Chapter 4
Eighty-Three Days Until the End of the Summer Excavation Season
Ripley doesn’t sleep well.
Neither do a number of her crew members, judging by the grumpy morning faces and post-sex hair on Griff and Cara, and is that—yup, Matteo and Jordin are taking spoonfuls of each other’s breakfasts. God. That’s going to leave a mark.
Ripley’s seen the aftermath of these relationships at all the digs she’s crewed on.
Everybody thinks it’s a great idea to hook up with their polar opposites until the inevitable breakup.
Next summer, the flippant one will still be stealing tape measures from the anal-retentive one, only there won’t be any orgasms to turn the infuriating habits cute.
Time hasn’t done much to dull Ripley’s regret over falling for Will under those exact circumstances.
She was young and dumb and beyond excited to be on a crew in Hell Creek, where—like every new grad student—she dreamed of finding the world’s most complete Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton and having it nicknamed for her, like Sue and Stan and Trix.
She was far too impressed by Will’s favorite excavation tool: a Bowie knife, which seemed so much cooler than her basic chisel.
While she hesitated before every brushstroke, Will shrugged when a fossil crumbled under his blade.
Bones break, he’d said. That’s the restorers’ problem.
Fucking Will. She’d tossed and turned all night, her mind changing every ninety seconds: His find is fake—no, it’s real. It’s a different species—fuck, it’s the same.
Cara ambles up and hands Ripley a mug of camp coffee. “Think it’s gonna rain?” This is a perpetual joke in this part of the state, where the mountains catch morning clouds but the prairie sun burns them off before they can make good on their promises.
“You betcha,” Ripley says, which is Montanan for anything from Yes to You’re incredibly annoying but I don’t feel like arguing.
“Still thinking about that guy?” Cara’s fascinated by the idea of scientists indignantly investigating each other, but as Ripley explained last night, this is how it works. Academic paleontology is basically two hundred years of people with grudges trying to discredit one another. Fun times.
“A little. Not the guy specifically,” Ripley adds when Cara arches a brow. “More like the whole…situation,” she says, making a stirring motion.
“Oh, yeah. I also noticed his”—Cara stirs much lower than Ripley did—“situation.”
“Ha-ha. Very—hold on.” She plucks her buzzing phone from one of the many pockets in her cargo pants. “Maury,” she says, reading the display. “Come listen in, C.”
Next year, Cara will be running the site without her. While Clever Girl Fossils will ideally be self-funding, it wouldn’t hurt for the incoming boss to get some experience with high-maintenance donors.
Ripley takes a second to adjust her mindset before putting the call on speaker.
She believes supporting small businesses and advancing the progress of science are good uses for a billionaire’s money, but she isn’t so naive as to trust said billionaire.
She made sure to put safeguards in their contract so he can’t whisk a critical piece of the fossil record off to a climate-controlled vault, never to be studied.
She wouldn’t admit it to Smithson, but she still cares about science.
“Hi, Maury.” In the background, Ripley can hear the clink of free weights. Cara rolls her eyes and makes a jerk-off gesture.
“Ripley. Ripperrrr. Rippity-doo-dah,” he singsongs.
Ripley doesn’t understand Maury’s obsession with riffing on people’s names, but she long ago decided it was prudent not to tell the guy with the money that whatever long-dead meme he’s referring to, nobody her age gets it.
“How are you?”
“Fantastic. Fucking A. My body fat is down to eight percent. My trainer says I have the bone density of a twenty-year-old.”
“Wow. I didn’t think that was possible.” Like a lot of paleontologists, Ripley studied human anatomy, so she’s pretty certain his trainer is lying to flatter him.
“Hard to believe I’m forty-eight,” he crows, exhaling with each rep.
His Wikipedia page says he’s fifty-five, but whatever.
“I have news, Rip-a-Roni,” he says cheerily.
“Good news for us both, I hope?” Like most people who own private jets, Maury’s a bit of a sociopath. He forgets that good news for him might not be good news for other people.
“More like interesting news. You know my bones. My one-of-a-kind dino-bird. Well, I got an inside tip. Turns out someone found another dino-bird in Montana. Remind me how long you said it would take to get mine ready?”
The bottom drops out of Ripley’s stomach. It has to be Will’s fossil, but how did Maury find out about it so fast? She squeezes Cara’s shoulder, trying to project calm. The younger woman looks like she might lose her oatmeal.
“You don’t want to rush a fossil prep, Maury…um, Maur-bore,” she says soothingly. “Bird bones are fragile, which is why they’re so rare. And valuable. I think six months would be reasonable.”
“But can you do it faster? Because this other one is ready to go now.”
“I’ve heard that’s not quite true,” she says carefully. “And your fossil will still be the only one available to private buyers.”
“See, that’s the thing, Ripster.” There’s the rattle and clang of a bar dropped showily into its cradle.
“I called this scientist. Dr. Will Stone. Turns out I was able to create an opportunity to sponsor his bones. Same deal as with you. I loan them to his university for a couple of years, and they give me a reproduction—museum-quality, very nice—until I get the real thing back. He sent me a video of his fossil. Looks like yours would if you had the whole thing. And they haven’t yet named the species, so… ”
Fear trails down the back of Ripley’s throat, cool like the Montana wind at summer’s end.
Will is an assistant professor at the University of Eastern Montana, scrabbling for tenure like every other junior faculty member.
If he could attract a gigantic private donation while still retaining the research rights to a fossil of this significance, of course he’d take that deal.
“We don’t know that his fossil is the same bird as ours. As yours,” she corrects herself.
Maury lets out a slightly impatient breath.
“I dunno. I see seagulls in LA, I see them in New York. Birds get around, you know? And I want the holotype, Ripley. The first one. I want the name. I’m not some basic Bezos or Musk, convinced that getting off the planet is the key to living forever.
Already nobody remembers I was the first to sell my dot-com start-up for over a billion even though the NASDAQ was in the toilet in ’97.
This is my shot at the afterlife. A million-year-old killer bird with my name on it. ”
“A hundred million years,” Ripley says, forgetting not to challenge him. Sometime in the past minute or so, Cara has walked away.
“Whatever,” Maury says, irritable now. Ripley hears splashing accompanied by an undisguised grunt of satisfaction.
“Hate to call and run, but I need to submerge my delts and traps. Long story short, I’m investing in the product that’s first to market.
And then”—his pause reads like a careless shrug—“it’s dino-mission accomplished.
Nothing personal, but I’m cutting your funding.
With a month’s severance, so you can’t say I’m an asshole. Right? I’m not the asshole here.”
“Summer is only ten weeks, Maury. Please. I’ve heard this other find might be—”
“I’m going to stop you right there, because I like you, Ripley. You’re cool, like if Indiana Jones spent his time digging holes instead of shooting Nazis. Let’s not end this on a bad note.”
“I don’t think we should end this at a—Maury? Hello?”
Ripley stares at her phone as if she can summon the broken connection back from the ether.
Thirty yards away, the team obliviously chatters among themselves while wolfing down mass quantities of breakfast. Matteo is finishing his private stash of the sugary cereal that leaves him hungry and cranky by ten a.m., but he’ll still buy more when the crew drives into Hercules next week.
Maybe for the last time.
A month of money means two weeks to dig and two weeks to shut down the site.
Even if Ripley pulls everyone from their other projects to hers, that’s barely enough time to extract Beauty’s wing, let alone the rest of her—if they even find her.
And if Ripley has to get another job over the winter, six months of prep work—stabilizing the bones with glue, air-drilling the matrix away a millimeter at a time—could balloon to two or three years.
Her dad doesn’t have that kind of time.
Beauty doesn’t either.
She forces her heavy legs to walk over to the rock where Cara sits, her bright pink NDN Girls Book Club T-shirt pulled over her bent knees.
“Naaáhsa took out a loan to build the cabins and the museum,” she says flatly. “That’s on top of the mortgage on the ranch. We were counting on this sale, Ripley.”
Ripley reaches for Cara’s shoulder. “I know—oh!” she says, finding herself yanked into a startling hug.
“Shut up and hug me back. Tight,” Cara commands. “It’s really early and I’m really sad.”
“I didn’t say anything!”
“Not with your mouth, you didn’t. God, you’re so bad at this, Ripley. You probably shook hands with your stuffed animals every night.”
It’s awkward with the younger woman’s knees between them, but Ripley sighs and leans in.
It’s not that she doesn’t like hugging or love Cara.
It’s that not long from now, her lease at Clever Girl will expire.
When that day comes, they’ll both be looking for the same fossils, and her fourth rule will go into effect.
She’d rather keep a firm line between work and relationships. That way, no one gets hurt when she takes her cut and leaves Yellowtail at summer’s end.
Grimacing, Cara unwinds her long arms from around Ripley’s back. “Thank you. I know human contact burns your vampire skin, and I appreciate your sacrifice. So what do we do now?”
Ripley shakes her head. “Our only option is to find the rest of Beauty and get her out of the ground before the other fossil is announced in…early September?” She’ll find out when the APS meeting is.
“We’ll skip the specimen prep, throw the bones in the scanner, and upload the images to one of the public paleontology databases.
We might still be able to claim the holotype. ”
“We don’t have CT scan money anymore, Rip. We can’t even pay the crew through this month.”
“I’ll reach out to some people who were considering funding us the last time around.” Ripley tries to sound confident, but most wealthy sponsor types want a T. rex or something even bigger. A bird needs someone both rich and a little offbeat.
But James Smithson—aristocratic, connected James Smithson—has access to a world of wealthy, eccentric philanthropists Ripley can’t reach from this side of the Atlantic.
And Smithson wants something from her.
Ripley makes a pained face, steeling herself for what has to be done. “We could ask Smithson for help in return for my doing his investigation.”
Cara brightens. “Ooooh. Clever Girl can’t have too many rich, well-connected friends. Are you sure you want that?”
“I don’t, but unless we get another offer, he might be our only hope.
” Time away from the dig, uncomfortable encounters with people she used to know, hours in the company of a man who gives her secondhand embarrassment for her past self—it’ll be agonizing, but for Beauty and Clever Girl, she’d endure much worse.
“I’ll drive in to the big house and see if Geraldine knows where he’s staying. Maybe I can catch him before he goes back to California.”
“Want me to come with?” Cara asks, climbing down from the rock.
“It’s better if I go alone.” Ripley checks her pockets—wallet, keys, phone.
She’s going to talk to a man about a bird.