Death on Tour - Janice Hamrick [38]
I slipped away from the others and followed him a few paces, trying to look like I was just casually walking down the path. I probably didn’t need to bother—he never looked back, and I didn’t have to pretend long. He called a greeting to the man behind the counter of the cold drinks stand, and slipped inside the little booth. Just a hawker after all, I thought. I turned back and almost ran into Alan, who had come up behind me silently.
He looked at me with a strange expression. “Problem?”
I glanced past him to where Kyla was glaring. “No. Just wanted something to drink.”
I turned back to the stall quickly and bought a Coke I did not want, glad that Aladdin was hidden from sight. I could feel Alan’s eyes on me as I returned to the group.
* * *
By the time we got back to the hotel, I felt uncomfortable and discouraged. Kyla was frigidly polite, which on the whole was a good thing. She could have taken us right back to high school by giving me the silent treatment, a game she had mastered and practiced a lot. It was a game I didn’t like much. My problem was that I was incapable of holding a grudge. One good night’s sleep, and I was ready to be friends again. She, on the other hand, had once ignored me entirely for almost a month when I’d criticized the boyfriend du jour. She thawed toward me only after she learned through another friend that I’d been right and that he had been playing footsie with her archenemy, Sandra Kowalski. Since that day, we’d been best friends and hadn’t had more than a moody spat or two or six hundred. Nothing serious though. Now we were seven thousand miles away from home and sharing a hotel room. We were going to have problems if she decided that I was untouchable.
Our hotel, the Elephantine Island Resort, was located on the high north end of Elephantine Island, which in turn lay in the middle of the Nile. The hotel itself looked like it had originally been designed as an air traffic control tower, but its rooms were clean and comfortable, if ordinary. I was starving and not very interested in talking, so while Kyla returned to the room, I sneaked down to the restaurant. Preparations for dinner were under way, but no one was paying me any attention, so I swiped a couple of rolls and a bottle of water, then slipped out the back and took the path leading down to a lower verandah. Two wrought iron benches rested under a clump of acacia trees, and I sank onto one. I could see Kitchener’s Island with its lush foliage across a little strip of water and beyond that the rocky dunes that lined the banks of the Nile.
After a couple of minutes, I gave a little shiver. The winds were dying down at last and my little bench was sheltered, but the desert air cooled down fast. I wished for my sweater, but it was still packed neatly in my unopened suitcase, and there was no way I was returning to the room, at least not for a while. I looked out over the water. The felucca and the motor launches had vanished, as had the white-tipped waves. The light changed slowly from the hard brilliance of day to a softer, ruddier glow. I began to relax. Blue shadows crept from under the trees and spilled into the water. The call to evening prayer floated across the water behind me from the Aswan bank, magnified by a loudspeaker. I listened, entranced.
“Mind if I join you?” a voice asked.
With a strangled squeak, I jumped about a foot and dropped my last roll.
“Sorry! I’m sorry. Didn’t mean to startle you.” Alan Stratton held up his hands, in which he held two glasses of red wine. He was grinning. “Here. I’ve brought a peace offering.”
Mindful that Kyla had staked a claim, I gave him a smile that I hoped was pleasant and yet impersonal, the one I used with overly persistent PTA parents. The trick to getting rid of them was to appear to agree with everything they