“Yeah. Nest Valley.” She wiped her nose with her wrist. “Derek invited Oliphant to see the site with him in early spring. Realizing that they had just discovered the first dinosaur eggs in North America, they agreed to dig together. They’d decided to start in early summer because Derek had other commitments in South America. However, according to Derek, Oliphant struck an inside deal with the landowner to dig in the spring and brought out his own crew. Digging in the melting snow was difficult, but before Derek knew anything was wrong, Oliphant already identified several nests and arranged for the PR campaign. It effectively cut Derek out of the find.”

  I rubbed my eyes as I absorbed this information. Nest Valley. Oliphant’s famous dig. He discovered not just egg nests, but fossils demonstrating the entire life cycle of Triceratops. He found fossils from birth until adulthood. It was a game-changer. Until Nest Valley, there was hardly any evidence that dinosaurs cared for their young. The find made Oliphant’s academic career and also catapulted him to broader stardom in the media. Farnsworth definitely wasn’t in the story I read about.

  “I had no idea,” I said quietly.

  “Why would you? It’s now a rumor more than anything. Oliphant denies it, but Derek says he somehow got the landowner to shut up. She probably didn’t want to get involved. Anyway, this was over twenty years ago. She’s not around to contradict the story.”

  “So why are you working with Oliphant?”

  Sarah gave me a long, appraising look. “He’s not all bad, Molly. You’re too young to get this, but everybody makes mistakes. Even good people.”

  Farnsworth could have had a very different life if the cards had fallen another way.

  “That was the first dig I was ever on,” I said.

  “What do you mean?” she asked.

  “There is an established field camp at Nest Valley, did you know?”

  She nodded. “Yeah, I went once a few years ago for a few days. Oliphant wanted me to see it.”

  “Well, they have a youth program, and when I was fourteen, my dad arranged for me to attend. We don’t have a lot of money, and they agreed to give me a scholarship.”

  I smiled at the memory. Then the weight of Sarah’s story hit me again, settling in my stomach like a block of ice. “It’s hard to believe that I worked at the place that triggered their fight.”

  “Derek thinks of all paleontologists as pirates,” Sarah said. “He has a point. Pirates aren’t nice, Molly. Oliphant seized an opportunity. Maybe Derek understood that might happen, maybe not. Now is a different story—both of them are extremely skilled paleontologists. Don’t hate Oliphant for the past. Derek and Oliphant both have their share of fame. They just approach things a little differently.”

  I looked up to find that Farnsworth was standing above us, his large arms crossed over his chest. He’d taken off his hat, and his dark hair was sticking up at all angles again.

  Sarah sighed. “Derek, it was a very long time ago. He’s changed.”

  “Like a leopard can change his spots?” Farnsworth snorted in response.

  “That’s right. People change,” Oliphant said loudly, walking over. I wonder how much these guys overheard.

  Farnsworth’s face reddened as he barked, “Seriously, Sean? Just how have you changed? By butting in on our discovery of the Monster?”

  “No, by taking on your understudy as a protégé.”

  “Oh, so you agreed to work with Sarah because you felt guilty?” Farnsworth said.

  “Hey!” Sarah said, looking indignant.

  “No. What I mean is— Sarah, you are extremely talented. My team is lucky to have you. Having you at my University has been great.”

  Sarah glanced away.

  “Okay, let’s do this here and now. Let’s get the cards on the table,” Oliphant said, more to himself than us. He looked Farnsworth in the eye. “Derek, look, I know you’re still angry.”

  Farnsworth glared at him.

  “And you have every reason to be.” Oliphant paused. “I was a stupid kid, and I’m not that much smarter now. Look, we can’t change the past,” Oliphant said in a more professional tone. “I admit that I was focused too much on my career. It’s a competitive world, and I didn’t want to wait. I thought taking on Sarah would help with what happened.”

  Farnsworth gave Oliphant a look not unlike the look a lion gives a zebra before he pounces. Oliphant moved back slightly.

  “You’re apologizing now?” Farnsworth finally said.

  “No. Yes. Well, I’m trying to. But it’s hard. It’s been over twenty years, Derek. Don’t you think it’s time we buried the rock hammer, as it were?”

  “Twenty years too late, Sean,” Farnsworth said.

  “Why?” I nearly shouted, slapping my hand against the thinly carpeted floor. The two startled men turned to look at me. A few other passengers also glanced my way.

  Slightly embarrassed, I lowered my voice. “Look, can’t you just let it go? We may have a chance here. We’ve got to do this together.”

  “You say that like it’s nothing,” Farnsworth said in a low voice.

  “It’s not nothing, Derek,” Sarah said gently. “But she’s right. Fighting with each other is only making this harder.” She stood up, rubbing a cramp from her leg. She took a jerky step toward the men, still working the heel of her hand into her leg, wincing slightly. “What matters now is that we work together—as a team. That means you two have to stop fighting.”

  Farnsworth grunted. “Easier said than done, Sarah.”

  “Why? Why is it so hard for you? Sean is willing to move on. He apologized!”

  “He didn’t have his entire life destroyed!”

  “No, Derek, but neither did you,” Oliphant said, his gaze unwavering.

  “What do you mean?” Farnsworth said.

  “I mean, look at yourself, Derek. You might not be famous in academic circles, but you’re famous in your own right,” Oliphant said, taking a step closer to Farnsworth. “Everyone knows museums call you all the time for help, or if they want to train staff for digs. Heck, my department head at the University often asks me to coordinate with you!”

  “I must have missed that call,” Farnsworth snarled.

  “No, you’re right. I never called.”

  Farnsworth looked at him incredulously. “You gotta be kidding me. So you’re still cutting me out of work?”

  Oliphant’s eyes flicked toward Sarah. Just as he opened his mouth, the loudspeaker announced in German and English that our flight was boarding.

  “Look, we have to get on that plane,” Sarah said. She looked at Oliphant and Farnsworth. “Can you both calm down? I’d rather not get thrown off the flight. You two can duke it out in Italy.”

  “Let’s go,” Farnsworth said stiffly, moving toward the gate.

  After a deep breath, Sarah reached down for her backpack. As she did, it tilted to one side, and its contents spilled out. As I reached down to help her gather her belongings, I saw a large orange pill bottle roll away. I grabbed it and handed it back to her. As she took it from me, she looked down, embarrassed.

  Oliphant looked at Sarah for a long moment. He’d seen the bottle, too. He opened his mouth a bit, like he wanted to ask her about it, but didn’t. “Time to board,” he said, turning toward the ticket counter. Spotting the magazine stand, he chuckled. “That turned out well, didn’t it?” he said, pointing to National Geographic.

  Without a word, Sarah walked toward the airplane gate.

  The Italian Job

  Molly

  NASCAR lost out when Oliphant chose paleontology as his career. As we drove toward Atessa at ninety miles per hour, I was seriously wondering if he had a death wish. He treated the other cars on the highway as if they were obstacles in a video game, zipping and braking around. He’d nearly crashed into one car.

  “Ciao, Bella!” Oliphant laughed, looking at me in the rearview mirror. “When in Rome, Molly, do as the Romans do. In this case, drive like a maniac.”

  Atessa, as it turned out, was a small village on the eastern side of Italy in the Chieti province of the Abruzzo region. Since this was my first time in Italy, I’d basically glued my nose to the car window and took it all in. Italy was stunning. Yellow-colored hills covered in flowing grasses were punctuated with picturesque buildings. The occasional vineyard poured around these obstacles, brown stalks and vines heavy with green leaves.

  Sarah seemed just as nervous about Oliphant’s driving as I was. Her hands curled around her armrests, knuckles white. Farnsworth wasn’t fazed though; instead his eyes were on his phone. Since we arrived in Italy, he’d been scouring the internet for the dragon connection Lorenzo Meyer mentioned in his note. According to a few websites, in ancient times, a man named Leucio, Bishop of Brindisi, was asked to deal with a dragon that was terrorizing the area. After supposedly subduing it with just his enormous willpower—aka his massive ego—he killed it.

  “‘According to the legend, the local church is built over the dragon’s lair,’” Farnsworth read aloud. He let out a barking laugh. “Dragon bone, my behind. Here is Atessa’s dragon bone rib.” He turned the phone’s screen toward me and used his fingers to enlarge the picture. On a red velvet stand sat a large, brown fossil. It was cylindrical, curving slightly to form a sharp point at one end. The other end looked broken, as if it was detached violently from its owner.

  I narrowed my eyes at the picture. “But that’s just—”

  “A mammoth tusk. Definitely not a dragon bone,” said Farnsworth. He passed his phone to Sarah, who held it up for Oliphant. Oliphant shook his head and turned back to look at the road.

  “According to the story, Saint Leucio himself pulled it from the dragon,” said Farnsworth.

  “You mean from Pliocene sediments in the area, about two to five million years in age,” Oliphant said. “So the time of early hominids, like Lucy the Australopithecus.”

  “Yeah. Anyway, even though it’s quite old, apparently it was ‘rediscovered’ about three hundred years ago by a parish member. He claimed he found it while hunting deer,” Farnsworth paraphrased as he read.

  “It’s geomythology at its best,” I said. Creating myths to describe natural phenomena. But something Farnsworth said made me pause. “That rib was supposedly brought to the church three hundred years ago? Wasn’t that the time that Cornelius Meyer disappeared in Atessa with his own dragon fossil?”

  Farnsworth slowly nodded. “Yeah, I think it was.”

  Maybe there was a connection.

  The Meyer estate was only a few miles northwest of Atessa. We drove through spikey, wrought iron gates down a gravel driveway. There was a large pile of stone ruins at its end. Next to the ruins was an impressive, modern-looking building with orange roof tiles, white walls, and a brown front door. As we parked, a young woman exited the building and headed for our car. A caretaker, maybe?

  Since Oliphant spoke a little Italian, we sent him out as our ambassador. He could charm a scale off a snake; I hoped he could get us some new intel on where we might even start looking for Meyer’s long-lost dragon fossils. Who knows, maybe she’d tell him all the deep dark secrets of the Meyer family, and we’d have our dragon skeleton in the next ten minutes.

  While Oliphant talked to the woman, Sarah, Farnsworth, and I walked slowly along one of the many gravel trails cutting through the estate. It was enormous, with tall yellow grass punctuated with oak trees as far as I could see. The entire area was mostly flat, except for a weird hill in the distance, maybe less than a mile away. I wondered what could have caused that. It just felt a little off. Not natural.

  I looked at the pamphlets the woman handed me before we walked away. What was clear from the pictures was that we could rent the property for weddings. Since the text was written in Italian, the other information was a little more challenging to decipher, and Farnsworth and Sarah gave up immediately. However, one of the benefits of taking Latin as my language credit was that it was the foundation of the romance languages, including Italian. Lots of similarities, and I was sorta proud of myself for being able to read a bit of it.

  According to the brochure, the estate had been in the Meyer family for centuries, only recently opened to the public as a museum and event venue. In the early 1700s, there was a terrible fire that destroyed the entire property. For some reason, the family never repaired the ancient Roman villa that existed before the fire. Maybe they weren’t around often enough to want to rebuild, or they just didn’t care.

  I heard a small crack and looked up. Sarah was throwing pebbles from a small pile in her hand toward the ground. From her hunched stance and scrunched-up face, I’m pretty sure she was back to pondering whether coming here was a stupid waste of time.

  I was worried about her. I really liked her. I hadn’t known her that long, but she seemed to be a kind, honest person. And a good boss. Farnsworth and Oliphant both trusted her, and from our conversations, it was obvious she was passionate about dinosaurs. About paleontology.

  But ever since England, she had been hot and cold. I thought that finding the truth about a potential fossil dragon would be amazing. Or even just discovering a huge new carnivorous dinosaur. I figured she’d want to work hard to prove exactly what it was. Be supportive of its discovery, no matter the strange journey we’d have to take to get there.

  But instead, one minute she was all about it, another she was yelling at us that we needed to go home. What was going on?

  Of course, Oliphant and Farnsworth were not helping. She was clearly stuck in the middle of two strong personalities. I bet it was hard for Sarah not to feel overwhelmed and frustrated between these two men. Plus, worrying about me wasn’t helping.

  As if she’d heard my thoughts, Sarah raised her head. She walked over to me, put her arm over my shoulders, and gave me a squeeze. “How are you holding up?”

  “I’m okay. Tired. Wondering where someone would keep a dragon skeleton in a place like this.”

  “Maybe it’s in the storage room.” She giggled, nodding to the pile of rubble near us.

  I glanced over my shoulder. Oliphant was walking toward us. I caught his eye, and he shook his head.

  “Long shot anyway. Let’s keep moving.”

  Farnsworth walked in step with me, his eyes scanning the estate. He started as his eyes fell on the large odd-looking hill of dirt I noticed when we arrived, and he plowed off the path toward it. I followed, unsure of where else to go. The grass gently rustled as it brushed against my legs.

  As we walked, I turned to Farnsworth. I had to say something. The last time I brought this up was in Lyme Regis, and the adults basically dismissed me. Inspector Poirot, whatever that meant.

  But a lot had happened since Lyme Regis.

  I took a deep breath. “Do you believe what Darwin wrote in that letter to Owen? About the Order being everywhere? Do you believe they would . . . kill to stop people from learning about science, like evolution? Or even dragons?”

  Farnsworth didn’t look at me. “I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe. People have killed for less. If this Order was threatened by scientific progress, then maybe.”

  “But evolution is fact,” I said.

  “Well, now it is. You have to remember, Molly, times were very different back then. For centuries, people were taught since birth to believe that God’s power controls everything, down to the smallest decision. Even as late as the nineteenth century, the great scientific minds were devoutly religious men. Take William Buckland, for example. He was one of the greatest paleontologists ever, but he was also an Anglican priest. To Buckland, science was a part of natural theology. Species were static and fixed, and any differences between species were God’s plan to deal with local conditions. Humans, well, they were made in God’s image, so no reason for change.”

  “I guess I can see that, but if the Order is still around, why are they threatened now?” That seemed kind of stupid. Evolution was widely discussed and accepted. Heck, I started to learn about evolution and Darwin way back in elementary school.

  Farnsworth sighed. “I’m not sure, but my guess is the old standby: that people fear losing power and control. Ignorance is a tried-and-true strategy for controlling people. Maybe the Order still believes it’s their duty to stop other scientific revolutions. Maybe there is a money angle, or they just need to control and shape the world.”

  “Scary,” I said.

  Farnsworth nodded. “Yup. Zealots are always frightening, religious or not.”

  “I just don’t understand how anyone could still be tied to some old religious idea. You can’t ignore evolution just because you don’t like it.”

  “It’s hard to deal with people who want to stay ignorant. But, I do think that, at a minimum, our job as scientists is to explain phenomena so that people without our background can clearly understand it. If we still have doubters, it means two things. One, we’ve failed those who are logical because we were not clear enough in arguing our finds. In that case, we need to do a better job. Or two, they are idiots who do not want to change, no matter the evidence right in front of them.”

  He shrugged as if shaking the weight of the world’s stupidity off his shoulders. “It was the same problem, back in Darwin’s day. The logical thinkers wanted to see the evidence. It caused a lot of fights. Darwin’s book, On the Origin of Species, was popular. He participated in debates to discuss his theories and encouraged his supporters to do the same. They were exciting events. One such friend was Sir Thomas Huxley.” Farnsworth chuckled. “He was a crazy man who loved to argue with anyone who didn’t believe in evolution.”

  “Thomas Huxley?” I asked. “Oliphant mentioned him before in London. He’s also mentioned in Owen’s journal too, connected with that acronym ‘S.V.’ we keep seeing, on things like your package, or on that slab of mudstone in Drachenfels.”

  “That’s right,” Farnsworth replied. “Huxley was known as Darwin’s ‘bulldog.’ He famously debated with a man named Wilberforce in the 1860s about evolution. And guess who coached Wilberforce . . . ?”

 

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29