Death on Tour

by Janice Hamrick

  “Come on. We should get out of here,” he said quietly in my ear.

  I didn’t argue.

  We hurried back across the open market to the restaurant where Kyla waited with the sobbing French woman. I knelt beside her and spoke soothingly in French, asking her where her people were.

  They had wanted to spend more time in the monuments, she said, and I translated quickly for Kyla and Alan. She herself had grown tired and decided to come back and spend some time in the little shops. She entered the most quiet shop where no one waited, and no one was calling and shouting. She thought the shop owner must have stepped out, and she was very glad to get to look at all the petit souvenirs without the attention of the vendeur. But then she kicked something with her foot and saw him lying on the floor. Tant de sang. All the blood. She burst into sobs again, then looking up she saw her husband and friends and ran to join them.

  “Where did you learn your French?” asked Alan casually.

  “Her mother is French,” said Kyla, when I did not reply immediately. “She’s completely fluent, lucky thing. Italian, too. She practically grew up in Italy. Her father was in the diplomatic corps.”

  “And you also?” asked Alan.

  “Not a word,” she answered with a grin. “I took Spanish in high school, for all the good that’s done me. I’ve already forgotten most of it.”

  Alan was shaking his head as if puzzled. “You really aren’t sisters, are you?”

  “What have we been saying? Of course we’re not sisters. If we were sisters, we’d hardly be going around saying we’re cousins, now would we? Our fathers are brothers. And we don’t even look alike,” she added for good measure.

  “And how about you?” I asked quietly. I held his eye for a moment. “A financial analyst from Dallas? You sure know your Arabic. And your pulse points.”

  He flushed a little. Kyla looked from me to him and back again. “What are you talking about?”

  “I know a little Arabic,” he admitted. “I took some college courses, thinking it would help me land a job. It might have sounded like I know the language, but I really know very little, and I’ve been assured my accent is atrocious.”

  “What were you saying, then?” I asked, not quite believing him.

  He hesitated. “Just asking if anyone had seen someone leaving the shop,” he said. But too late and too little. He really was a terrible liar. But if he was hiding something, I could not imagine what it was.

  “And did they?” asked Kyla.

  “No,” he answered shortly. “No one saw anything.”

  Exactly like the events at the pyramids when Millie had been killed. A dead body on the ground, but no witnesses, even though the place was crowded. No outcry, no screams, not even much blood, never mind what the French woman said. Just a silent death. Only this time, instead of one of a tour group of foreigners, the victim was an Egyptian native. A simple shopkeeper, here in the sunny marketplace of Abu Simbel. None of it made any sense.

  “We should ask Flora and Fiona,” I said, suddenly remembering. “They were in that shop about ten or fifteen minutes earlier.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I saw them coming out. You might have seen them, Kyla. They were coming out while you were stopping at the postcard shop.”

  She shrugged. “I didn’t see them, but it doesn’t matter anyway. They could have stepped on the dead guy and not have noticed.”

  Mohammad appeared, moving fast. “Everyone, let us meet at once back at the bus! Tell the others. We don’t want to get stopped here and miss our flight.”

  Anni hurried up behind him. “Mohammad is right. Here, Alan. You take Hello Kitty and start for the parking lot.” And she thrust the pink umbrella into Alan’s hands and hurried away to gather the rest of the group. For a moment, I thought he would protest, but he seemed to think better of it.

  We sprang into action. The commotion had drawn everyone together into the center of the market. It was a simple matter to wave Hello Kitty frantically at our fellow passengers and then dash back to the buses. Alan led the way quickly, the feeling of urgency affecting the group. Perhaps we would not have reacted so rapidly had the memory of waiting for hours at the pyramids not been relatively fresh in our memories. Even Flora and Fiona fell into line and for once weren’t the last on the bus. It was Jane’s reaction that shocked me. I thought she was going to faint. In fact, if Ben hadn’t put his arm around her, I think she would have melted to the ground. Terror poured from her like water from a fire hose. Ben and Lydia half dragged, half carried her to the bus.

  Anni urged the driver to start the engine and we were halfway down the hill and on our way to the airport before we saw the first police car. We tensed up as they drove past, but then gave a collective sigh when they didn’t turn around and come after us. We couldn’t have been more relieved had we been guilty of the crime ourselves.

  “Thank goodness we got out of there,” said Nimmi.

  “And thank goodness it had nothing to do with us this time,” said DJ.

  I felt a little sick inside. DJ hadn’t seen the dead man, didn’t know the death was a duplicate of Millie’s. Whatever had happened, it most certainly had something to do with us. I just wasn’t sure how to find out what it was.

  Chapter 8

  SHIPS AND SHOPLIFTING

  The rest of our tour was to be spent aboard a cruise ship, traveling north on the Nile toward Luxor. On the flight back to Aswan, Kyla sat next to me, our quarrel forgotten. The shock of the death had knocked the sense back into both of us. Alan ended up sitting several rows behind me where I couldn’t see him. I wasn’t sure whether I was pleased or not. I had about a million questions for him, but since none of them were remotely polite, I wasn’t sure I would have the nerve to ask them anyway. Questions like, who are you really? Are you a policeman? A spy? Or are you a murderer? No, none of those would have been appropriate for a plane flight.

  Back in Aswan, a bus waited to take us to the docks where four large cruise ships floated on the dark waters of the Nile. The four ships might have been built to the same pattern. Tied together side by side like four horses pulling the same chariot, they occupied only a single mooring in the small harbor, and passengers had to walk through one to get to the next. The captains were clever enough to have them lined up in order of departure, and so when we arrived back at Aswan, we passed through the lobbies of three of the floating hotels before we stepped aboard the Nile Lotus.

  I’d never been on a cruise ship before and had to make an effort to keep my jaw up. Chandeliers, curving staircases, marble floors. The tantalizing odor of lunch and the sound of flatware on china drifted through open doors, reminding us how hungry we were, and spurring us from one ship to the next. Our ship, when we reached it, seemed to be in the middle of the pack in terms of luxury and right at the top in terms of brightness and pleasant atmosphere.

  Kyla put her hands on her hips. “Well, this looks like it might be acceptable.”

  I grinned at her. “Your majesty is pleased?”

  “I’ll let you know when we see our room. Depends on how much bilge water is on the floor.”

  “And I was assured there was a two-rat limit for every room.”

  “Well, okay then.”

  Our hand luggage waited in a pile beside the front desk and we gathered our belongings while Anni doled out the keys to our rooms. We could hear shouts outside. Then the ship gave an almost imperceptible shiver and, slowly, like a glossy crocodile sliding down a riverbank, glided out onto the Nile.

  Despite earlier events, I couldn’t help giving a shiver of my own. To be floating on the Nile was a dream so deep that I’d never really thought I’d ever see it happen. For a moment, I felt disconnected, as though I were on a movie set and nothing around me was quite real. The noise of the groups scrambling for luggage, calling to each other, asking questions—mostly about keys and lunch—seemed insignificant as I stared out the huge windows of the lobby and the ship slipped through the s
apphire water.

  “Hey, I got our keys. Come on, let’s dump our stuff and head for the dining room. I’m starving,” said Kyla, breaking the spell.

  Our cabins were on the second floor, up the great curving flight of stairs, and Kyla and I looked at each other before we opened the door.

  “If we have bunk beds, I call the top,” she said with a grin.

  “If we have hammocks, I call the one without the rats.”

  But when we opened the door we were very pleased to find what could pass as a very decent, if small, hotel room in any city. If the bathroom hadn’t been raised about six inches higher than the rest of the room with a door that closed like a porthole, and if the banks of the Nile weren’t streaming by outside the huge picture window, we could have fooled ourselves into thinking we were in France.

  Kyla threw herself onto the closest bed. “What a morning,” she said.

  “Get up,” I said, tossing my bag onto the far bed. I knew that she’d let me have the bed nearest the window as another peace offering. “Lunch calls.”

  She bounced back up immediately. “Say no more.” She vanished into the tiny bathroom, and I sat down to wait for her.

  “What do you think about that guy being dead?” she called through the door.

  I knew I should be used to her habit of talking while on the toilet, but I wasn’t.

  “I think he was murdered,” I called. “And I think it has something to do with our group.”

  “What?” she shouted. Because of course by this time she was washing her hands and couldn’t hear the conversation she’d started.

  I didn’t bother to repeat myself until she reappeared. There should be rules about talking on the toilet. In fact, there probably were. I was pretty sure Miss Manners would have something to say about it.

  “Murder’s a pretty strong word. But it does seem to be too much of a coincidence,” she admitted, as she stepped out.

  “Millie was killed exactly the same way. You remember, Alan told us she’d been stabbed in the back of the neck. We just didn’t see it on her because she was lying on her back. This guy was on his face.”

  “That must have been pretty awful.”

  “Well, yeah. What with being dead and all.”

  “No, I mean for you. More awful for him, of course,” she admitted. “But still not much fun to see.”

  “The really weird thing was Alan,” I blurted out. I hated the feeling of mistrust that I couldn’t put aside. “He was checking the body and asking questions.”

  “Pretty sexy, huh?”

  “No!”

  She raised her eyebrows.

  “No!” I insisted. “Checking dead bodies is not sexy.”

  “Methinks thou doth protest too much,” she misquoted gleefully.

  “Are we in high school here? Focus!”

  She opened her bag, pulled out her makeup kit, and emptied the contents onto the vanity. “Look, maybe he’s just a take-charge kind of guy,” she said, applying lipstick. “He just likes to know what’s going on. You can’t honestly think he’s involved in any way.”

  I didn’t reply. That was just what I was beginning to think. “We don’t really know anything about him,” I said slowly.

  “We know lots of things. He’s from Dallas, he’s a financial analyst, his wife’s dead, and he’s got a nice ass.”

  “Okay, we know that last one,” I admitted. “We’ve seen that for ourselves. But we don’t really know that other stuff. If you think about it, we don’t know anything about anyone here, except what they tell us.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Look. I’ve told everyone here that I’m a high school teacher, God help me. It happens to be true. But I could just as easily have said I was an artist or a programmer or a financial analyst. You’d know I was lying, but no one else here would. They have to take what I said on faith. It’s the same with everyone else. Anyone could be lying.”

  She frowned. “But why would they?”

  “Well, normal people wouldn’t, because they don’t have anything to hide and because keeping up a lie is a lot of work. But if you were planning to kill someone, you’d probably want to use an alias,” I pointed out.

  “So what, you think Alan is serial killer?” She rolled her eyes.

  “No. Of course not. Not exactly, anyway. It’s just…” my voice trailed off. I wasn’t sure what I meant.

  She put her hands on her hips. “Now you’re just being ridiculous. No one would come on a tour to commit multiple murders. That doesn’t even make Hollywood sense. You have to do better than that.”

  “I can’t,” I said. “You’re right, it doesn’t make sense. But you have to admit something really odd is going on. And I want to know what it is.”

  * * *

  Later that afternoon, however, I wasn’t thinking about murder. The next evening’s entertainment was to be a costume party, and Anni was pushing hard for all of us to come to the party in full Egyptian dress. After lunch, she suggested we meet her in the ship’s gift shop, where we would be able to purchase one of the inexpensive Egyptian tunics called galabias as well as jewelry and other accessories, all about as authentic as the plaster statues in the street stalls. We knew it was a chance for her to get us to buy something from someone who was almost certainly a friend. We didn’t care. I, for one, was dying to acquire a few Egyptian things, and she had promised to assist with the bargaining.

  Located on the third floor beside the door that led to the sunning deck, the gift shop was brightly lit, and stuffed to bursting with gold jewelry, small trinkets, plastic pyramids, and carved wooden boxes. Silk scarves in every imaginable color hung from pegs, and several silver racks sagged with the weight of dozens of multicolored galabias of the sort that probably had real Egyptians laughing themselves sick. It didn’t matter in the slightest. Half our little group filled the shop, while the other half waited in the hall for a chance to squeeze inside. The only people I didn’t see were Jerry and Kathy, who were probably down in their rooms tending to her ankle. I couldn’t actually imagine Jerry participating in a costume party anyway.

  The shopkeeper was a rotund middle-aged Egyptian with the patience of Job and a perfect grasp of English. Unlike his counterparts in the markets beside the monuments, he was obviously used to American and European tourists and stood back and let us look to our hearts’ content. He brought out gold pieces from under the counter for Nimmi and Lydia to admire. Seeing DJ rifling through a rack of clothing, he hurried from behind the counter, produced a magnificent black galabia with flowing headdress, and helped DJ try it on. With his dark skin and protruding belly, DJ looked like a desert sheik. Laughing helplessly, Nimmi searched out a bright red galabia and paired it with a belly dancer’s jingling belt. DJ began haggling right away.

  Kyla found a flowing golden galabia that looked more like a pretty dress than a tunic. She slipped it on over her clothes and looked in the full-length mirror. The color brought out the golden highlights in her hair and the pale tan of her skin.

  “That’s perfect on you,” I said honestly, if a little enviously. “Now you just need some gold jewelry.”

  “Can I see that ankh?” she asked the shopkeeper, pointing in one of the display cabinets.

  I wandered away to search through the racks. Nothing was going to compare with the golden outfit, so I started looking at the darker colors. I wondered how many of my choices in life were based on trying not to compete with my cousin. I pushed the garments along their racks and stopped at a deep blue. I considered. The fabric wasn’t the same quality as Kyla’s gold, but it wasn’t as expensive either. It was marked one hundred Egyptian pounds and a quick calculation made that about $20. I pulled it from the rack. Anni joined me.

  “Ah, that is very nice,” she said. “And here, look at this.”

  She pulled a matching scarf from a hook on the wall and wrapped it around my head. Little fake gold coins dangled from the edges and framed my face. She pulled me in front of a mirror.
I thought I looked very exotic and mysterious. Then I blinked, and I looked like a not-so-young tourist playing dress-up with a cheap scarf. I squinted my eyes, trying to get the initial illusion back, then decided it didn’t matter.

  “I’ll take it,” I said, starting for the counter.

  Anni looked at me pityingly. “No, no. You never say that. Here, watch me.”

  She took my things to the cash register and made a little gesture to the shopkeeper.

  “Ah, excuse me,” he said to Nimmi, who was now admiring several pieces of gold jewelry. She gave him a smile of assent, and he turned back to Anni, leaning over the counter with a spark of enthusiasm in his eyes.

  “Ah, Mr. Elgabri, I would like to introduce to you Miss Jocelyn Shore, from America. She is a very special person, and part of this very big group who will be buying many, many fine things from your shop.”

  I listened, admiring Anni’s skill as she very politely pointed out to him that I deserved only the best prices, and moved smoothly into telling him that the things I had chosen, although very beautiful, were really not worth the amounts on the price tags. He was smiling and agreeing how special I was, but pointing out that I had excellent taste and had obviously chosen some of the finest items that he carried. I grinned helplessly, face very red, knowing I would never, ever have the courage to say any of those things. In fact, it would be worth extra not to have to haggle for what I wanted.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed Nimmi was still fingering the pieces of jewelry in the small black velvet tray sitting before her on the counter. Briefly, she laid an elegant little hand over a ring, and when she lifted it, the ring had vanished.