Digging For Trouble

by Linda Fairstein

  We followed her to the elevator to get to the third floor.

  “This place is so huge,” I said to Keisha, when we were waiting in the corridor for everyone to catch up. “Is it scary to be here at night? Are the security guards going to be up on the fourth floor with us?”

  Keisha patted my arm. “You’ll all be fine. There’s never been a problem here. During the night, the security guards are downstairs, watching the exits and entrances—because you’re the only ones here. You just scamper on down if you think you’ve got a problem. Is that okay?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said. She had no idea just how okay that was for me and Booker.

  Katie was so excited to be on a private tour with the museum all to ourselves that it was hard to push Keisha to move faster.

  Natasha was yawning more regularly now. Her exhaustion was probably exaggerated by the darkness of the corridors and the low level of air-conditioning kept on at night.

  The museum was stuffy and dark, and I was glad for that. Everyone would feel sleepy before too long.

  We took one of the double-long staircases up to the fourth floor and the home of the Titanosaur.

  “So, we’re back at the Titanosaur, where we all started, almost two hours ago,” Keisha said. “Are your feet aching?”

  Natasha’s “yes” spoke for all of us.

  “Just a few things about this amazing specimen,” Keisha said. “Then I’ll point you down the hall to the restrooms, so you can change and get ready for bed.”

  Booker gave me a thumbs-up.

  “How many of you know what a fossil is?” Keisha asked.

  “An old bone,” Rachel said. “I mean really old.”

  “That’s a good start. But a fossil is really any evidence of prehistoric life—whether animal or plant—that’s at least ten thousand years old,” Keisha said. “Bones and teeth are the more common ones that we see, but there are fossils of footprints as well as skin impressions, too.”

  “They’re called body fossils when they were part of an animal organism,” Booker said, “and trace fossils if they’re just about anything else, like footprints and stuff.”

  “You’re right,” Keisha said.

  “He’s not smarter than we are,” I said, trying to make the girls laugh. “He’s just super into science.”

  “I love science, too,” Amy said. “The whole point of fossilization is that it turns bones into rocks.”

  “Exactly,” Keisha said.

  “You mean this whole giant skeleton that’s hanging over me tonight,” Katie said, “is made out of rock?”

  “What if it falls down?” Rachel asked. “It will break every bone in my body. I’m going to move my cot farther away.”

  “Don’t worry, girls,” Keisha said. “Titanosaur is just a model, like most of the other dinos on display. He’s been digitally remade—out of fiberglass—from the original fossils that were found in Argentina. Every detail is accurate, but it’s just a replica.”

  “A replica?” It took a minute for me to absorb those words. “Made of fiberglass? You mean those aren’t the real bones?”

  “That’s the way museums do things these days,” Keisha said. “You’d never even know, would you?”

  I could feel a sense of panic as my chest tightened.

  “But where are the bones? I mean the fossils. The original fossils,” I said. My anxiety was kicking in, wondering what would become of Katie’s discoveries—her fossils and her clutch of eggs—and when they might disappear.

  “I can’t say that I’m sure exactly, at least not for each exhibit,” Keisha said. “I know the museum keeps most of the real fossils for research, but some are stored here and lots are stored off-site.”

  “My mom says there are bones all over the place in this museum,” Booker said. “Fossils, I mean, on shelves everywhere. Millions of them. Miles of them, actually.”

  Keisha scrunched up her face. “Is your mother a paleontologist?”

  “Nope. She’s an orthopedic surgeon,” he said. “That’s why bones fascinate her.”

  “Did she ever say where she saw them?” Keisha asked.

  “There are pictures online,” he said, “on the museum site. She showed them to me this week, because we were coming here.”

  Keisha shrugged. “They could be in one of the sub-basements, I guess,” she said. “We’ve got miles and miles of things on shelves downstairs. I’ve never looked at all the specimens that are labeled, but I’m sure we can find someone to help you do that when you decide to come back.”

  “Can you take us to see some of them?” I asked, practically before she could finish the sentence. “Just a sampling?”

  Natasha was on me in a flash. “This is enough for tonight, don’t you think?”

  “Anything else, before I let you go off to dream about all these wonderful treasures?” Keisha asked.

  I had turned my back on the Titanosaur and was looking in a display case at some smaller fossils.

  “Yes, please,” I said. “One more thing. Do you know whether anyone tries to get any DNA off the fossil, on its outside?”

  “Okay, so you don’t mean inside the bones or rock?”

  “No, ma’am. Just the outside,” I said. “You know, like trace evidence? I’ve seen it done on crime scenes on TV shows.”

  “What would that tell you, Dev?” Keisha asked. “Explain to the others, please.”

  “Oh, like maybe who had touched the thing in the first place,” I said.

  “Not very likely,” she said, shaking her head from side to side.

  “Why not?”

  “Take those bones from Katie’s dig in Montana, which she was telling me about while we were just walking around tonight,” Keisha said. “They were all encased in plaster of Paris in order to be shipped back here. The preparators—”

  “The what?” I asked. The word sounded too close for comfort to perpetrators.

  “Preparators,” Keisha said.

  I repeated both words quickly to myself, almost tripping over the similar syllables. “Who are they?”

  “That’s the name for the highly skilled technicians who work in labs, extracting the fossils from their plaster casts and working on all kinds of specimens,” Keisha said. “They use adhesives and resins to make sure the samples stay safe. I would think there’d be no chance at all of finding DNA from diggers like Katie—because of all the handling that goes on—any more than I figure you’d be able to find fingerprints.”

  “I get it,” I said, spinning the words around in my brain.

  “The best information,” Keisha said, “may lie deep inside those rocks. That’s the snapshot we all wish we could get.”

  The other kids surrounded Keisha to thank her for making the evening so much fun.

  Booker was just as bummed as I was. “Not the answer you were hoping for, Dev, was it?”

  “Just think of it as a bump in the road,” I said.

  Natasha was helping each of the girls put their sleeping bags on top of their cots. I unfolded mine and grabbed my turquoise cotton pajamas and toothbrush.

  “Men’s room is the other way, Booker,” I said.

  “You still up for prowling around in the dark?” he asked, toothbrush in hand.

  “You bet I am. We can just call it exercise, okay? It’s good for us.”

  “How will you decide when?”

  “Same as you,” I said. “First, we’ll let Katie enjoy every minute of her party. That’s the most important thing. I know she wants to play charades for awhile, and I’m up for anything else that’s fun for her.”

  “I’m in,” Booker said.

  “Sooner or later, the chatter will stop,” I said, “and the girls will quiet down.”

  “And Natasha?” Booker asked. “What if she’s still reading when our friends close thei
r mouths?”

  “I’ll know,” I said. “She makes noise when she sleeps.”

  “Natasha snores?” Booker asked, screwing up his nose.

  “I wouldn’t call it that. I say she snortles—short little snorts that are way cuter than snores.”

  “You’ll hear Natasha, even on this end of the Titanosaur, out in the hallway here?”

  “Atwells,” I said, pointing to my ear with my free hand. “Generations of great auditory perception, Booker. I’ll hear the lightest little snort, I promise.”

  “And staying awake?” he asked. “Can you manage that for yourself?”

  “You bet,” I said. “It’s hard to fall asleep when you’re reading Edgar Allan Poe.”

  “That’s true,” Booker said.

  “And then there’s our adventure that lies ahead,” I said. “You and I have to get to the bottom of this. What if Katie’s dino had a telltale heart?”

  “You’d hear it beating, Dev, wherever it is. I’m sure of that.”

  24

  Total darkness surrounded the Titanosaur in his lair.

  Poe was always best read by flashlight, in the pitch-black of night for full effect, but it was also nice to be surrounded by my flock of friends as the beast hovered over me in the dark.

  I saw Natasha’s light go out, and I waited about five more minutes. Then she made that familiar snorting noise—it seemed loud enough to wake the T. rex in the rotunda, though it didn’t disturb the Ditchley crew.

  I reached over and wiggled Booker’s big toe. No response. I grabbed all five toes of his left foot and pulled on them.

  He propped himself up on one arm and shook his head until he focused on my face.

  I stood up, put on my slippers, and signaled to Booker to follow me. He did. There is nothing in the world better than a best friend who rises to the occasion every single time.

  We followed the jawbone of the Titanosaur, which pointed in the direction of the stairwell we had used on Friday to get up to the area of the lab.

  I lifted the velvet rope and we both ducked beneath it.

  Booker grabbed my wrist. “What happens if one of the girls wakes up?”

  “Then she’ll wake another one and that one will wake Katie.”

  “But we’ll be gone,” he said. “Won’t they come after us?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. Katie will think I’ve finally awakened to your coolness,” I said. “She’ll think we’re off by ourselves. Hey, I let her be alone with Kyle at the rodeo. She’d never come looking for us.”

  I broke away from his grasp and powered on up the staircase, shining my small light on the steps.

  “You don’t think there’ll be guards up here?” he asked.

  “I asked Keisha, and she said the guards all stay around the entrances on the ground floor at night,” I said. “So we should be okay.”

  At the top of the steps, inside the turret, the moon lit up the interior space. We knew the way back to the lab because of yesterday’s scouting trip.

  “You think it was fair to leave Katie out of this?” Booker asked as I started down the hallway, losing the moonlight behind me.

  “Best friend I could ask for, Booker, next to you,” I said. “But she gets skittish sometimes, so I need an experienced pro like you at my side.”

  “Because we’re going to do exactly what, Dev, now that Keisha told us that you’re not going to get any DNA off these fossils?” he asked.

  “We’re going to do exactly what the situation calls for. Sam says a good detective really needs to be flexible,” I said. “Able to roll with the punches.”

  The wide corridor was totally dark, fifty yards out from the windows in the turret. I turned my beam back on, and walked forward until I reached the door of the lab.

  “Is it open?” Booker asked.

  I held up my left hand with crossed fingers and turned the knob with my right.

  “What’s the point of locking up old rocks when nobody even has a clue where they are?” I asked, joking with Booker. “Maybe it should be locked, but they all know things are pretty secure up here all day.”

  The door swung open to reveal more black space. I took a deep breath and stepped inside.

  When I flashed my light straight ahead, the first thing I saw was the long worktable, where Katie’s clutch was sitting—still a work in progress.

  He raised his beam, too, and walked to the other side of the table.

  “What an amazing thing this is,” he said. He was leaning in over the clutch and studying each one of the eggs. “Just like you told me, it looks like the surface of the moon.”

  “Yes, but if I could just get one of these eggs out of the Ditch, imagine what it could tell us.”

  “What do you mean, Dev?”

  “You heard Keisha,” I said. “If we could just get to see what’s inside one of these prehistoric things, we could find out whether it’s feathered or not. I mean, Katie and you and I could write a paper before the Montana team does.”

  “Then it would still be Katie’s big discovery, right?” Booker said.

  “You bet. What a gift to her that would be.”

  Booker tapped lightly on the top of one of the eggs.

  “It’s a rock. You’re the one who told us that. You don’t have to be so gentle with it.”

  He laughed and knocked on it again like it was a closed door. Nothing budged.

  “You don’t really think you can get inside by pounding on it, do you?” I asked.

  “Afraid not.”

  “And we can’t move the clutch,” I said, thinking out loud.

  That’s when I spotted a box of vinyl gloves on the end of the worktable.

  “There you go, Booker.” I was trying to get in the mind-set of a real detective. “We should put on gloves if we’re touching things in here.”

  I pulled some out and we both put them on. I couldn’t help but smile at the thought of my mentor, Sam Cody, working a crime scene in pajamas. Then again, a good cop went after trouble, wherever it was.

  I turned my back to the table and faced the tower of shelves opposite it, which stretched from the floor of the room to its tall ceiling.

  There were fossils of all shapes and sizes, stacked on top of each other, labeled by species and date. Some had locations of their finds written with bold marker, while others bore the names of individuals, whether scientists or dig volunteers there was no way to tell.

  “The teeth and things from Montana must be closest in reach,” I said. “Wouldn’t you think?”

  “I guess so,” Booker said, examining the assortment of tools that were laid out on the worktable.

  I was about to reach for a large fossilized bone on the shelf in front of me when I froze in place, nailed there by fear.

  “Did you hear that?” I whispered, standing dead still and turning off my light.

  “Nothing,” Booker said, shutting his off then, too. He waited a full minute before he asked, “What did your Atwells get?”

  “Listen,” I said. “Can’t you hear it?”

  Booker turned his head toward the door. “Barely, Dev. It’s a really faint noise,” he said, looking as scared as I was. “Is it footsteps?”

  “Sort of. But too many of them to be so light.”

  The sound was confusing me. More than two feet moving in our direction, or so it seemed.

  What if a guard had been summoned because someone had seen or heard us?

  Suddenly, I heard a loud bang, like something crashing close by—maybe even in the room next to us.

  I scooted around the table on my tiptoes, standing close behind Booker.

  “Don’t back down now,” he said.

  I straightened up and stepped beside him. If there was no other place to hide, I’d have to take the consequences for my actions.


  I turned on my flashlight again, so as not to provoke any response from whoever was coming to find us.

  The small beam prompted a reaction from whoever was stirring in the corridor.

  “Have you got my back?” I asked Booker, speaking softly into his ear.

  “Always, Dev.”

  I tiptoed closer to the heavy door and leaned against it, poking my head into the hallway.

  I put one foot out and the culprits flew up at me, practically in my face, fluttering their wings and circling overhead in the hallway.

  “Pigeons!” I said to Booker, running to the next lab adjacent to ours to check the source of the noise.

  A large casement window had been left open—banging in the wind that must have come up since we arrived at the museum—and six or seven pigeons had flown in to seek shelter from the rain.

  “Trespassers again, Dev,” Booker said, breathing a sigh of relief. “Your dig seems to be haunted by trespassers.”

  25

  “Ready to go downstairs, Dev?” Booker asked.

  “Give me five more minutes in the lab,” I said.

  “Steve wanted feathers on his dino. Why not just give him pigeon feathers with your bones and call it a night?”

  I was padding back down the hallway to the lab while the birds were flitting around overhead, looking for ledges on which to perch.

  “Because Keisha gave me an idea, Booker.”

  “Like what?”

  “You check the shelves on the other side of the lab,” I said, shining my light back on the spot where I was when I had been interrupted.

  “What am I looking for?”

  “Teeth and bones,” I said. “Marked with Big Timber or Steve’s name, or maybe Ling’s. I want to find Katie’s bones.”

  I ran my flashlight back and forth across the rows of specimens, but none of the ones within reach were more recent than a year ago.

  “Ling Soo!” Booker called out, a couple of minutes later. “Looks like a couple of big teeth right here, the writing on the bag says, wrapped up with her name on them.”

  “Way to go, Booker,” I said, dashing around the end of the worktable to join him in the hunt. “Now if we can just find something that says Katie Cion.”