Chapter 22
Eastern Alberta looks unnervingly flat to someone raised with the Rockies firmly at her back.
The long, straight highway and lush squares of farmland are interrupted only by the odd oil derrick and, once, a coyote dashing across the road.
In the distance, the planet falls away sharply against the sky.
Drumheller is a deep scar in the smooth skin of the prairies, a river valley carved out over fourteen thousand years. It’s greener here than in Hell Creek, but you can’t mistake the characteristic humped cliffs of the Badlands. It feels like a fossil kind of place.
On any other day, Ripley would be overflowing with excitement on the switchbacks toward the town.
Today, she’s spent a deeply weird three hours in the car with James.
He’s been super-dismayed ever since he realized he forgot to pack his hair products.
She can’t stop sneaking glances at the way his Superman hair has morphed into a wildly tousled mop.
He’s compensating by holding his spine so straight, Ripley imagines his vertebrae clicking together like a tower of Lego blocks.
Every so often, she gets a whiff of rain and vetiver no matter where she redirects the vents in the Charger.
Both of them are obviously avoiding contact, snatching their hands back whenever they stray too far toward an invisible line painted down the middle of the car. He’s twitchy, repeatedly taking breaths like he’s about to say something, then staying silent.
Nobody has brought up the kiss.
Along a dusty stretch of the Trans-Canada Highway, he finally manages to ask, “So your trips home—they weren’t simply to visit? They were so you could take care of your dad?”
She swallows. “Yeah.”
“And the money you’ll get from Beauty, that’s for him too?”
“We don’t have your National Health Service, James. He has medical debt. And I’d like to give him a better life.”
“Yes. I imagine you would.”
More silence. It feels impossible to be near him, but not in the way she meant when she made her rule about staying far away from paleontologists. It’s impossible to be near him and not have him. Impossible to consider that in a little under two months, he’ll be gone.
She’s relieved when they get to the museum.
She grabs her oversize purse and bolts out of the car, pretending she wants to smooth the short denim skirt and fluttery green blouse she wore to try to impress Charlie.
James watches a procession of tourists debarking from a tall bus and brushes imaginary dust from his trousers.
It’s eighty-five degrees, and still with the trousers.
When her dad admired the outfit earlier, James delightedly launched a mini-monologue about the subtleties of Prince of Wales check.
To Ripley the suit looks like textured gray-brown wool paired with one of those Belgian linen shirts and a quietly expensive watch, but what does she know?
The Royal Tyrrell is what you’d expect from a world-class museum built by Canadians: modest and unassuming, most of the long rectangular building hidden by white pines.
There are a number of cute dinosaur statues perfectly sized for kids to ride, all accompanied by cheerful Please Do Not Climb the Dinosaurs!
signs. Not a single child is riding the dinosaurs, because Canada.
Ripley hasn’t darkened the doors of a paleontology museum since she left academia. She used to love them, obviously. She used to love everything about paleontology. Before.
Maybe today is the day she can love museums again.
“Would you like me to do the talking?” James says, taking in the velociraptor statue that appears to be leaping from the foliage at the front entrance.
“Why?” Because James is a man? Because he’s dressed like he’s at his country house in Whateveringhamshire? Because he’s James fricking Smithson, and she’s nobody? All of the above?
“Because sometimes you reveal more than you want to, and I don’t know how much you trust Charlie.”
“Rude,” Ripley says, offended. “I can keep plenty of secrets.”
James raises an eyebrow. “When you talk to yourself, which is semi-constantly, you call yourself Adams. Your shoulders hurt when your work is going badly—”
“What?”
“Because you do this.” He hunches crossly. “You almost never wear your hair loose even though you secretly think it’s extraordinary. About which you are correct.” He inhales as if he’s surprised himself, then quickly adds, “And you still have nightmares about college examinations.”
She puts a hand to the low, thick, knotted bun that took her half an hour and three YouTube tutorials to make and stares at him in slightly bewildered, half-turned-on fascination. “How did you know about the exams?”
James looks studiously in the direction of the interpretive trail. “You talk in your sleep.”
“Well, I’m awake now. And you were supposed to be sedated.”
“Sometimes I wake up at night if I take my medication during the day.” After a short silence, he adds, “Also, you’re not exactly quiet. As it were.”
“Oh my God, James.”
At this, his barely there blush lights up like a sunrise. Ripley has the horrible suspicion she might have said that phrase in her sleep too.
“Fine,” she says. “I’ll do the introductions; you do the talking.
Charlie will love you, anyway.” James’s reputation will be helpful, especially because Charlie hates talking about frauds.
It’s been that way ever since he got fooled by Archaeoraptor.
Surprising him with their suspicions about Will is a risk, but he would never have agreed to meet them if he’d known in advance.
“Superb.” James opens the door and holds it for Ripley.
She grits her teeth and walks into the belly of the beast.
Half an hour later, Ripley and James are perched on a maroon pleather bench in front of the gift shop, cooling their heels on the speckled granite floors of the small lobby, a soundtrack of twitters and roars emanating from the trees in the spookily lit Cretaceous diorama.
Ripley can tell James wants to look at his fancy watch again by the way his long fingers drum against his trousers.
“Stop twitching. You’re scaring the children. ”
James’s eyebrows draw down. “Is Charlie always this late?”
“Let me guess,” Ripley says. “You’re a punctual-to-the-millisecond type. Always a Queen Elizabeth, never a Harry Styles.”
“There are more than two types of British people,” he says.
“Probably, but those are the only ones we’ve found in the fossil record. Besides, you should feel good about the amount of diversity in your country. There’s just one kind of Canadian. The nice ki—”
A deafening half-trumpet, half-fart sound obliterates Ripley’s impromptu taxonomy. She screams a little, as do about fifty museumgoers. James scrambles to his feet, looking around wildly.
A few feet away, a man with lightly silvered black hair is clutching a lumpy, curved piece of pink plastic. He’s making a crazy-eyes face and laughing too hard to speak.
“Goddamn it, Charlie!” Ripley yells, earning herself dirty looks from half a dozen parents.
“You should’ve seen your faces,” he wheezes, brushing tears from his eyes before they can land on his green plaid button-down. “You hate me, but it’s worth it. Oh my God, I would do it again in a second.”
James leans over and murmurs in Ripley’s ear, “Only one kind of Canadian, is there?”
“Can it, Professor,” she whispers back. She swipes the trumpetlike instrument from Charlie. “Is this a reproduction of a Parasaurolophus crest? Where the hell did you find this?”
Charlie acts affronted. “My ancestors built the Great Pyramids. You think I can’t figure out how to 3D-print the nasal passages of a dinosaur?” He gestures for her to put it to her lips. “Try it. It’s really fun.”
“I’m not trying it here,” Ripley says, gesturing at the tourists who are still fluttering after the jump scare. “I’ll get arrested.”
“I already called the Mounties,” Charlie says. “I told them the Americans were coming to steal our loonies.”
“American, singular.” Absorbed in Charlie’s noisemaker, Ripley waves absently at James. “This one is British. Charlie Bassa, James Smithson.”
“Not the James Smithson?” Charlie’s dark eyes sparkle. Nothing delights him more than a surprise.
James offers Charlie his hand. “Delighted to make your acquaintance, Charles. I’ve heard so much about you.”
“I’ll bet,” Charlie says, giving Ripley a conspiratorial smirk before turning back to James. “Quick: If you could invite any paleontologist in the world to dinner, who would it be?”
James blinks. “What?”
“Living or dead. Present company excluded so you don’t offend Ripley when you choose me.” Charlie gives James a Muppet-like open-mouthed grin.
“Er. Mary Anning, I suppose.”
“Really?” Ripley asks.
“Really,” Charlie purrs, looking from James to Ripley like he’s savoring another surprise.
James shrugs. “My mother took me to Lyme Regis as a boy. Mary Anning made pivotal discoveries on that beach, no matter that academic societies refused to admit her.”
“You like women who color outside the lines, huh? Makes sense that you showed up with this one.” Charlie smirks like he caught them banging on a bed of lab coats.
James’s expression is frankly alarmed. “We’re not—”
“He’s yanking your chain, James,” Ripley interrupts before he gets them both caught in a web of diminishingly plausible denials.
“And you love me for it,” Charlie coos.
Ripley’s dying by the time they work their way around to the business at hand. Once James starts hinting about novel proto-bird fossils, though, Charlie latches on with dismaying quickness.
“You mean Will Stone’s fossil? Heck of a bird,” Charlie says. “Can’t wait to get a closer look at the APS meeting.”
Ripley forgets James is supposed to be doing the talking. “How did you hear about that?”
“Them Bones leaked the abstract yesterday.” Charlie pulls out his phone to show them the front page of the paleontology gossip site.
Jesus. Hundreds of comments. Thousands of likes. Paleontology nerds around the world are losing their damn minds.