Death on Tour
To my parents Joyrene and James Pope and to my daughters Jacqueline and Jennifer Hamrick who have always been there for me and who always believed I could
Writing might be a solitary activity, but thank goodness it is never done in isolation. My heartfelt thanks go to my wonderful editor, Kelley Ragland of Minotaur Books, for her meticulous work in editing this manuscript and for believing in it in the first place, and to St. Martin’s Minotaur and the Mystery Writers of America for sponsoring the First Crime Novel Competition and giving me this opportunity. My gratitude also goes to the following wonderful people at Minotaur Books: Matt Martz, who kept me on track and answered my millions of questions with unfailing patience, Anna Chang for her awesome copyediting skills, and David Baldeosingh Rotstein and Ben Perini, who designed and illustrated the coolest cover art ever. My thanks go to my agent, David Hale Smith, for taking a chance on me and for his much-needed advice, encouragement, and guidance. And finally, I would like to thank Cindy Marszal for reading my first drafts, for saying all the right things even when those things were hard, and for sharing the writing adventure with me.
Contents
6. Changelings and Challenges
After a restful night in your luxury hotel, join your Egyptologist and traveling companions on a short ride to the necropolis at Giza where you’ll see the enigmatic Sphinx and marvel at the awe-inspiring great pyramids. Travel by luxury coach to ancient Memphis to admire the 40-foot statue of Ramses II and the Alabaster Sphinx. Next, a quick stop at the Step Pyramid at Saqqara, followed by a demonstration of the making of world-famous Egyptian silk carpets. No visit to Cairo would be complete without a visit to the Egyptian Museum, where you will see the treasures of King Tut and the most famous mummies in the world.
—WorldPal pamphlet
The body lay facedown in the sand beside the giant stone blocks of the great pyramid of Khafre. Overhead, the blue sky flickered dimly through a haze born on the khamsin winds whistling relentlessly from the desert. The morning air was still cool and very dry, but full of the promise of heat to come. Men wearing head cloths and flowing tunics ran back and forth like ants, shouting in Arabic, while camel drivers stood beside their indifferent animals, craning their necks and talking excitedly. Policemen carrying automatic rifles guarded the perimeter of the crowd, looking alert and dangerous, when only a few minutes before they had been sleepy and bored.
Our tour group stood huddled together in a little knot a few yards from a brightly colored heap of clothes that had once been Millie Owens. Every few seconds, one of us broke from the herd, caught a glimpse of the body, and hurried back to the safety of the circle. It seemed impossible that the body was really there, that it wasn’t some horrible mistake, and that Millie wasn’t really just resting and would soon bounce up and start annoying us again. I wished she would.
Almost, anyway. I’m a high school history teacher, and I’m well acquainted with the full range of human behavior, but I’d never seen anyone who grated on the nerves of an entire group like Millie Owens, not even in PTA meetings. To be honest, the sight of her dead body lying at the base of the pyramid was not nearly as disturbing as it should have been. I glanced around at the faces of my traveling companions of the last two days. Everyone looked worried, but no one was crying, unless you counted a pair I called the ditz duo, who were wailing and whirling around like the dervishes we were supposed to see at dinner tonight. Our guide, Anni, was halfheartedly trying to calm them. The rest of us stood in shocked silence. Shocked, yes, but not grieving.
What bothered me the most was that it seemed that no one had seen what had happened, or at least no one was admitting it. Granted, the morning light was barely kissing the stones of the pyramids and the inevitable tourist hordes had not yet descended, but literally scores of people milled about. The hawkers with their postcards and plaster statues of Horus. The dozen or more carriage drivers with their unenthusiastic horses. The tourist police, managing to look both incompetent and frightening at the same time. Our own group of twenty-two, now down by one.
So how was it that no one had seen a fifty-five-year-old woman climb onto a pyramid and fall to her death? Our group could probably be excused because most of us spent a good deal of effort staying away from Millie. A buffer of twenty paces was the minimum required to avoid interaction. Just last night, I’d been scouring through my Egyptian phrase book for the correct phrase for “pepper spray.” Not that I’d have really used it on the old bat, but it would be nice to have, just in case I could take no more. Millie was one of those intense, pushy women who seemed to be in constant motion. Her mouth moved in an unending stream of fatuous observations, idiotic questions, and catty gossip. While the rest of us were still making introductions, she somehow knew everyone’s names, and a great deal more. She had a way of weaseling out details and then making rather shrewd guesses to fill in the gaps, and she wasn’t above snooping. I’d caught her going through my backpack on the bus during the very short trip from the hotel to the pyramids, less than an hour ago, and she’d just gazed unblushingly at me and handed it back.
“Diarrhea already or just playing it safe?” she’d asked loudly, an embarrassing reference to my Imodium.
I’d glared at her, unable to think of a snappy retort quickly enough. I suppose I should be grateful I hadn’t been carrying anything worse. And I was pretty sure she’d stolen the new strawberry lip balm I’d bought the day before at the hotel gift shop.
Millie was … or had been … living proof that no one ever really changed after high school. In a school the size of the one in which I taught, I saw a dozen Millies every day. She was the kid who bounded into a group of pretty, popular girls like a slobbering stray, oblivious to the discomfort she caused, clueless to the social cues that might have allowed her to join in. The nicer girls tolerated her for a few moments before suddenly remembering homework or prior commitments. The meaner girls were openly rude, cutting her with razor-sharp tongues before flouncing away in disgust in the face of her hurt incomprehension. The Millies of the high school world broke my heart, but that didn’t make them any easier to tolerate in the adult world.
Not surprisingly, our Millie had been traveling alone. She had droned on at great length about her traveling companion’s attack of appendicitis striking only hours before their plane was scheduled to take off. I decided that this “traveling companion” was either fictitious or had burst her own appendix with an ice pick. My own traveling companion, my cousin Kyla, backed the former because she contended that no one would have agreed to come with Millie in the first place. My money was on the latter because, as I pointed out, there’s no explaining how one chooses one’s roommates. It took her only a second.
“Bitch,” she said admiringly.
But that was all yesterday. Today, the March sun was brilliant even through the haze, and poor, sad Millie Owens was dead, which no one could have wished for her. And something had gone seriously wrong with our beautiful trip to Egypt.
I leaned against the stones of the pyramid, cool in the morning air, and wondered how many others had done so throughout the millennia since they had been carved. Maybe not many. Had the Egyptians spent much time in their cities of the dead after the pharaohs had been laid to rest? The huge necropolis had been a thriving community, almost a small city during construction, but what about afterward when the work was finished and the new pharaoh was far away fighting wars or building new monuments? I imagined an unearthly silence enveloping everything as the wind pushed the sand higher around the stones until they were all but swallowed by the desert.
Pretty much the opposite of what was going on now. The police were now moving among the vendors. I’d never heard so much shouting to so little purpose. Even after two months with my Pimsleur CDs, I could not understand more than two or three words of Arabic, but I could tell that they were getting nothing out of the bystanders. Wild gestures, head shakes, points and shrugs, but not one coherent statement as far as I could tell. Somehow, impossibly, Millie had climbed up onto one of the gigantic blocks of the pyramid and then fallen to her death.
It just made no sense. Large though the blocks were—and they were far too big for an out-of-shape tourist to climb without help—they just weren’t that tall. A fall of five or six feet at most. Far enough to break an arm, or a hip, I thought, glancing at the wizened, ancient figures of Charlie and Yvonne de Vance, but a neck? Maybe if she’d managed to get up to the second layer and somehow bounced off the first.
One of the policemen beckoned to our tour guide, Anni, who joined him a few paces away. Anni was a lovely and interesting mixture of traditional and modern Egyptian. A little younger than me, probably in her midtwenties, she had large dark eyes made to seem even larger by kohl eyeliner and thick mascara. She wore a lightweight turtleneck shirt carefully pinned to her headscarf to ensure that no part of her neck or hair showed, but over that she wore a t-shirt with an I
WorldPal logo. Jeans and tennis shoes completed the outfit. In one hand, she held a pink Hello Kitty umbrella, which she used, not for protection from nonexistent rain, but as a beacon for gathering her small flock around her. Everywhere we went, we followed Hello Kitty like a row of ducklings following their mother.
Now she began a rapid torrent of Arabic with the policeman. The only word I understood was “la,” which meant “no.” She said it a lot.
My cousin Kyla joined me beside the stone, looking worried. She is far too careful about her clothes to lean against a dusty pyramid, but today she stood stiffly upright a pace away, looking striking as always. Her long dark hair, the exact color and texture of mine, was pulled into an elegant twist, gleaming in the sun. I’m not sure how she managed it, but her tan slacks and lemon shirt still looked crisp and pressed. And now, while the rest of us fretted, she looked perfectly cool and composed.