Digging For Trouble

by Linda Fairstein

  Booker reached his long arm into the space between shelves, behind the items labeled with Ling’s name, and came out with some small paper bags.

  “Any of these sound familiar?” he asked, reading them aloud. “They’re all marked with the words Big Timber.”

  “Yes, I recognize some of them. They’re the other grad students who were digging with Ling and Katie and me.”

  Booker put the bags back in place and came out with four more. He put two to the side. “Dev, I think I’ve got them.”

  “Them?”

  “Two bags,” he said.

  “Katie found three bones our first afternoon,” I said, holding out my gloved hand. “I thought they’d be all together in one single bag.”

  “Help yourself,” Booker said.

  I opened the bag and unwrapped the fossils, which were still packed in camel matting. There were three separate bones, just as I remembered.

  Booker opened the second bag. “Three bones in here, too.”

  “Maybe Katie was right after all,” I said. “Maybe Chip or Steve swapped out her bones for different ones. Let’s compare them.”

  Sure enough, one set of fossils was larger than the other.

  I picked up the two bags. The ones with the smaller bones was marked Return to KATIE CION with the date of her find. The writing on the second bag said KATIE CION***, with three asterisks—maybe one for each fossil, is what I was thinking—and the same date.

  I leaned in over the bones—smaller ones first and then the larger ones—holding my light directly above them, turning them from side to side.

  “Don’t you have any photos of them from the dig site?” Booker asked.

  “We didn’t think fast enough,” I said. “We never expected that they’d be taken away from Katie right there on the spot.”

  “Well, did you bring your phone up here with you?” Booker said, putting his hand out for it.

  “Nope.”

  “Want me to go downstairs and get it?”

  “Nope,” I said, rewrapping the six bones and putting them in the same bags that Booker had found.

  “You should take photos, if you’re so suspicious, Dev.”

  “Here’s the deal, Booker,” I said, swiveling to face him. “I’ve figured out what to do. It’s all become clear to me in these last few minutes.”

  “What’s that?” he asked.

  I handed him the bag with the smaller bones—the ones either Steve or Chip had substituted for the ones Katie actually found. “Would you mind reaching in and putting those back where you found them?”

  “Sure,” Booker said, replacing the first bag. “How about the one you’re holding?”

  I didn’t answer him directly. I had just this single opportunity to convince him my plan was the right thing to do.

  “Do you remember the time in second grade when I fractured my wrist?” I asked. “I had that bad fall when we went skiing with your parents, but I didn’t complain about the pain till we got back to the city from upstate?”

  “Yeah, Dev. Your arms and legs were all over the place that afternoon on the slopes.”

  “And where did your mother take me when we got back to the city?”

  “I’m not sure I remember. Did we go to a hospital?”

  “No, she took me first to her office, so she could do a scan of my wrist.”

  “A CT scan,” Booker said, like the idea was slowly dawning on him. “Computerized tomography scan.”

  “Yeah. At the time,” I said, laughing at the memory of the much-younger me, “I thought your mom was talking about an X-ray machine that was used on cats. A CAT scan. I didn’t know tomography meant waves that can penetrate to see inside things.”

  “Oh, no you don’t, Dev,” Booker said, reaching out for the bag I was holding, just as I moved to put it behind my back.

  “Keisha said it herself, Booker. We need to see what’s inside these very bones that made Steve or Chip or Ling want to keep them for themselves.”

  “This is the point where your mother says it with your full name,” Booker said, shaking his head. “It’s not happening, Devlin Quick.”

  “A CT scan is all,” I said. I didn’t get what Booker’s objection to that idea could possibly be. “I know your mom will do that for me. Plus there’s nothing to break or damage with these little old guys—they’re just ancient pieces of rock.”

  “But, Dev,” Booker said, sounding as though his voice had deepened by an octave as he pleaded with me, “you can’t take that bag out of here.”

  I was already on my way through the door.

  “You can’t steal those bones,” he said, raising his voice even louder.

  “For your information,” I said, turning to face him. “I’m not stealing anything. I would never condone a theft.”

  I paused, to make him understand my purpose.

  “I’m borrowing the bones,” I said.

  “But you can’t do that! They belong to—to, uh, to Steve or to—whoever paid for the dig.”

  “Let me explain the law to you,” I said, holding the bag up at eye level and swinging it back and forth. “The law of the land in Montana.”

  “But—”

  “It’s Katie who found these fossils,” I said. “And she dug them up on private property, not on public lands. Her dad called the rancher who owned the dig site and got his permission to let Katie keep them.”

  “He did?” Booker asked.

  “Yup. Just this week,” I said.

  “How come he didn’t want to claim them for himself?”

  “Because he told Katie’s dad that he doesn’t have any kids, and he was happy that she was so interested in such important scientific work,” I said. “Beside that, he’s got so much land he probably thinks he has a shot at finding more bones.”

  “Cool,” Booker said.

  “So the law is quite clear that this little fragment of some duckbill dino is entirely owned by my best friend, Katie Cion. I promise I’ll return them to the museum in a couple of days, but for now I’m borrowing these bones.”

  26

  “Wake up,” Katie said, shaking my shoulders. “I’m really hungry.”

  I must have been the last one in the group to open my eyes.

  “I am, too,” I said. “Where is everybody?”

  “The girls are in the bathroom getting dressed. Booker, too,” Katie said. “So we can go back to the food court for breakfast before the museum opens.”

  I got off the cot, rolled up my sleeping bag with the small bones still tucked inside it where I had put them before I went to sleep, and took my clean clothes down to the bathroom to catch up with the others.

  I have to make the point that carrying the truth around—whether inside your head or wrapped in a piece of camel matting—is an awfully large burden for a kid to bear. But I had undertaken this investigation with a plan to see it through to the end.

  I thought about telling Katie what Booker and I had done, but I really wanted her to enjoy her birthday with a clear conscience.

  Natasha and our friends were all laughing and talking as we ate, but I was sort of anxious to be on our way.

  We all left the museum in late morning, and once I got home I pretty much had the day to myself. When I went into my bedroom, I hid the bag with three bones under my pillow.

  Then I went for a bike ride along the promenade by the East River, and took Asta to the dog run in Carl Schurz Park.

  I had dinner at Lulu’s house, which was always a pretty special occasion. She has a cook named Bridey, who loved to spoil me by making my favorite dishes, even though Lulu would have preferred that I ate a proper meal along with her.

  Once I told Lulu about some of the adventures of the Montana dig, she came pretty close to cracking me. She kind of figured out that something had been going on
with Katie’s bones, and tried to get me to spill the beans about things while I was enjoying my grilled cheese and bacon sandwich.

  Lulu had a great sense of adventure. She knew I was up to something, but she was cool with the fact that I wasn’t telling any secrets about Katie quite yet.

  “You know you can always confide in me, Devlin,” she said, holding me by my shoulders and kissing me on both cheeks as I got ready to leave. “Everyone on earth needs one person like that, you know?”

  “I do know that, Lulu,” I said, smiling back at her. “I’ve always known that about you.”

  “You seem rather distracted tonight, dear,” Lulu said, without letting go of my shoulders. “Your mother told me you’ve been spending a lot of time at the Museum of Natural History these last few days. Perhaps you need some more sunshine instead.”

  “I’m kind of fascinated by the things I’m learning about fossils, Lu.”

  “Bully,” she said.

  I figured she meant someone was forcing me to be inside the dark corridors with all the old fossils.

  “No, no, Lu. No bullies at all,” I said. “I really like it there.”

  “Bully, my dear, was Theodore Roosevelt’s favorite phrase. It means ‘grand,’ Devlin, or ‘most excellent,’” she said.

  “I didn’t know that.” I was trying to get on my way—a short walk to home.

  “You’re right in his mold, young lady. He didn’t like ‘mollycoddlers’ a bit, if I remember my history,” Lu said. “He didn’t like people who were morally soft.”

  “Soft?” I asked.

  “You act, Devlin,” Lulu said. “You act when you encounter a wrong. And there’s nothing more impor-tant than to do that. Your father was that way—and your mother is, too. It’s in your genes, dear, and I like that about you.”

  I turned to get onto the elevator, then looked back at Lulu. “You don’t happen to have any paleontologists in your address book, do you? You know everyone, Lu.”

  “Bone diggers?” she said, taking a few moments to think. “I’m afraid that I don’t.”

  “Thanks anyway, Lu. See you next weekend,” I said, blowing her a kiss as the doors closed.

  Hours spent with my grandmother always inspired me. Of course I would take action. I had proof that the bone diggers had messed with Katie’s fossils.

  27

  “Where’s your mom working today?” I asked Booker when we met up at a West Side coffee shop on Monday morning.

  “No surgery scheduled,” he said. “She’s in her office.”

  “Which one?” Aunt Janice had two of them, one on Martin Luther King Boulevard in Harlem, near the home in which she’d grown up, and another closer to Roosevelt Hospital on Fifty-Ninth Street.

  “Monday and Friday she’s in Harlem,” Booker said.

  “That’s good,” I said. “Anyway, we’re closer to Fifty-Ninth Street.”

  Booker finished his iced tea and looked up at me as I motioned him to get going. “You sure you want to do this?”

  “Actually, I had dinner with my grandmother last night, and she’s one hundred percent behind me.”

  “She knows all about it?”

  “Enough, Booker. Lulu knows quite enough,” I said. “Are you a man of action, or not? A mollycoddler or—?”

  “A what?” he said, pushing back his chair and throwing his plastic cup in the trash.

  “It’s a Teddy Roosevelt thing,” I said.

  I had worn a cross-body bag with a thick strap, so that the pouch with the bag of bones hung at my waist, in front of me where I could see it. I found myself patting it from time to time to make sure the package was safe.

  We took the subway down to Fifty-Ninth Street and walked a few blocks west till we got to the building where Janice Dibble had her office.

  Booker opened the door and we went inside.

  “This brightens my day,” Tina, the receptionist, said. “It’s nice to see you both, but I assume you know that your mother’s at—”

  “Yeah,” Booker said, “in the Harlem office.”

  “Actually, she’s in surgery right now. There was a bus accident in midtown and she’s got a whole lot of fractures to take care of.”

  “Will everyone be all right?” I asked.

  “Now don’t get all squeamish on me, Dev,” Tina said. “Nothing Dr. Dibble can’t fix.”

  Squeamish wasn’t my problem today. Aunt Janice’s ability to shut me down was the bigger issue.

  “Is Harry here?” Booker asked.

  Harry was Aunt Janice’s tech guy and had worked with her for years.

  “He sure is,” Tina said. “He’s got a couple of procedures booked for later today. Want to see him? Just go on in the back.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said.

  “Hey, Harry,” Booker said, once we got into the examining area and found him at his computer, entering data on medical records.

  “Booker!”

  They high-fived and we hugged, then caught up on things.

  “What brings you here?” Harry asked.

  “You tell him, Dev,” Booker said, less than enthusiastically.

  I explained that Katie and I had been on a dig. Harry knew who Katie was, from hearing Dr. Dibble talk about all of us, but he had never met her. I left out the mysterious elements of the story and asked him if he would be so kind as to do a CT scan of the three bones.

  Harry didn’t look any happier than Booker did. “Where are they?”

  I unzipped the pouch and unwrapped them. “The people who run the dig told us they’re foot bones. Parts of the baby dino’s feet, that is.”

  Harry smiled. “Small guys, aren’t they? This will be easier than I thought. I was expecting something much larger.”

  “You know looks can be deceiving,” I said. I was snapping photographs of the bones, which I wish Katie and I had done back at the dig site. “These could actually be from a super-duck. Super-duckbill, I mean.”

  “Started out little, like all the rest of us.”

  “I know that CT scans are expensive, Harry. And my grandmother will certainly pay for this, if you give me a bill.”

  I knew Lulu would be only too happy to do that, in the name of science.

  “Now, if I was doing this on Booker’s brain, Dev,” Harry said, “he’s got so much info jam-packed in there that it might cost you thousands of dollars.”

  “Really?” I said.

  If there had been an emoji of my face to capture the moment that Harry put a price tag on the scan, it would have been a frowning expression. Maybe it even would have been an emoji with a single tear rolling down her cheek.

  “I had no idea. I mean, I know it’s a full house up there in Booker’s head, but I didn’t know how expensive the scans are. Aunt Janice didn’t charge us anything when I had mine done.”

  “You’re family, Dev. This critter with fossilized bones didn’t go to Vassar College with your moms,” Harry said. “Not to worry. This will just be a couple of hundred dollars.”

  I gulped. “Okay,” I said, trying to think how old I would be if I took some money out of my allowance every week to pay Lulu back. Probably eighteen. Maybe twenty. I’d be in college then and hopefully still getting an allowance or having a job to get me through.

  “What are you looking for, exactly?” Harry asked, making a soft bed for the fossils on the cushion of his machine.

  “Um—I’m not exactly sure,” I said. “What do you think I should be looking for?”

  “Beats me, Dev,” Harry said.

  “Well, one of the museum people told us the most important thing about ancient bones is what’s inside them. Things we can’t see by holding them or touching them.”

  “I believe that. CT scans will show you things that even X-rays can’t do.”

  “Why is that?” I asked.
>
  “That technology was invented more than one hundred years ago.”

  “Wilhelm Röntgen,” Booker said. “A German professor.”

  “S.O.S!” I spurted out, rolling my eyes. Lulu was right, though. If I rolled them too often, the move lost all its effect.

  “What’s that supposed to mean, Dev?” Booker asked.

  “Show-Off in Science,” I said. “You do it all the time.”

  “There’s stuff I know more about than you,” he said. “You don’t have to make everything a competition, you know.”

  “So Röntgen's discovery was a scientific bombshell,” Harry said, adjusting the settings on his machine. “Docs could see inside the body without performing surgery on the patient. The X-rays created images like individual slices through the human body. Painlessly.”

  “But they couldn’t see through bones, could they?” Booker asked.

  “That’s right. Just soft tissue. But that’s what makes CT scans so amazing, because they can cut through human bones, too,” Harry said. “I’ve just set the radiation dose to a much higher level. Then we’ll step out of the room and see what’s inside these fossils, okay?”

  “Why is the dose higher?” I asked.

  “The human body couldn’t withstand what these little old fossils can, Dev. My machine is making thousands of radiographs through the rock, rotating a degree or so between images.”

  “What will the results tell us?” I asked. I was getting really excited now.

  “Well, the software puts all the images together and kind of reconstructs your fossils, knitting the sliced images together into a 3-D graphic for you, if we get lucky,” Harry said.

  “What would be un-lucky?” I asked as Harry closed the door behind us, and I pressed my nose against the glass window, watching as the cushioned platform was guided into the cylindrical scanner—a giant steel doughnut with Katie’s three fossils disappearing into the center hole.

  “Your bones could be too dense,” he said, “or crystallized, which wouldn’t give us a very clear picture of what’s inside there. Or maybe this machine just won’t be as powerful as a special CT for paleontological work.”