Dead x 4.
I woke up in our hotel bed, my head still aching. I hate to admit it, but that's a souvenir from a concussion on the world's worst flight a month ago: occasionally, when head pain skewers me, I wish someone would shoot me in the brainstem and get it over with.
Tucker's legs spasmed. He'd stolen most of the covers, and his sweat smelled like onions. I snagged the top cover, rolled on my back, and tried to sink into sleep.
Something else had woken me up. But what?
Dead x 4. I was dream-musing about super-slayed Osiris. Drowned, smashed into a tree, chopped down as a tree, and dismembered as a mummy. Can't get much deader than that.
I tried turning on each side and even on my stomach while Tucker snored.
Finally, I gave up and checked my phone. Even though I'd turned off notifications, my Spidey sense must have kicked into overdrive. Ten minutes ago, at 5 a.m., I'd received a message from Noeline Momberg.
Dr. Sze, could you please make sure Gizelda Becker gets her red book? She's not answering her phone. She checked out of her hotel. Her flight's not until Thursday morning.
We're flying to ZA to see a surgeon.
I think she'll like Jaco and Fleur's drawings.
I sent it to your hotel. Many thanks.
The red book. Could this be Mr. Becker's notes?
The notes Gizelda had refused to give me?
If Gizelda had made friends with the Mombergs, maybe she'd let the children draw in the pretty red notebook to distract them from their dad's eye and to cheer them up before their urgent flight.
I jumped into some clothes and popped down to the lobby to present my passport as ID. The elderly desk clerk handed me a palm-sized notebook covered in imitation red leather, and I remembered to tip him.
"Thank you, Madam."
"Did I just miss the woman who brought this? Maybe a whole family of four?" I asked him.
He shook his head. "An Uber-Careem dropped it off, madam."
The Mombergs must have headed straight to the airport. The drop-off would have cost more than the notebook was worth, something their family could ill-afford.
Still, what a break for me.
I shut myself in our bathroom and flipped on the light and fan, my heart already thudding in anticipation. If Gizelda had let kids play with the book, I didn't consider it top secret.
I flipped past the childish pen scrawls inside the front cover, praying that they hadn't obscured anything vital further in.
Gizelda Becker's neat, spare handwriting barely covered two pages. The remaining pages were either blank or filled with more Momberg baby art. She must not have been too thrilled with her father's pearls of wisdom. Still, I pored over the few words:
Osiris
Isis
Set
The eye of Horus
Hathor
golden disc
My heart thrummed. The Becker notes actually made sense to me.
Tucker and I had pieced together the rest of the legend last night before we'd fallen asleep. It goes a little something like this.
Nephthys helps Isis find all the pieces of quadfecta-dead mummy Osiris, except his penis. Some say that a fish ate it. ("Ouch," from Tucker.)
Still, they resurrect 99 percent of Osiris. Isis flies around him in falcon/kite form and miraculously becomes pregnant.
Osiris can't rule without a dick—female leaders like Hatshepsut must've come later—so he descends to rule the underworld.
Isis gives birth in the marshes of the Nile, the same area where she’d hidden Osiris’s body. This time, Nephthys keeps her secret. Isis and Osiris's son, Horus, survives and eventually challenges Set for the kingdom.
Nine gods agree that Horus wins, but the sun god can't decide. Horus and Set fight for another 80 years, including one battle where they take the form of hippopotami.
Set always plays dirty. He steals Horus's left eyeball while he's sleeping, and a goddess named Hathor has to restore his vision.
In their final and strangest battle, Set dominates Horus by jacking off between his nephew's legs. In their culture, defiling a man with your jizz ensures victory for Set. Horus is only able to trap his uncle's semen in his hands.
When Horus asks Isis for help, she screams and cuts off his hands, which mitigates the bad juju. She tosses Set's nasty spunk into the marsh. Then she takes a sample of Horus's semen and sprays it on Set's lettuce, which Set eats.
So when Set brags to the gods that he "performed the labor of a male" against Horus, the gods light up Set's sperm to show the proof, only to discover his swimmers in the marsh.
Then, thanks to his mom, Horus summons his semen from Set's head in the form of a golden solar disk. Horus places that disc on his own head, crowning himself.
Thus Ma'at, or cosmic balance, is restored. The right king, or at least his offspring, takes the throne. Plus it sounds like he got his hands back.
Obviously, this legend had spoken to Phillip Becker. He made his daughter take dictation on it during their vacation.
But why?
What was the clue in this legend, if any?
Tucker snored so loudly that I could hear it over the bathroom fan.
My heart leapt as I scanned the next page, trying to make sense of it before he woke up. Yep, call me petty, but I wanted to crush this while Tucker got his Z's.
Cat
☥
Antiquities
Anubis
Bata
Wife
Beer
Flower
Bull
Carnarvon
L 12:15
Wow. Pretty good drawing of a cat. Who knew Gizelda Becker had artistic talent.
The ankh, I recognized. I still had mine in my thigh pouch. I should move it somewhere safer and/or buy a chain for it.
I moved on to Anubis. I remembered his jackal's head, and the fact that he had a role in the underworld. Turned out Anubis was the original god of the dead before Osiris. Some said he was the son of Bastet, the cat-headed god; others believed he was the son of Ra and Nephthys; still more said he was the illegitimate son of Osiris and Nephthys; some melded Anubis and Osiris together.
I started pacing. Quietly. So far, Phillip Becker had seemed to have a predilection for the afterlife. Did he know he was going to die?
I mean, all 87-year-olds should be aware of their mortality. Still.
When I entered "Bata" in my phone, it pointed me to shoes, but my search engine soon spat out the Tale of Two Brothers, Anubis and Bata.
Anubis is the older, married god, and Bata is the younger, hunky brother. Anubis's wife tries to seduce Bata. He refuses. Out of vengeance, she lies to her husband that Bata came on to her and beat her. Enraged, Anubis sets off to kill his younger brother.
Bata prays to Ra, the sun god, who magics up a crocodile-filled lake between the two brothers. With this protection in place, Bata calls out the truth to his brother, and as proof of his sincerity, Bata cuts off his own equipment and throws it in the lake, where it's snapped up by a catfish.
(At this point, I stifled a laugh. What's with all the dick cutting and consumption? Then I tiptoed out of the bathroom and kissed Tucker's knee through the sheet. Sorry. Poor dudes.
My own dude snored on.)
Bata says he's off to the Valley of Cedars. He'll hide his heart in a blossom on top of a tree. If Anubis ever receives a jar of beer that froths over, he should come find his brother.
Anubis believes his bro and returns home to slay his wife.
Eesh.
"Hope?" Tucker rasped.
My heart tried to leap out of my chest as I shoved the notebook under the bed. I took a deep breath. I was lucky to have a heart in my chest, unlike Bata. "Yep?"
"What are you doing up?"
I should tell him that I finally got a hold of Becker's notes.
He patted the bed. I climbed in, coaching myself. Two heads are better than one. We're a team. Tell him.
His body felt almost too warm against mine. Now the onion smell mixed with his bad breath. I could still hear Tucker's voice in my head, with a faint sneer.
I got this.
We all know you're the "detective doctor," Hope.
Nope.
Nope on all of that.
Technically, I told him the truth. "I'm reading about Anubis and Bata. Can you believe another god got this cut off? He did it to himself, though." I slid my hand along Tucker's morning wood, and if he got a little distracted, well. I could always tell him later.