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He can’t change this.
She grabbed her backpack and slid from the truck to the rocky ground. A fifteen-minute walk would take her the rest of the way to the quarry.
ALEXANDER BLAKE TURNED into the museum parking lot just as a battered pickup truck clattered out. He got a quick look at the tense-faced woman at the steering wheel. Dark hair pulled back from a pale, oval face. Slender. Whoever she was, she was in a hurry.
He parked in a reserved spot, then stood beside his car surveying the place that had lured him away from the field. The museum was long and low and the color of sandstone. It fit right in with the sedimentary hills and dry, rolling prairie. To the east, there was a wide, winding river. Far to the west, the Rocky Mountains’ faded blue foothills merged with the horizon. Not a bad place to spend a couple of months.
He swung open the staff door and stepped inside. To his left was the preparation lab. Through the small window that let visitors watch technicians free bone from rock, he saw that someone was already at work.
The galleries, off to the right, were still quiet. They’d be humming with voices soon, when visitors crowded in to see the displays: the primordial invertebrates, the fish that had dragged themselves from the sea onto the land, and the dinosaurs, frozen in flight and ravenous frenzy.
There was an elevator, but Alex took the stairs two at a time and arrived at the top breathing easily. The nameplate on the first door to his right caught his eye—S. Robb. Hadrosaur nesting habits, he remembered. She’d been short-listed for the job he was about to start.
An auburn-haired woman was in the room, reading at the desk…the World’s Greatest something or other, according to her mug. Her desk was free of clutter, free, even, of dust. Neat rows of journals, textbooks and color-coded file folders lined a ceiling-to-floor bookcase along one wall. On another, six identically framed photos of quarries formed a perfect rectangle. A collection of rocks stood in orderly rows on shelves under the window, as straight as soldiers on parade. World’s Greatest Organizer?
The woman noticed him and said warmly, “You must be Dr. Blake.”
“That’s right. Dr. Robb?”
She looked surprised. “Oh! I forgot where I was. No. Diane McKay.” She went around the desk to meet him, hand outstretched. “My perfectly usable office is across the hall. I just couldn’t overcome my inertia once I’d sat in Susannah’s chair.”
“McKay,” he repeated. “Burgess Shale?”
Diane nodded. “My team has been up there for most of the summer, but I’ve been going back and forth. I want to spend as much of August as I can with my son.”
“You must have a reliable team.”
“Don’t tell my boss, but they hardly need me. The same group has been with me for years.”
Alex could hear morning clatter coming from the other offices. “I’d like to hear more about your quarry, but I don’t want to be late for my own meeting.”
“You’ll have to come up to Mount Field with me. There’s no place like it anywhere in the world.” The soft-bodied creatures from the Burgess Shale site often seemed like reckless experiments of nature. One, the Opabinia, had five eyes and claws on its nose.
The suggestion fell in nicely with Alex’s plans. “Are you going back soon?”
“In a couple of weeks, just for a few days.”
“Sounds perfect. I’ll be able to take some time away from the museum by then.”
Diane walked with Alex to the conference room. He sat at the head of the long table and waited for the staff to get settled. He didn’t recognize most of them. Field and lab technicians, probably, or the teachers and artists who helped prepare exhibits. A few paleontologists working at faraway quarries, like those in South America or on Ellesmere Island, near the Arctic Circle, hadn’t made it back to the museum to meet him.
He could only identify four people at the table. George Connery, a rumpled, dark-haired man fidgeting with his pen and looking as if ten weeks of sleep would do him good. He headed the Bearpaw Formation quarry, studying marine reptiles. Diane McKay, still grasping the mug he now saw praised her parenting skills. Lynn Seton, a dignified older woman…where had he met her? A conference at UBC, he thought. She’d lectured on fossil pollens. She leaned away from a young man sitting beside her…Jeff Somebody, studying links between dinosaurs and modern birds. Had a few too many last night, from the look of it. Alex wondered if it was habitual. Guilty conscience? Stress? Maybe just a special occasion, somebody’s birthday. Across the table was a man of medium height and early middle-age, white coated and frowning, with faint chemical smells clinging to him—probably Charlie Morgan, the head conservator. Susannah Robb seemed to be absent. That was odd. Her quarry was just half an hour away.
Alex sat forward, a small movement that signaled the meeting was about to start. Shuffling and talking stopped. Twenty faces looked back at him. A lot of people to get to know before he could prove that at least one of them was a thief.
AT FIRST NO ONE NOTICED Susannah had arrived. She stood on the periphery of the site, watching James work with the new group of children from the science camp, the last group of the summer. Some of the campers used chisels and toothbrushes to chip and brush soft rock away from the specimens. Others painted exposed fossils with preservative, or wrapped them in plaster, to protect them during their trip to the museum.
“Dr. Robb!”
Susannah was already familiar with that excited voice. Matt was the busiest, most talkative ten-year-old she’d ever met. He ran toward her, clutching something to his chest. Sand sprayed against her leg when he skidded to a halt at her side.
“Look what I found!” He was so bursting with eagerness he seemed to take up several feet of space in every direction. He handed her a saucer-size fossil. “It’s a backbone, right?”
Susannah used her cuff to rub dirt from the specimen. “It’s part of a backbone,” she agreed. “How did you know?”
Crowding next to her, he traced the fossil’s shape with his finger. “It’s like the backbones on my models at home. It’s a circle, and it’s got these two points.”
“Those are the pedicles. They formed part of the neural arch, where the spinal cord went through. Any idea how old it is?”
Matt hesitated. “Seventy-five million years?” James and Susannah had explained how old the site was, and had tried to help the kids make sense of that amount of time. He added, “Before pyramids. Even before people.”
“That’s right. It’s from the Late Cretaceous period. Where did you find it?”
“Over there.” He pointed vaguely along the dry riverbed.
“Exactly where over there? We need to know, because we might find more vertebrae in the same place.”
Matt’s small body expressed the beginnings of agitation. “Um…”
“Retrace your steps in your mind,” she suggested quietly. “You left the site and walked…where?”
“Up the hill.”
“Up the hill!” Susannah reminded herself the problem at the moment was the exact location of the fossil, not the fact that Matt had ignored warnings about disturbing delicate ecosystems, damaging specimens or falling down sinkholes. Time enough for that later. “Okay. Up the hill and then?”
“Then I slid down it.” Matt darted an exploratory glance in Susannah’s direction. When she didn’t comment, he continued more confidently. “Then I followed the riverbed, and I saw the backbone just lying there on the ground.”
“Where those new hoodoos are forming?”
He nodded.
“Okay. Ask one of the counselors to help you map it, and add it to the collection.”
Matt didn’t move. “Dr. Robb? How did you find the bonebed?”
“I just went for a walk, and there it was.”
“Really?”
“Almost. Really, I went for lots of long walks, looking at the ground, and looking at the ground—like you did this morning when you found the vertebra—and then one day, I saw part of a skull, just barely nudging up out of the rock.”
“And that’s how you find dinosaur bones?”
“Absolutely.”
“Like me this morning,” he repeated. Matt’s eyes wandered past Susannah, to the badlands stretching beyond the quarry. He had the bug: he was clearly imagining the dinosaur he would find one day. The biggest, the best, the first of its kind.
“What are you going to do now, Matt?” Susannah prompted.
His eyes met hers, questioning. “Oh! Map the vertebra.”
“Good. And, Matt, don’t wander away from the group again. You have to stay with the other kids. It’s important.” She watched him hurry off without giving any sign that he’d listened to her warning.
A young woman stepped carefully around a chiseling camper to join Susannah. With sun-streaked blond hair scraped back into a ponytail, and a bright yellow T-shirt and denim shorts that revealed long, tanned arms and legs, Amy looked more like a teenage baby-sitter than a fourth-year geology student. “I didn’t expect to see you here today, Susannah.”
“It was a sudden decision. How are the kids doing?”
“Settling in. They’re already finding out how boring paleontology can be.” Amy gestured toward a small girl with short, curly hair and pink-framed glasses. Her head was bent low, her chin tucked into her chest. “Julia had a tough night. Homesick. Think you can do anything to help?”
“I can try. I’ll put these water bottles in a cooler first.”
“I’ll do that for you.” A little more insistently than Susannah liked, Amy put a hand out for her backpack. “Julia’s going to burst into tears any minute. She’ll get all the younger ones started.”
Susannah quickly relinquished her pack. She’d been at the campsite on Saturday afternoon to welcome the children, and had spent that evening getting to know them. Julia had seemed upset right from the start, as if she really didn’t want to be there. She looked and acted younger than ten—she probably wasn’t ready to spend two weeks away from home.
Hoping she wouldn’t say or do anything to release pent-up tears, Susannah knelt on the ground near Julia. “Finding anything?”
The small, curly head shook from side to side.
“I get days like that, too. I had about five years like that when I was just a bit older than you. I grew up on a farm in Manitoba. Not prime dinosaur country.”
“Wheat,” Julia muttered, still looking at the ground.
“Lots of wheat,” Susannah agreed. “But I was interested in paleontology, so I’d go out into a pasture, rope off an area and start digging.”
Julia glanced up. “But you didn’t find anything?”
“Not much. Rusted metal that broke off a plough about a hundred years ago. Bone from a bison. One summer I lucked out—found a pioneer garbage dump.”
Julia had stopped her halfhearted digging and was giving Susannah her full attention. She wrinkled her nose. “Yuck.”
“It wasn’t yucky. There were old medicine bottles and broken dishes and a pretty chamber pot with hand-painted flowers on it. Do you know what a chamber pot is?”
Julia shook her head.
“Maybe I shouldn’t tell you.”
The girl’s gaze intensified. “You can tell me.”
Susannah whispered in her ear. Julia drew back, her face twisted in pleased disgust. “Eew! With flowers on it?”
Susannah nodded. “Those pioneers must have had a sense of humor. The thing is, where I turned up bottles and dishes and chamber pots, you’ll turn up a hadrosaur bone.”
Using her geologist’s hammer and a chisel, she began to chip at the ground. Julia watched Susannah’s even motion and began to copy it. It wasn’t long before they uncovered the tip of a bone.
“Finally. A rib. We found this animal’s skull, its spinal column, and its tibia, but we couldn’t find its ribs. Good for you!”
Julia smiled up at Susannah, her glasses glinting in the sun. Smiling back, Susannah realized she had passed thirty minutes without a single thought about Alexander Blake.
THE SUN, STILL HOT, was in the west. A few plaster-coated specimens lay drying on the ground. Some of the children worked slowly, obviously tired; others sat together, resting and talking.
“James?” Susannah said. “I don’t see Matt.”
“Again? He’ll be around somewhere.”
“I told him not to go too far.”
“Your definition of too far and Matt’s are probably very different.” James raised his voice. “Matt!” He listened for an answer, then called again. “Matt, if you know what’s good for you, you’ll get back here pronto!” But no apologetic Matt, full of explanations, trotted back to the bonebed.
“I saw him near the dining shelter,” one boy said. “Maybe fifteen minutes ago.”
“He was just here, wasn’t he?” asked another camper. “Wasn’t he talking to Julia?”
Julia, her eyes huge, shook her head. She looked from James to Susannah, ready to panic.
One of the older girls said, “I was digging with him about an hour ago. He left to get some preservative, but he didn’t come back, so I just got it myself and kept working.” Uncertainly she added, “I guess I should have looked for him.”
“He’ll be somewhere nearby, Melissa.” Susannah spoke quietly to James. “Let’s take a quick look around. He could be behind any of these hills or walking along the riverbed—he found a vertebra there this morning. Maybe he went bone hunting again.”
When they didn’t find Matt near the quarry, in the dining shelter, supply tent, or back at the school bus, Susannah and James organized a more thorough search. Four pairs of one counselor and one camper fanned out from the quarry, carrying whistles as a simple form of communication. Hoping useful action would help ease the girl’s worry, Susannah asked Melissa to be her partner.
As she walked, Susannah thought about how often Matt had been told not to wander off. She hadn’t paid close enough attention to him. For most of the day, she’d been preoccupied with work and angry feelings about Alexander Blake, sometimes almost forgetting the children were there. In all the years the museum had run a science camp, no one had ever got lost.
Self-recrimination at this point was counterproductive. Nothing bad would happen to Matt. He was lost. They would find him. Later—alone and awake at night, or assessing the summer camp at the end-of-season board meeting—there would be lots of time for guilt.
They were nearly a mile from the quarry when Susannah noticed a pile of shale at the foot of a hill. Scraped ground leading to the top suggested someone had climbed up recently.
“Look at that, Melissa. I’ll bet Matt slid down the other side. He’s probably sitting happily in the shade, making sand castles.” She called Matt’s name, waited, then called again, louder.
“I think I heard something,” Melissa said eagerly. “It sounded really far away, though.”
“I’ll go up for a look. Wait here.”
Carefully Susannah edged up the side of the hill. At its crest she saw what she had been afraid of seeing: a hole about two feet across, with an uneven edge. She wriggled closer on her stomach and looked down into the stale darkness. “Matt?”
A faint voice reached her. “I’m down here!”
Susannah fumbled in her backpack for her flashlight and shone it down. There: a ghostly reflection. She called to Melissa, waiting at the base of the hill. “Have you got the whistle? Try to get someone’s attention—three blows means help.” She wished she could see Matt better. The flashlight’s beam barely reached him. “Are you hurt, Matt?”
“Get me outta here, Dr. Robb!” His voice quavered.
Get him out. Good idea. But how? From the sound of him, Matt couldn’t wait for the others to arrive, if they ever did arrive. There was no guarantee anyone would hear the whistle.
She could hear and see Matt, so the sinkhole wasn’t all that deep. She tried to estimate the distance to the pale face illuminated by her flashlight—thirteen feet, maybe more. Not a long enough drop to kill you, but long enough to hurt you, long enough to keep you stranded. She had to make sure Matt wasn’t hurt, reassure him, get him out.
His voice wafted up to her. “Dr. Robb? Are you there?”
“Of course I’m here. I won’t leave you.”
She couldn’t get him out. She could throw the flashlight down so he’d have light. She could send Melissa back to the quarry for help, and lie there with her head down the hole carrying on a long-distance conversation to keep Matt calm.
Bad idea. She didn’t want another child wandering alone in the badlands, and she wanted to have a good look at Matt, as soon as possible. He was talking, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t hurt.
She’d have to go in after him.
Her body tensed at the thought. She didn’t like heights or the dark or jumping. She didn’t like fast sports or danger. But here she was, proposing to plunge into a dark void. Without a net. Well, she wasn’t exactly a couch potato. She did a lot of on-the-job hiking and climbing. She was fit.
Again she shone the flashlight into the hole. About a yard from the top, she noticed a small outcropping. Here and there along the sides were uneven areas that might provide hand- and toeholds.
“Melissa, I need you up here.” She waited until the girl joined her at the top of the hill. “Lie on your stomach so your weight is spread out—the ground could cave in again. I’m going down to see if Matt’s okay, and I’ll try to help him out.” She spoke calmly, as if she were just going to walk down some stairs to check on him. “Be ready to give him a hand.” She tucked the flashlight into the backpack.
“Matt? Is the ground clear? I don’t want to land on rocks.”
Several seconds passed while she waited for his answer.
“It’s clear!”
“Move out of the way—I’m coming down.”
Susannah sat on the crumbling edge of the hole, feet dangling. I can’t do it. She willed her muscles to relax. Do it. She let go and felt herself falling. She hit the ground and rolled, and pain shot through her left ankle and shoulder. Seemingly very far above her, she saw a small circle of evening light, and Melissa’s anxious face. Two small hands clutched her.
“Are you okay, Dr. Robb?”
“I’m fine.” Cautiously she flexed her arms and legs. It didn’t take much movement to convince her she’d injured her shoulder and ankle. Not seriously, though. Grimacing, she sat up. “Throw down the backpack, Melissa!”
The pack landed with a thump near her feet. She retrieved the flashlight and shone it on Matt. Apart from a few blood- and sand-encrusted scrapes, he seemed to be in good shape.
“Are you mad at me, Dr. Robb?” One hand still clung to her shirtsleeve.
“Definitely. But it’s nothing you can’t survive.”
“I was hiking, like you did. I wanted to find another bonebed. Then I fell in and I thought, wow, there really are sinkholes.”
Susannah’s eyebrows rose in surprise. What did he think, sinkholes were the bogeymen of the badlands? She had a strong urge to give him a good, long lecture, even though she knew it wouldn’t do any good. Instead, she said, “I’ve got a plan. Are you any good at math?”
“Yeah.” Matt sounded puzzled.
“If there are enough stones down here to make a big pile to stand on, you plus me plus the stones should just about equal the height of that ledge near the mouth of the hole. See it?” She shone the flashlight upward.
Matt peered up into the faint light. “I think so.”
“If you can reach that ledge, Melissa will grab your hands. The sides of the sinkhole are closer together there. You can plant your feet against them and climb out.”
“I dunno…I’ll try.”
“That’s the spirit!”
Susannah shone the flashlight around the floor of the sinkhole. There were plenty of stones, large and small, scattered here and there. She didn’t want to think about what would have happened if she or Matt had hit a knee or head on one of them. “I’ll need your help to move some of these rocks, Matt.”
He sprang to her side and helped her roll and push some rocks into place. He seemed glad of a chance to demonstrate his strength. With some difficulty, Susannah climbed onto the pile. “Can you jump up on me, piggyback?”
“Sure.” Matt’s confidence was streaming back.
Susannah put one hand against the cold wall of the sinkhole, but she still swayed under Matt’s weight. She tried to ignore the stabbing pains that accompanied his climb. A pointed elbow, then a bony knee, dug into her. Fingers grasped her forehead. Their bodies swayed.
“I can’t reach,” he gasped, fear returning to his voice.
“You’re nearly there, Matt,” Melissa called. “A couple more inches. Stretch!”
Finally he was on the ledge. She waited, ready to break his fall if he couldn’t hold on. She heard scraping sounds and the children panting, then Melissa called, “I’ve got him!” Loosened sand rained down on Susannah’s head.
Two faces appeared at the mouth of the hole. “How are you getting out, Dr. Robb?”
She hadn’t planned that far. “I’ll just hang around here for a while. I’ve always wanted to study the ecosystem inside a sinkhole.” The children didn’t laugh. “So I’ll get started on that. Any sign of the others?”
“I don’t see anyone coming,” Melissa answered. “And I didn’t hear a whistle.”
“Then you two trot back to the quarry. Ask someone to look after Matt’s knee, and to come back for me. Tell them if they bring a couple of tent poles and a rope, I should be able to climb out.”
Matt seemed unwilling to go. “Maybe I should stay and keep you company.”
“I want the two of you to stick together.”
As soon as the children left, there was total silence. Susannah stood in an eerie puddle of light thrown by her flashlight. “At least I hope I’ll be able to climb the rope. I was never much good at it in gym class.”
She picked up her backpack, wincing when she put weight on her ankle. It was beginning to swell over the top of her shoe. Bending down, she loosened the lace but left the shoe on for support.
She shone the flashlight around the ground and the walls. “The bad news is, I’m all alone down here. And the good news is I’m all alone down here.” Black widow spiders and rattlesnakes liked the damp coolness of sinkholes.
It was a narrow hole, irregularly carved by rainwater that had soaked in from the top and chiseled through the rock until it forced its way out somewhere along the hill’s sides. The inner walls were layered in the same distinctive way as the outside: there were beige and ocher seams of sandstone, gray mudstone, black coal and whitish-gray volcanic ash. She could even see the reddish K-T Boundary, the layer of sediment that was like a lid closed on the dinosaur world. No dinosaur fossils were found above it.
“This is creepy. That’s my scientific conclusion. I’ve observed, I’ve gathered data, and I’ve concluded that sinkholes are creepy.”
She decided to check the floor to make sure there were no soft spots that might cave in to a deeper hole. Sometimes seeping rain carved out a series of openings until the water reached an underground stream. She had almost finished her inspection when her injured foot twisted on a damp rock, sending waves of pain up her leg. She gasped and dropped the flashlight. It went out.
“Oh, no.” Susannah eased down onto her knees and felt the ground for the flashlight. She found it and flicked the switch. Nothing. She twisted its head to be sure it was tight. She shook it. It shone faintly for a moment, then went out. And stayed out.
She sat still, her breathing audible, her senses instantly alert. The sudden darkness seemed endless and full of threat. Sitting in the middle of the sinkhole floor, she felt like a target. Slowly she crept along the uneven ground until the rock wall was at her back.
It was so dark. There was nothing like the darkness of a hole in the ground. It was different from the darkness of night. Blackness thick enough to pick up by the handful. She turned her face to the opening far above her. She would keep her eyes on the small circle of light.
“It’s just the same place it was a second ago,” she whispered. “No more holes, no snakes, no tyrannosaurs. Darkness is a good thing. Nature’s protection. Of course there are predators, like owls, that hunt very successfully in the dark. Not that there are any owls here. And not that I’m a rodent.”