by Stuart Gibbs
Dad and I charged into the water.
My jeans had almost dried out. Now they got soaked again. The runoff was colder than I had expected and a chill shot through my body.
We clambered up the far side of the culvert. My shoes and socks were now saturated and squelched with every step.
There was a barbed-wire fence at the top of the culvert with nothing but woods on the other side. Someone’s private property. A ranch like the Bonottos’, maybe. For all I knew, it might have even been an extension of the Bonottos’. The fence wasn’t really designed to keep anyone out; it was simply there to let you know someone owned the property—although it would have stopped a cow. There were only four sagging strands of barbed wire, so rusty they were probably decades old. It was extremely easy to slip through the strands.
Caitlyn had already done this. We could see her ahead of us, dodging through the trees on the fenced property.
Dad and I slipped through the fence and continued after her.
“Caitlyn!” her mother yelled behind us, sounding exasperated. I glanced back to see her on the far side of the culvert. She seemed to be really hoping that her daughter would come back and save her the annoyance of having to follow through the water.
Caitlyn’s friend had stopped to tend to Xavier.
Caitlyn kept on running. Either she hadn’t heard her mother, or she was ignoring her.
Dad and I continued chasing her.
The forest undergrowth was thick and wet, the branches bowed under the extra weight of the water on their leaves. I caught a few branches to the face and slipped twice.
Still, we were gaining on Caitlyn. It was much easier to follow someone through the woods than it was to figure out a path through them.
We were about twenty feet behind Caitlyn when she suddenly yelped in surprise and dropped out of sight. A second later, she cried out in pain.
Dad and I shared a look of concern, then hurried through the woods. We slowed down as we came to the point where Caitlyn had disappeared and cautiously pushed through a curtain of branches.
A stream cut through the forest. Most days, the streambed probably would have been dry, but now there was a foot of water in it. It wasn’t moving nearly as fast as the water in the culvert had been. And yet, it was still strong enough to erode its banks, which was what had just happened.
The bank of the stream, saturated and weakened by rain, had collapsed under Caitlyn’s feet and she had fallen into the water. The bank had only been about two feet high, and now a sizable chunk was missing. White tree roots poked out of the side, seeming almost startled to find themselves in the open air.
Caitlyn was sitting in the creek, wincing in pain and clutching her side. She looked at us defeatedly, aware that she wasn’t going to be able to run away again.
“Are you okay?” Dad called to her.
“Not really,” she replied through gritted teeth.
Dad and I cautiously climbed down the collapsed bank into the water and waded to her side.
“What’s wrong?” Dad asked. “Did you break anything?”
“No,” Caitlyn answered. “I kind of got bitten.”
I looked around us nervously. The Texas Hill Country was home to plenty of venomous snakes, although given our location, I was most worried about water moccasins. “By what?” I asked worriedly. “A snake?”
“No. A tyrannosaur.” Caitlyn held open her jacket. An eight-inch-long conical brownish object had torn through the interior pocket and was jabbing her in the left side through her T-shirt. The tooth of a tyrannosaur.
I assumed this was what she had stolen from the dig that morning. And now, she had been wounded by it.
Dad knelt by Caitlyn’s side. “Can you stand up?”
“I don’t know,” Caitlyn said. “It really hurts.”
Dad put an arm around her back and gave me an expectant look that indicated I should do the same. So I did. With our help, Caitlyn stood, although she winced in pain.
There was a small island in the middle of the stream with the trunk of a fallen oak tree stretched across it. “Over there,” I suggested.
Caitlyn’s legs turned out to be fine. Supported between us, she easily made it to the fallen tree and sat down on it.
Blood had slowly seeped from her wound into her shirt, staining it red.
“How much do you care about this shirt?” Dad asked. “Can I tear it?”
“Sure,” Caitlyn said. “Mom only bought it for the dig. We were gonna toss it afterward anyhow.”
Dad tore the shirt from the bottom, taking care to only go as high as the wound in Caitlyn’s side.
Now that I could see the injury better, I realized it wasn’t too bad. The tooth had jabbed her between the ribs, but hadn’t gone too deep, maybe only a quarter of an inch, and the wound appeared to be quite clean. Yes, there was blood, but not too much, indicating that no major veins or arteries had been hit.
Caitlyn kept her eyes locked on my father, not wanting to look at her injury. “Is it bad?”
“No,” Dad said reassuringly. “In fact, it looks awfully good, considering you’re the first victim of a tyrannosaur bite in sixty million years. Mind if I try to remove the tooth?”
“Do you think that’s a good idea?” Caitlyn asked.
“I think your biggest risk is from infection,” Dad said. “So the sooner we get this out, the better.”
“All right.” Caitlyn clenched her teeth, preparing for more pain.
“Is that a baby deer over there?” Dad asked suddenly.
“Where?” Caitlyn asked, looking around excitedly.
While she was distracted, Dad quickly yanked the tooth out of her side. It came out so easily, Caitlyn didn’t even feel it. She kept scanning the forest. “Where’s the deer? I don’t see it… Oh.” Understanding of what Dad had done dawned on her.
Now that the tooth was in his hands, Dad couldn’t help staring at it. “Holy cow,” he said, amazed.
“Can I see it?” I asked.
Dad handed it to me. The sensation of holding it was surreal; it seemed impossible that I could be touching part of an animal that had lived millions of years before I had. The tooth was bigger than my hand, and heavier than I had expected. It made me realize how large the skull of a tyrannosaur was, and how powerful the dinosaur must have been to support it.
The tooth was not in pristine condition. It was chipped and scarred and there was still a good amount of rock and dirt stuck to it after hundreds of millennia in the ground. But it was still in good enough shape to slice through skin, as Caitlyn had discovered the hard way. I could make out small serrations along the tip, which would have allowed the dinosaur to saw through meat—and the tooth itself was big and thick enough to punch a hole through bone. I delicately ran my thumb along the serrations, imagining that the last time this tooth had been used, it might have been to kill an iguanodon or an ankylosaur.
“What were you planning to do with this?” Dad asked.
“I don’t know,” Caitlyn admitted, sounding upset—although I couldn’t tell whether she was upset with herself or upset about being caught. “I know we’re not supposed to take anything from the site—and I hadn’t. I’d done everything exactly the way we were told to, even though it was really tempting and way hotter and harder working out there than anyone thought it was going to be. But then we showed up there today and the skull was gone—and Dr. Chen said that without the skull, everything else was pretty much useless…”
“I don’t think that’s exactly what she said,” I corrected.
“Well, whatever it was, it wasn’t good,” Caitlyn retorted defensively. “So I figured, maybe it wouldn’t matter if I took something. Because I’d been working my butt off out there for two weeks already. And besides, all I took was a tooth. The other person made off with a whole skull! That’s way worse than what I did!”
“Maybe so…,” Dad began, trying to calm her down.
“And anyhow,” Caitlyn protested, “if you wan
t a real criminal, you ought to be looking at Jeb!”
“Who’s Jeb?” I asked.
Caitlyn looked at me like I was an idiot. “Weirdo ponytail guy. From the dig. He’s cousins with Harper Weems!”
Dad and I shared a look of surprise.
Harper Weems was one of the wealthiest people in the United States. She was very young for a self-made billionaire, only in her thirties. She had first struck it rich at twenty-two by selling a website she had created while she was in college, but her real fame had come as a businesswoman. Harper was one of the big players in developing private space travel, but she was also involved in other ventures, like large-scale 3-D printing, and had even produced some movies. Harper loved the spotlight and was particularly well-known for her love of science fiction. Her office was designed to look like the bridge of the USS Enterprise from Star Trek, and she conducted meetings from the captain’s chair. She often dressed as famous movie heroes, like Wonder Woman or Ellen Ripley from Aliens, and she was rumored to be fluent in Klingon, Wookiee, and Dothraki.
Harper was also known to be obsessed with Jurassic Park. It was her favorite book, and she had often stated that she thought bringing dinosaurs back from extinction would be fun—even though this was the complete opposite of the book’s message. The grounds at her mansion had been modeled after the theme park in the book, with animatronic dinosaurs throughout. Harper had even claimed, on several occasions, that “a real Jurassic Park would blow FunJungle out of the water.” (To which J.J. McCracken had replied, “Go ahead and try. But don’t come crying to me when you get eaten by one of your own velociraptors.”)
So it wasn’t too hard to imagine that, if any billionaire really wanted a tyrannosaur skull, it would be Harper Weems.
“They’re cousins?” Dad repeated.
“First cousins,” Caitlyn stressed. “Jeb is Jebediah Weems. He’s spent the whole dig going on and on about how close they are. Dr. Chen was even worried about it. We all had to sign these nondisclosure thingies, promising to keep the dig a secret, and she made Jeb sign a whole bunch of extra ones, but I know he told Harper.”
“How?” I asked. “Did he tell you that?”
“No, but I’m sure he did it. The whole dig, he’s been like, ‘I just talked to Harper this morning,’ and, ‘Harper and I were texting all last night.’ He couldn’t possibly have kept Minerva a secret.”
Caitlyn had been so intent on pointing the blame at Jeb that she seemed to have forgotten all about her wound—which indicated it wasn’t nearly as bad an injury as she had first let on. I was sure it had hurt, but wondered if maybe Caitlyn had played up the pain so we wouldn’t be too angry at her for stealing the tooth.
Dad seemed to be thinking along these lines as well. “Looks like your injury isn’t bothering you anymore,” he observed.
“What?” Caitlyn asked blankly, and then realized that she hadn’t been acting like she was wounded. “Oh, it’s definitely still hurting.” She made an agonized wince to sell us on this. “I’ve just been trying to fight through the pain.”
Dad didn’t call her on it. “I think we should get you back to the motel. Your mother’s probably worried about you.”
“Sure.” Caitlyn looked to the tooth in my hands. “Can I have that back?”
“Better let me hold on to it,” Dad said. “In your weakened condition, we don’t want you to fall on it again. Next time it might stab one of your internal organs. I’d hate for you to be the first person ever killed by a T. rex.”
Caitlyn seemed to realize there was no point in arguing. She stood up and made a show of limping back the way we had come, even though the wound was nowhere near her leg.
We found her mother back by the barbed-wire fence. She had waded through the culvert and was pacing frantically along the edge of the woods, searching for any sign of her daughter. She was at first relieved to see Caitlyn, then concerned about her wound, and ultimately embarrassed and angry when Dad revealed what Caitlyn had done. “Oh, Caitlyn,” she said. “I am sooo disappointed in you.”
We all crossed back through the culvert together. Caitlyn no longer seemed to be bothered by her wound at all. Now she just seemed embarrassed as well.
Caitlyn’s friend, who was named Madison, was still tending to Xavier on the other side of the culvert. Xavier had gotten a bloody nose as a result of his fall, and Madison had fetched some ice from the motel for him. The blood appeared to have stopped long before we returned, but Madison was still by Xavier’s side; she was fascinated that he worked at FunJungle and was listening with rapt attention as he described his adventures there.
“You get to see the giant panda every day?” Madison was asking.
“There wouldn’t even be a giant panda at FunJungle if it wasn’t for me,” Xavier said proudly. “I helped Teddy track it down when it got stolen.”
The four older members of the dig were gathered by the edge of the motel, gossiping about what was going on. I would later learn that they were the Brocks and the Carvilles, and that they had been friends for over forty years and went on a different adventure together every summer. As we got closer, I could hear them all talking about how they always knew Caitlyn was trouble, even though Caitlyn was now easily within earshot of them.
“What’d she do?” one of the women asked my father.
“Nothing,” Dad said diplomatically. “It was only a case of mistaken identity.”
The Brocks and the Carvilles didn’t look like they believed this at all and started gossiping again; still, Caitlyn seemed pleased that Dad had concealed what she had done.
Jeb Weems was nowhere to be seen. I figured he simply wasn’t interested in what was happening with Caitlyn—or had maybe been desperate for a shower.
But then we rounded the corner of the motel and saw that his camper was no longer in the parking lot.
Dad turned to Caitlyn. “What room is Jeb in?”
Caitlyn pointed to a room on the first floor. The door hung open and the housekeeping cart sat in front of it. “That one, I think.”
We hurried to the room. The housekeeper was exiting with a load of dirty towels.
“Is this Mr. Weems’s room?” Dad asked.
“It was,” the housekeeper replied. “But he checked out.”
“How long ago?” I asked.
The housekeeper shrugged. “Fifteen minutes, maybe.”
We all turned toward the highway. Fifteen minutes was plenty of time to get far away from the motel.
Jeb Weems was gone.
9 PLAN OF ACTION
For once, I was in a hurry to go home.
The trailer park that served as FunJungle employee housing was sandwiched between the employee parking lot and a construction site where the newest thrill rides at FunJungle were being built. I loved FunJungle itself—there were always plenty of amazing things to see and do there—but our house was small, cramped, and uncomfortably hot in the summer.
Still, it had a shower. And on that day, I wanted a shower more than I ever had in my life.
I was chilled from my repeated soakings, my feet were clammy, and my toes were puckered after wearing wet shoes for hours. Plus, I had mud caked onto my private parts. Even the saunalike heat of the trailer was a blessing given how cold I was. I stayed in the shower for a good fifteen minutes, scrubbing every last inch of myself clean and getting my core temperature back to normal.
Then I got the heck out of the trailer again.
Dad had work to catch up on, having been gone all morning, so I headed to Mom’s office at Monkey Mountain to borrow her computer. The office had much better air-conditioning than the trailer, plus a window that looked out onto the gorillas. Mom wasn’t there; she was at the veterinary hospital with a young macaque who had gotten into a bad fight with a dominant male. She texted me that day’s code to access the offices; I already knew her computer password, as I was the one who had set it up in the first place.
A web search quickly confirmed that Jeb Weems was the first cousin
of Harper Weems, and that they were at least in contact. There were several photos of the two of them together, all posted by Jeb himself on his various social media accounts. The most recent one was from three weeks earlier. Jeb was tagging along on Harper’s tour of a rocket launch site at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. There were multiple selfies of Jeb with Harper in the background, and one in which Harper and Jeb were actually right next to each other, although Harper was distracted by something and didn’t even seem aware that the photo was being taken.
I found a blog of Jeb’s called WeemsWorld. Half of it was devoted to detailing Jeb’s travels around the country in his camper, and half was playing up his connection to his famous cousin. The travelogue from the past three months showed Jeb slowly working his way down the east coast of the United States to Florida and then along the gulf to Texas, stopping at sites ranging from the Smithsonian museums in Washington, DC, to the Okefenokee Swamp in Georgia to the Alamo in San Antonio. The most recent entry was about FunJungle. There was even a photo of Jeb at Monkey Mountain, which was a little weird to look at given that I was inside Monkey Mountain while I was looking at it.
The blog posts about Harper mostly seemed to be cataloguing whatever Harper was doing and then Jeb’s thoughts on it, which were inevitably in favor of whatever Harper was doing.
Jeb had also posted some photos of the dinosaur dig. He never gave away the location—or revealed what had been found—but I still assumed the photos had been posted without Dr. Chen’s permission. Anyone following the blog could easily piece together that Jeb was in central Texas, given that the dinosaur dig post was bookended by posts on the Alamo and FunJungle.
Jeb didn’t appear to have a job. Although he owned the camper, he usually seemed to be staying in motels. If they were anything like the one I had seen that day, they weren’t expensive, but still, I figured the costs of living for months on the road would add up quickly. I wondered how Jeb paid for everything and if his rich cousin helped out.
I sat back, doing the math on Jeb’s recent timeline. He had traveled slowly down the east coast of the United States, taking over two months to get from Washington to Florida, but then, after meeting up with Harper at the Kennedy Space Center, he had moved across the southern US much faster, covering Florida to Texas in less than a week before starting the dig.
