Maria Hudgins - Lacy Glass 01 - Scorpion House (31 page)

“I don’t know.” Paul turned toward the river and its strip of emerald green. “Help me out here. What do we do first? We can’t screw this up. Do we go to the police first? What about the language thing? How do we explain it? It’s hard enough to understand this mess in
English
. Should we tell Roxanne first? Should we call Dave Chovan and ask him to be our translator? Should I have a show-down with Graham first, in case we’ve got this all wrong?”

“Roxanne’s already gone across the river. She won’t be back until this afternoon and she has no cell phone.”

“Right. How about Chovan? He works over there.”

Lacy shifted her weight from one bare foot to the other. The sun was heating the roof. “How about the man from the American Embassy. Myerson, isn’t it?”

“Good idea. We at least have to tell him not to get them plane tickets home. We don’t want Graham leaving the country. If we’re right, and he finds out we’re onto him, we’d never see him again.” Paul squinted into the bright sun bouncing off the sandy hills. “Look who’s coming.”

Little Yasser, scrambling down the slope between Whiz Bang and the settlement where Selim’s house was and where his own had been. He toddled his way around a large boulder and scrambled over another.

“Yasser!” Lacy called out.

The child didn’t seem to hear her. They called out several more times, but, unheeding, he turned half way down the slope and headed toward the tomb.

“Does anyone ever keep an eye on that kid?” Paul asked.

“In the U.S., his parents would be arrested for neglect.”

Graham, they could see, was doing something with the polyurethane tubing in the area of the tomb’s exhaust vent. Bent over, he wrapped something around and around something else. Shelley had disappeared, possibly into a dip in the path.

Paul squinted, raised his glasses to his hairline and watched for a minute or more. “Oh my God! We’re standing here talking while he’s committing murder number three right in front of our eyes!”

I
n a flash, Paul assessed his chances of getting to the tomb in time. The overland route would be easiest, but Graham would see him coming and Paul would lose the advantage of surprise. The secret tunnel would be shorter and it would let him emerge at a spot directly below the tomb. He could climb the ridge and take Graham by surprise. But it was more important to save Shelley and Yasser. “You go to the tomb. Hurry!” he told Lacy as he headed for the stairs.

“Where are you going?”

“I’m going to try to surprise him.” A half-dozen ideas collided in his head. Lacy is barefoot. Can she make it to the tomb in time? How about calling Shelley? Would she have her phone with her? Sure. She’s waiting for a call from Myerson. Call her how? What’s her number? “Lacy, call Shelley on her cell phone and tell her, don’t go into that tomb! Give any reason you can think of but make sure she doesn’t go in! And find Yasser.”

Paul remembered he’d written Shelley’s number on his note pad, but he feared it would take him too long to find it. His chest pounded. He yelled her name as loudly as he could but got no answer. She might be behind the hill between the house and the tomb, or she might be there already.

Paul had often wondered how it is when you need a miracle one pops up. Why, for instance, do you notice the child’s ball out of the corner of your eye before it rolls into the street? There are plenty of other things whizzing past in your peripheral vision as you drive along and you don’t notice any of them. Trees, benches, a basketball game. Why is it that when you’re trapped in a longshore current, as he had been once, a man on the beach just happens to be watching you and he just happens to be standing beside a rope-tethered life ring? And why is the rope long enough but only barely?

And what made Graham leave his cell phone on the computer desk next to Paul’s laptop? “All right! Here Lacy, Shelley’s number is on speed dial number 1.” The fact that he wouldn’t have known this if Selim hadn’t stolen the herbal papyrus didn’t escape him, but he filed it away to think about later. He threw her the phone and ran.

He looked for a flashlight on his way out the back, couldn’t find one, then flew across the back yard. He ducked into a couple of crevices before he found the one behind which lay the tunnel entrance. Screwing up his nerve, he plunged into the dark, claustrophobic tunnel. Reminding himself that he’d done this before, he used his hands as a cat uses whiskers to guide himself along the walls. Scooting his feet rather than stepping straight down, perhaps on a snake, he ignored the burbles, clicks, and whirrs. Sounds that seemed magnified by the stone silence of the passage. Something clutched at his hair. A bat or a pigeon, probably.

Paul felt the curve in the walls that preceded the gap he sought. He was almost there, but where was the daylight? A wall of something stopped him cold. Something not solid, but made of bars and chunks and slabs. Of metal and wood and pottery. Running his hands over whatever it was, he reached forward hoping to trace what felt like a chair leg to its other end. He slipped. As he fell, his body dislodged an avalanche of unknown objects. Something large fell on his head.

It must have knocked him out for some period of time because his next conscious thought was of something rope-like sliding across his shoulders. A snake, he knew, even though he couldn’t see it. His heart pounding so hard he felt sure the snake could feel it, he lay still. Snakes, he had heard, didn’t strike unless threatened, and he had every intention of posing no threat. He felt the rest of the snake’s body slip across his ribs, its size diminishing until he felt the tip of its tail flick his right arm.

Slowly, he rose and explored the blockage in front of him with his hands. Apparently, someone had filled this section of the tunnel with furniture, pottery, and household items. One object felt like a wooden pizza shovel. His dark-adapted eyes now saw light beyond the blockage, but fighting through it to the opening seemed hopeless.

He turned and ran back the way he’d come.

* * *

Lacy ran toward the tomb, holding the cell phone to her ear. She counted the rings, checking to the left and to the right for any sign of Shelley or little Yasser, and scrambled, stumbling upward, falling, scrambling to her feet again. It was as if they’d both been swallowed up by the hills.

Reaching the retaining wall at the tomb entrance, she climbed up and scanned the area for any sign of a woman in a straw hat or a child in a ratty gallabeyah. She saw nothing. She flew into the tomb, down the long hall and into the burial chamber. She stopped, dead in her tracks, and cried out, “No!”

A stepladder sat beneath the hole leading to the new chamber. Shelley’s army/navy backpack, yellow scarf and straw hat lay at its feet. The hole, however, was no longer a hole. It was blocked solid with rocks and with chunks of plaster. Lacy scrambled up the stepladder and began pulling whatever she could budge out of the hole, tossing it onto the floor behind her.

She called out, “Shelley!” as she worked, but she heard no answer. Her fingernails, already trimmed short and variously broken, ripped into the quick and bled.
Is Yasser in there with her? Did he want to see what was in the hole and did Shelley boost him up, follow him in?
Lacy shook her head sharply to eject the tears clouding her vision.
How could there possibly be so much debris blocking this hole? Had there been a complete collapse? The workmen had cleared the room out, why hadn’t the junk fallen to the floor? Why would it still be blocking this hole only a few feet from the top?

“Shelley!” she cried out. “Yasser!” But there was no answer.

* * *

Paul was forced to go by the overland route which meant Graham could see him coming from a hundred yards away. He paused a few seconds at the tunnel’s entrance to let his eyes adjust to the glare. He felt the lump on his head and drew back bloody fingers. The first leg of this trip went fast. Across the parking area near the kitchen and halfway down the driveway, he raced at top speed, then took the most direct route across rocky outcrops and the stone wall. His head pounded. The terrain slowed him down but this route was still faster than running to the end of the driveway. Soon he heard the rhythmic chug of the generator. Up another hill and up the dirt path to the tomb.

The first thing he saw when he reached the tomb was the chair Akhmed always sat in, now empty. He scrambled up and around the tomb entrance, past the tailings pile to the generator, the noise from its rotors growing louder as he approached. He prepared himself for a fight, looking up and forward as he climbed. The polyurethane tube he had seen Graham carrying was duct-taped to the exhaust of the generator. The tube led from the exhaust to the vent over the new chamber and more duct tape sealed the pipe to the vent so that nothing but exhaust gases could enter the tomb. The fan used for pulling fresh air through the tomb lay flat on the ground a few feet away. There was no sign of Graham, and Paul had no doubt the monster had seen him coming and fled.

This was a gas chamber.

“Shelley!”
Where was she
?

Paul shouted her name again.

No answer.

He shouted again, so loudly that felucca sailors on the Nile must have jumped off their seats.

Nothing. Was she inside?

Paul ripped the tube from the vent in one heave, trailing strands of duct tape between the two. He ran down the slope and into the tomb, down the long hall, and fell off the bottom step into the burial chamber.

“Lacy!”

Lacy stood, wobbling, on the stepladder throwing rocks over her shoulder like John Henry laying track. “She’s in here, Paul. I don’t know where the little boy is but I can’t hear anything!”

Paul grabbed her and threw her off the stepladder. He couldn’t take the time to do it gently because silence beyond the wall of debris meant that Shelley was either dead or unconscious. He took over, yanking out one huge boulder Lacy had been unable to move.

The boulder crashed onto the tomb floor, a cloud of dust rose, and a hole appeared. He jerked back, knowing that a torrent of invisible, odorless gas, a mixture of deadly poisonous carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide was pouring out. Dashing away from the hole, he sucked in a lungful of air and attacked the blockage again.

When his lungs burned for another breath, Paul saw hair. The top of a head dusted with powdered plaster. He ducked away from the opening for another breath, then grappled through the remaining blockage, but he couldn’t get purchase on the body. The height of the hole forced him to bend his elbows to reach in.

He needed something taller to stand on but the burial chamber was empty except for the hallowed coffin now lying on top of its protective tarp.
What the hell.
He motioned to Lacy and together they shoved the entire coffin across the room and beneath the hole. He balanced the stepladder shakily on top of the woman’s face on the carved lid and climbed up. He heard a crunch that sounded like the prelude to a larger crunch.

Returning to the ground, he motioned Lacy to take his place and held the ladder steady while she climbed up. Her lighter weight precipitated a pop or two, but the lid held up. She reached in and grabbed the inert body by its shirtsleeves. “Grab my waist, Paul. Let the ladder go.” When she felt his firm grasp, she gave one huge pull and the head and shoulders emerged.

It wasn’t Shelley. It was Graham.

S
helley sat on her bed, cocooned in her sleeping bag, shivering, but she wasn’t cold. Her own husband had tried to kill her and killed himself instead. Roxanne brought her “a nice cup of tea,” the English panacea that doesn’t work on Americans. Lacy sat at the end of the bed, silently watching her.

Paul stood near the door. “It was an accident, Shelley. He didn’t intend to kill himself.”

“What did he intend to do?” Her voice quivered. “Never mind. I know what he intended to do. He intended to kill me.”

Lacy made a small move toward her, but Paul stepped across and pulled her to him. He examined the tips of her bandaged fingers and kissed the palms of her hands. “Where were you when you got Lacy’s call?” he asked Shelley.

“I was walking into the burial chamber. Roxanne said we could go into the new chamber now and I thought it might be my last chance. When I put my backpack on the floor I felt my phone vibrate through the material.”

“Was the hole blocked with rubble?” Paul asked.

Shelley looked at the wall, vaguely. “I can’t remember.”

“It was when I got there,” Lacy said. “I can’t figure out whether Graham had already blocked it up … no he couldn’t have. How else could he have climbed in? He must have crawled in to check on the vent from the under side and set off a rock fall, then turned around and tried to claw his way out but the carbon monoxide got to him first.” Lacy knew she’d never forget the raw, bloody fingers she saw on the body she pulled out.

“So I went outside where I could get some reception before I answered it, and that’s when I saw that adorable little boy. I said, ‘What are you doing here?’ and you know what he said to me?”

“How now, brown cow?”

“He said, ‘Itsy-bitsy spider,’ and he showed me his yo-yo.”

It was more than Lacy could take. She dissolved in a shaking, sniveling fit of sobs, soaking Paul’s shirt as he held her until she gave herself the hiccups. Selim had taken Yasser home, promising to talk to the child’s parents about keeping a closer eye on their son.

Shelley’s phone, now lying on the dresser, rang. Paul handed it to her. After a minute, she said, “It’s Mike Myerson. He’s found us two tickets to New York.”

“Tell him to hold off a bit.”

“If it’s all right with you, I need to be by myself for a while.”

They left her alone with her pain.

R
oxanne hogged the house phone the rest of the afternoon. She talked to the police, to her friend at Chicago House, and to Dave Chovan, explaining to each as much as she knew about Susan’s murder and why Horace Lanier was the wrong man. Meanwhile, Marcus, in a Seattle hospital with his new daughter and peacefully-snoozing wife, was getting nothing but busy signals. When he finally did get through, Roxanne let out a whoop. “Great news! I can’t wait to tell Horace!”