Death on Tour - Janice Hamrick [22]
I picked up a small amulet made of dark green jade hanging on a leather cord. Intricately carved, it had an Arabic inscription in the center, and looked well worn, as though it had been rubbed between calloused fingers for years and years. Not something one could find in a tourist shop, I thought. Almost certainly someone’s cherished heirloom. There was no telling from whom she’d stolen it. Anni, Mohammad, even our bus driver, Achmed. I winced. These things would have to be returned.
I turned back to the notebook and flipped through the small pages until I found the entry about Kyla and me. Where did the lesbian suspicion come from? I guess it was inconceivable two women could share a room without something going on. Very catty. And mean-spirited. I did not feel so bad for disliking Millie, alive and dead.
Turning the page, I saw only one more entry remained, so maybe I hadn’t missed as much as I thought. I probably could have left the bag on the bus for all I had learned, but then I would have been curious about it for the rest of my life. I might as well finish what I had started. Reading on, I gave a little gasp.
Day 2
Something fishy going on. Smuggling!?
Must verify statue is real.
Contact A or M? Or police?
I sat frozen. Impossible, I thought. Millie had found something that made one of us look like a smuggler? A or M. That had to be Anni, our guide, or Mohammad, our WorldPal representative. How ridiculous. We were a completely ordinary group of tourists, by turns clueless, annoying, enthusiastic, kind, and so on. A pretty standard grouping of random people. In fact, the only thing at all unusual I’d learned about our little group was that most of us were fairly experienced travelers, which I supposed made sense. By the time someone chose Egypt as a destination, chances were that they’d already visited the standard European countries.
So Millie thought one of us was a smuggler. Believed it strongly enough that she was eager to pursue the possibility and turn that person in to the authorities. How ridiculous, I thought again. The unfounded fantasy of a petty mind, not to be given a second’s consideration. Except that Millie was now dead. I felt a chill of uneasiness shiver down my spine. A coincidence. Her death had been a freak accident. A simple fall that unexpectedly turned fatal, probably because she wasn’t exactly young and her bones had been brittle.
Annoyed with my own suspicious mind, I replaced all the items, stolen or not, into the bag and zipped it. I’d leave it on the bus tomorrow, I told myself sternly, and be done with it. No more thinking about death or smuggling. I lay back on the bed and began thinking about smuggling and death.
After an interminable time, the blow-dryer ceased and blessed silence reigned. I looked at the clock. It would be only 11:30 a.m. back in Austin. Just about time for lunch. I wondered if my ex-husband, Mike, would be meeting his new fiancée back at their downtown condo for a bite and a quickie.
“You’re thinking about them again, aren’t you?” asked Kyla, emerging from the bathroom.
“Not at all,” I denied quickly and guiltily.
“I can always tell. You get this little pinched look around the lips. Sort of like sucking on a lemon, but less attractive.”
I gave a groan. “I hate them both so much.”
“And rightly so. But you swore you weren’t going to think about them on this trip.”
“No, I swore I wouldn’t talk about them on this trip,” I corrected, rising to my feet. It was time to put on the one dressy outfit I’d brought, a flowing black skirt that could be reversed into a flowing black-and-white patterned skirt. Tonight I chose the matching black knit top with the scoop neck. The next night I could go with the white.
Kyla sprayed hairspray on her hair,