. You can take what we’ve found and make it into a whole series of papers. Career-making papers, Lacy! We have a dozen interesting little tidbits you can throw in that archaeologists can work on for decades.”

  Lacy didn’t answer. She folded her arms and walked to the edge of the porch.

  “Shelley’s at the end of her rope. That jail scared the shit out of her. She’s pretty sure now she’s pregnant and we’ve been trying to have a baby for three years. She’s deathly afraid of what she may have picked up in jail. And now the tomb’s flooded! Do you think I’d let her go back in there not knowing what’s leaching out from the walls with all that water?” Graham’s eyes shot sparks at her.

  Lacy’s mind had split down the middle, making it hard to concentrate. One side filtered everything Graham was saying through the gauze of guilt. Examined every word he said to see if it made sense coming from the mouth of Susan Donohue’s killer. She took “we have all we’re ever going to get from Joel or Susan,” and mentally added, “because I’m a heartless son of a bitch and they meant nothing to me.” She took “Do you think I’d let her go back in that tomb,” and mentally added, “because I care about life, even unborn life.” She took, “Shelley and I are going home (because Shelley wants to) and altered it to “Shelley and I are going home (because I want to get out of town while the getting’s good and if things go wrong it’ll be a lot harder to extradite me from the U. S. than to arrest me here.)

  The other side of Lacy’s brain tried to imagine publishing the paper alone. It was tempting. Graham was right. It could make her career, solidify her position at Wythe, and set her on the fast track to tenure. Would her conscience let her publish the paper in her name alone? No. The others had already done too much and she’d need to consult with Graham and Shelley on a hundred details before she could consider it ready for publication.

  Around the edges of these swirling ideas and emotions, other thoughts popped up like bubbles and burst. If you were in Luxor last night, why didn’t you come back here? If you’re going home, why did you just put your clothes back in the dresser?

  Shelley walked out and stood at the edge of the porch, her back to Lacy and Graham. She had a most unusual sunburn. She had changed into shorts and a loose-fitting halter top. The backs of her legs were bright red, as were her shoulders, back, neck, and arms but the burn did not extend around to the front of her legs, and the backs of her hands were pale.

  “You got too much sun, Shelley.”

  “I fell asleep on the deck of the boat,” she said, “who’d ever think you could get a sunburn in January?”

  Lacy glanced at Graham. His jaw muscles were working furiously, his eyes scanning his wife’s legs. He looked ten years older than he had a month ago. His blue eyes now faded to blue-grey over dark circles.

  “Graham says you’re going home.”

  “I am.”

  “We are.” Graham corrected her.

  The phone in Shelley’s pocket rang. She fished it out and answered it, then turned to Graham and mouthed, “Myerson.” With the phone to her ear, she ambled toward the far end of the porch.

  “Who?” Lacy asked, her mind too full of the events of this harrowing day to recall who the hell Myerson was.

  “Myerson. The guy from the American Embassy.”

  “What do you think he wants?”

  “Shelley called him earlier. She wants him to help her with plane tickets. Seems the airlines are booked up.”

  “Must be nice to have friends in high places.”

  “The last time we saw him, he said, ‘If there’s anything else I can do, don’t hesitate to call.’ I don’t think he meant to be our travel agent, but he’ll probably be happy to see the last of us.”

  In a deliberately off-hand way Lacy said, “Did you spill a bunch of our ether? I started to use some yesterday and there was less than a half-bottle left.”

  “What did you need ether for?”

  That’s right! Don’t answer the question. Change the subject.

  * * *

  Lacy carried the video microscope back to her lab from Kathleen’s room where they had been using it on the herbal papyrus. She hooked it up, and slid the front of Joel Friedman’s manila folder under the lens. She pushed the folder around until the tomato juice splatter and the name written with a ball point pen came into view on the screen. The tomato juice Joel Friedman spilled on the pant legs of the woman on the plane had also splashed onto the folder he had stuffed into a seat back pocket.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  Selim came around with something he said was a pump late that afternoon. Roxanne suggested it might have been left behind by Napoleon’s troops. Paul rounded up the necessary hoses and cords and carried it all to the tomb. He ran the outflow hose through the newly-vented and shored-up chamber that had nearly claimed Lacy’s life, then shoveled a shallow ditch to lead the water safely down the slope and away. Because the floor in the burial chamber was uneven, sloped, and pocked with holes, he knew he would have to stay with it throughout the pumping process,
moving the intake around to wherever the water was ponding. Also the ancient pump, working against a fifteen-foot difference in the levels of the chamber floor and the vent proved capable of yielding only a trickle out the nether end. He toted a stool into the chamber and settled himself for a long night.

  Lacy brought him his dinner. Bay had cooked his favorite molokhiyya, a vegetable stew with lamb, and vine leaves stuffed with rice. He sopped up the last of the stew with the flat bread Selim’s wife baked in a clay oven and sent down to Whiz Bang most afternoons.

  “Seems like I’m always bringing you meals. First you and Kathleen working twenty-four-seven on the papyrus and now this.” Lacy looked around for a place to sit.

  “Go outside and grab a chair or something. And a rock, if you want to keep your feet out of the water.”

  “My feet are already wet. They can’t get any wetter.”

  At this point, the water was ankle-deep and diminishing at the rate of about an inch per hour. Lacy located another stool in the transverse hall, carried it into the chamber, and sat with her feet on one of the top dowels, her knees doubled up to her chest.

  “Do you mind if I stay here a little while?”

  “I’d like that,” he said, “but it’ll be boring, I’m afraid.”

  She took his dinner plate and carried it out to the long hall where the floor was dry. When she returned, Paul asked, “Is it true that Graham and Shelley are going back to America?”

  “Oh, you heard that, did you? That’s what they told me, but I’m hoping to talk them out of it.” She returned to her stool and sat, wrapping her arms around her knees.

  Paul looked up from the intake hose he was adjusting. “You won’t go, too, will you?” His face wore a touchingly tense expression of concern. Under the single overhead light, his cheekbones and chin looked like polished stone.

  “I’m not going back until my time is up.”

  “Good.”

  “Paul, do you remember what we were talking about the other night? When I asked Marcus if the name Jody Myers meant anything to him?”

  “Yes. Why do you keep asking about that name? It’s at least the fourth time I’ve heard you mention it.”

  “It probably doesn’t mean a thing, but I can’t put it out of my mind. On the trip here, from New York to Cairo, I remember very clearly Joel’s trip folder was in the seat-back pocket in front of him, then in front of me after we switched seats. It was an eleven-hour flight and I spent a big part of the night staring at that folder. Every fifteen minutes all night, I’d wake up and there it was. He’d stuck it in so the corner with the tab was on top. There was a smear of tomato juice below the tab where Joel had slopped his drink over it and the pant legs of the woman beside him.”

  “Was the woman pissed?”

  “Yes. Anyway, there was nothing on the folder but this stupid streak of tomato juice at that time. I’m positive.” Lacy paused while Paul gave the outflow hose a tightening twist. The tone of the motor changed. “From the time we got off the plane until we went to bed that night, Joel and I were together. The only time we weren’t was a few minutes at the Cairo airport when I went up to the observation deck and left him with the luggage. That evening, the folder was in Joel’s room with the name Jody Myers on it.”

  “So?”

  “Stick with me here. I do have a point. Anyway, when Joan flew over I asked her about it—drew a blank. I asked another woman back home in an email—drew another blank. Nobody knows the name. Now, Joel just happened to write the name through the tomato juice smear. Or could I be wrong? Could the name have been there when the tomato juice was spilled? Today I looked at it through the video microscope. It lets you see layers, you know, even pulp fibers. The name is definitely written on top of the tomato juice so it had to have been written after we left New York. And yesterday, Marcus Lanier tells us Jody Myers is the kid his parents wouldn’t let him play with.”

  Paul stopped, planted his elbows on his knees. “Yes. Marcus said she used to torture animals and the parents of all the children …”

  “She?”

  “Jody’s a girl’s name, isn’t it?”

  “I hadn’t even thought about that!” Lacy pushed her hair out of her eyes. “Did Marcus say if Jody was a boy or a girl?” Lacy couldn’t remember. Paul shrugged his shoulders. “Did Horace mention it?” Her conversation with Horace was weeks ago and Lacy couldn’t recall any gender-specific words he had used. When you get a picture of a person in your mind you tend to assign it a gender whether you’ve been told or not, she thought. In this case, Lacy envisioned a gang of neighborhood boys but it could have been girls and boys. “The name on the folder is J-O-D-Y. That’s the spelling you’d use for a boy. A girl’s name would probably be spelled J-O-D-I-E.”

  “If Friedman was writing the name in a hurry, would he have paid attention to a little thing like that? Would he even know there were two spellings? I didn’t.”

  “Probably not.” Lacy quickly revised her mental picture of the ephemeral Jody Myers to include a Jodie Myers. “But here’s the other thing. While we were all waiting in the visa line at the Cairo airport, we were passing our passports around, laughing at the photos and talking about our full names. Seems none of us was going by his given first name. Except Susan, I think. I remember looking at Joel just then and seeing a strange—sort of shocked—look on his face. I thought it might be something he’d seen and I asked him but he said it was nothing. But what if it was a name? One of our names rather than something he saw?”

  “You mean, like one of you was Jody Myers?”

  “If so, it has to be either Graham or Shelley, right? Couldn’t be Susan because her only name was the maiden name on the passport.”

  “I don’t know, Lacy. It’s not much to go on.”

  “I know. That’s why I haven’t talked about it to anyone but you.” She gave him a look she hoped he would understand. A look that said because I trust you and I hope my trust isn’t misplaced.

  Paul took a deep breath and changed the subject. “Have you seen anything here that you think needs more investigating?”

  “There’s a lot that could be done with Graham’s analysis of the material in the unguent jars. Does it match up with any of the recipes on other tomb walls? What about the species in the herbal papyrus? How many of them were used in making those unguents?”

  “Good ideas.”

  “But what I’d really like to know is, did the artists who worked with the red and yellow paint in this room—it’s different from the reds and yellows outside. Did you know that? —did they suffer from arsenic poisoning?”

  “How could you find out?”

  “We’d need to find out if any of the mummies discovered so far can be identified as painters. Do an autopsy. Or maybe just a hair sample would do. Arsenic is deposited in hair, you know.”

  “Wouldn’t it have degraded by now?”

  “Not arsenic. It’s a metallic element. Elements don’t degrade.”

  “So, you need to stay here!” Paul smiled and winked at her. “All this work will take you years.”

  “Not me. That’s work for a forensic scientist.”

  Lacy trekked outside to check on the outflow and make sure it was sticking to the channel Paul had carved. Paul was monitoring his progress by the width of the wet ring around the walls. The water level was about a third of the way down. When Lacy came back with a favorable report she said, “Did you notice that Marcus never met Graham or Shelley?”

  “Huh?”

  “Think about it. Shortly after we hear Marcus is coming, Graham and Shelley all of a sudden decide to go off on a felucca trip. They’re gone by the time he arrives. Then the rain comes, the trip is called off, and Graham does what? Comes home? He’s in Luxor, for God’s sake. Fifteen minute ferry ride. No. He calls Roxanne and asks her if Marcus is there! I overheard the conversation. She tells him Marcus is there but he’s taking the red-eye to Cairo in the morning. So Graham and Shelley get a room at the Sheraton and sh
ow up late this morning. Wouldn’t it have been cheaper and almost as easy to simply take the ferry last night?”

  “Why would they be avoiding Marcus?”

  “Think about it, Paul. Who would be most likely to recognize Jody Myers after all these years? His old playmate, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Now. Why was Susan murdered?”

  “Because somebody didn’t like her?”

  “You don’t kill people just because you don’t like them. If we did, the human race would’ve gone extinct a long time ago. You kill people because they’re a threat. Maybe they threaten to wreck you financially or maybe they stand between you and the fortune you think you deserve. Whatever. I wouldn’t know. I’m no psychiatrist. Maybe they threaten your marriage or your freedom.” She paused for dramatic effect. “Or maybe because you really, really hate them. Not just don’t like them. Hate them.”

  “Sure.” Paul pressed his hands together, raised them to his lips. “Horace Lanier didn’t like Susan and she didn’t like him. But Susan was, very likely, a threat to him, too. Shelley considered Susan a threat. She suspected Graham and Susan were having an affair.”

  “I don’t think they were.”

  “I don’t either. Selim didn’t like Susan’s attitude about the relocation of the locals.” He shifted the gurgling intake hose. “Akhmed walked out on the meeting where Susan was shooting her mouth off. Roxanne was mad at her. Kathleen was mad at her but is any of this a sufficient motive for murder?”

  “No. Here’s another way to think of it. In all these horrible happenings, who’s hurting the worst?”