Maria Hudgins - Lacy Glass 01 - Scorpion House (7 page)

Within seconds the room was full of people, all of them as useless as referees at a cat fight. Lanier approached the bed and raised one of Joel’s eyelids with his thumb. The pupil was dull, fixed, and dilated.

Roxanne ran out to call an ambulance.

* * *

Lacy sat on the floor at the foot of Joel’s bed until the ambulance arrived some thirty minutes later. Paramedics strapped the body onto a stretcher and left. Roxanne slipped back into the room and told her, in a voice that sounded to Lacy as if it was echoing through a tunnel, that Selim and the Jeep were outside, ready to drive anyone who wanted to go to the hospital.

She stood and took one last look at the bed in which her best friend had died. There was a damp ring about the size of a poker chip on the rumpled pillowcase. Was it just drool or had Joel’s body seized up and forced his face into the pillow? Had Joel forgotten to take his digoxin last evening? Lacy had promised Joan she’d make sure and remind him, but she hadn’t once thought about it last night.

Even if Joel had taken his pill, there was no guarantee he wouldn’t have had a heart attack, anyway. That must have been what it was. A heart attack. He’d had a big one a few years back. She wondered if Joel woke up when his heart sent daggers of fire through his chest or if he’d died in his sleep. She hoped it was the latter.

She didn’t realize Graham was in the room until she looked up and saw him. He too, was staring at Joel’s empty bed. “The Jeep’s leaving, Lacy. You going with us?”

“One minute. Give me a minute.”

Graham backed out the door, his curly head nodding. “Yes. All right.”

The bed had been pulled away from the wall by the paramedics but the top sheet still bore the impression of Joel’s body. Lacy pulled it up and smoothed it.

An odd, greasy smear near the margin of the sheet nearest the wall caught her eye. She grabbed it up and sniffed it. It smelled a bit like grass. She touched it with her finger, then touched her finger to her tongue. Sweet. Like honey.

* * *

At the hospital in Luxor someone contacted a doctor, an ex-patriot American named Chovan, and sent him to the waiting room. Communication, an Egyptian doctor told them, was hard enough at a time like this without the added struggle of dealing with two languages. The ex-pat doctor, whose practice was mainly treating the ills of tourists, told them he was originally from Houston.

“It looks like cardiac arrest. Did he already have a heart condition?”

Lacy told him Joel had been on digoxin since his earlier heart attack. “If he suffocated would there be any signs of it?”

“Suffocated?”

“Yes. I found him face down in his pillow.”

“It’s hard to imagine why he wouldn’t have turned his head if he was suffocating. We do that, you know, even in our sleep.”

“But what if he couldn’t, for some reason?”

The doctor tilted his head and looked at Lacy, quizzically.

“For instance, what if he had a seizure?”

“Did he have seizures?”

“Not that I know of, but what if he did?”

“Then we may or may not find evidence of it in the autopsy. Sometimes we find broken capillaries in the whites of the eyes. Sometimes not.”

“I see.” Lacy didn’t like the picture forming in her mind.

* * *

It fell to Lacy to make the gut-wrenching call to Joel’s wife. By her voice, Lacy couldn’t tell much about how Joan was reacting, but she dropped the phone twice while they were talking.

“You’ll need to come here, Joan. Do you want me to make the airline arrangements for you?”

“I don’t know.”

“Don’t do anything right now, Joan. I’ll call you back in a minute.” Lacy made a quick call to Peter Swain, the head of Wythe’s biology department. She knew that Peter’s wife and Joan Friedman were friends. Swain’s voice, gravelly from sleep, answered on the third ring. She told them the bad news and said, “Can Virginia drive over to Friedman’s, right now? I’ll keep Joan on the phone until she gets there.”

Lacy was using the house phone because her cell phone didn’t work in Egypt. Graham told her she needed to buy a SIM card for it. A card specifically for Egypt. She called Joan back, kept her talking until she heard their doorbell ring and heard Virginia Swain’s voice in the background.

She made arrangements for Joan to fly to New York at noon and to Cairo that evening. It was still barely seven a.m. in Virginia so Joan would have time to pack a bag. She called Peter Swain back and asked if they could drive Joan to Reagan Airport in D.C. Her plane would arrive in Luxor late the following afternoon.

* * *

Lacy found Graham Clark sitting on the porch and pulled up a chair for herself. She turned it, like Graham’s, to face the western hills and sat. “Where is everybody?”

Graham nodded toward a dirt path that seemed to lead westward to a spot near a light pole and what might be excavation equipment. “Those two we met last night. Paul and what’s-her-name, Kathleen. They went over that way to the tomb. I don’t know about everyone else.”

Graham’s blue eyes squinted into the afternoon sun. He just barely missed being too handsome by having a nose a bit wider and larger than suited his face. His eyes were startling—pure blue fringed by thick, black eyelashes. He wasn’t known for being a flirt, however, even when actively pursued by undergraduate girls who signed up for his biochemistry courses in greater numbers than could be explained by their graduation requirements. Shelley, Lacy knew, was keenly aware of her competition.

This was the first time she had seen Graham in shorts and she noticed he had lean, muscular legs. At school he was usually in a chemical-stained white lab coat with acid burns on the sleeves. Like several other staff members, he lectured in his lab coat, wore it to lunch and only took it off when he went home. It felt odd, she thought, to see your co-workers in this rather family-like setting, sleeping across the hall from them, waiting for them to finish in the shower, sitting on the porch with them, staring out together at a foreign world of sand and rock.

“You’ve talked to Mrs. Friedman?” Graham asked.

“She’ll be here tomorrow night.”

“I can’t believe it. I can’t fucking believe it.” Graham shook his head. “He was so looking forward to this project! And he dies the first night here!”

Lacy said nothing.

“Had he been having heart problems lately?”

“No.”

“How did his wife take it?”

“I couldn’t tell, over the phone.” Lacy ran one hand over her face, squeezed the bridge of her nose. “Why didn’t he call out or something? Wouldn’t the pain have woken him up?”

“Seems like it would have.”

“We’d have heard him, wouldn’t we? I mean, these walls are thick, but still, we’d have heard him if he yelled.”

“I certainly would have. I’m a light sleeper and I thought I’d never get to sleep last night.” Graham turned his red-veined eyes to Lacy’s face. “What can I do to help? I’m no good at this sort of thing but you shouldn’t be doing all the work.”

“I’m not doing any work. I called his wife because I know her better than the rest of you do.”

“Joel was crazy about you, you know.”

“He helped me a lot. When I first came to Wythe, I was clueless about departmental politics. If it hadn’t been for Joel, they’d have given me an office in the broom closet.” Lacy noticed she was wearing flip-flops and wondered when she had put them on. She pulled at the bottom of her shirt, checking to see if it was buttoned right. All memory of getting dressed that morning was gone.

“Joel had the hots for you.”

Lacy made a derisive puffing noise. “He loved me like a daughter.”

“You are so naïve.” Graham turned to face her, cocked his head to one side. “No you’re not. You aren’t naïve, you just choose to keep it simple, don’t you? We’re all just friends, aren’t we? Partners, buddies and pals.”

“Have it your way.”

“Seriously, Lacy. When you were going out with that guy, Bart, Joel was unbelievably pissed. He talked to me about it a couple of times.”

“What did he say?”

“He said the guy was a jerk. Not good enough for his sweet Lacy.”

“The guy
was
a jerk. The fact that Joel was smart enough to see it when I couldn’t doesn’t mean he had the hots for me. It only means he was smart.”

Lacy left the porch, went straight to Joel’s bedroom, and stole the top sheet.

* * *

Lacy lay on her own bed trying to figure out how Lanier’s wrinkle concoction could have wound up smeared on the selvage edge of Joel Friedman’s top sheet. She had examined the smudge again, smelled it and compared it to the scent of the cream in the bowl still sitting on the table in the antika room. Same grassy smell. Tucking the soiled sheet into the bottom drawer of her dresser, she recalled the blob she’d seen on the outside of Joel’s elbow the evening before. On his left arm. Joel had used his right hand to turn Lacy’s chin, and, looking downward, she had glimpsed Joel’s left arm.

The smear, a translucent greasy spot, was on the side of the sheet that had been facing up. About a foot from the margin and halfway between the top and bottom edges. As Joel had lain on top of the sheets, that spot would have been down between the bed and the wall. Had he gone to bed on top of both sheets, or had he slipped between them and decided it was too hot? Face up or down? Either way, the outside of his left elbow wouldn’t contact that part of the sheet. It would have had to be pulled up and over him. And he would have had to be facing down.

Could someone have wrapped the sheet around him, pinning his arms to his sides, then sat on him and smothered him with his own pillow? That would explain why Joel hadn’t cried out.

She experimented. She turned and twisted every direction in her own bed, pulling her top sheet this way and that. She scrambled through her makeup bag until she found a tube of aloe gel and smeared some on her left arm. She found she could get smudges on the center of the sheet, the pillow, or the top margin, but not on the left edge. No way. Pulling Joel’s sheet out again, she held it up to the light slanting through her window. The spot where the unguent had contacted the sheet had turned translucent. She shook it out preparing to fold it up again, then stopped. There was another spot—lighter but almost the same size and shape as the first. Laying the sheet out flat, Lacy folded the two sides over until they coincided, and a small cry slipped from her throat. Now the sheet formed a sort of burrito-shaped envelope just large enough to accommodate a man’s body. It was so obvious it made her sick to her stomach. Someone had wrapped Joel in the sheet, face down, his arms trapped by his sides, and held him there until the pillow took his life. No scream. No noise.

Slipping back into Joel’s room, she looked around one more time. Was anything else out of place? Strange? A suitcase lay open on the floor beside the dresser, not completely unpacked. On the writing table, a manila folder. The same one he’d brought to the greenhouse on Friday? On the outside, Joel had written “Selim Hamdy,” and “Jody Myers.” Who was that? She opened the folder and found Joel’s itinerary, flight insurance forms, a photocopy of his passport photo page and a page, in Joel’s own handwriting, of addresses and phone numbers, mostly folks back home. For postcards probably. She spied a red smear on the back and recalled the tomato juice spill on the plane. Lacy closed the folder, took it across the hall to her own room and stuck it in her bottom drawer on top of the sheet.

As crazy as it sounded, Lacy couldn’t think of a more likely scenario than that Joel had been pinned face down, wrapped in his own sheet. The evidence? She had nothing but two smudges of greenish goo and if she told anyone else, they’d laugh. But the more she thought about it the more certain she became. Joel was murdered.

I
n the late afternoon, Roxanne suggested a trip to the tomb. “We’ll go daft sitting around here,” she told them.

Lacy, from her seat on the built-in bench in the antika room, said, “I don’t want to leave the phone.” She had commandeered a spot near the dining room door because the house phone was just around the corner.

“Horace will be here and Bay’s in the kitchen. One of them will come and get you if there’s a call.”

Shelley stood up, unfolding her knobby limbs, as if she was anxious to get out of the house. She turned to Horace, who had been pacing the tile floor for the past hour. “Aren’t you coming?”

“I’ve been inside that tomb twice in the past six months and that’s twice too many. I’ve seen it.” Lacy figured her mouth must have been hanging open because Lanier looked at her and added, “I’m a bit claustrophobic.”

“We have an hour until dinner. Shall we go?” Roxanne led the foursome out the front door and across a hill toward the west. “We’re really quite lucky. Kheti’s tomb was rediscovered only about five years ago. I say ‘rediscovered’ because it had obviously been entered and plundered in ancient times. Almost all tombs were. Many of them served as shelter for early Coptic Christians and Muslims throughout the years. Their cooking fires ruined the ceilings in some cases.”

Shelley and Graham followed Lacy and Roxanne up the path, close enough that they could hear what Roxanne was saying. Lacy turned, shielding her eyes from the sun, and spotted Susan, tramping along a good twenty yards behind. With her short, spiky hair and skinny frame, the biggest part of Susan was her desert boots. Out of all proportion to her size, the boots made her look as though she would automatically spring back up if knocked down. Like a well-rooted sapling. She struggled along behind them, weighted down with equipment she insisted on carrying herself.

Roxanne continued. “What we believe happened is, the entrance to Kheti’s tomb got hidden behind a wall built in the Nineteenth Dynasty at the entrance to a newer tomb. Also, there are some cliffside houses, still lived in, that sort of wall it off from the other direction. At any rate, when it was rediscovered a few years ago, it wasn’t thought to contain anything particularly exciting, so we were awarded the right to excavate and document. We had enough grant money behind us to convince the Council we could do a good job.