Chapter 23
J.D. escorts them down a long cinder-block hallway painted the yellow-brown of the Alberta Badlands.
“Are there security cameras?” James asks, looking up nervously.
“Only at the main entrance. Last call for the bathroom,” J.D. says, swiping his badge to open yet another set of heavy doors. “You can leave anytime before closing. The doors will automatically lock behind you.”
They walk into a high-ceilinged, windowless industrial space filled with hundreds of wide, squat metal lockers that house the smaller pieces. Bigger specimens, many of them still in plaster field jackets labeled with locations, dates, and sample numbers, are racked on open metal shelves.
“Mo’s ass,” Ripley whispers, stepping over a fair-size mosasaur resting on a wooden pallet.
“Yo’ ass,” James replies, smirking at J.D.’s curious look.
“Can we keep our phones?” Ripley asks.
“Feel free, but the signal is crap down here. It really kills your battery.” J.D. hands each of them a visitor badge. “My shift ends at seven. If you stay until closing, give me the badges tomorrow. And if you love me at all, don’t get caught. See you at lunch?”
“Can’t wait,” Ripley says and laughs when J.D. lifts her off her feet in an exuberant hug. When he sets her down, James’s smirk has vanished.
It’s weird being in a research collection when no one’s working or chatting or pushing squeaky-wheeled carts down the aisles.
Ripley grabs a cart to hold the sizable chunk of paper J.D. printed from the electronic logbook. Will was here for weeks. He accessed three hundred and nineteen drawers in over two hundred separate lockers during that time.
She and James have only a few hours to retrace his footsteps.
“My phone’s almost dead. Can you set an alarm on yours?”
James shakes his head. “Mine’s in the car. I’ll set my watch.”
“You left your phone in the car and didn’t go back for it?”
“I thought Charlie would turn up while I was outside. And then…” He exhales. “You needed me. I didn’t want to leave.”
The sound of his voice dies away quickly in the hum of the ventilation system, but Ripley feels his words echoing in her chest.
She needed him. And so he didn’t leave.
She has to do something right now to stop thinking about how she can’t have the one man who wants to do the opposite of taking something from her.
“The watch is fine,” she says. “Let’s go.”
She starts down the first row of lockers, chattering to fill the quiet. “My dad would go wild for this place. Some of these lockers probably haven’t been opened since the museum was built. I’d love to bring him here when—” Ripley catches herself. “Someday,” she finishes.
“Your father loves dinosaurs too?”
“He wanted to be a paleontologist. He had to drop out of college when I came along.”
James cocks his head. “You went into paleontology to please your father?”
“He never asked me to, but I spent my whole childhood doing it as a hobby. I mean, you probably grew up talking chemistry at the dinner table.”
“Something like that.” James’s eyes dart ahead, looking for the first locker number on their list. “J.D. was very happy to see you today. You two were…close?”
“Very,” she says. “Ha! Found it.” She bends down to a locker at ground level.
James makes a choking sound. Ripley straightens with an undignified hop, grabbing at her miniskirt like something bit her in the ass.
James’s face is beet red. He’s pretending to be absorbed in the prep table at the end of the aisle, which features a stack of plywood, a yogurt container crammed with six bottles of glue, and no bones.
This is why she wears pants. “Why don’t you open it,” she says testily.
The locker greets them with a breath of eternity-scented air. Inside, gray metal drawers hold boxes of bones, each piece nestled in custom-cut foam.
Ripley pulls out a drawer of neatly bottled teeth in every size from velociraptor to Bambiraptor.
“What are we looking for?” James asks.
“Anything that looks wrong or misplaced. Or missing.”
James runs his hand over the jumble of bottles. “How am I supposed to tell if something’s missing?”
“Exactly. You wouldn’t think it’s easy to steal a fossil, but in a collection this big, it’s easy to lose track of small things. People grab a specimen and forget to check it out. Someone reorganizes, then leaves, and no one knows what got moved.
“Also, if I were Will, I’d have asked to see a lot of drawers I didn’t care about to throw people off my trail.
” She closes the locker. “Hopefully something will jump out at us. Here, you take the next locker,” she says, handing him the sheet of paper detailing the fossil Will was supposed to have examined. “I’ll take the one after that.”
Ripley falls into a semi-mindless routine: check a locker, close it up, pull the cart to the next location.
The data sheets start to blur in her mind.
Sometimes, she watches James peer in a drawer, frowning over the contents.
Once, she catches him with his eyes closed, face tipped toward the soaring warehouse ceiling, rolling his shoulders.
The front of his neck arches so tenderly, she can’t breathe for a second.
In the windowless space, time passes slowly, but they still don’t have long enough. She closes another drawer of fangs, muttering, “How many teeth does one museum really need?”
James’s voice floats over the bank of lockers in front of her. “From what I’ve seen tonight, all of them.”
“I wasn’t talking to you, smart-ass.”
“When talking to oneself, one must include Adams at the end of the sentence. It gets quite confusing for others if this step is omitted.”
“Ha-ha.”
James comes around the corner to pick up another page. “Will you and J.D. keep in touch now that you’ve found each other again?”
“I hope so. I love J.D. I mean, everyone loves him. He broke up a lot of fights by walking into the middle of an argument like”—Ripley mimes being huge and deliberately clueless—“Hey, guys, what’s happening? He really knows his way around a backhoe too.”
James coughs. “A backhoe?”
“Yeah. To get the big specimens out of the ground,” she says distractedly, looking over a box of tiny fragments. “For the really big ones, like T. rex, we sometimes had to bring in a helicopter.”
“Oh, a backhoe,” he says, exhaling. “You mean a back actor—the machine with the shovel.”
Ripley takes in his Lego-block posture, the tight voice, that downturned mouth. Is he jealous?
“Did you think backhoe was code for something?”
His cheeks are as red as they were when she bent over in the stupid skirt. “It does sound quite suggestive.”
“More suggestive than back actor?” She’s about to make a whole argument of it, but suddenly, she’s too tired. She got up with the damn sun and drove for half the day. They have maybe an hour left to find a needle in a hundred-and-fifty-thousand-fossil haystack, and she hasn’t eaten since noon.
“You don’t get to do this, James. I respect your rules, but you’re not allowed to make me confess that I have feelings for you, then push me away, then act jealous when I’m happy to see an old friend.
Who, in case you didn’t notice him flirting with that group from Out-n-About Tours while he was stealing our visitor passes, is gay. ”
She expects him to apologize and back off. She does not expect him to say, in a low rasp, “You never said you had feelings for me.” He looks shaken. Starving. His eyes are dark and fathomless.
She lets out a disbelieving breath. “Yes, I did. You said Tell me you want me to stop, and I will. And I didn’t say stop.”
“Ripley,” he says carefully, “that was about—about kissing. I was asking whether I could kiss you.” There’s an artificial smoothness to his voice that hides whatever emotion he’s feeling.
Fuck. She looks down at the smooth concrete floor. She’s surrounded by things that came out of holes in the ground, yet the earth refuses to open up so she can throw herself in.
She grabs a page from the top of the stack. “Forget it. I was confused.” She finds the locker she wants and yanks it open.
He comes to stand on the other side of the metal door. “When I told you I’d stop, Ripley—”
“Stop,” she says abruptly. James immediately steps back. “No, no, not like that. I meant look at this.”
He comes around the door. “What is it?”
“Nothing.” She touches the empty foam liner in the center of the drawer.
“Something’s missing,” he says.
She rechecks the data sheet. The image feels like a punch to her gut.
“It’s a coracoid,” she says. The size, the shape, the birdlike sturdiness—the missing bone could literally have come from Beauty’s other shoulder.
“Possible dromaeosaurid, Dinosaur Provincial Park, 1978,” she reads.
Her heart gives a panicky thump. Dromaeosaurids were closely related to birds, but this specimen was found before the paleontology community fully accepted the idea that birds evolved from dinosaurs.
It could easily have been misidentified, then overlooked by everyone for the past five decades.
Everyone but Will, that is.
“It’s not marked as loaned or lost,” she says.
“Because it’s not loaned or lost. It’s stolen.” James’s voice is grim, almost a growl. He pulls the drawer out all the way, checks the boxes at the back. Fourteen more slots are empty—all bigger bones, including a skull.
“Khankhuuluu,” Ripley says, her heart like a stone in her chest.
“Khankhuuluu,” James agrees, his mouth tight.
Stumbling on a mislabeled treasure in a research collection sounds like fantasy, but it happens.
A team of Canadians did it with two skeletons in Mongolia that had been misidentified as tyrannosaurs and relegated to storage for fifty years.
The story of the newly renamed Khankhuuluu mongoliensis got picked up by every major media outlet in the Western world.
“Will couldn’t steal the whole thing. Someone might recognize it,” she says, thinking aloud. “But if he included a few pieces as part of a supposedly complete skeleton, would any museum think to check its collection?”
James paces in a tight circle. “If he’s assembled a skeleton from several research collections, he certainly wouldn’t want to subject it to confirmatory testing.”
Ripley’s never been the type to break stuff in frustration, but if she weren’t surrounded by priceless fossils, she might give it a try. “We can’t prove anything with a shitty Polaroid and an empty drawer.”
“I know. For now, we should try to get through as many of the drawers as we can. See how many other fossils he might have taken.” James slides up the cuff of his robin’s-egg-blue button-down and consults his watch. “We still have…”
He frowns at the watch. Taps it. Looks at Ripley, his face slack with panic.
“Do you think it’s only half past seven? I mean, if we got here at half past five?”
She grabs his wrist. The second hand on his fancy watch isn’t moving.
“Oh, fuck.” She fumbles for her phone. The red low-battery icon flashes once, then the screen goes black.
“We have to go.” She scrapes the scattered papers into a chaotic pile.
“This watch is failproof. It’s self-winding.” James shakes his wrist, feet firmly planted.
She tugs his arm. “Come on, James. It might not be nine o’clock yet. We might still make it out.”
“It’s barely a year old.”
She hauls him bodily into the access corridor. The security door slams hollowly behind them. No going back now.
“Return the damn watch. Tell”—she glances at the watch face—“Jaeger-LeWhatever that their product fucked up a heist in a dinosaur museum. I’m sure that falls under the warranty.” She hesitates at the doors to the lobby, then, seeing no wiring for an alarm system, shoves them open.
There are no shrieks from excited children. No twittering from the Late Cretaceous soundtrack. Accordioned glass doors seal the entrance to the gift shop. At the end of the velvet-roped corridor leading to the exit, security lights send triangles of yellow down through the inky darkness.
“Shit.” Ripley leans over to check the digital display behind the info desk. “Oh my God. Ten thirty,” she moans.
“Christ on a cracker,” James says. “Can we get out?”
“Not without setting off the alarm system. If there are motion detectors, we’ve already tripped them.”
“Can you text J.D.? Can he help us?”
Ripley glances up at James’s pale cheeks. There’s a silver lining to already being an outlaw of sorts. Sometimes she forgets what it’s like to have a reputation to lose.
She flashes her screen of death at him, then points across the lobby. “I think there’s a charging station outside the cafeteria.”
As soon as the phone starts up, Ripley sends J.D. an all-caps text: SO SORRY, WE FUCKED UP. LOCKED IN MUSEUM. WHAT SHOULD WE DO.
“Is he coming to let us out?”
“He has to. Either that or the Mounties are going to invite us to spend the night in a whole other locked building.”
James doesn’t laugh. Ripley doesn’t either. She hasn’t been this worried about well-earned consequences since her dad got home from poker early the same night her best friend, Ashley, had come over with half a pack of cigarettes she’d lifted from her mom’s winter coat.
After thirty minutes of James’s distraught pacing, no texts from J.D., and no squadron of cops, Ripley starts feeling a little ridiculous. She thinks longingly of the emergency protein bars she keeps in the glove box of the Charger, but they might as well be on Mars.
“Welp.” She unplugs her phone.
He whirls around. “Wait, where are you going? Shouldn’t we be together if the police come?”
“No one’s coming, James. We’re stuck here until J.D. rescues us or the museum opens tomorrow morning. There’s literally nothing we can do until then. We can’t dig, we can’t investigate, we probably can’t even sleep.” She tucks her phone in her pocket.
“But where are you going?” he repeats.
“I’m hungry, James,” she says firmly. “I’m going to find something to eat.”