The Find by Kathy Page Read Free Book Online

place like nowhere else on earth. Its staggered shape and ochre walls deliberately echoed the landforms surrounding it, but, as Mama had once pointed out, you could also think of it as a ship voyaging on the vanished Cretaceous seas, a kind of modern-day ark, huge and well-equipped, its storerooms filled with plaster-wrapped life forms awaiting preparation and, eventually, resurrection.
    The public carparks were empty; even the staff parking, tucked away behind the landscaping to either side of the main entrance contained only a dozen vehicles this early in the day. Anna slipped her pass into the reader and, inside, felt herself relax into the particular hum — almost, but not quite, silence — that was the sound of the working part of the museum.
    Anna wedged her office door open. Light filtered through the Venetian blinds in the farthest of the two rooms, illuminating, just, the closer, larger room where she kept equipment and specimens in use. Waiting on the workbench was the long skull of the mosasaur, Clidastes liodontus , right there where she had left it six weeks ago.
    The electric lights threw everything into sharp relief and showed up the dust. She dug into her daypack and unwrapped the fossils. The air seemed to stiffen as she set the exposed phalanx under the binocular microscope, steadied it with miniature sandbags, adjusted the focus and, there — suddenly clear — was the porous pattern of the ultrathin bone, a bubbled effect almost, like batter made with self-raising flour. The texture was exquisitely detailed at the joint end, where the top layer had adhered to the other side of the concretion and partially detached when the nodule split. And there, where the border between fossil and rock had been disrupted, she caught the faintest hint of something gold: pyrites, which must have been formed right at the beginning of the fossilisation process.
    â€˜What have you there, then?’ Peter Grace, aka Wings, stood in the doorway waiting to be invited in. After months of fieldwork, his iron grey hair was especially shaggy.
    â€˜Vancouver Island?’ he asked, as she stood to let him look. A thin man, he bent awkwardly at the knees before giving in and using the chair.
    â€˜It’s quite something. The scale—’
    â€˜Yes. Two of them. Maybe more.’ Later, when Brian Hogarth took his turn at the microscope, she and Peter watched him, knowing what he would see, waiting for him to see it. When he looked up, grinning, you could see the boy in him, Anna thought, despite his baldness and weathered skin.
    By ten o’clock, everyone was in the staff lounge. Brian and Pete, Dave, Jan, Ken and Ray: Dinosaurs, Birds, Fish, Mammals, Arthropods, Pollen. Squat, bushy-haired, lanky, unshaven, pop-eyed, dusty-looking, as various as the creatures they studied and all gathered together in an odd, coffee-smelling, windowless, leftover box of a room. This was her other family, her kinship group. It was good to share her luck.
    â€˜So, next year?’ Pete was applying for co-funding for a trip to the Arctic and so now they would be looking to the same sources, but then, she reasoned, so would several hundred others. It was a matter of the project itself; the various committees would decide.
    â€˜Yes,’ she told him. ‘It’s very fragile. I’m aiming for next year.’
    â€˜Pressure’s on, then,’ he said. ‘Better get started. Let me know if I can help.’ She wanted to hug him, but he’d turned away to fill his cup.
    In the preparation lab, a crane lifted a two-metre hadrosaur femur onto a bench; the sound of the machinery, the bench tools and the ventilation system merged into a rhythmic blur of grey noise. Huge metal tubes from the extraction system snaked up from each bench and reached towards the ceiling that towered above them. None of the half-dozen masked and goggled technicians bent over their benches had noticed her enter and Anna waited