“. . . no one around.”
“I had to go to Magdi’s shop anyway,” Seth answered whoever was talking to him.
Great. Just what I needed. Mr. Octopus hands right there, in the dark, just a few feet away from me. Silently I sank off the bench and hugged the wall. If he turned his head to the left, he’d see me. I held my breath as the person hidden by the palm handed him a chunky manila envelope and said something in a voice too low for me to hear.
Seth shrugged and took the envelope. “Just for delivering a package? How much is it?”
I paused in the middle of slinking away. What on earth was Seth doing hanging around the dark end of the veranda, talking about mysterious packages and envelopes of money late at night when no one could see him?
No one but January James, Wonder Journalist!
“That’s generous of you, but what will I say if my parents find it?”
Well that sounded suspicious! Just exactly what was he involved in? Visions of me standing in front of a bunch of photographers, being handed the Pulitzer Prize for investigative journalism (TEEN SINGLE-HANDEDLY UNCOVERS INTERNATIONAL DRUG/WHITE SLAVERY/SOMETHING ICKY PLOT!) clouded my vision for a moment. I hesitated between wanting to peek out and see who Seth was talking to, and escaping.
“Good idea. There’s a Strat I have been wanting for a long time. Have you seen Jan? I thought she came this way.”
The other person said something.
Seth laughed in response. “I don’t think so at all. She’s just like a ripe fig waiting to be plucked, and you know how I love figs.”
Ripe fig? Plucked? ME?!? Well, that decided it. I sucked in my breath to make myself as skinny as possible, and slowly crept down the dark end of the veranda, praying that he didn’t see me.
Luck, for once, was with me. I had to jump over the edge of the stone railing to the ground, but the agony in my ankles from the four foot drop was worth it to make my escape from Seth. The pain was much less by the time I hobbled around the hotel building. Just as I rounded the corner, I saw a familiar figure coming down the front steps. It was Blondie one. I couldn’t see his face until he turned to wave at a cab. He slipped on a pair of dark glasses before he got into the cab, but not before I saw that his lip was cut and his eye was dark and swollen.
“Serves you right,” I whispered, hiding by a spiky shrub until the cab left. I limped my way up the steps of the hotel and entered the lobby. Luckily, it was empty—or it was until a dark-haired guy in black wandered out of the room that connected to the veranda.
“Jan,” Seth said, his brows pulled together in a frown as he walked toward me. “Have you seen—”
“Fig plucker!” I yelled, and slapped him. Right on the cheek I had kissed earlier. The beast. I spun around on my sore ankles and ran up the stairs to my room.
One day in Egypt and already my life was a mess.
MUMMY’S CURSE CAUSES FLATULENCE!
“And this will be your room, my dears. It’s a bit small, but I’m sure you girls will make the best of it. Now, as I said earlier, we all eat lunch on site with the rest of the dig crew, but you’re to take your breakfast and dinner here at the monastery. Abdullah is an excellent chef, so I’m sure you will enjoy the cuisine here. I told Dr. Tousson many years ago that being on a dig was no excuse to be uncivilized, and I stand by that.” The woman who’d introduced herself as Kay fluttered around the room, opening the wooden shutters on three small glassless windows. She was American, had a short dark blond bob, wore a taupe-and-lavender linen pantsuit, and the way she fussed with the covers on the bed and the chairs made me mentally dub her the Martha Stewart of the desert.
“Tousson?” I asked as I dumped my dirty, torn, held-together-by-tights duffel bag onto one of the two small beds that were crammed into the tiny room in an old abandoned monastery, sliding a glance at Izumi to see if she minded me claiming the bed. She was bouncing on the other one, apparently happy.
“Yes.” Kay turned to smile at me, one of those big toothy smiles adults always use with teens. “Oh, didn’t I introduce myself properly? I’m Kay Tousson, and my husband is Dr. Reshef Tousson. You know all about him, I’m sure. Anyway, as I was saying, I’m delighted to have you both on the conservation team. Normally we wouldn’t accept student helpers for such delicate work as the conservation of the tomb walls, but what with Maria and Benedict off on their honeymoon for a month, it seemed ideal to have you fill in for them, especially since you have such an artistic background, Jan. Imagine having the daughter of two such famous artists as Renata and Brendan James on my conservation team!”
I flinched. The last thing I wanted to do was be assigned any work having to do with arty stuff. I’d tell her later, once we were alone, that I was the only member of my family who couldn’t draw, paint, design, or sculpt anything. Right now, I had something else on my mind. “You…uh…wouldn’t happen to know a guy named Seth Tousson, would you?”
Her smile faded a little. “Do I know…didn’t you meet Seth on the trip out from Cairo?”
I looked at Izumi. Her mini alarm clock had failed earlier that morning, leaving us both oversleeping and subsequently in a mad scramble to get to one of the three vans that was arranged to take the Dig Egypt! students to Luxor. By the time Izumi and I ran down the stairs to the front lobby, it was twenty after six, and Dag, pacing in front of the last van that had been held up for us, read us the riot act the whole way to Luxor.
Well, not the whole way. It was a ten hour trip, and she spent a good part of it lecturing Izumi, me, and the French girl who didn’t speak English about how we weren’t to touch any of the objects found on the site, since they were all cursed.
“Cursed?” I had asked, thinking that would make for a great article subject. “You mean cursed as in, curse of the mummy, cursed? Ugly bald guy with bad teeth trailing bits of brown wrappings chasing girls down long, dark hallways cursed?”
Dag shot me a look that by rights probably should have dropped me dead on the spot. Talk about cursed! “An attitude such skeptical is not fine. Curses are very bad for childrens. They scare most horribly pipples of Egypt. Not to be taking curse of mummies dead Tekhen and Tekhnet lightly! Curse has killed much worse than pipples!”
“What could be worse than death?” I whispered to Izumi.
“Ten hours in a van with Dag?” she whispered back.
I laughed so hard I snorted, which brought Dag’s attention back to me, something I had realized was not a good idea. Just remembering it as I stood in the stifling heat of the monastery brought little shivers of unpleasantness. Although the ride down with Dag had been a nightmare, it was a nightmare that hadn’t included Seth.
Until now.
“Um…no. Seth wasn’t on the van. Is he connected to the dig?”
She gave me an odd look. “Seth is my son.”
My jaw dropped.
“My youngest son, actually. Youngest by four minutes. His twin, Cy, is the oldest. You didn’t meet him, either? I’m sure Seth rode his motorcycle to Cairo since he takes that horrible thing everywhere—it’s a mother’s worst nightmare, him riding around without a helmet, and with the state of the roads in Egypt—but I’m surprised you didn’t see Cy. They were both in Cairo, although you know how boys are—always off doing their own thing. Still, Cy makes a point of meeting all the new students. He does enjoy meeting the young women. He’s a good boy, but…well, I needn’t tell you what it’s like to be young.”
“Twins?” I croaked, absolutely horrified. The vision of Seth danced before my eyes…a dark, brooding Seth in the shop, the dark, menacing Seth in the alley as he karate-chopped the gropers, the suddenly smiling, thigh-touching Seth at dinner, and later, a smug, fig-plucking Seth…oy. Two Seths. Twins. Seth and a Seth-substitute. And I’d slapped one, and almost broken the thumb of the other. Both sons of the archeological dig head and his wife, my boss for the next month. “Identical twins?”
“Oh, yes, very much so. The only way to tell them apart is Seth’s horrible tat
too.”
“Man, I am such an idiot,” I moaned, sinking down onto the bed.
“I’m sure it’s not as bad as all that,” Kay said in that chirpy, happy tone adults get when they see teens self-destruct. “I know you’re sorry you missed them in Cairo, but you’ll meet them now that you’re here. I’ll introduce you, if you’d like. I’m sure the boys will be as thrilled as I am to have Brendan James’ daughter here.”
She beamed at me for another moment, then said something about washing up for dinner, pausing at the door to add, “I should warn you girls that technically we’re on a water ration, since the monastery well is shared with the workers at the dig, but what they don’t know can’t hurt them, now, can it? Just don’t use too much water in your baths, all right?”
I groaned and fell back on the hard, lumpy bed as Kay drifted out the door saying something about having to tell all her friends just which famous artist’s daughter was on her conservation team.
“Your father is a famous artist?” Izumi asked as I covered my face with a wimpy pillow, trying to erase from my mind the mental image of the shocked look on Seth’s face when I slapped him.
I peeked out from under the pillow. She was carefully unpacking her two bags, placing the neatly folded clothing into the wooden chest at the foot of her bed. Even after a ten hour van ride, she looked perfect. She wasn’t sweaty, rumpled, or sunburned, as I was. I tried hard to hate her, but she was just too nice to hate.
Which was yet another form of perfection.
“Actually, my whole family is pretty famous. My mother and father were noted muralists until my dad died, and now Mom has turned to mosaics. My brother Alec creates environmental paintings—stuff like dressing up trees in an endangered forest, and bringing the press in to take pictures. My brother August is a sculptor. He’s in Italy studying on a scholarship. My sisters Denise and April design fabrics, batiks and things like that. My sister Kara makes tapestries. My oldest brother, Nash, has his own line of comic books, and Alexa—she’s another sister—is in Japan working for an Anime company. My younger brother Toby is heavily into digital graphics—Digimon rules his life—and March is a book illustrator.”
Izumi paused in the middle of tucking away lacy undies, her eyes big. “How many brothers and sisters do you have?”
“Nine. I’m the ninth of ten. How many do you have?”
“None,” she said, looking at me as if I was some sort of giant insect lying on the bed. “Your whole family are artists? That must be wonderful.”
“Yeah, right,” I said, rolling onto my back and covering my face with the pillow again. “It’s so wonderful I couldn’t wait to get out of there. Do you have any idea what it’s like to belong to a family where everyone is talented except you? I’m the only one in the family who can’t do anything. I can’t paint, can’t draw, can’t sing, dance, or play a musical instrument, school is just a way to pass the time, and I don’t have any hobbies other than pretending I can actually do something. I’m a freak, I’m just a freak, that’s all.”
Izumi laughed. She even did that perfectly, in a nice, cheerful, amused way that wasn’t at all offensive. “Oh, Jan, I do like you. If you’re a freak then so am I, because I can’t do any of what you said, either. And you have a talent—you’re smart!—otherwise you wouldn’t be here on the dig. Only the smartest students were accepted into the program.”
“Or those whose stepfather serves on the board,” I muttered darkly. I tossed the pillow aside and sat up, figuring I’d better put my stuff away, too. “There is something I’m hoping to do, though, and that’s part of why I wanted to come here. I’m going to be a journalist.”
Izumi looked up from where she was setting a bag full of bath things on a small dresser next to the bed. “A journalist?”
I scooted down to the end of the bed and dragged my bag over, unwinding the tights so I could dump the things into the chest at the end of my bed. “Yeah, the kind who write those great stories in the trashloids you see at the grocery store.”
“Trashloid?” she asked, her head tipped to the side. She had long, black hair that made my little redheaded heart green with envy.
“Trashloid means tabloid. monkey boy marries dog girl—that kind of tabloid. They’re really fun. Anyway, I read somewhere that the people who write those stories make a ton of money, and I figured how hard can it be to write up stuff like that? So when Rob—he’s my step-dad—asked if I’d like to go to Egypt for a month to work on this dig, I figured this would be a great chance to work up a few good stories that I could sell to the tabloids. Mummy’s curse and all that stuff.”
Izumi grimaced. “Then you should be talking more to Dag. She seems to have the curse on her head.”
I did a few therapeutic blinks. “Her head?”
Izumi patted her hair. “Yes, it’s all she thinks about.”
“Oh, on her brain. Yeah, you’re right about that.”
Her gaze dropped like she was ashamed of something. “I’m sorry, my English isn’t very good yet.”
“Are you kidding?” I gawked, I positively gawked at her. “Your English is better than mine! And you speak other languages as well. That’s another thing I can’t do.”
I would have thrown myself into a really quality pity party, but Izumi just laughed again and trotted off to take a tour of the grounds. Since it was at least a thousand degrees outside—and only nine hundred inside—I spent the next hour dumping my things into the chest and wandering through the abandoned monastery peeking into various rooms. The building itself was pretty slick—two levels of beige stone, shaped like a big square, but totally open in the middle to a courtyard where a couple of dusty trees shaded a cluster of tables. The bedrooms were on the second floor, and steps led up to the flat roof, where Kay said a lot of people slept at night because it was cooler.
“What if you fall off while you’re asleep?” I asked that night at dinner.
“Then you would break yourself,” Dr. Paolo, the head conservator said without looking up from the notepad he seemed always to have with him. He was Italian, an old guy with thick round glasses that magnified his eyes so he looked bug-eyed. I was starting to get the feeling that although Kay was officially the leader of the conservators, it was Dr. Paolo who really knew what he was doing.
“Think I’ll pass on the roof-sleeping,” I said, and concentrated on eating the cucumber salad and only a tiny bit of the chicken and rice dish that smelled like heaven, but which I knew wasn’t going to be in the least bit diet-like. Because there were four Egyptians on the conservation crew, three of whom were Muslims—Sayed (nice guy with a birthmark on his face), Ahmed (snob who didn’t look happy to see Izumi and me sit down to dinner), and Gemal (seemed nice, but was very quiet)—Kay explained that we’d be following Ramadan meal times, which meant we could only eat dinner after the sun was down, and have breakfast before sunrise.
“Of course, it’s up to you girls whether or not you wish to partake of lunch with the rest of the dig crew. You’re certainly welcome to—no one here will think any less of you if you do not wish to honor Ramadan.”
Izumi and I glanced at each other, then around the table. Ahmed frowned at us, Sayed smiled, and Gemal kept his eyes lowered.
“Mind you, I think it’s an excellent opportunity to explore and celebrate another culture by participating in the religious events,” Kay said, taking another piece of the soft flat bread that made my mouth water just looking at it. “I wouldn’t think of insulting my Egyptian brothers and sisters by not following tradition, but that’s just me.”
I was just opening my mouth to say that I would be happy to fast during the day as well—a big fat lie, but hey, when in Rome and all that stuff—when the big wooden door that separated the courtyard from the outside swung open, and Seth walked in. At least I thought it was Seth. If he and his twin were identical, which they certainly seemed to be from what I saw, then it could be the other one…
“There you are!” Kay chirped, waving hi
m forward. “Seth, have you met Izumi and Jan? Where have you been all this time? I expected you earlier.”
My face went red as Seth gave me a long look before taking the empty seat across the table. “I was working on my bike, and then I heard Hussein had a find while sifting dirt from the burial chamber, so I went to look at that.”
Kay gave a delicate shudder. “Darling, it’s bad enough one son has gone over to the other side, I won’t have you grubbing around like a common digger.”
“Dad started as a digger,” Seth said, his frown turning into a scowl. “I don’t see why Cy is allowed to dig and I’m not.”
“Your father was never a common digger,” Kay said firmly, her smile going a little tight. “He was apprenticed to one of the greatest Egyptologists of the time, a man who recognized your father’s superior intellect and abilities. As for Cy, I’ve explained to you several times that your father and I agreed that one of you would work with him, and one with me. And really, darling, you must admit that it’s far nicer work to be conserving those lovely walls rather than rooting around in the dirt like an animal.”
“I don’t like conservation. I want to dig like Dad,“ Seth growled.
Kay laughed as she turned to the rest of us. “Just like his father, always snaps when he’s hungry. Have some hummus and chicken, darling. You’ll feel better after you’ve eaten.”
I thought he was going to explode at that, and given the way his mother’s eyes widened as he snarled something under his breath, I think she might have thought so, too. Instead he just slammed back in his chair and stormed off to the stairs to the upper level.
Michael, the fourth Egyptian conservationist (and a Copt, which meant he was Christian instead of Muslim), crossed himself as Seth leaped up the stairs. Paolo pursed his lips and went back to making notes with one hand while he fed himself with the other. Sayed, Gemal, and Ahmed kept their gaze firmly on their plates, although I thought I heard Gemal mutter, “masha'allah,” which I knew was asking Allah for a blessing. Izumi also avoided looking at anyone in particular. I glanced away from Kay, who tried to laugh off Seth’s hissy fit even though I could tell she was embarrassed.