Read Online Death on Tour by Janice Hamrick - Free Book Online

night was to include belly dancing and whirling dervishes, which I was looking forward to seeing. My shower and primping usually took about a quarter of the time that Kyla’s did, so I went first and then pulled on a t-shirt and threw myself on the bed to rest while she went through her elaborate routine.
    As soon as the bathroom door shut and the water started, I leaped up and retrieved my backpack. I still had Millie’s pack and wasn’t exactly sure what to do with it. I should have given it to Anni before I left the bus, or even stuffed it under a seat, but at the last minute I’d decided I wanted to take one more look at the contents. For all I knew, something else of mine or Kyla’s might be hidden in the depths, but I knew that was only an excuse. I really wanted to read through the rest of that notebook. As soon as I heard the sound of Kyla drawing the shower curtain, I emptied the bag onto my bed.
    The notebook, the lighter, the pen, and the purse all dropped onto the rust-colored floral bedspread, followed by a couple of small items that might have belonged to Millie herself and a hair brush filled with long black hair that certainly did not. Yuck, I thought, picking it up distastefully between thumb and forefinger. Either Dawn Kim’s or Fiona’s. Who would steal a used hair brush? With a little grimace I dropped it back into the bag so I wouldn’t have to look at it.
    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,