by Stuart Gibbs
Jim’s guard went up anyhow. “I don’t have to tell you anything.”
Over the phone I suddenly heard Jim’s twin brother, Tim, call out, “What’d he say?”
Jim forgot about me and spoke to Tim. “That Griselda’s dead. Because you had the stupid idea to buy that snake!”
“You wanted it too!” Tim challenged. “So maybe you’re the stupid one.”
“Don’t call me stupid, idiot,” Jim yelled back, and then the two of them started fighting. I heard punches being thrown, more insults being shouted, and glass breaking.
I figured I wasn’t going to get any more information out of the Barksdales, so I hung up.
Dad was now taking pictures of Summer as she hopped from rock to rock in the river. He lowered the camera and looked to me curiously. “What was all that about?”
“The Barksdales bought an anaconda somehow,” I reported. “One that’s fifteen feet long.”
Dad’s eyes widened in surprise. “Fifteen feet?”
“And it ate their cat.”
“They’re lucky it didn’t eat one of them.”
“I think they might try to kill it,” I said, worried.
Dad nodded, concerned, then slung his camera strap over his shoulder and fished out his phone. “I’ll call the reptile guys at FunJungle. Maybe they can run out there and intervene before things get out of hand.”
“Too late,” I said.
I immediately called Tommy Lopez, who worked at the Department of Fish and Wildlife. Summer and I had helped Tommy with a case a few weeks before. Fish and Wildlife was responsible for policing the illegal reptile trade, so I figured they would want to know about the anaconda. I got a message saying that Tommy was out on assignment, so I left a message for him.
And then Dr. Chen started screaming.
5 THE STORM
“Are you crazy?” Dr. Chen shouted. “Get off there!”
At first I thought she was yelling at Sheriff Esquivel; maybe he had carelessly trod upon some fossils that hadn’t been dug up yet. But then I noticed she was looking toward my friends on the boulders. Although I still couldn’t tell who she was upset with. Neither could anyone else. Everyone looked her way, confused.
So she pointed directly at Summer, who had made it out to a boulder in the middle of the river. “You!” Dr. Chen yelled. “Don’t you think we’ve had enough tragedy here today? We don’t need a drowning, too!”
“I’m okay!” Summer yelled back confidently. “These rocks are totally safe!”
“No, they’re not!” Dr. Chen came toward the boulders, looking genuinely concerned for Summer’s safety. “They’re wet and slippery, and that river is moving much faster than usual. If you fall in, you could drown! So please, do us all a favor and come back to land!”
Even from a distance, I could see Summer roll her eyes, but I found myself thinking that Dr. Chen had a point. The rock Summer was standing on was barely poking above the surface of the river—Summer had to place her feet right next to each other to stand on it—and the water was churning around her. I started to feel nervous myself.
Summer didn’t show the slightest hint of concern, although she did follow Dr. Chen’s request. She casually made her way back to shore, hopping from rock to rock.
As she did, I caught a glimpse of something out of the corner of my eye.
I turned back to the dig. Everyone there was distracted by Summer, looking toward the river.
Except one person.
One of the people working with Dr. Chen was a teenage girl, about fifteen or sixteen, I guessed. She was dressed for a long, hot day of dirty work, wearing overalls over a long-sleeved T-shirt and a wide-brimmed hat to block the sun.
The girl was scurrying away from a part of the dig and rejoining the rest of the team. It appeared that, while everyone else was watching Summer, she had taken the opportunity to slip away. She looked around furtively to see if anyone had noticed her, then did her best to act like she had been standing with the others the whole time.
It occurred to me that I hadn’t taken a very good look at the seven other people working on the dig with Dr. Chen.
One was another teenage girl. She appeared to be friends with the first, as they were standing next to each other and dressed similarly, the way that girls who were good friends often did. They even had their hair done the same way, in ponytails that peeked out from under their floppy hats.
A middle-aged woman with short-cropped hair was close to them. I guessed she was one of their mothers, as she had a distinct mom vibe about her. She was dressed in the same sort of outfit my mother had worn when studying gorillas in Africa: jeans, a button-down shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and sturdy hiking shoes—only this woman’s clothes looked a lot newer.
There were four people who looked old enough to be my grandparents: two men and two women. Despite their ages, they seemed to be in good physical shape, which would make sense, given that they had hiked at least three miles to the site that morning.
The final person was a man in his thirties. He was tall and gangly, and he wore a tie-dyed T-shirt, cargo shorts, a baseball cap, and a ponytail even longer than the teenage girls’.
“Those people can’t all be paleontologists, can they?” I asked Sage’s mom, who was standing close to me.
“Oh no,” she told me. “They’re all volunteer diggers. Dr. Chen is the only one here who works for the university. The rest are doing this for fun. Although I think the girls are getting some sort of high-school credit.”
Summer leaped from the last rock in the river to the safety of shore. Upon impact, her shoes sank several inches into the mud.
Sheriff Esquivel now seemed to take notice of the eight volunteer diggers as well. He whistled to his one fellow officer, like she was a dog. “Brewster! You done taking photos of the crime scene yet?”
Brewster looked up, startled, and answered timidly, “Not quite yet, Sheriff. Maybe a few more minutes.”
Esquivel frowned grumpily, like this had annoyed him somehow. “Well, get it done. And then get all these people’s names and phone numbers and work out a schedule for them to come be questioned at my office.”
“You’re going to question us?” the mom asked. “Why? We didn’t steal the skull.”
“Do you want me to investigate this or not?” Esquivel asked sourly. “If no one knew the location of this dig but you folks, then you’re all the suspects I’ve got.”
“You’re not going to question them here?” Dr. Chen asked.
“Nope.” Esquivel nodded toward the north, where the sky had grown darker along the horizon. “Looks like we have more rain coming, it’s a long way back to the car, and I’m not a big fan of being wet.”
I hadn’t noticed the potential storm until Esquivel pointed it out. It appeared that no one else had either.
“We ought to start heading out ourselves,” Dr. Chen told the others on the dig. “Hopefully, we can make it to our cars before that gets here.”
Esquivel turned to her, a thought having occurred to him. “The Bonottos said all y’all are parked out on Fletcher Road?”
“That’s right.” Dr. Chen was already gathering her things and preparing for the hike back out.
“That’s on the other side of this river,” Esquivel observed. “How do y’all normally get across it?”
“There’s a big log spanning a narrow spot in the river down by our camp,” Dr. Chen explained. “We rigged up a hand rope for safety. It was a little dicey this morning, but still passable.”
“Too dicey to carry a skull across it in the middle of a rainstorm, I’ll bet.” The sheriff considered the fast-moving river. “And no one crossed this with a quarter ton of dinosaur skull either.” He turned back to Officer Brewster. “Forget those crime scene photos and get me those names and numbers. ASAP. These people have three and a half miles to hoof it before the heavens open up again.”
With that, he walked away from the site, his boots making great sucking sounds
in the mud.
In the distance, lightning flickered in the clouds. It was still too far off to hear the thunder, but it was definitely coming our way.
“We better get going too,” Sage’s mom told us, then started back toward her horse and the ATVs.
Dad, Mr. Bonotto, Sage, Xavier, and Summer followed her. I took a last look around the dig site.
The dig crew was quickly gathering their gear to hike back out to their cars. They had already been upset about the disappearance of the skull, but now Esquivel’s attitude and the coming storm had them all looking as morose as could be. As they pulled on their raincoats and gathered their umbrellas, Officer Brewster flitted about them, entering their contact information into her phone.
As Brewster moved from the mom to the grandparents, she suddenly looked my way. Our eyes locked and she held my gaze. I got the sense there was something she wanted to say to me.
“Teddy!” my father called.
I broke my gaze with Brewster.
Dad stood at the base of the small bluff, waiting for me. “Let’s go,” he said. “Before we get drenched.”
I hurried after him, my shoes sliding in the mud. We clambered up the bluff and made our way to the ATVs.
Sheriff Esquivel was already sitting astride one. He took off without even a glance back, the motor shredding the prestorm silence.
Sage’s mother hopped onto her horse as easily as I would have climbed onto a bicycle and galloped toward home.
The rest of us put on our helmets, climbed onto our ATVs, and drove back to Sage’s house. The ride wasn’t nearly as much fun as it had been on the way out. My mind was filled with thoughts about the missing skull; how it had been stolen was certainly a major mystery. And I was thinking about the Barksdales and their anaconda too, wondering where they had acquired it. Even though I hadn’t liked their cat, I still felt bad for it; no animal deserved to die because its owners were careless. I even felt a little bit bad for the Barksdales as well.
We weren’t far from the house when the storm arrived. By now the sky had turned so dark it felt like dusk, even though it was only around lunchtime. The rain began slowly, with the drops plonking down every few seconds. They were big enough that they had real weight to them; each one felt like someone flicking me with a finger as it smacked into my arm or shoulder. A few splattered on the visor of my helmet. We all gunned our engines and sped up, racing the rain.
We reached the covered shelter for storing the vehicles mere seconds before the rain really came down. Sheriff Esquivel had beat us back, so he had already parked his ATV and was halfway to his squad car when we arrived.
The moment I turned off my ATV, the deluge hit.
A serious Texas rainstorm can be quite a sight. Locals often joked that the Texas Hill Country got ten inches of rain a year—and it all fell within fifteen minutes.
This storm made me think that wasn’t really a joke. It was as if someone had torn a hole in the sky. Water was suddenly pouring down so hard we could barely see the house thirty feet away. Luckily, we were protected by the tin roof of the shelter, but Sheriff Esquivel was in exactly the wrong place at the wrong time. The rain came down on him like an anvil, drenching him in an instant.
He was about twenty feet away from us and already had his keys out, intending to get into his squad car as fast as possible. But the rain caught him by surprise, knocking his cowboy hat down over his eyes. He promptly stumbled over his own feet, slipped on the slick ground, and face-planted in the mud. His keys flew from his hands and plopped into a puddle left over from the previous night’s rain.
Under the shelter, we were still dry, but it had grown cool fast, and the wind kept blowing gusts of mist inside. Still, it made more sense to stay there than attempt a run for the house or the cars. If we did, we would certainly end up getting drenched like Sheriff Esquivel.
The rain was rattling so hard on the corrugated tin over our heads, it sounded like we were in a war movie. Thus, no one else could really hear when Sage came up beside me and asked, “So? Can you help us figure out who stole Minerva?”
“I don’t know if that’s such a good idea,” I said. “The police are already investigating…”
“You call that investigating?” Sage pointed to Sheriff Esquivel, out in the rain. “He doesn’t even think there was a crime!”
Outside, Esquivel pulled himself to his knees and crawled to the puddle his keys had fallen into, which was growing by the second in the downpour. The sheriff fumbled through the murky water, tossing aside clumps of grass he had grabbed by mistake. His hat fell off and landed upside down in the puddle. Esquivel snatched it out and slapped it back on his head. Even in the few moments it had been off, it had caught enough rain to pour down his shirt. Esquivel screamed in rage, splashed around in the puddle some more, and finally came up with his keys. He leaped to his feet to race to his car, but immediately lost his balance on the saturated ground and fell once again, this time on his back.
Everyone else in the shelter was so riveted to the sheriff’s mishaps that they hadn’t even noticed Sage and me talking.
“Esquivel’s not going to be happy if I start snooping around,” I said.
“He probably won’t even notice,” Sage replied.
“Plus, getting involved might be dangerous.”
“No, it won’t.”
“Everyone always says that,” I replied. “And then I end up in danger.”
Out in the rain, Sheriff Esquivel was writhing about on his back like a turtle flipped onto its shell. He finally managed to flop over onto his stomach and then stagger to his feet again. He was now so coated with mud he looked like he’d been dipped in chocolate—although the rain quickly washed some of it away, leaving him dappled and soaked to the bone. He grabbed his hat once more, shook the water out of it, and clambered into his car. Then he drove off angrily, his car skidding and kicking up mud.
No one gathered in the shelter seemed the slightest bit sorry for him.
“Please,” Sage begged me. “Sheriff Esquivel isn’t going to do anything. And we need to know who stole that dinosaur.”
The worried tone of his voice struck me. I turned to him and was surprised by the desperation in his eyes. It made me think something much greater than a stolen dinosaur was at stake. “What’s going on?” I asked.
Sage glanced furtively at his parents. They and everyone else were staring out at the rain, most likely trying to guess how much longer it would last, and thus, how much longer we would be stuck in the shelter.
Even though they were distracted, Sage pulled me farther away from them and whispered, “The cattle business has been really bad lately. My folks have taken out a lot of loans against the ranch, and they’ve just ended up deeper in the hole. A lot deeper.”
I looked toward Sage’s parents.
“They don’t know I know,” Sage said quickly. “But it’s bad. Minerva’s the only thing that can save us.”
“What do you mean?”
“If that skull was really worth millions, it’d be enough to save our ranch. It was like stumbling across a treasure chest.”
I now understood why Sage was so desperate. “Your parents were going to sell it?”
“According to the law, if it’s on our property, we own it. But if we can’t find who stole it and get it back… we’re going to lose our home.”
I frowned, feeling a growing sense of worry.
I was concerned for Sage and his family. I didn’t want them to lose the ranch that had been in their family for generations. And I didn’t want my friend to have to move away from a place he obviously loved.
I was also worried because I shared Sage’s belief that Sheriff Esquivel wasn’t going to investigate this case properly.
And I was worried because I knew what all that meant: Despite my concerns, I was going to help find out what happened to the dinosaur.
6 MUD
Like many Texas thunderstorms, this one didn’t last long. After fifteen minutes,
the massive downpour stopped almost instantly, as though the clouds had run out of water. The lightning and thunder moved on into the distance, although the sky remained dark and ominous, threatening more rain.
We took advantage of the break in the weather to get to our car and head home. None of us wanted to be out on the ranch’s poorly maintained driveway when another downpour started. As it was, poststorm, the long road was in bad shape. It was mostly mud slicks and puddles so big, they could have almost qualified as ponds. Lots of branches had been knocked loose by the winds, and at one point, an entire cedar tree had toppled into the road, its trunk snapped like a toothpick. Luckily, it had fallen in a clearing, which allowed us enough room to circumnavigate it; otherwise, we would have had to backtrack to the Bonottos’ and hope they had a chain saw.
“I’m surprised Sheriff Esquivel got out of here all right in that rain,” Xavier observed. “Especially since he took off like a madman.”
“We’re not off the property yet,” Dad warned, in a tone that said he half expected to find the sheriff’s car wrecked on the side of the driveway.
Summer pointed to the roadside ahead. “Looks like he did have some trouble.” The bubble lights from the roof of the sheriff’s car lay smashed in a puddle. It appeared that the sheriff had lost control and a low-hanging branch had torn them off his roof. Three sodden cattle stared at them, confused.
“He’s not going to be happy about that,” Xavier said.
“He wasn’t happy to start with,” I said. “He really won’t want to investigate this case now.”
“It’s not like he would have been any help anyhow,” Summer claimed. “Daddy says there are rocks that could do a better job fighting crime than the sheriff.”
“He’s not that bad—” Dad began.
Xavier interrupted him. “All those people from the dig were telling him the skull had been stolen and he was acting like they were just making up some crazy story!”