McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales - Michael Chabon [179]
One night as I was walking as silently as possible back to my bedroom I collided with Mallick. He was wearing a nightshirt that left his saggy old knees bare. “Going to the lavatory,” he explained, unnecessarily, so that I knew it was true what Patwin had told me, that he’d been visiting Miss Jackson. I tried to see the good in that, but really, what comfort could sleeping with Mallick have been?
“Me, too,” I said with an equal lack of conviction.
We stood a moment, carefully not meeting each other’s eyes. “So, Miss Whitfield leaves tomorrow,” Mallick offered finally. “She’s been a lively addition.” I realized then that he thought I’d been visiting Miss Whitfield. As if that wouldn’t be worth your life!
A woman’s face appeared in a doorway, white and sudden. When my heart began beating again, I recognized Miss Whitfield. She didn’t speak to me; merely noted my suspicious, nighttime ramblings, my covert meeting with Mallick, and disappeared as quickly as she’d come, no doubt to write it all down before she forgot. “Taking my own sort of pictures,” she called it once, as if what she did and what I did were the same, as if her imposed judgments could be compared to my dispassionate records. If I’d wished to murder her this would have been my last opportunity.
I went to my room and into a night of troubled dreams. Miss Whitfield left the next morning. I took pictures of everyone before she left, at Patwin’s insistence. Patwin was always reminding me to document the work as much as the artifacts. “Take some pictures of live people today,” he would say. “Take some pictures of me.”
Everyone lined up in the expedition house courtyard, staring into the morning sun. Davis had his hand on Patwin’s shoulder, but no one else was touching. Miss Whitfield could not stand still and ruined three exposures before I got one that showed her clearly.
“Was there a curse on Tu-api’s tomb?” she’d asked us shortly after her arrival. According to the newspapers Carter had a curse; it was one more way in which we disappointed. (According to Mallick, who had his own sources, no one could find the actual site or text of this alleged curse. Other tombs had them so, of course, Carter couldn’t do without.)
The very day Carter found the entrance to Tut-ankh-Amen’s tomb a cobra ate his pet canary. “Some curse,” Patwin scoffed when we read this, but Davis had reminded us of the function canaries served in mines, their deaths a warning that death had entered a room. And then, just last week, we had a telegram from Lord Wallis that Lord Carnarvon, who sponsored Carter’s dig, had suddenly died in Cairo. The cause was indeterminate, but might have been a fever carried by an insect bite on his cheek. Back in England his dog also died—this curse was most unkind to pets.
It was the dog that did it for Miss Whitfield. She cared little for mountains of copper, gold, and ebony. She was, as Patwin had once noted, being nothing but fair, no materialist. But she loved a suspicious death. She left us for Egypt just as quick as an invitation could be wrangled and transport arranged.
I believe we were all a bit disappointed to realize that none of us was to be either the murderer nor the victim in her next book. All those murderous thoughts I’d obligingly had, all the probing we’d withstood, all the petty disputes we’d engaged in, and all for nothing. Carter would reap the benefit.
We stood at the entry to the expedition house and waved. She was turned around to us, her face in the window, smaller and smaller until it and then the car that carried her vanished entirely. “A dangerous woman,” Patwin said.
“A pot-stirrer,” said Davis.
“A terrible eater,” said Ferhid. His tone was venomous. “A picky eater.”
“I can’t put my finger on exactly what it was about her,” said Miss Jackson. “But there were times when she was watching us, taking notes on everything we said and did, as if she knew what we really