Maria Hudgins - Lacy Glass 01 - Scorpion House (22 page)

“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.

Paul waited until it looked as if the tot was completely engrossed, then surveyed the room. Storage cartons lined the walls but they all seemed to be filled with clothing. He reasoned that Selim would not have stashed the papyrus in a place where a child might find it and draw on it or tear it up. He backed out of the room, still grinning like Bozo the Clown (let me entertain you!) and shuffled up a short flight of stairs to the next door.

Here, he struck pay dirt. As soon as his eyes adjusted to the gloom, he spotted a regular bed such as a husband and wife might share. Along one wall sat a row of cardboard boxes, most of them filled with clothing. One, however—the smallest one—was taped shut. Paul pulled the tape off, looked in, and found a mocha-tinted roll. The herbal papyrus.

Safely back in the secret corridor, he stopped and took a deep breath. The claustrophobic space that had seemed so frightening before now felt like home. The pigeons burbling at his feet were now his little friends. He kissed the cardboard box containing the papyrus, pulled Shelley’s phone from his pocket, and sent Graham a vibrating call to announce “All Clear.”

* * *

Graham was mounting one of Whiz Bang’s bicycles, intending to cycle to the ferry dock, when his cell phone rang again. It was Mike Myerson informing him there had been a glitch in Shelley’s bail negotiations and advising him to stay put. Graham had a fit. Paul, eavesdropping, deduced from Graham’s half of the conversation that Myerson preferred to handle the delicate situation with the hot-headed husband safely on the other side of the river. At length, Myerson persuaded Graham to sit tight, assuring him he was doing everything possible to spring Shelley and promising he would call back the minute there was a breakthrough.

* * *

Roxanne called a summit conference in the antika room after dinner. They pulled the computer table out from the wall and arranged chairs around it. Even Bay, having nbeen persuaded to delay her evening temple rites, was there.

“I think Lacy deserves an academy award for her performance today,” Graham said, cracking his knuckles nervously. “She kept Selim’s wife and kids, total strangers you understand, engrossed in conversation outside their house for eighteen minutes. And she did it in Arabic, which she doesn’t even speak.”

“I think I promised them a block party with balloons and free food,” Lacy muttered. “But I’m not sure because I don’t speak Arabic.”

Paul guffawed, but let his laugh trail off when no one else joined him.

Lacy reached over and laid a feather-light hand on Paul’s shoulder. “Paul deserves the award, for breaking into a child’s bedroom and putting on such a show the child forgot to scream.”

“Yeah, who was that kid? Selim said he had two kids, but we had two kids outside with us.” Graham looked around the group.

“I lost a good yo-yo.”

“You
will
have your laugh, won’t you? This is serious, so let’s get started,” Roxanne placed the papyrus roll on the center of the table, and then laid another strip beside it. “Which of these is the real herbal papyrus?”

Everyone except Horace Lanier looked confused.

“They both are.” She answered her own question. “Unbeknownst to me or anyone else, Horace saw fit to cut the original five-foot strip in two.”