Maria Hudgins - Lacy Glass 01 - Scorpion House (6 page)

“Some people have suggested that Akhenaten was a victim of Marfan’s syndrome or Froelich’s syndrome,” Susan said.

“But that’s ridiculous,” Roxanne barked. “Certainly the whole family wouldn’t have been victims of Marfan’s syndrome. It was a
style
of drawing. And if he’d had Froelich’s, he’d have been sterile, which he obviously wasn’t because he had six daughters with Nefertiti, not to mention Tutankhamen, who was his son by another one of his wives!”

It appeared to Lacy that Susan and Roxanne were in stark disagreement on the matter of Akhenaten’s personal life. What evidence did each of them have, on which to base her opinion? She recalled the poster of the famous bust of Nefertiti she’d seen hanging in the big room beside the one of Akhenaten. Even Lacy recognized the painted sculpture of the beautiful queen in the flat-topped hat, quite possibly the most famous bust in the world.

Graham said, “Are you telling me that beautiful woman was married to that freak? I don’t believe it.”

“Being pharaoh sort of trumps physical appearance,” Roxanne said. “At any rate, it was a time of turmoil. Priests of the Karnak Temple found themselves out of a job. Some say they were shipped off to work in the quarries. All references to the old gods on temple walls, on statues, even the hieroglyphs on little amulets were hacked off. Scratched out. You can imagine the suppressed fury of the Egyptian people who were given no choice at all regarding whom they could worship. It took Akhenaten’s son, King Tut, to restore the old order and begin the healing.”

“But he was just a child, wasn’t he?” Graham asked. “How old was King Tut when his father died and he took the throne?”

“Actually, Tutankhamen didn’t immediately follow Akhenaten as pharaoh. Another one, Smenkhkare, took over for a short time, perhaps ruling as a co-regent. It’s unclear exactly when Akhenaten died. Smenkhkare may have been a half-brother or perhaps his son-in-law.”

Susan butted in, her dark eyes bulging. “Smenkhkare wasn’t a he. Smenkhkare was nothing less than Nefertiti herself, acting as pharaoh. There’s plenty of evidence for this.”

Roxanne said nothing for a long moment, as if she was silently counting to ten. “There are fads in Egyptology, as there are in all disciplines. The current fad in our field seems to be finding female pharaohs under every rock.”

For a second, Lacy feared Susan was going to jump up and attack Roxanne. Her hands clamped on the arms of her chair and her shoulders heaved forward.

Horace Lanier rescued the situation. “Tell them about the secret room, Roxanne.”

“Ah, yes. Do you know what a canopic jar is?” No one answered and she went on. “When a body was mummified, they put the internal organs in tall jars and sealed them. There were usually four jars and they were interred in the tomb with the mummy.

“A couple of weeks ago, I was examining a section of wall in the tomb and I found a chink which proved to have empty space behind it. At first we thought it was where a modern-day resident, hacking around perhaps from a back room of his own dwelling, had hacked right into our tomb. This happens sometimes and when it does you can bet the contents of your tomb will soon disappear. But as we dug farther, we found a whole new room!” Roxanne clamped her hands together. “This room has been filled with debris from rock falls and sediment brought in by flash floods, but we’ve found two canopic jars, a few shabti figures, and some papyri. One of the canopic jars has the cartouche, that is, the name, of Nefertiti. We’re trying to make sense of all this, but we’re severely hampered by the fact that the ceiling is unstable. It could collapse at any time.”

“Why wasn’t I told about this?” Susan’s voice sounded threatening.

“You’re being told about it now, dear,” Roxanne said. “It was only a couple of weeks ago, and since we knew you’d be here today, we saw no reason to mention it earlier. What a lovely surprise for you, right?”

“If I’d known, it might have influenced the reference material I brought with me. Are these new papyri written in hieratic or hieroglyphics?”

“They’re in hieratic,” Lanier told her and, to the other newcomers, he added, “Susan is a whiz with hieratic script. She’s our go-to woman when we need something in hieratics translated.”

“So how did you and Susan hook up?” Lacy directed this to Roxanne. “Was it just coincidence that you both were here last winter and living in the same house?”

“Not entirely. We first met at Oxford. Susan came over to do research on the papyri in the Bodleian Library and I was doing post-graduate work there.”

“We were both interested in the Eighteenth Dynasty.”

To Lacy, it sounded as if Roxanne and Susan had joined hands in pursuit of a common goal but she suspected it was more like they’d locked horns.

“Funny, isn’t it?” Joel Friedman spoke up for the first time. “What is it they say? Six degrees of separation? Small world, isn’t it? I’ve got another one for you. Graham and I have worked in the same department for five years, but only last week I learned that his aunt, Joanne Clark, is a girl I dated in high school. She was Joanne Myers at the time.”

“Aunt Joanne raised me,” Graham said. “But I don’t recall her ever mentioning how Joel Friedman broke her heart.”

Friedman laughed. “It wasn’t that serious. Joanne, by the way, is now the registrar at Wythe University. I knew that, of course, but I didn’t know she was Graham’s aunt.”

“I’ve got a better one for you,” Lanier laughed. “Do any of you remember Simon Scott? Taught archaeology in the social studies department at Wythe a few years back?’

Friedman shook his head.

Susan said, “I do.”

“Ran into him a few months ago in Cairo, wandering through the museum. I couldn’t believe it.”

“What was he doing here?”

“Just visiting, he said. He had his wife with him.”

“Small world.”

Graham stretched his legs out and leaned back, cradling his head in his laced fingers. “Think about this for a minute: What would King Tut have said if he knew folks, thousands of years in the future, would come half-way around the world to sift sand for every little scrap of evidence about him?”

“And run into people they already know.”

“Small world,” Joel said.

* * *

Lacy climbed the stairs to the roof and gazed eastward across the Nile to the lights of Luxor. Her head ached from jet lag and, although she hadn’t slept for thirty-six hours, she didn’t feel like going to bed. She needed to think. The night was pleasantly cool. Temple lights and stars pierced the darkness all around.

She thought about the scuttled seaweed project she’d left in the greenhouse and, again, considered the possibility that she might be in the wrong line of work. She now believed the relationship between pigments and light was more complex and elegant than was currently recognized. But two major projects in three years had come to nothing because of—what? Her own clumsiness. Yet she could juggle, she could skate, and she could dance. It wasn’t coordination. It wasn’t clumsiness.

Was she subconsciously sabotaging herself? Why?

Ohmigod! I left the seaweed and the water in all six tanks with the pumps turned off! That’s going to smell like shit.
By now almost everyone would have left campus for winter break but a few people should still be there. Luke, the graduate assistant who had promised to keep an eye on her tanks, was going home for the holidays and it hadn’t seemed necessary to ask someone else to watch them for that short time. Lacy must, she decided, call the school first thing tomorrow and tell Maintenance to drain the tanks and toss out the seaweed.

“So. You’ve found the roof already.”

Lacy jumped at the unexpected voice behind her and jerked her head around. It was Paul Hannah. “It’s nice up here.”

Instead of answering, Paul pulled a yo-yo from his pocket, flipped it over his upturned hand and yanked it back to its original height. Lacy, startled at first, stepped back and watched as he executed a couple of complicated-looking moves. The yo-yo’s strobe lights flashed as the orb flew out, back and around. After what seemed to her like a reasonable period, she applauded.

“Little hobby I picked up to help me quit smoking,” he said, flipping the yo-yo down and up again. “Keeps my hands busy.”

“Is it working?”

“I haven’t had a cigarette in over ten years.”

Lacy wondered if he had a family. He had told them at dinner that his research was mostly in Turkey, Lebanon and Israel, but here he was in Egypt and apparently working alone. “How long have you been here?”

“Four months, so far. I came first to Abydos, did some work there, and then came here. I’m studying material they have at Chicago House across the river, but I’ve also become interested in Kheti’s tomb.”

“How does that relate to your research?”

“It doesn’t, really. I have a tendency to get side-tracked.” He glanced at her and grinned. His round glasses reflected the light from the temple, giving him a sort of Orphan Annie look. He wasn’t unattractive, Lacy decided, but he seemed a bit vague. A rolling stone, perhaps, or maybe a dabbler. One of those men who hop from one thing to another but never devote themselves to anything for long. But he did have a PhD because Roxanne had introduced him as Dr. Hannah. That indicated he could at least stick with a research program long enough to get a doctorate.

“I see Bay leaving the temple,” he said.

“How can you see that far? From here, I can make out a few people on the flat part, but I couldn’t begin to tell you what they look like.” She squinted across the dunes to Hatshepsut’s floodlit temple.

“It’s easy. Bay is the one walking backwards.”

“Why?”

“Bay always backs out of her mother’s temple, sweeping away her footprints with a sort of rush broom as she goes. She heard the ancient priests used to do that, so she does it, too.”

“What else does she do? Roxanne told us she goes there every night.”

“Who knows? Some silly ritual she made up.” Paul stepped closer to the thigh-high retaining wall that surrounded the roof and looked down. They were standing directly over the porch where the orientation session had taken place earlier. “Bay thinks she’s the reincarnation of Hatshepsut’s daughter and that she was murdered in her past life to keep her from succeeding her mother as pharaoh.”

“Did Hatshepsut even have a daughter?”

“She did. And we don’t know what happened to her, but Hatshepsut was succeeded by her stepson. She was only supposed to be acting as regent until he came of age, anyway. Hatshepsut’s daughter probably died of the plague or something.”

Lacy glanced at Paul’s face again and with a small jolt, decided that this man was absolutely alone and adrift on a very large planet.

* * *

Before turning in for the night, Lacy stopped by Friedman’s room and borrowed his Neosporin. She rubbed it onto the cat scratches on both arms and the left side of her chin.

Friedman grabbed her shoulders and turned that side of Lacy’s face to the light. “Be careful with the wash cloth until your chin gets better.”

Lacy ignored his mother hen clucking. “The new chamber Roxanne told us about. Is that the big thing you told me Lanier was onto?”

“No, no. I was referring to something bigger than that. Much more important.”

As Friedman studied Lacy’s chin, she peered down at the old man’s left arm. It looked greasy, and a small blob of greenish, jelly-like material clung to the arm near the bend of his elbow. Lacy frowned. “What’s that?”

“I’m testing Horace’s magic wrinkle eraser. If it works on my arm, I’ll try it on my face.”

“If it works, don’t tell Horace. We can steal the formula and sell it to a cosmetic company.” Lacy lowered her eyebrows, conspiratorially.

“What do you mean,
we?
What makes you think I’d let
you
in on it?”

* * *

Some time after two a.m. Joel Friedman’s door opened, closed, and a pair of bare feet padded down the tile hall.

L
acy woke to the smell of coffee and bacon. Her tiny window opened onto the back side of the house not far from the kitchen. Realizing her last bath was two hectic and sweaty days ago, she picked up a towel, washcloth and basin and headed for the shower out back. She knocked on Friedman’s door as she passed it, but got no answer.

The whole shower procedure felt awkward. At home, Lacy’s morning routine was robotic. She normally showered, dressed, ate a bowl of corn flakes, and left for work without once thinking about the motions her physical body was going through. She located the plastic water bags Roxanne had mentioned, found the shower stall and the hook on which to hang the bag, but she wet her whole body before she realized she had no soap. She found a small sliver stuck to the wall and made do with it.

Returning to her room with a basin full of water, she used her bare heel to knock on Friedman’s door again. “Hey, Joel. If you’re in there, wake up.”

As she dressed, she considered what she would need for the day’s work. She and Shelley had bought wide-brimmed hats at a little place near the airport yesterday. Boots. Thick socks. Khaki shorts. White cotton shirt.
How odd, to be wearing shorts in December.
Back home everyone would be asleep now, under thick comforters. She wondered what Bart would wear to his veterinary clinic today. She hoped he froze. She hoped every cow and horse in the county decided to give birth this week and he had to work around the clock in unheated barns.

Lacy heard Graham’s and Shelley’s voices as they passed her door. She slipped out and knocked on Friedman’s door for the third time.
I guess he’s already up and gone.

Lacy opened the door and looked in. Nope, there he was, sound asleep on top of the sheets. He’d tossed his bedcover onto the floor, probably because he felt too warm, and fallen asleep in T-shirt and boxer shorts. Face down with his head in the pillow and his bare feet hanging off the end of the bed.

“Wake up, Joel! Breakfast.”

Nothing.

Lacy flew across the room and shook him. The grey head rocked against the pillow. Joel’s neck was cold. Cooler than the air in the room. She seized his shoulders, turned him over, and started CPR. She cried out, “Need help! Need help in here!”