Maria Hudgins - Lacy Glass 01 - Scorpion House (3 page)

Bart had backed out at the last minute. Couldn’t leave work, he told her. The veterinarian who was to have filled in for him had a family emergency. So she went alone, filled the back of her SUV with coolers of sloshing seaweed, and curled up each night in a series of double beds, sometimes without even washing the saltwater off her legs.

When she returned home, Bart was engaged to somebody else. Someone he must have had a relationship with before she left, she figured, because Bart was not a fast worker. In October Lacy heard he had married a paralegal with a Jack Russell terrier.

Returning in her mind to yesterday in the greenhouse, she worried that she should have watched Otto longer to make certain he suffered no ill effects from the Johnsongrass. Perhaps she should have taken him to the vet.

Forget that. His vet was Bart.

The eastern seaboard slipped smoothly under the belly of their plane until Lacy looked across the top of Susan’s magazine and saw the skyscrapers of Manhattan.

* * *

The EgyptAir plane with a red-and-gold logo of Horus the falcon god on its tail crouched on the tarmac, its wheels in furrows of dirty snow. Their five seats, they found, were scattered around the tourist section with Graham and Shelley Clark together on the left side, Susan on the right, Joel Friedman and Lacy a dozen rows behind Susan but with a middle-aged woman in the seat between them.

“Excuse me! Are you two going to talk across me like I’m a backyard fence all the way to Cairo?” the woman griped.

“We are traveling together,” Lacy said. “I don’t know why we don’t have seats together. Would you like to change with one of us?”

The woman snorted, then looked at Joel’s aisle seat. “I’ll change with him.”

The exchange was made. Friedman, now sitting in the middle, twisted his large mouth toward Lacy and muttered, “Thanks a bunch for relieving me of my leg room,” his long legs folded tightly into the scant space available.

“I’ll trade with you,” Lacy said, noting that the outward curve of the bulkhead on her right afforded a little extra room beneath the window. Friedman’s legs were slightly longer and much older than her own.

Friedman suggested they trade seats halfway through the flight.

“Tell me about Horace Lanier. What’s this big thing he’s on to?” Lacy asked as soon as the roar of the plane’s take-off subsided.

“I shouldn’t have mentioned it. I was sworn to secrecy. It’s a papyrus he’s discovered. It’s going to change a lot of ideas.” Friedman asked the flight attendant for a scotch and soda.

“I’m sorry sir. We don’t serve alcohol.”

“I forgot. Egyptian airline. Muslim. Make it tomato juice.” He turned to Lacy and raised an eyebrow.

“Water, please. Why the secrecy?” Lacy nudged Friedman back to the subject.

“He’ll tell you about it himself when he’s ready. For now, he doesn’t want certain people to know.” Friedman pushed himself up with an elbow against the back of his seat and peered forward. “Susan. He mainly doesn’t want Susan to know.”

Lacy figured Friedman would explain that and, when he didn’t, tried another tack. “Dr. Lanier used to be head of our biology department, didn’t he?”

“Right. He left five years ago and I took his place. I hired you the next fall, right? Yes. So he was gone by the time you came.”

Friedman had served as department head for two years until a heart attack forced him to step down and take lighter teaching duties. Lacy thought back to that time five years ago when Friedman had recruited her from her California school, and she had moved to the East Coast.

“There was some sort of scandal.”

“A tragedy.” Friedman took Lacy’s water from the flight attendant and passed it over, but splashed a bit of his own tomato juice across the seat back in front of him and onto the middle-aged woman’s blue slacks. The woman shot him an evil look and took off for the bathroom. “Horace’s wife was murdered. Strychnine.” His chin jerked backward on that last word. “The case was never solved. That was the problem. They had no suspects, really. It happened up in the mountains. They had a summer place west of Harrisonburg.

“With no suspects, suspicion naturally falls on the husband, although Horace was in Charlottesville at the time of the murder. Their son, Marcus, also got the third degree from the police but he had a pretty good alibi as well.”

“Then what?”

The woman returned to her aisle seat, still blotting a large wet spot above her right knee with a tissue. Friedman muttered apologies and got nothing but a glare in reply.

“That was it. No other suspects, no arrests, but a lot of speculation.” Friedman drew in a breath. “The gossip got worse and worse, and finally Horace said, ‘Screw this.’ He resigned and moved to Egypt.”

“Why Egypt?”

“Because he’s interested in the herbology and medical knowledge of the ancient Egyptians and because he sees the Nile ecosystem undergoing changes that threaten to wipe out many of the species the ancients used.”

“And he just happens to be living at the same place we’ll be staying?” Lacy sipped her water. “Or is he the one who invited us?”

“Neither, actually. Roxanne Breen is an Egyptologist from England and she’s in charge of the expedition house. She and Susan have worked together before. It’s Roxanne who invited Horace and now she’s making room for us.”

Lacy made a pre-dinner trip to the bathroom and returned to her seat by the other aisle, which took her past the Clarks. Graham, tall and lanky with curly hair the color of maple syrup and periwinkle blue eyes, had the brighter plumage of the pair. His wife, Shelley, reminded Lacy of a tall version of Susan Donohue. Large brown eyes, oval face, and a body that was all knobs and angles. They had no children. Both had taught at Wythe since before their marriage and both had grown up in the local area. Graham, much to his chagrin, had made the superlatives page in a fall issue of the Wythe University student newspaper as “Sexiest Science Geek.”

“Have you heard about our equipment? Has it been delivered yet?” Lacy asked Graham, who was plugged into the armrest and watching the overhead TV.

Graham pulled his ear buds out. “Haven’t heard a thing. We turned in the paperwork in July, but Susan says things in Egypt are on
Inshallah
time.”

“Meaning whenever … ‘God willing’ “ Shelley added. “It’s one of the Arabic phrases you need to get around in Egypt.”

Even more than Susan Donohue, Graham had been the prime mover of this project. The original idea—using physical scientists, rather than Egyptologists and archaeologists, to analyze a tomb—had been his. He had proposed the concept to Susan last spring when she returned to school after her dig season in Egypt. Hundreds of ancient sites had been explored in Egypt over the last century or two, but only by people with a pre-existing knowledge of Egyptian history. A history that often proved to be wrong and misleading. Had this knowledge colored the way they looked at what they found? Graham suggested that it must have. What if a tomb could be examined using twenty-first century techniques and by people who knew
nothing
about history? Mightn’t fresh eyes see what educated eyes couldn’t? Susan had agreed and, together, they had scrounged grant money, pitched the idea to the powers-that-be in Cairo, and decided who they wanted to join them.

Graham settled back in his seat. “Those men standing by the bathroom door were checking you out when you walked back here.”

Shelley’s swift glance up and down Lacy’s long, athletic body carried with it a flash of unabashed resentment.

* * *

When their dinner trays arrived, Friedman pulled a bottle from his jacket pocket and shook out one pill. “Did my wife tell you to make sure I take my digoxin?”

“She did.” As a matter of fact, Joan Friedman had reminded Lacy to do just that when they had talked by phone yesterday.

“You can relax until tomorrow,” he said, downing the pill with the last of his tomato juice.

D
r. Roxanne Breen, Egyptologist from Oxford, barged into Horace Lanier’s lab without knocking. Her frizzy hair shoved back by the reading glasses on top of her head, she approached him with her hands pressed together, prayerfully, in front of her. “You
must
put the papyrus back in the tomb, Horace. Now!”

“It’s safe. Don’t you worry.”

“Someone knows it’s here! Obviously, that’s what they were looking for—whoever it was.”

“I’ve taken care of it.”

“You’ve put it back?” The relief in her voice was palpable.

“I didn’t say that. I said, ‘I’ve taken care of it.’ “ Lanier leaned forward, squinting at a handwritten recipe tacked to the corkboard above his worktable. An ancient Egyptian toothache remedy. Selecting a jar labeled “carob” from the row of powdered materials at the back of the table, he pointed to the label. “Thanks to the papyrus, we now know for sure that we’re supposed to use carob, not colocynth.”

Roxanne shivered a little. “
How
have you taken care of it, Horace, if you haven’t put it back?”

“Check the door. New lock.”

The room’s only exterior door now wore a chain and padlock.

“That’s not what you need to be worrying about, Horace. You need to worry about Susan Donohue. She’ll be here tomorrow and
someone
knows the papyrus is in this room. If Susan finds out, it’s all over for you. She’ll run straight to the Council and there goes your access to the museum. In fact, there goes your work visa!”

“I can handle Susan.”

“
No one
can handle Susan.”

A
warm Cairo breeze swept them from the plane to the waiting shuttle and into the terminal, where they queued up at the back of a long line for the visa booth. Lacy felt groggy and jet-lagged. She needed a good run to work the kinks out of her legs.

Susan held the paperwork for their three-month work visas. Now her normal size, she had peeled off several more layers of shirts and stuck them in a plastic bag.

Shelley looked as if she had tried to apply fresh make-up to her sallow skin, and Graham’s jaw line had sprouted stubble. Friedman’s craggy face was craggier than ever and his eyes were red. They all looked the worse for their trip across seven time zones.

“Hand me your passports,” Susan said. “It’ll speed things up if I explain the whole thing one time for all of us.”

It became a good opportunity to examine each other’s passports and see who had the worst photo. They grimaced and chuckled as they passed their blue booklets up the line to Susan.

Susan looked at Lacy’s first. “Lawrencia Clarissa Glass?” she shouted so loudly nearby men in turbans turned to look. “Your parents named you Lawrencia Clarissa?”

“After my grandmothers. My parents didn’t want either of their mothers to feel left out. I was in third grade before I learned how to spell my whole name.”

“Graham doesn’t use his first name either, I see.” Friedman held Graham’s passport out at arm’s length, studying the photo page. “Joseph Graham Clark. Born April 1, 1965, Wythe, Virginia.”

“I don’t much like Joseph, so I use Graham.”

“I don’t use my first name either,” Shelley said.

Susan opened Shelley’s passport and read, “Kimberly Ward Clark. Where does the Shelley come in?”

“Ward was my maiden name. Kimberly Michelle Ward. When Graham and I got married I changed from Kimberly to Michelle, and Graham shortened that to Shelley.”

“Why did you drop the Kimberly?” Lacy asked.

“Kimberly Clark? Sounds too much like toilet paper.”

Everyone laughed except Joel Friedman. Joel, Lacy saw, was staring ahead with a haunted look in his eyes.

“What’s wrong?” Lacy asked.

“Nothing,” he answered. “Nothing.”

* * *

They had a two-hour wait for their flight to Luxor. Not permitted to leave the security area, Lacy left Joel Friedman in charge of watching her luggage and climbed a flight of stairs that led up to an observation deck. She pushed up her sweater sleeves and did a few stretching exercises, then stepped closer to the deck’s glass wall. Another world. Cairo spread out as far as she could see, the crescent-shaped finials of mosques piercing the purple haze of pollution. Seventeen million souls in the greater metropolitan area, she had read somewhere. It was greener here than she’d expected. She turned at the sound of Graham Clark’s baritone.

“You didn’t bring a
hat
? We’re in Egypt, for God’s sake, Shelley. The sun will burn you to a crisp!”

“I thought I could buy one here.” Shelley emerged at the top of the stairs, a few feet behind her husband.

Graham turned and held out one hand to her. “Shades.”

Shelley plunged her arm into the side pocket of her tote bag, drew out a pair of dark glasses and handed them over. “Lacy! What happened to your arms?” Shelley grabbed Lacy’s left wrist and caught Graham’s eye, pointing with her free hand.

“Cat,” Lacy said. She recounted the greenhouse battle between Otto and herself while Graham picked up each of Lacy’s arms, lifted his sunglasses, and studied the scabbed-over scratches.

“Neosporin,” Graham said. “These could get infected.”

“You didn’t bring a hat? Neither did I.” Lacy addressed this comment to Shelley, but with a glance toward Graham to convey the message that Shelley wasn’t all that stupid for having brought no hat. “There’s a shop downstairs, but the prices are probably high.”

“Forget it. We’re not paying airport prices,” Graham said. Wait ‘til we get to Luxor.”

“I started to bring the hat I wore every single day at Mesa Verde, but my bag was jam-packed.” Shelley approached the glass wall with her arms spread wide. “Egypt! We’re here!”

Lacy glanced from Shelley to Graham and back again. “We’re obviously not in the Chesapeake Bay anymore.”

“Can you handle three months without your seaweed?” Graham asked.

“This may be good. I need a break from my seaweed.”

Graham launched into a long description of Lacy’s research to the upturned face of his attentive wife.

Lacy interrupted him with a “time-out” hand signal. “Use the past tense, Graham. The whole project went down the drain yesterday.”