The Find by Kathy Page Read Free Book Online Page A

at Ai Lin’s bench until the other woman became aware of her and removed her safety glasses and dust mask.
    â€˜You can have him very soon!’ she said, gesturing at the row of vertebrae on her bench. How to say she had something better now? And the fact was, she had barely three weeks to prepare a sixty-page application: permissions, outline, significance, context, budget, benefits to local community, referees, maps, pictures, timeline.
    She leaned in and unwrapped the fist-sized nodule that Mike had dug out.
    â€˜Just look at this, Lin. Very fragile bone in rather tough but also terribly brittle shale—’ She watched Lin turn the nodule over in her gloved hands. ‘Hopefully, we’ll extract it next summer — and hopefully you’ll get out of here and join us? Anyway, it’s urgent. Funding application. I can’t wait until the next committee.’
    â€˜No paperwork?’ Lin’s face with its dark eyes, its stillness, was hard for Anna to read, but she leaned closer as she spoke. ‘Not even a number ?’
    â€˜Not yet. But I need fantastic pictures by the end of the month.’
    â€˜Two weeks, maybe,’ Ai Lin said, and reached for her eye protection. Eighty million years it had lain in the ground: it was, Anna knew, absurd to have these deadlines and agendas, this huge impatience inside her. Later, separating the new specimen from its matrix and reassembling it would proceed micron by micron and take three technicians at least four years.
    Physically large, technically challenging, and of the utmost scientific importance , she wrote to Andrew Bellavance at CanCo, the logging company which owned not just the adjacent land but also that section of the riverbed itself. The Ministry of the Environment had said that designation as a Special Heritage Site would take at least three months: there had to be a way around that.
    . . . Although it is too early to know the exact timing of any possible excavation, we are hoping for the summer of next year, and I am writing at this stage to obtain in a general sense the permission of CanCo to extract these fossils (which would of course take place with full consultation and in co-operation with yourselves) and indeed to invite you to enter into partnership with us and our possibly other sponsors in what will be a hugely exciting enterprise
attracting international attention...
    Anna made lists, proceeded with what she needed to do and tried very hard to ignore completely what had happened with Mike that night in Big Crow — but it came down to this: the museum was not a teaching institution and in terms of grants, it could not go it alone. Nothing would progress without collaboration with a university. It was best to use a tried-and-tested partnership, and that meant dealing with Mike Swenson, who was already involved. Surely, he wasn’t prepared to jeopardize the entire excavation out of a mixture of anger and pride? She certainly was not.
    All her instincts told her not to make a fuss. To move on, not dwell, to bury rather than confront. She hadn’t told Vik about what had happened, and she hadn’t told her mother. She hadn’t told Janice (had she told anyone at that point, it would probably have been her), and she certainly had no intention of telling anyone at the museum. She would make the incident go away, and take with it, too, the fears, memories and anxieties it had provoked. This was not the time for them. She would ignore the man, and make contact with the scientist inside. And if what was needed was for her to swallow the very last shreds of her pride and offer him a way back that involved absolutely no loss of face, not even a mutual apology, well, yes, she could do that, too.
    She looked at what she had written to Mike and deleted my part , replaced incident with misunderstanding .
    I’m deeply sorry about the misunderstanding last week. Let’s put it behind us, and begin a new