I wondered if all the rooms around me were empty because the scientists who worked in this wing were at Steve Paulson’s presentation. It was a totally phony PowerPoint, for sure.
I studied the dead birds stacked above one another in ceiling-high cases—each of them stuffed and staring back at me with beady eyes. They’d probably been stored up here for half a century.
I stood up again and started to pace, walking the length of the hallway toward the staircase that Booker and Ling had gone down just a minute ago. I tried to stay centered, and thought of the Rudyard Kipling poem I’d had to memorize for school.
I muttered the words, under my breath, to steady my nerves as I walked.
“If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you, . . .”
I got through about three stanzas that I’d memorized, letting the poet’s noble advice keep my spirits lifted.
There must have been a huge lightning strike nearby—although there were no windows on this hall for me to see it. But right before the next colossal crash of thunder shook me, the entire fifth floor shut down in darkness.
36
It’s just a blackout, I told myself. It’s just an electrical thing that would have to be restored within minutes.
The words of the poem flew out of my mind as I concentrated on what to do.
I didn’t want to stand near the top of the staircase and take the chance of losing my footing and falling down in the dark.
If I could make my way back to the intersection of the two hallways, I would get to the turret that had windows facing out onto the museum’s courtyard. They would provide some light.
I held my arms straight out in front of me as my eyes tried to adjust to the dark.
I took three careful steps forward, and then moved along more quickly. There was another loud sound—maybe a thunderclap—and I turned my head in case it was something inside the building, behind me. I almost lost my balance when I swiveled.
I continued my march forward in the dark, quickening my pace. But that sudden turn had thrown me off course.
My outstretched palms crashed up against an old wooden cabinet, twice as tall as I was. I felt it teetering as I slammed into it, and it fell over onto the floor, dumping its contents across the broad hallway as the glass panels shattered.
Suddenly the lights went back on. The museum’s generator must have kicked in.
I had dropped to my knees on impact. Now I found myself surrounded by mounds of animals—dead animals. Creepy crawly rodents whose fur had collected dust over the years. Mice and rats and marmots and weasels. If there was a Pied Piper to be found anywhere, he’d missed this stash of unattractive creatures on his march out of town.
I cleared a path through the museum’s collection of furry beings, dodging sharp shards of glass, and got to my feet, running toward the turret to make my escape.
37
I was racing through the hallway toward the turret, figuring that the route I knew best would take me down one flight to a security guard. I had no idea how far Booker and Ling had gone, in a direction unfamiliar to me, to make their phone call.
Halfway there, I heard voices. Two voices. Men talking to each other, getting louder as they climbed the staircase.
I had just passed the door to the lab, which I had watched Chip lock. I knew I’d bump right into the men—maybe the two I’d most wanted to avoid—if I kept going.
Then I thought of the pigeons that had come into the adjacent lab, seeking shelter, on Saturday night, scaring the wits out of me.
I ran to that door, twisted the handle, and pushed it open.
It was dark inside. Quiet and dark, rain still beating against the window. But no one was there, and I closed the door behind me, taking care not to bang it shut.
There was no bolt to lock it, and no sign of a key. So I just leaned against it to catch my breath.
I couldn’t figure what was taking Booker and Ling so long—and my mother, too, for that matter. But now, if they returned to the hallway to look for me, they’d have no idea where I was hiding.
Footsteps and voices were getting closer now. The two men who were talking to each other were just a few feet away, in this very hallway.
I stood as still as I could—like a taxidermied grizzly bear in a museum exhibit, frozen in time and place. I tried to hold my breath.
The men stopped in front of the lab door. I could hear them clearly now. It was Steve Paulson and Chip Donner, and they were talking about me.
“That kid was a problem from the first day,” Steve said. “I think she was out in Montana just digging for trouble.”
Chip laughed. “I thought you threw them all off the scent when you created those tracks on the hillside during the night.”
“Yeah,” Steve said. “Me too. I figured that idea of poachers and trespassers would take those kids’ minds off our real business.”
“Too smart for their own good,” Chip said. “I should have figured them for bad luck from the get-go.”
“Give me your key,” Steve said. “I’ll show you where the bones are. Let’s take ’em and get out of here while we can go.”
The key rattled a bit and then the door opened. Both men walked inside and closed it behind them.
Their words were more muffled now and although I could hear movement in the room, I couldn’t make out what they were saying.
The counter closest to the lab—the one that shared a wall with that room—was empty. I placed my foot on the stool next to it and boosted myself up. My sneakers made no noise as I positioned myself on the wooden planks.
I put my ear against the wall but couldn’t hear much more.
Then I remembered one of my grandmother’s favorite tricks. When she wanted to hear what the relatives were saying about her when they gathered at her apartment, she’d hold a drinking glass against the wall. Lulu had more practical advice for me than Rudyard Kipling ever would.
I leaned over and picked up an empty mason jar. It would do as well as a water glass.
I placed one end against the wall and the other to my ear.
“You don’t think anyone in that conference room was suspicious, do you?” Chip asked.
“Not a chance. They’re all so pumped up about getting the first shot at seeing a new species that if anyone opens his mouth, the rest will just claim he’s jealous of me,” Steve said.
“You’re a patient man,” Chip said, “holding on to those birdlike little legs for so long, just waiting for the right vertebrae fossil to come out of the earth.”
It sounded like Steve was moving things around on the worktable, maybe packing up some fossils.
“I told you this work takes a lot of patience,” Steve said. “I found them about a year ago.”
“In Montana?” That was Chip asking the questions.
“Nope. South America.”
Chip laughed. “So you’ve created a totally international dinosaur species.”
“That will make it harder for paleontologists working here to catch on to my scam anytime soon,” Steve said. “Got some feather-like extenders from China—bought them online—then some Patagonia juvenile leg bones and a Big Timber set of vertebrae.”
“Done like a real pro.”
“Had to be,” Steve said. “It’s the feathers attached to the vertebrae that gives the world a flying dinosaur. That’s what makes our specimen so unique.”
“You’re keeping those pieces that Cion kid found, right?”
Steve didn’t hesitate for a second. “Hey, we might want to give our Big Timber dino some cousins. Wouldn’t want the old critter to get lonely.”
“Good answer,” Chip said. “I guess twenty years makes a lot of people forget what the Chinese tried to pull off back then.”
“Sure does.”
&nbs
p; “And the equipment changes, too.”
“My most important investment was in the glue, Chip. The newest glue won’t even be detectable when they get to scans of my creation,” Steve said. “That was one of the biggest problems the Chinese had way back when they tried to do something like this.”
“Kind of like Dr. Frankenstein,” Chip said. “You, making your own monster in a laboratory.”
I could hardly believe my ears, but they had always been my greatest asset.
“Glad I got you on board,” Steve said. “You were pretty reluctant when I asked you to join in with me.”
“I’ve never done anything illegal,” Chip said, lowering his voice. “But then, nobody ever gave me the chance to strike it rich before you did.”
“I’m almost ready to go,” Steve said. “I’ve got everything except the most important piece of the puzzle. Can’t leave those behind.”
I could hear footsteps as Steve walked toward the far side of the room.
The men seemed to be moving items around on the shelves, but neither of them spoke. Then Steve broke the silence, slamming something—maybe his hand—against the counter.
“They’re not here, Chip!” Steve said, shouting at his companion. “I’m telling you this is exactly where I left those fossils the Cion kid found. And we need to get them out of the museum tonight so that they’re with me when I fly out of town in the morning.”
“Don’t look at me. I never touched them,” Chip said. “Where else could they be?”
“Who did you say was with that devil girl when she was in here a bit ago?”
“Devlin, Steve. Her name is Devlin.”
“I know her name, and I know I’d like to wring her skinny neck if I could catch up with her about now,” Steve said.
I recoiled, holding on to the glass so I didn’t drop it.
“They’re gone,” Chip said. “I think I scared them out of here.”
“Don’t you get it, Chip?” Steve said, raising his voice so much that I didn’t need the jar. “That kid’s mother is the police commissioner. If that woman shows up—if those kids got their hands on the fossils—you and I will be digging our own way out of jail, instead of making our fortune in China.”
I had to get out of this place. I slipped down off the counter, leaving the jar right where I’d found it.
Chip opened the door of the lab. I could hear him shout back to Steve from the corridor. “I’ll go look for the kids. Could be they’re still in the museum.”
He passed by my safe room and headed for the staircase in the turret. There was no way I could follow him at this point, and I didn’t want to go back and play slip’n’slide with the dead rodents laid out in the other direction. Dead or alive, they totally creeped me out, and I had no idea what else lurked in that direction.
Now I realized what it felt like to be trapped. I had a whole new respect for all the animals that had been tracked down, hunted, killed, and then stuffed, to spend eternity in a museum. No disrespect to Teddy Roosevelt, but I wasn’t ever going to be a fan of any hunters.
I picked up the jar again and leaned over the counter to hear what Steve was up to. He seemed to be moving more things around on shelves.
Then he stepped into the hallway, coming back to the counter, sort of talking to himself before he slammed the door shut behind him. “Footprints. Dusty footprints,” he said to himself. “Somebody else is skulking around up here.”
That would be me! I must have tracked decades of dust from the storage cases of rodents that I’d overturned. If Steve went back to look at the prints—if he paid them any more attention—he’d see they led right into this room.
I had to act fast. This was no place to have a confrontation with an angry criminal desperate to get his hands on the evidence of his guilt—and on my neck.
The idea came to me in a flash, with the next thunderclap. It wasn’t a pretty thought, but I could thank my friend Katie—and those trespassing pigeons—for holding out hope of a route to safety.
38
I took off my sneakers and socks. This was a job for bare feet. Slipping was not in the cards.
Then I opened the door as quietly as I could.
Yup, dusty prints led right into this room. I kneeled down and looked out into the hallway. With my hands stuffed inside my sneakers, I made a set of tracks leading away from my position, reaching over each step and stretching my arms as far as I could to lay down another one.
Then I sat up, crawled away, stood to close the door behind me. I tucked my sneakers and socks as far out of sight as they would go under the workbench.
I went to the end of the room, climbed up once again, and pulled open the handle on the old casement window.
The rain was still coming down, but not as fiercely as it had been at the height of the storm. It was a summer rain, too, so it wasn’t too cold.
I don’t like heights that much. I had no problem looking out from the top of a skyscraper, but walking on window ledges? That’s not entirely my thing. Maybe that’s why I’d never tried it before.
It must have been five o’clock in the afternoon. Streetlights had come on early because of the dark clouds and heavy rain.
I could see that the ledge was about a foot wide just outside the window I had opened. And I knew from scores of museum visits that the turrets were covered with carved animals—fantastic sculptures that represented most of the creatures on display in cases below.
Now all I had to do was get from this windowsill to the turret, and cling to the neck of one of those animals until I was out of danger.
But that seemed to me, at the moment, like walking a tightrope across the Grand Canyon without a net.
I had to stop shaking before I could move, but telling myself that just made it worse for me.
Then I heard Steve, yelling down the corridor to Chip. “Check out the footprints! Don’t look big enough to be a grown man’s, do they?”
I couldn’t bring myself to step out on the ledge. Maybe the guys would fall for my fake sneaker marks. No reason to try a high-wire act if I didn’t need to.
Chip must have doubled back to where Steve was standing, right in front of the door to this room.
They were whispering to each other now, and I couldn’t make out the words. I froze in place with my back against the heavy window, trying hard to hold my breath. It seemed to me that even if I exhaled, the men would hear the sound.
Dead quiet for thirty seconds.
Then I could see the knob twist. My stomach knotted up as the door pushed in.
“Eureka!” Steve said. “Looks like we’ve got our culprit, doesn’t it?”
“You don’t have anything,” I said. “Once they do a CT scan of your phony fossil, everyone will know the truth.”
Steve shook his head at me. “Not with my miracle glue. So far, it’s fooled every machine we’ve practiced on.”
“You won’t fool President Sutton,” I said.
“Bring her down and then we’ll figure out what to do with her,” Steve said.
Chip charged toward me, his arms out in front as though he was going to grab my legs
“Oh, no you don’t,” I said, aiming my foot at his head but missing the mark.
Chip lunged again but I had steadied myself and put the same leg through the opening and out onto the windowsill.
Time for me to channel my grandmother. “Never look back, Dev,” Lulu liked to say to me. “You may spot someone you don’t want to see coming after you.”
“Where do you think you’re going?” Steve yelled.
I stepped out onto the ledge and took a minute to balance myself. I think Lulu’s advice was a reference to my swimming competitions, but it might hold me in good stead up here.
I could see Chip’s head peeking out through the window, but I knew anyone much larger than I was w
ould have a hard time balancing on this ledge.
When I had firm footing, I stood on my tiptoes and swiveled to face the building, clinging to a narrow strip of cement that jutted out all along the side at about the height of my shoulder.
“Go after her,” Steve yelled.
“No way I can,” Chip said. “But I can make sure Dev’s only got one way to go, other than straight down.”
“What?” Steve asked.
“Go to the next office over and we’ll grab her as she tries to pass it,” Chip said.
I didn’t know if I could summon the courage to make it that far. But the men left me little choice. The window I’d stepped out of slammed behind me, and I heard the old metal lock turn in place.
This time, there was no turning back.
39
I stepped carefully to my right, toward the turret about twenty feet away, I could see a light go on in the room I had just exited.
I didn’t look down once. If there were people in the interior courtyard of the museum below me, I didn’t want to see them until I could get to a secure perch.
I took a minute to get my bearings. All that I had to lean against was the wall of the building. The roof sloped away from me, somewhere up above. The height was dizzying—it may have been the fifth floor of the museum, but each one was double or triple height—so it was as though I was looking down from the tenth floor of a high-rise.
I couldn’t make out any individuals on the pavement below. The people didn’t exactly look like ants, but no bigger than caterpillars.
The sky still looked dark and threatening, and heaven seemed closer to me than earth.
Inch by inch, I made my way along the ledge, scraping my nose against the old brick facade of the museum as I turned my head to the side to look for the giant cone-shaped turret.
I kept looking back, even though I knew I shouldn’t, thinking Chip might try to catch up with me after all.
Digging For Trouble Page 20
