Death on Tour - Janice Hamrick [1]
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