by C. S. Poe
Dog and duffel bag accounted for, the two of us walked through the sliding glass doors. Calvin checked in at the front desk, retrieved our room keys, and was directed to the elevators around the corner. There was a little dining area—now dark—for breakfast in the mornings, and a small bar setup on the opposite end of the room, with one tender and two young women giggling over martinis. I followed Calvin into an open and awaiting elevator.
He pressed 6 with his thumb, and the doors silently shuttered.
I reached for his hand. Calvin slid his fingers through mine. He gave me a brief squeeze. Not so strong as if to say he feared the worst, nor so little as if saying it’d all blow over. Just enough.
The doors opened on the sixth floor, and we stepped out. It was very clean and eerily quiet. Calvin checked the room card in his hand again, then walked to the left, turned a sharp corner, and stopped outside of 6112. He scanned the key, and the lock gave. He walked inside first and held his hand out to indicate staying where I was. Calvin quickly checked the bathroom, around each side of the double beds, and then briefly peeked through the curtains.
He turned on the floor lamp in the corner of the room and said, “Come in.”
I let Dillon in, and the door fell shut behind me. The dog immediately jumped onto the nearest bed and flopped back dramatically against the pillows.
I glanced at Calvin and pointed to the bed beside the window. “I guess this one is ours.”
He smiled a little, set the bag beside the desk, and approached me. “I have to go. It’ll be late by the time I return,” he said, handing me one of the key cards. “Call room service if you need anything.” Calvin gave me a kiss.
“Okay.” I turned and watched him go to the door. I took a breath. “Hey. I like you.”
Calvin glanced at me as he stepped into the hall. “I like you too.”
I ACTUALLY did leave the room, intending to grab a beer at the bar downstairs. But when the elevator doors opened on the ground floor, the drunken laughter of the two martini-sipping ladies filled the otherwise silent dining area and reminded me why I never drank at bars. I went back upstairs and instead ordered a Guinness and slice of cheesecake from room service.
“What’re you eating?” Max asked on speaker phone.
I sat on the bed, legs crossed under me, the television on mute, with a wedge of dessert balanced on my fork. “Cake,” I said before taking a bite.
“You’ve been mailed human remains, have potentially picked up a new stalker, the police have you under protection, and you’re sitting in a hotel room drinking beer and eating cake?”
“Yeah.”
“You’re living your best life, man,” Max said.
“Thanks.”
“So this guy knows your home address?” Max asked next.
“I guess it wouldn’t be so hard to deduce,” I answered. I took another bite of cheesecake. “At least when it comes to shadowing someone whose mode of transportation is walking.”
“That and you’re a creature of habit.”
“What do you mean?”
“You take the same exact route to work every day,” Max explained. “You walk on the right-hand side of the street—”
“That’s not weird. The sidewalk on the right is about half a foot wider, and there’s less overhead construction.”
“Uh-huh. And you get to work at the same time, unless you were treated to the morning bump-and-grind. In which case you have a tendency to roll in around nine o’clock, all flushed, with your hair uncombed, and wearing mismatched loafers.”
I glared at the phone beside my knee. “Funny.”
“Only because it’s true.”
I leaned back, grabbed the beer off the nightstand, and took a sip. “Anyway. The real conundrum is that Neil is encouraging bad behavior.”
“Calvin is too. At least a little,” Max said.
And he had a point. If Calvin wasn’t remotely interested in my being a part of this case, he wouldn’t have actively discussed the handwritten notes on the car ride to the hotel. He wouldn’t have told me details about Frank Newell beyond “he’s missing, so you may, by extension, be in danger.”
“That’s true,” I said in agreement. I set the beer down. “But Neil is outright showing me crime-scene photos.”
“Has he been dropped on his head recently?”
“I don’t know. But he’s pretty insistent that I’d actually be beneficial to the investigation.”
Max made a sound under his breath. “I admit I’m intrigued, but defying Calvin in this instance seems like a pretty surefire way to end up on his shit-list for life.”
“I don’t like that list,” I answered.
“Who would?”
I stuffed the last wedge of cheesecake in my mouth and said between bites, “Have you ever read the phrase, ‘Hope you’re satisfied’?”
“What do you mean?”
“Like in a historical context. That’s what Frank’s second note said. I don’t think it’s an original phrase from the Collector. I think it’s a reference, or a quote even.”
“Nothing comes to mind.” I heard the sound of a keyboard after Max fell quiet for a moment. “It’s a song. ‘Hope You’re Satisfied,’ by Betty and Dupree.”
“Etta James,” I replied. I picked up the remote and flipped channels to something not so bright and flashy. World Poker Tournament? Sure.
“It says Betty and Dupree,” Max was saying.
“That was a onetime release under aliases for Etta James and Harvey Fuqua. It’s a good song. You should listen to it.”
“Well… anyway. That’s all that shows up when you google it.”
I sighed. “I feel like I should recognize it.”
“Me too. You’re oh-for-two today.”
“Not that I don’t appreciate your support…,” I began. I climbed off the bed and picked up my beer. “But I’m going to finish this overpriced Guinness and get some sleep. I don’t know if we’ve been cleared to open the Emporium tomorrow, so enjoy your day off.”
“Cool. Lock your door, boss.”
“Already done.”
“Check the closet.”
“What’s going to be in it, an ironing board?”
Max snorted. “This is you we’re talking about. Check the damn closet.”
I rolled my eyes and walked across the room, beer in hand. I opened the door. “Nada,” I called loudly.
“All right,” Max answered. “Give Calvin a kiss for me.”
“Will do.”
“With tongue.”
I shut the closet door and walked back to the bed. “No.”
“Squeeze his butt.”
“Max.”
“Just one cheek!”
“Good night,” I said sternly, ending the call.
I glanced at the second bed. Dillon thumped his tail lazily at me. Sighing, I finished the last sips of beer, tossed the bottle, and got undressed. I put on pajamas, brushed my teeth, and took out my contacts before turning off the lights and television. I blindly stumbled to the bed and crawled under the blankets.
The room was so quiet. So not our apartment. And I had a sudden pang in my chest for all those gentle sounds of life that I’d come to associate with home and heart. The ticktock of the wall clock downstairs that echoed all the way up to the loft. The hiss and ping of the old radiators coming on at night. The muffled laughter of 4A, who talked way too loud on his phone.
I missed the domestic calm Calvin and I had finally obtained in our lives. I could admit that, even now, mysteries were more captivating than the contentment of nine to five, but if it were a choice between Calvin or a good mental exercise? I’d take my big redheaded fellow any day. And that said a thing or two, considering I’d nearly died more than once simply to prove I was intelligent.
Should have told him I loved him before he left.
I rolled onto my back. I closed my eyes and thought about Frank Newell’s second message.
Hope you’re satisfied.
Recover a most unusual article lost to time and neglect.
A most peculiar war of intellect began and ended with a skull.
The clues were all there, waiting for me to piece them together. And based on both mine and Frank’s circumstances, the Collector believed this was enough to figure it out.
Spencerian script told me post-1850s and pre-1920s. The attempt at antiquated verbiage suggested this person was zeroed in on the nineteenth century. An unusual… skull… that both began and ended a war. There were plenty of battles, skirmishes, and all-out actual wars the Collector could have been referencing in the given time period. There was the Civil War, for starters. The Spanish-American War. And countless atrocities against indigenous people.
Except none of those seemed to fit this particular description.
Because they weren’t peculiar wars. Peculiar implied not a literal, but a figurative war. A legitimate battle of the minds. A dispute over a dinosaur skull….
I HAD a strange dream that night. Real strange.
I’d been at the Museum of Natural History, in the hall of permanent dinosaur exhibits. One of the skeletons on display was… there was something wrong with it. There were people, just out of the corner of my eye, arguing about the fossil, but I couldn’t pick out their individual comments. It was only after what felt like hours in the dream that I’d come to a simple conclusion: the dinosaur’s skull had been placed on the wrong end of the body.
I also determined I could fix it myself.
Walking forward, unrestricted by the usual barriers that didn’t appear to exist in the dream, I reached up and plucked the head off the tail. But when I turned it around in my hands to study the details, it was the decapitated head from the Emporium.
The one milky eye rolled around before focusing on me. The mouth moved, showing the gaping holes where several teeth had been yanked out. The bloated tongue licked at chapped lips.
“Dixon. Dixon. Dixon. Hope you’re satisfied!” it said.
“DIXON!” I shouted, jolting awake like you do from a falling dream, and scaring the ever-loving shit out of myself. The sudden jump startled the body draped across my chest, and before I realized what was happening, I fell off the edge of the mattress I’d been teetering on. “Son of a fuck!” I cried, hitting the floor.
“Jesus Christ!” Calvin said from above me, breathless.
The lamp on the bedside table was switched on.
I slowly pulled my legs out from the tangle of sheets, finished my ungraceful landing onto the carpeted floor, and then buried my face into the bend of my arm.
“Seb?” Calvin asked after a beat, his voice shaky.
“Present,” I muttered. I slowly sat up on my knees, turned, and squinted.
Calvin was sitting up in bed, a hand pressed against his bare chest as he struggled to calm his breathing. Waking him suddenly or making loud noises were still triggers of his PTSD that we’d been diligently working on. But Calvin was beginning to make progress on taking control of those fight-or-flight responses. Consistent therapy and the presence of Dillon were finally producing positive headway in his life. In fact, said dog must have moved to my bed during the night and was currently sitting beside Calvin, licking his free hand.
The anchoring action kept Calvin here. In New York. In our hotel. He looked at the dog and pulled Dillon closer.
I cleared my throat. “I had a bad dream. What time is it? When did you get here?”
Calvin glanced at the clock on the bedside table. “It’s four in the morning. I got in about an hour ago.”
I climbed to my feet, knees cracking. “I’m sorry.” I leaned over the bed to kiss him. I missed his lips, catching the corner of his mouth.
Calvin put his hand on my jaw. It still shook slightly as he redirected the kiss.
“Oh my God,” I mumbled against his lips.
He pulled back a bit. “What?”
“Samuel G. Dixon. Hope you’re satisfied!”
“I need you to use complete sentences.”
I grabbed my glasses off the table, walked across the room, and picked up my messenger bag from the floor. “I know where the phrase is from!” I took my laptop out, set it on the desk, and powered it on. I pulled out the computer chair to sit but turned to look at Calvin. “No! I know—wait. Oh shit. This is big.”
He was staring at me as if that fall to the floor had done some actual damage to my brain. Even Dillon had his head cocked and ears up in apparent befuddlement.
“I fell asleep with that phrase in my head. The meaning was right in front of me the entire time. I simply wasn’t thinking.” I turned when the computer sounded its start-up jingle, typed in the password, then looked at Calvin again. “I had a dream about a dinosaur skull—like what we talked about.”
Calvin rubbed his jaw and nodded for me to continue.
“In my dream I realized the skull had been put on the wrong end—on the tail. So I was going to fix it. Anyway, the skull turned into decapitated Jack-in-the-Box, and that freaked me out and woke me.”
“Who’s Dixon? You shouted Dixon when you woke up.”
I finally sat in the chair and rolled it toward the foot of the bed. “I did a project junior year of college on illustration plates and how the printing industry for books and newspapers was shifting to accommodate a growing population during the second half of the nineteenth century. One of the books I cited in the report was….” I snapped my fingers a few times and then tapped my forehead. “Fuck… oh. Vertebrata of the Tertiary Formations of the West. It was written by paleontologist Edward Drinker Cope, and—where’re you going?” I asked as Calvin climbed out of bed.
He said nothing but held up a finger to indicate he needed a moment while walking to the stand beside the desk. He collected a disposable cup, went into the bathroom and filled it with tap water, then returned and poured it into the tiny coffeepot. He popped one of those K-cup knockoff brands into the top and turned it on. The machine gurgled, sputtered, and then began brewing.
“All right. I’m listening,” he said quietly. Calvin looked down at me and combed his fingers through my sleep-mussed hair before giving me an encouraging smile.
“Cope was brilliant. But he was also a total asshole.” I spun around in the chair, opened a web browser, and did a quick search for the photograph I had stored in my long-term memory. It was found easily with a few keywords. “This is a picture of the study in his home the year he died.”
A picture, dated 1897, showed a room with large bay windows letting in daylight, completely packed to the gills with books, endless stacks of paperwork across multiple desks and chairs, as well as scientific specimens.
Calvin rubbed his eyes and studied the screen for a moment. “Okay,” he said at last.
“When I was doing research about his bible—as the Vertebrata was called—I came across this story about Cope doing dissections on snakes at the academy in Philadelphia he was a curator for, and bringing the organs to his home to study without permission. The executive officer of the board—Dixon—asked him to return the missing items, which Cope did by leaving them on his desk, soaked in alcohol solution, with a note.”
“Hope you’re satisfied,” Calvin concluded.
“Right.” I smiled. “I knew that phrase was familiar.”
Calvin reached for the cup of coffee and took a sip of the undoctored beverage. “So this Cope guy….” He looked down at me again. “Did he steal a skull too?”
“Here’s the good part,” I declared. “The thing in my dream, about the skull? That’s a true story. It sparked the Bone Wars.”
Chapter Five
CALVIN SLOWLY sat down on the edge of the bed. “The Bone Wars?”
“A period of intense fossil-hunting in America. Hmm… 1870s to 1890s. I’ll get you the specific dates,” I said, putting the computer on my lap.
“It can hold,” Calvin insisted. “It wasn’t an actual war, though.”
“No
. I mean, not technically. Scientific rivalry between Cope and another paleontologist named Othniel Charles Marsh. They literally spent their entire professional careers and wealth trying to sabotage, embarrass, or one-up the other.”
“Over dinosaurs,” Calvin stated dryly before taking another sip of coffee.
“People kill for less.”
His eyebrows went up, and he nodded while swallowing. “That is true. So do you think this is the war of intellect the notes are referring to?”
“It must be,” I replied. “The quote is a direct reference to Cope. The whole rivalry thing spiraled out of control because Cope had reconstructed a skeleton and placed the head on the wrong end. Marsh called him out on it, and totally humiliated, Cope tried to collect all copies of his recent scientific publication with the error. His attempted cover-up was later found out.”
“Sounds like a man with an exceptionally fragile ego,” Calvin murmured.
I did another search of the internet and quickly found the story in question. “Elasmosaurus.”
“What?”
I pushed my glasses up my nose and looked at Calvin. “That was the fossil.”
“Elasmosaurus would be the skull that ‘began the war’?”
“Certainly could be viewed that way.”
“And what about the one that ended the war?”
I shrugged. “I’m not certain. But between the two men, they found something like a hundred specimens. That’s a lot of potential skulls.”
Calvin stood. He took another drink before setting his almost-empty cup beside the coffeepot. “Interesting.”
“Yeah?”
He nodded, put a fist to his mouth, and suppressed a yawn. “It gives us an insight to the sort of knowledge and background of the Collector. It might open a few new avenues of inquiry.”
