Maria Hudgins - Lacy Glass 01 - Scorpion House Read Online Free PDF Page B

into the house. They followed him across the long porch, through an arched doorway and into a large, square room. “This is our main work room and storage room. We call it the antika room, for lack of a better term,” he said. “This is where we keep artifacts from the tomb.”
    Lacy looked around and saw that a concrete bench of a comfortable seating height, actually built into the walls, ran all around the room with gaps only where there were doors. Most of it was lined with pots and lump-filled burlap bags.
    “First things first, Horace,” Roxanne took over. Her crisp English accent contrasted starkly with Lanier’s American drawl. “I’m sure you’re all quite weary. Would you prefer to choose your bedrooms first or take a tour of our laboratory facilities? Selim will bring your luggage in and Bay has informed me that dinner will be served in an hour.”
    Susan clapped her hands. “Lab first! Lab first!”
    Shelley rolled her eyes.
    Lanier led the way through a door on the side opposite the front entrance and into a long, narrow room. The whitewashed wall facing them was punctuated by one small window and a door. Overhead, two bare light bulbs hung from cords. All four walls were lined with lab benches and equipment that shined as if it was brand new.
    To Lacy’s left, she saw a refrigerator, two binocular microscopes and one compound microscope. A tall glass chromatography column, a colorimeter and some other electronic instruments sat atop the bench. Beside the refrigerator stood a spectrophotometer, an instrument about the size of a clothes dryer. She hadn’t expected anything as sophisticated as this. She stepped over and ran her hand across its smooth top. It looked brand new, it’s three-prong plug still wrapped in shipping tape.
    “Golly.”
    Graham headed for the chromatography column and fingered the other equipment nearby. “Colorimeter … melting point apparatus …” He opened the wooden doors under the counter and revealed a dozen or more gallon bottles of reagents. “Acetic acid, methanol, ethanol, diethyl ether … The acids need to be stored separately. We’ll have to find another place for them.” He closed the door, straightened up, and looked around. “Where’s the fume hood?”
    “We had to make some concessions to the electric supply,” Roxanne said. “We’re actually lucky to have as much power as we do have running to the house. Even so, it isn’t sufficient to run things like fume hoods and such without blowing the circuits. And now that you’ve brought it up, I must caution you to run only one major appliance, excepting the fridge of course, at a time. Don’t run the spectrophotometer and the centrifuge at the same time.”
    “You’re all gonna love this, though.” Lanier directed their attention to a flat-screen monitor at the far end of the room. Beside it were a tangle of wires and fiber optic cables. “This is a video microscope and we’ve got light filters you can use and a digital camera attachment. It’s amazing. You’ll have to play with it when you get a chance.”
    Lacy picked up a device that looked somewhat like a police radar gun for nabbing speeders. “What’s this?”
    “Oh! Oh!” Susan pushed past the others and snatched the gun-like instrument from Lacy’s hand. “It’s an X-ray spectrometer. You just point it at a wall in the tomb and it analyzes the composition of the paint, the plaster, or whatever it’s pointing at.”
    “An X-ray spectrometer?” Lacy snatched it back. “I’ve heard of these but I’ve never seen one. How did you get this, Susan?”
    “By groveling. We have it on loan from the University of Chicago. They’re letting us use it for the next three months.”
    “Very cool. This’ll make working on the walls a piece of cake. I was wondering how I was going to analyze the paint without damaging it.”
    “Be careful with it, Lacy. It cost more than your car. And read the instructions before you go off half-cocked