Maria Hudgins - Lacy Glass 01 - Scorpion House (16 page)

“Only if you promise me you’ll ask Kathleen’s
permission
before you compare them to the ones in her room.”

A
fter dinner that evening the gin-and-tonics were going down easily and often. The air, hot and still, made coffee sound unappealing. Only Kathleen opted for something non-alcoholic. She had iced hibiscus tea. They sat in a rough semicircle on the porch with Paul sitting on the floor, his back against a column.

“Where’s Susan? Why wasn’t she at dinner?” Lacy asked, fanning the back of her neck with the latest issue of
Archaeology
magazine.

“She has a dinner date,” Roxanne said. “With a doctor from the hospital across the river.”

“Oh right. He called her this afternoon.”

“His name’s Dave and he’ll be here shortly.” Susan appeared in the doorway. “Anyone want me to make them a drink while I’m making one for myself?”

Graham raised his eyebrows and his empty glass. Thus far, he hadn’t mentioned the kisses in the burial chamber to Lacy and she hadn’t mentioned it either. Was she imagining it, or was Shelley looking daggers through her whenever she turned her back? She decided it was probably her imagination. Graham’s broad shoulders and lean torso, silhouetted in the temple light, tempted her cruelly.

“Those vases in the transverse hall,” Lacy said, forcing her mind onto a new path. “I’m finding cobalt in the blue paint. The blue on the wall and in all the other pottery contains copper.”

Roxanne said, “Those vases must be from Amarna, then. We suspected as much. In Amarna they used what we call ‘Amarna Blue’ but most everything painted here in Thebes was done with what we call ‘Egyptian Blue’.”

“So those vases aren’t local.”

“No. And what does that tell us?” Roxanne went on. “It tells us that the tomb was open during or after the Amarna Period of the Eighteenth Dynasty.”

Graham leaned forward, his elbows resting on his knees. “Didn’t you say you found Nefertiti’s cartouche on a jar in the new chamber?”

“What’s Nefertiti’s jar doing in Kheti’s tomb?” Shelley asked.

“That’s what we’d love to know.”

“Maybe he and Nefertiti were closer than anyone thinks,” Paul said.

“Not likely,” Roxanne said. “The best we can figure, Kheti would have been an old man when Nefertiti married Akhenaten, and she married in her teens.”

“They didn’t pay much attention to little things like age or kinship when it came to coupling. In fact, they married their own brothers and sisters.”

“Yes, and their own fathers, sometimes,” Roxanne said.

Susan returned to the porch with fresh drinks for herself and Graham. She took control of the discussion. “Nefertiti outlived her husband by a number of years. After his seventeen-year reign, she became pharaoh herself, using the name Smenkhkare.”

Light from Hatshepsut’s temple reflected off the tight-lipped grimace on Roxanne face.

Susan went on. “Nefertiti was the power behind the throne, anyway. Monotheism wasn’t Akhenaten’s idea, it was hers. She changed her name to reflect her devotion to the sun god, Aten, before her husband changed his.
He
followed
her
.”

“Where do you think her mummy is?” Graham asked.

“It’s probably the one they’ve found in tomb KV 35.”

“Then why is her canopic jar here, in our tomb?” Kathleen asked. Her voice sounded as if she wanted a confrontation, not an answer. Roxanne had spent the hour before dinner in Kathleen’s room, talking her down from her white-hot fury over the scorching of the tomb linens.

Susan answered in a sarcastic tone. “That’s what we’ll have to find out, isn’t it? That is,
if
we’re ever allowed to actually see it!”

Kathleen answered that blatant slam with, “I don’t intend to let these canopic jars suffer the same fate as everything else from Amarna. Wall inscriptions hacked off, statues smashed, building blocks used for fill.”

“Too bad you weren’t there when the place was abandoned. You’d have had the whole city shrink-wrapped.” Susan muttered.

Lacy noticed the warning glare that Graham shot Susan.

“Nefertiti was
not
Smenkhkare.” Roxanne said. “Nefertiti probably died before her husband. She’d borne six daughters, after all, and in those days a woman was lucky to survive
one
birth, let alone six. Smenkhkare was probably Akhenaten’s son-in-law. I believe he was married to one of Akhenaten and Nefertiti’s daughters.

“And monotheism was clearly Akhenaten’s idea. Nefertiti went along with it because she had no choice. Those who give Nefertiti credit or blame for everything—and they’re all women—are simply on a girl-power trip.”

Susan jumped up, kicking over her drink as she stood. “That does it! I’m going to my room.” With that, she clomped away knocking over her chair, slamming the screen door, and leaving her overturned glass on the porch floor.

Graham nodded a silent message to Shelley. He curved his mouth into an O and tilted his head toward the door. Shelley got up and followed Susan in but she returned to the porch shortly. “She vants to be alone,” she said in a deep, Greta Garbo voice.

Roxanne went on. “At any rate, it fell to Tutankhamen to restore the old gods, move the capital from Amarna to Memphis, and begin to rebuild the country’s infrastructure.

“What?” Paul interjected. “He was ten years old! Are you telling me a ten-year-old boy says, (Paul deepened his voice, raised one hand) ‘We must bring back the old gods that for so many centuries have served us well. We must leave this place and establish a new capital. Let us move to Memphis!’ Are you kidding me? That’s not what a ten-year-old boy says. A ten-year-old boy says, (Paul raised his voice up an octave) ‘When can I drive the chariot all by myself?’ “

Lacy had to laugh.

“Well, he may not have done it as soon as he took the throne. He didn’t die until he was about nineteen,” Roxanne said.

“And he had plenty of advisors,” Horace said. “As a ten-year-old boy he may have simply rubber-stamped their suggestions.”

Paul appeared to be feeling his gin. Lacy thought it looked as if he was deliberately trying to see how much it would take to send Roxanne flying off to her own room, as Susan had just done. If Susan was prone to pomposity on the subject of archaeology, Lacy thought, so was Roxanne. Paul asked who else, other than himself, wanted another drink and left the porch carrying three glasses.

A strange car chugged up the drive followed by a cloud of dust. Dr. Dave had arrived. Dressed tonight in a shirt and tie, Lacy vaguely recalled meeting the red-haired man in the hospital emergency room the morning they’d brought Joel in. Dave had been wearing a white lab coat then.

“Susan’s in her room. But you might want to wait a minute before you go in,” Shelley said.

Briefly, Roxanne explained the circumstances that caused Susan to leave the porch in a huff. Paul, carrying three fresh drinks, kicked the screen door open with his foot, distributed the drinks, and shook hands with Dave.

“Roxanne’s been telling me about your views on King Tut,” Dave said, with a slight grin.

“I have a theory,” Paul said after resuming his chair. “I think Akhenaten was sterile. He had something seriously wrong with him—I read some names but I can’t remember what they are, Martin’s syndrome or Frommer’s or something—that made him sterile. Those six daughters were Nefertiti’s but they weren’t his. She had a lover on the side. Maybe more than one.”

Roxanne drummed her fingers on the arm of her rocking chair.

Paul leaned forward, his eyebrows raised. “King Tut wasn’t Akhenaten’s kid either. His mother was that little second-team wife, Kiya, but his father could have been anybody. Maybe Kheti. At any rate, all of Akhenaten’s wives either had lovers on the side or else they were childless.”

“You aren’t the first to make that suggestion,” Roxanne said.

“Damn! That’s disappointing.”

“But it’s been pretty thoroughly abandoned by the real experts,” Roxanne added.

Graham, who had gone into the house at the same time Paul had, came out and announced, “Horace, phone call.”

Lanier jumped. He clearly wasn’t expecting a call. He got up and dashed into the house.

Paul followed Roxanne’s put-down with, “On what grounds did the ‘real experts’ decide my theory wasn’t worth considering? I think it’s a damn good theory.”

“For a number of reasons but most especially because of the simple fact that Akhenaten was the pharaoh. You didn’t fool around with the pharaoh’s wives. If you did, they chopped off your head.”

“Oh, come on, Roxanne. If you’re the pharaoh and you’ve got dozens of gorgeous babes in your harem, are you going to let the world know you’ve got no lead in your pencil? Or maybe no pencil?”

Lacy’s mind flashed on the photo of the sexless colossus.

“What are you going to say when people notice none of your wives have any children?” Paul went on. “If it was just one wife, you could blame her, but if it’s twenty wives, they can’t
all
be barren!

“So what do you do if you’re the pharaoh, a living god, and you don’t want your subjects to know you’re not all that omnipotent? At least you ought to be able to make a
few
babies. Here’s what you do. You order the guards at the harem door to pay no attention to late-night visitors. That’s what you do.”

Lacy giggled to herself. This was fun.

Horace Lanier tumbled out onto the porch, banging the screen door against the side of the house.

“Something’s wrong with Susan! She needs help.”

* * *

In a cluster, they all rushed across the big antika room, through the door to the east wing, and into Susan’s room.

Susan lay on the floor near her writing desk, curled up, her whole body jerking spasmodically. Paul got to her first and grabbed her up, cradling her upper body in the crook of his arm. She was pale and sweating so profusely her hair and shirt were soaked. A trickle of drool ran sideways from the left corner of her mouth to the angle of her jaw. Her throat made a grating, rasping noise as she struggled to breathe.

Dave pushed him aside. He pried her mouth open, peered in and turned her onto her left side. He barked, “Call an ambulance!”

His knee slipped on a smear of what looked like vomit. “I need something to …” He looked around the room, pointed to a brass luggage tag on a suitcase near the foot of her bed. “Rip that off. Give it to me.”

The tag was attached to the handle by a buckled strap. Lacy unfastened it quickly and handed it over. Dave inserted it into Susan’s mouth. An emergency tongue depressor.

Susan was wearing no blouse or shoes, only a thin, maroon skirt and a flesh-tone bra. On top of her bed lay a white blouse, silver earrings and bracelet, black sandals.

Horace Lanier came in with a coffee mug. “Maybe she can keep a little of this down,” he said, kneeling beside her.

“No!” Dave pushed him away.

“It won’t do any harm and it might help.”

“Take it away,” Dave’s voice was firm.

Susan’s whole body shuddered violently, jerking completely out of Dave’s grasp. She stiffened. Her eyes opened wide for a second. Terror.

She stopped breathing.

Dave set to work applying CPR. After fifteen minutes he let Paul relieve him. After another fifteen minutes Graham took over for a while then Dave resumed the grim task. The ambulance had to be dispatched from Luxor Hospital on the east bank so it took three-quarters of an hour to get there.

On Susan’s desk, make-up was strewn around a small mirror she had propped up against a stack of books. A saucer held one cigarette butt crushed into a V. Another one lay on the saucer’s lip, filter tip outward. The filter tip formed the caboose of an ash train that stretched across the middle of the saucer. Obviously, it had been set down and allowed to burn out by itself.

No one spoke until Roxanne appeared at the door and announced, “The ambulance is here.” Paramedics carried Susan out and Dave stepped into the ambulance beside her blanket-wrapped body.

“What about your car, Dave?” Roxanne asked.

“Oh yes. I forgot I have a car here.”

“I’ll ride in the ambulance and you can follow in your car.”

“Actually, I think the EMTs need all the work space they can get. Why don’t you ride with me?”

* * *

Paul, Graham, Horace, and Lacy were left in Susan’s room, staring silently at each other.

“Did you notice this?” Paul picked up the pack of Marlboros lying beside the saucer.

“I thought she quit smoking,” Lanier said.

“She’s wearing the patch.”

“She was wearing one tonight. On her arm. I saw it,” Graham said. He pressed his palms together, raised them to his lips. “Nicotine poisoning. Absolutely.”

“Would that be enough to kill her? Two cigarettes and a patch?” Lacy’s mind raced ahead. Surely, if that would do it, there’d be hundreds of deaths in the U.S. every day—people trying to quit, wearing the patch, weakening, giving in to temptation.”

“Susan’s so small, though. It might not take as much.”

“But as a smoker, she’d probably built up tolerance.”

“I don’t know the symptoms of nicotine poisoning,” Paul said. He slid Susan’s top dresser drawer open and pulled out three boxes of nicotine patches. Three different colors and sizes. Three strengths. Seven, fourteen, and twenty-one milligrams.

“I do,” Graham answered. “Nausea, difficulty breathing, pallor, sweating, drooling, seizures.”

“Damn!” Lanier shook his head.

“You know what else?” Paul asked. “What’s missing here?” When the others said nothing, he raised his head and inhaled. “The smell of smoke. The window is shut. If Susan was in here smoking like a chimney, we’d still be able to smell the smoke. I smell nothing but stale ashes.”

Horace Lanier went pale.

Graham flung both hands out like a traffic cop. “My God. Don’t touch anything else. Let’s get out of here and shut the door. This is a crime scene!”

T
hey all headed for the porch. Lacy filled her lungs with the night air, closed her eyes, and tried to think. A crime scene?

“A crime scene?” Paul broke the silence. “Isn’t that a bit drastic? You can’t know that for sure!”