Chapter 5
A plume of dust follows Ripley’s jeep as she bounces along the rutted dirt road. The big house is visible for miles in the rolling farmland, the red pine siding and slate-blue aluminum roof popping against fields striped with neat rows of pale green hay.
She pulls up next to a well-used light pickup and a dusty Dodge Charger.
A dozen bird feeders, a few rocking chairs, and a woven hammock in black, white, and blue decorate the wraparound porch.
At lunchtime, Geraldine will ring the iron triangle that swings gently in the wind in defiance of Cara and the numerous ranch hands who’ve suggested that we could, y’know, make a group text.
That’s the way Geraldine is—stubbornly warm, lavishly hospitable, with a raspy laugh and a weakness for charity bingo nights at the Tribal community center.
The day the two of them met, Ripley had been shouted off the farm next door by Mr. Shipman, who wanted a payout whether or not she found any fossils.
She was braced for more profanity when she knocked on the door of the big house to ask for permission to scout Yellowtail Ranch.
Instead, Geraldine came out to inspect the canyon with Ripley, then sat her down at the kitchen table.
“My granddaughter is finishing her bachelor’s in agriculture, but she’ll need more than a degree to keep the agribusiness companies from swallowing this land.
You teach her how to run a fossil operation, and I’ll give you half of whatever you find. ”
The day they signed the lease, the canny, slightly terrifying seventy-something wrapped Ripley in a surprise embrace and barked, “Get out there and find me some fossils, my girl.”
She’s careful not to accept too many of those hugs, due to her unfortunate tendency to act like a newly hatched duckling around other people’s mothers.
In Ripley’s sophomore year, her roommate Sophie had uninvited her to Thanksgiving dinner, saying, with equal parts pity and annoyance, “My mom wouldn’t tell you to your face, but she’s kind of uncomfortable with you.
I mean, you hang with her almost more than you do with me. ”
Ripley turned down every invitation from Sophie and her family after that. She upped her work hours at the campus bar and focused on saving enough money to travel to her own home on holidays.
It’s a lonely realization, but her dad might be the only person she hugs without overthinking it.
Ripley knocks before opening Geraldine’s never-locked front door. “Hello?” Her voice bounces off the exposed beams and tall windows of the foyer. It smells like a farmhouse—dirt and leather mingling with bacon and frybread.
“In the kitchen!” Geraldine shouts back.
Ripley kicks off her boots so she doesn’t catch hell for tracking dirt across Geraldine’s spotless floors.
The low, sprawling ranch house was built in the days before open-concept design, the kitchen hidden by a swinging door.
Ripley pulls her sleeve over her dusty fingers before pushing the door’s gleaming brass plate.
“Morning, Geraldine. I was hoping you might know where—”
“Sit. Eat,” Geraldine orders, taking a piece of frybread from the pan with her bare fingers and setting it on a speckled stoneware plate with eggs and bacon.
“I will, but—”
“You have time for a proper breakfast.” Geraldine puts the plate down in front of Ripley.
“Leaving my granddaughter to manage Clever Girl Fossils alone, I see.” She turns a kitchen chair around so she can straddle it while she drinks her jet-fuel-strength black coffee.
This is an invitation for Ripley to talk.
“It’s Saturday. Half the crew is still in bed. Besides, Cara’s got the operation down pat. Which was the point, I believe.”
“Pull your claws back in,” Geraldine says mildly. “You know I want you to stay on next season. Work with Cara.”
“That’s kind of you, but I’ll probably spend the summer with my dad.”
“Bring him too.”
“There’s no hospital in Hercules. He can’t come.”
“Is that what he says or what you say?”
“Geraldine.”
The older woman shrugs. “You’re the one keeping your dad in cancer jail while you spend your juiciest years with no one to warm up the other side of your bed. Did you even listen to that nice young man I sent your way yesterday?”
“Did you?” Ripley asks.
“Oh, I don’t know fossils. That’s for you and Cara. But if I were twenty years younger, I’d definitely ‘work’ with him. Hell, thirty years ago I’d have fought you for him.” She grins, reminding Ripley where Cara gets her cheekiness from.
“I’m too smart to fight you. You’d kick my ass.”
“I’ll kick it anyway if it gets you out of your shell. You should have a little fun, Ripley. Lighten up.”
“Sure,” Ripley agrees, privately vowing to do nothing of the sort. “Speaking of Smithson. Do you happen to know where he’s staying? And when he’s flying back to California?”
“He spent the night in my guest bedroom.” Geraldine smiles slyly, her brown cheeks rising into tight apples. “He’s down at the museum. Why don’t you show him around?”
Ripley puts down her knife and fork. “It’s not like that.”
Geraldine prefers to get bad news in a rip-off-the-Band-Aid style, so that’s how Ripley gives it to her. The older woman absorbs it like a Native rancher who’s seen seventy years of births, deaths, floods, droughts, and struggles. She tosses back her coffee and sets the mug down with a solid thunk.
“Well. If you’re going to ask that young man for money, you’d better get down to the museum and give him a good show.”
The newly completed Clever Girl Museum sits on a low rise a few hundred yards down Yellowtail Ranch’s long driveway, just off the main road.
With its angular white exterior and floor-to-ceiling windows, the building looks like a car dealership crossed with a spa.
A tall fence shields the ranch house from view and provides selfie backdrops of cartoon dinosaurs for the tourists they hope to lure in next summer.
Through the windows, Ripley spies a tall figure browsing the aisles, examining the fossil-filled shelves.
Smithson’s shifted back to his natural professor shape in a white oxford shirt that stretches across his shoulders.
There really is no word other than trousers for a pair of pants as British as the brown tweeds he’s wearing, with their sharp creases and rolled cuffs.
He should look like someone’s grandpa, but he’s giving off the vibe of a black-and-white ad for a luxury watch.
Typical.
She pulls open the heavy wood door shamelessly copied from the Jurassic Park franchise, noting the large suitcase and matching weekend bag just inside. He packed like he expected to stay for a while.
At the other end of the long line of shelves, Smithson’s absorbed in the prepared specimens, his eyes roving almost greedily over Ripley’s bones.
Geraldine’s kept a lot of the smaller, less valuable finds to make the shelves look full.
A plaster reproduction of Beauty will take pride of place when the time comes, but for now, the roped-off display area remains empty.
Smithson reaches for a deinonychus vertebra despite the Do Not Touch the Fossils sign on every shelf. Watching him, Ripley feels the roughness of the bone against her own fingertips, smells the unmistakable signature of old earth under the pungent new scents of glue and sealant.
Paleontologists tend to be suckers for hands, and unfortunately, his are very, very nice.
He holds his fingers like they’re poised over the neck of a violin while his thumb dips softly into a bony hollow.
His bent head makes a desperately appealing line from his ear to his shoulder, the tender skin of his neck shadowed in the dim light.
His smile is not the polite expression of last night. Today, his mouth curves like a composite bow, its arc interrupted where the fullness of his lower lip pushes up at the center instead of down, like a sculptor pressed her thumb into that tender, pouty spot.
Ripley has the urge to put her thumb in it the way he slid his into the foramen of that vertebra.
Wait. No.
A flush of annoyance prickles through her.
She’s supposed to be smarter than this. She’s not supposed to repeat history by falling for another paleontologist on the way to getting bamboozled into all kinds of bad deals.
She’s here to make an arrangement with this man that keeps him and any rumors about herself a thousand miles from her dig.
“Planning to lick them next?”
He startles, his hand jerking back. Behind those square glasses, his eyes flash across her body like she’s somehow changed since yesterday.
He swallows and looks away, his pale cheeks lighting with a splash of pink.
He’s left a shocking two shirt buttons undone, teasing a glimpse of olive-skinned chest and a hint of crisp dark hair below his collar.
“Good morning to you too,” he says, stiff as a shot of twenty-year-old Scotch. “Clever Girl—quite the name for a fossil company. Is it your favorite line from Jurassic Park?”
“I prefer ‘Life finds a way,’ but it doesn’t make for very good signage.”
“I suppose not.” He looks at the floor. When his eyes come back up, he’s fully transformed from the soft stranger of a moment ago to the prudish, particular man she’s met before. “Your shoelace is undone.”
Annoyed, she bends down to make a quick, sloppy bow. “Have you ever licked a fossil, or did you change the subject for some other reason?” Everyone’s done it; it’s a quick trick to distinguish between the Velcro-like texture of bone and the smoothness of rock.
“Are you suggesting this specimen isn’t real?” He arches a brow.
“I’m saying you’re not a real paleontologist until you’ve frenched a femur. If you’re tired of keeping your taxonomist hands clean and reaping all the glory from other people’s fieldwork, maybe today’s your day.”