Free Maria Hudgins - Lacy Glass 01 - Scorpion House by Maria Hudgins Page B

back in Kathleen’s room. Various colors. I see nothing wrong with your cutting off a few small samples. How much would you need for the tests you want to do?”
    Roxanne and Shelley went on establishing ground rules for analyzing the textiles. Lacy and Graham headed for the wall to get a closer look. Graham clasped his hands together behind his back apparently to remind himself not to touch. Lacy noticed and followed suit.
    “Thank God, Susan got that hand-held x-ray spectrometer,” Lacy said. “Without it, I don’t know how we’d ever do what they want done.”
    “Where
is
Susan?” Graham looked around, walked to the end of the hallway and called back. “She’s setting her equipment up at one of the walls in that first room. The one Roxanne called the transverse room. Are you hot? I am.”
    Lacy suggested the tomb’s internal temperature probably crept up as the day wore on and this might be the hottest time. Late afternoon.
    “I’m going out for some fresh air,” Graham said, backing up the hall.
    Lacy turned and caught an anxious look on Shelley’s face. Almost fear, she thought, as if she had stopped breathing for a moment.
What was she frightened of?
    She stood facing the wall, struggling to put her tasks in order. First, she should learn how to use the hand-held spectrometer and that would involve (horrors!) reading the instruction manual. She would work with Shelley to obtain some of the cloth and attempt to extract the dye. What would that tell her? Should she read up on ancient dye techniques so she’d know what she was looking for, or should she proceed with the empty mind of ignorance? Last night at Whiz Bang she had found a whole room full of reference books. She assumed she could use whatever was there.
    What effect would time have had on the dyes? Would they have chemically degraded? Would she find degradation products, different from the original dye, or would there simply be less of it? She knew the paint on the wall would be largely mineral in origin—not her specialty but with the spectrometer she should be able to handle it. The dyes would be extracts from plants. But wait. Some early people used kermes insects for red dye, didn’t they? And a certain species of sea snail for purple?
    She noticed a hole in the wall, about three feet in diameter and a bit higher than her own head. “Roxanne, what’s this hole? It looks like it goes way back.”
    “Oh, that’s our new discovery! I meant to tell you about it. Where’s Graham? Never mind. You must bring a stepstool in here sometime soon and have a look. We’ve cleared out some of the debris, and, as I told you last night, we found those canopic jars and shabti figures and took them back to the house. We’re still clearing and we don’t know how large the whole room is, but Yasser Saleh, our surveyor-slant-engineer, told us we had to improve ventilation in there before we go any further. He says it’s not very far from the ceiling inside to the surface of the ground up above, so they’re installing a duct that will bring in fresh air. Then we can safely work inside.”
    Lacy examined the walls, made a few notes on paper she borrowed from Susan, and stuck more sloughed-off paint flakes in her pocket. Taking a break, she sat cross-legged beside the coffin, admiring the workmanship, and Shelley joined her.
    “Want some linen strips?” Shelly handed her a couple of one-by-two-inch strips of the pink cloth. “Roxanne says there’s cloth at the house that’s been covered with hieroglyphics and magic charms. She wants to know whether they used paint or ink or what.” She glanced down the hall toward the entrance. “Hadn’t we better go back?”

CHAPTER TEN
    A fter dinner that night it was Lacy and Susan’s turn to do the dishes. Susan helped her fill the large plastic basin with water from one of the kitchen’s five gallon jugs, add a squirt of detergent, and enough hot water from the kettle on the stove to warm it up. She tied a