Maria Hudgins - Lacy Glass 01 - Scorpion House (2 page)

Adjusting her grip, Lacy pried Otto’s mouth open, ran her finger around inside and pulled out several bits of grass. She held the cat up by the scruff of its neck, turning the body so the wind-milling legs pointed away from her and took advantage of the next yowl to check the mouth again. It looked empty.

She set the furious Otto on the floor and looked at her arms. Both were bleeding. They looked as if they’d been plowed. “What moron put the Johnsongrass down here where Otto could get to it?”

Otto flew up the aisle and leaped onto a cart. The cart rolled forward and the cat, in one of those maneuvers only a cat can pull off, flew upward to the shelf where Lacy had placed the jar of phosphate-removing granules, pushed away from the wall with its back feet and knocked the jar off.

The jar tipped sideways. The lid flew away and sprayed scores of granules into the air above the tanks.

Friedman lunged forward and plucked the jar out of tank number one.

“Never mind. It’s too late now.” Lacy watched as nutrient-destroying pellets sank through the water of several tanks.

“Can you clean it up before tomorrow?”

She shook her head, fighting back the tears.

“A years’ work down the drain?”

“Yeah, pretty much.” Lacy tapped the red switches on two power strips with the toe of her shoe. The pumps fell silent. “I’m starting to get the message. I’m in the wrong line of work.”

Friedman made a small move toward her, then stopped. His expression said
I wish I knew what to say
. He backed out through the swinging door that led to the rest of the biology building. “Your little friend is out here.”

Lacy joined him.

Otto sat in an alcove a few feet down the hall, his paws placed precisely side-by-side, his ears down and back.

“Hey, Fur-face.” Lacy said. “You forgive me?”

Otto glared at her through narrowed green eyes.

W
hile Lacy was watching Otto for signs of a reaction to the Johnsongrass, Dr. Horace Lanier stood on the roof of his mud-brick home on the west bank of the Nile sipping his evening coffee. He watched the Theban hills darken from amber to burgundy as the Earth turned this ancient side of its face away from the sun. As it had done a million-and-a-half times since the pharaohs ordered themselves tucked into the valley beyond the ridge a few hundred yards away.

All along the ridge and down its slope into a cluster of hovels, dozens of holes pockmarked the bare rock. Some of these holes were tombs of nobles, priests, members of pharaohs’ inner circles. Some were just holes. Some of the tombs were decorated and some weren’t. Some had been explored, excavated, mapped and documented with photos and diagrams. Some hadn’t. If the odds of discovering a new tomb in the Valley of the Kings across the hill were slim, the odds of discovering a new tomb on this side weren’t too bad. The last tomb unearthed in the Valley of the Kings was number sixty-three, discovered in 2004. The last one before that was the tomb of Tutankhamen in 1922.

The tombs on this side of the ridge, sometimes called the Valley of the Nobles, numbered more than five hundred, and the researchers with whom Dr. Lanier shared this house had permission from the SCA (Supreme Council for Antiquities, the Cairo-based ultimate authority over this sort of thing) to explore, map, and document one of them.

“Allah u akbar!”
The evening call to prayer from the minaret of a nearby mosque. They used loudspeakers now so the muezzins no longer had to run all the way up the stairs five times a day but, by local agreement, the muezzins themselves were still real men rather than recordings.

“Allah u akbar!”
Another call from a mosque on the other side of the Nile. A bit out of sync, Lanier thought, either because the sound took longer to travel the greater distance or because one of the muezzins needed to adjust his watch. Sometimes he could hear calls to prayer from as many as five mosques at once, depending on the wind.

Dr. Lanier was standing above the porch of the residence hall, where they gathered in the evening for coffee and scientific debate, the intensity of each depending on the topic and who made the coffee. The Temple of Hatshepsut, a female pharaoh of the Eighteenth Dynasty, nestled against the ridge to the north. On this side of the temple, a scattering of backhoes, pushcarts and graders sat idle, after their day’s work demolishing hovels or restoring the temple, both long-term projects which had been underway for years.

Scattered around the roof where Lanier stood and leaning against the low retaining wall of its perimeter, dozens of clay pots sat cooling from a day under the desert sun. Two large stucco domes, one over Lanier’s laboratory the other above the dining room, popped up like bubbles in a mudpot on either end of the roof, its flatness otherwise interrupted only by a couple of canvas chairs, a stack of blue tarps, and a metal kitchen vent.

A thud followed by a crash flew up from below. As nearly as he could locate the source, Lanier decided it must have come from his own quarters on the east end of the building. Had he left his outside door open? If he had, maybe a dog, a goat, or a child had dropped in for a look-see and knocked something over. He hurried, sloshing his coffee across the front of his shirt, to that end of the roof and looked down. His door did appear to be slightly ajar.

Cursing the absence of stairs on this side of the roof, he set his cup down and rushed to the center where a rectangular hole opened on a concrete stairway to the floor below. As fast as his aged knees would allow, he descended the steps and ten seconds later he stood in the big central workroom. He looked all around but saw no one. This room with its tile floor was encircled by benches built into the walls and punctuated by a dozen archways, some with doors, some without. Archways that led east to bedrooms, south to laboratory and equipment rooms, west to the kitchen, the dining room and more bedrooms, and north to a long, open-air veranda.

Lanier realized the only other residents at the moment were three fellow researchers all of whom were out for the evening. Bay, the cook, had already left. He had seen her walking toward Hatshepsut’s temple a half-hour earlier.

He flew down the hall past empty bedrooms to his own lab and banged the door open. A wooden table lay upended in the middle of the floor. The glass bowl he had left on it lay smashed and its contents—a mixture of wine, honey, saffron, raisins, sweet flag, juniper berries, and myrrh—splattered across the floor. His ceramic mortar and pestle had rolled across the mess leaving thin trails of goo in their wakes.

Lanier, his heart leaping into his throat, ran to the workbench along one wall, dropped to his knees and scanned the row of pots underneath. He counted down seven pots from the left end, pulled one out and snatched the plug from its neck. He turned the open pot so the light could enter.

“Thank you, God!” he said aloud. The papyrus was still there.

Lanier plugged the pot and replaced it in its usual spot. Seventh from the left end. Now it looked no different from the other twenty or so pots he kept under that bench. He rose shakily to his feet and hobbled across to the exterior door. He scanned the vista from north to south. Nothing. No one. And no one could have gone out that door recently or he would have seen them from the roof. There was nothing but sand, rock, dirt, and ruins for more than a mile in all directions. To the north lay a parking area for visitors to the temple, too far away for anyone to have run in such a short time.

Inside, he checked his own bedroom. Lanier slept and kept all his earthly belongings in a Spartan room with one window over his cot and one door that opened onto his lab. His whole life was in these two rooms, but he was obviously not sharing them with anyone else at the moment. His bedroom was tidy, exactly as he had left it.

He checked the kitchen, the storage rooms, the dining room, and peeked down the hall leading to the library and more bedrooms. He threw open the screen door to the veranda. Gazing through one of the arches that framed the distant hills and temple, he spotted a cloud of yellow dust. A dark green Jeep bounced up the rutted driveway and disappeared around the side of the house.

I
t was a short flight from Dulles to JFK.

Lacy stuffed her pea coat into the overhead bin beside her carryon bag and shoved both aside to make room for Susan Donohue’s, then noticed Susan wasn’t wearing a coat. The walk from the parking lot to the terminal, with strong wind and temperature in the teens, had chilled Lacy right through her heavy coat.

“No coat?”

“We’re going to Egypt,” Susan said. “You’ll get sick of toting that pea coat around.” She struggled on tip-toes to loft her own bag into the bin.

“I don’t plan to tote it around for three months,” Lacy teased. “I plan to leave it in my room.” She helped the shorter Susan push her bag back until it was safe from falling out.

“Whew! They’ve really got the heat cranked up, don’t they?” Susan pulled off her knit cap and re-spiked her auburn hair by running her fingers through it. She was a little woman, about forty, and no more than ninety pounds. With a nose too long to qualify her face as pretty. Her big, brown eyes gave her a perpetually startled look.

Lacy took a better look at her travel companion and realized that Susan was much rounder than usual. In fact her normally wiry frame was positively rotund. She watched as Susan stuffed herself between the armrests.

“I had to wear most of my clothes and my desert boots because they wouldn’t fit in my luggage.”

Lacy laughed.

“You wouldn’t believe the paperwork I had to bring. Plus my laptop.” Susan was the project’s leader. She began peeling back layers of material at her waistline, counting the shells, shirts, and T-shirts as she peeled. They counted eleven layers. Next to her skin, the last layer was a plastic-coated nicotine patch.

“You’ve quit smoking?”

“I’m in the process of quitting. It’s too soon to brag. This is my twelfth day on the patch.”

“Good luck,” Lacy snapped her own seat belt and pulled it tight across her lap. “I’ll bet it was a bitch, organizing this trip.”

“You would not believe it.” Susan fanned her face. “Sorry, Lacy, I have to lose a couple of tops.” She shed a long-sleeved shirt and pulled two T-shirts over her head. “And I hope you realize how privileged you are to have been selected.”

Lacy bristled inside at the implication that she was lucky to be a part of the expedition but kept her face neutral. “A lot of people wanted to go?”

“Dozens.” Susan rolled the shed clothing into a ball and shoved it under her seat. “I got applications and queries from all over the country. Like, ‘I have a PhD in Egyptology and I’ve won three Nobel Prizes. May I please, please join you?’” Susan pressed her palms together in a mocking plea. Her eyes darted to Lacy’s as if she was expecting a laugh.

“I’m honored. I hope I won’t let you down.” Lacy didn’t feel like laughing.

“Oh, you were a shoo-in, actually. Joel Friedman thinks you hung the moon.”

“Not today, he doesn’t. Yesterday he watched me and a cat trash my whole wavelength-versus-pigment project.” She recounted the debacle in the greenhouse.

“We’ve got a great team, you know.” Susan gave her a sideways glance. The team’s only bona fide Egyptologist, Susan had spent the previous dig season working and living at the place they were going to now. She already knew the living quarters and the researchers with whom they would be staying. “You on pigments, Graham on chemical analysis, Friedman on taxonomic identification, and me on hieroglyphs and hieratics.”

“And Shelley?”

Susan gave her a blank look.

“Shelley Clark? Graham’s wife?”

“And Shelley on textiles.”

“Was she your choice?”

“No.” Susan pulled a magazine from her seat-back pocket. “If it hadn’t been for pressure from certain quarters, I’d have chosen someone with expertise in something other than Apache blankets.” She opened the magazine, raised her eyebrows at an ad for Seagram’s gin, then slammed it onto her lap. “I went to Graham’s lab yesterday and I told him, I said, ‘Anyone who doesn’t pull their own weight on this project will be sent home!’ “ She tapped the armrest between them for emphasis. “By me! We don’t have enough grant money to waste it on someone who’s there for a nice vacation.”

“Meaning Shelley.”

“Meaning Shelley.”

“What did Graham say?”

“Just shrugged, like he always does.”

Lacy conjured a mental picture of that exchange: Graham, clueless and careless about the tug-of-war between two women, shrugging and returning to his bubbling flasks. “You don’t like Shelley, do you?”

“I don’t
dis
like her, but she gets on my nerves. She’s a one-upper.”

“A one-upper?”

“You know the type. If you’ve been to Alaska, they’ve been to Antarctica. If your parents met the president, hers met the queen. Always thinking of a way to go you one better. You can practically see the wheels turning in Shelley’s head when you’re talking to her. She’s paying no attention to what you’re talking about, she’s thinking,
Now, how can I top this
?”

“I know the type,” Lacy said. “I think I’ll tell her I have herpes.”

* * *

Lacy closed her eyes and relived the demise of her precious project. The project that might have revealed how plants adjust their colors to take advantage of whatever light was available to them but which would have at least assured her of tenure. She could set it all up again, of course. Probably faster this time since she’d already made all the mistakes. At the moment, she didn’t have the will to think about it. Perhaps it was best that she was going to Egypt. A three-month hiatus.

Starting over would mean another road trip up and down the Eastern Seaboard collecting the right species of seaweeds. Before her last trip, in August, she had phoned ahead for reservations at quaint-sounding bed-and-breakfasts spaced at easy days’ driving distances apart from Cape May, New Jersey to Nova Scotia. Rooms for two with double beds because Bart was going with her. She had imagined days wandering rocky shorelines, snorkeling, playing with Bart in sunny waters. Nights in Bart’s arms.