Beastly Bones

by William Ritter

  I withdrew my notepad and held it up meaningfully. The farmer looked out of sorts, but he nodded and stepped back toward the path. “Do you mind giving this young lady the tour without me?” he called up the hill.

  Owen Horner gave me a charming smile. “I should like nothing more.”

  “Well, okay, then,” Brisbee said. “I guess we’ll see you folks this afternoon.” With that, the farmer led Jackaby back down toward the farmhouse. “Say, weren’t you in the papers yourself, a few weeks back?” he was saying as they departed. “Something about an honest-to-goodness werewolf?”

  “That article was painfully inaccurate,” Jackaby said, his voice fading as they wound down the hill.

  “Shall we?” Owen Horner gestured grandly when they had gone, inviting us toward the rough, dusty plateau. I had seen successful excavations in the past, but only in the pages of my father’s field journals or as lithographs in a textbook. The scene that spread before me could not possibly have been confined within a printed page.

  The entire Brisbee farmhouse could have fit easily into the wide grid the paleontologist had established atop the hill. The ground was uneven. To one side it had been broken roughly in thick, haphazard rows. I could see where the farmer’s efforts to till the earth had ended and the methodical scientist’s work had begun. Wooden marker spikes had been pounded into the soil along a perimeter of a few hundred feet, and a simple brown twine had been tied along them to define the site. Outside the string border sat piles of rocks and dirt. Within the boundary, the loose debris had been cleared away, and the first layers of soil had been removed. Peeking out from the red-brown earth were the bones of an impossible colossus.

  Most of the prehistoric creature remained beneath the dirt, but a faint, incomplete outline had been revealed, and the figure it described nearly filled the site. Half a rib cage had been dusted clean, and several feet of vertebrae as thick as my waist curved above the surface before the earth swallowed them up again. Twenty feet away, a wide lower jaw with nasty-looking sharp teeth had been unburied. If the visible bones were an accurate indication, the entire specimen was taller than a house and just waiting to be exhumed.

  My eyes could not grow wide enough to take it all in. My whole body tingled. This was completely unlike my only previous personal experience, a miserable expedition I had attended in the mountains of the Ukraine. All of those frozen months had yielded a handful of scattered bones—all of which had later been confirmed to come from common mammals. This was . . .

  “Impossible,” I breathed.

  “Isn’t it?” Horner’s voice was hushed and close to my ear. I felt the gentle pressure of a hand on my lower back, and he held his other in front of me. “Let me show you.”

  I accepted the hand out of courtesy, and he escorted me down the uneven terrain toward the beastly bones. I peeked back to be sure that Charlie was coming, too. He was keeping just a few paces behind, although his attention seemed to be more focused on the scientist than the astounding discovery. The ground leveled out, and Horner stepped away to fetch a pair of gloves from a pile of tools.

  We were at the creature’s stomach, so close I could reach out and touch the pale ribs. The sheer size of the thing was dizzying. “There is no way that you did all of this alone in just a few days,” I said. “This is at least a week’s worth of labor for even a very large team.”

  Horner shrugged with a cocky grin.

  “No, seriously—how did you manage it?”

  “Well, I can’t take all the credit. First of all, Mr. Brisbee has the fortitude of a workhorse. He was with me every morning for the first few days, hauling rocks and dirt. Second, the bones are scarcely beneath the surface.” Horner spun to marvel at his find. “I thought, at first, that geological shifting might have pushed them to a higher strata. The same forces that made these foothills could have done that much—but the more we uncovered, the less that seemed to fit. If the ground had been churned up enough to expel the specimen from its grave, the bones would not have remained so neatly arranged. Aside from what we’ve done to uncover them, the whole skeleton looks entirely undisturbed. The soil is rocky, but it’s relatively soft and easy to work with. I can hardly blow away a layer of dust without uncovering a new fossil. They’re not encased in stone, yet they’re preserved pristinely. It’s astounding.”

  “It is, absolutely.” I moved closer, inspecting the nearest bones. They were only partially exposed, but once freed, the ribs looked as if they would form a more spacious cavity than the trapper’s carriage.

  “So far as I’ve been able to tell, the basic anatomy is not unlike a Dryptosaurus—only easily twice as large.” Horner pointed toward the head. “The jaw tells us that it was a carnivore, of course.” Centuries of fossilization had dulled them, but from several yards away I could see that the long canines were still vicious. I could also see that one of them was missing. A row of distinct points was interrupted by a smooth, concave hole where a tooth should have been.

  “I take it that’s . . .”

  “The reason you’re here? Yes. We uncovered the lower jaw on the very first day I arrived. Tremendous initial find. You can bet those teeth held a keen edge when this brute was alive. Beautiful artifacts. Such a shame.”

  “When did it go missing?”

  “They were all there when I wrapped up for the night, about three days ago. In the morning, we found Mrs. Brisbee’s body. Then the doctor was called, that reporter kept asking questions, some neighbors came around, and the police. I didn’t even make it up to the site again until Brisbee had ridden off with the body and I was alone. Any one of them could have walked off with it.”

  Horner pulled on a pair of gloves. “Take a look in that midsection I just cleared. See anything interesting?”

  I did not know where to begin.

  “Are those flint rocks in its stomach?” asked Charlie. I hadn’t even realized that he had come to stand beside me.

  Horner jabbed a finger at the policeman, looking very pleased. “Gastroliths. Good eye. They’re stones of any sort—flint, in this case—that animals swallow to help with digestion. It’s common in birds.”

  “Except they’re not common in dinosaurs—at least not in meat eaters,” I said. “A few sauropods have been found with them, if I recall, but only ever herbivores.”

  Horner clapped his hands together. “You do know your stuff! Ready for another? Put these on and follow me.” Horner handed me a spare pair of leather gloves. They were several sizes too large, but I pulled them on. He trotted a few yards down to the feet of the beast. Its claws were as vicious as its teeth. Horner stopped in front of a leg bone taller than he was. I followed, and he leaned down to the base of the massive fossil.

  “I take it that’s the femur Brisbee pulled out with his horses,” I said.

  Horner nodded. “Now watch this.” He took hold of the tremendous bone with both hands and lifted it upright like a strong man at the circus. It was a rather shameless display, but his strength was impressive nonetheless. Upright, it looked like the great menhirs, massive standing stones that my father had once studied in France.

  “Very impressive, Mr. Horner,” I said.

  He laughed and set down the specimen. “The fact is, either one of you could perform that stunt just as well. Would you care to give it a try, miss?”

  The femur was half again my height and as wide across as my shoulders. Skeptically, I leaned down and positioned my fingers beneath it. As I pulled, to my own amazement, it tilted up, rising several feet off the ground. “My word,” I exclaimed. My grip within the oversized gloves slipped, and the priceless artifact thudded gracelessly to the ground.

  “Careful,” Owen Horner and Charlie said at once. The scientist caught hold of the fossil, shifting it carefully back into place, and at the same moment Charlie caught hold of my arm to steady me, but he let go almost as quickly and stepped shyly aside.

  “It’s as though it’s hollow,” I said.

  “The medullary cavit
y,” Horner replied smartly. “It’s a space in which bone marrow and adipose tissue were stored when the creature lived.”

  “No, that can’t be it.” I shook my head. “I watched my father and his team articulate a skeleton at the museum, and it took three grown men to support a bone smaller than this. Could it be structured more like a pterosaur’s?”

  “Possibly,” he said. “Pterosaurs did have bones like birds, sturdy and lightweight, but that’s because they were designed for flight. I would wager what we’re looking at here is an especially large relative of the Allosaurus.”

  My head swam as the reality of the discovery washed over me again. It was as if the childish dreams that had lured me away from home had all come true. “May I help?” I asked. “I do have some experience.”

  “So I gather. What about the missing piece?”

  “The more thoroughly we understand what’s missing, the more thorough our investigation will be. I could be an invaluable member of the team.”

  Horner leaned in close. “My dear, of that I have no doubt. So long as I’m running the show here, your assistance is more than welcome. You’ve already proven you’re as clever as you are lovely.” He gave me a wink.

  The man was a ridiculous flatterer, but my heart leapt with excitement to be back on a real dig. It was almost enough to forget that he would be running the show only as long as it took Lewis Lamb to arrive, at which point he’d likely be run out of town. I took a deep breath, looking over the bones. I would enjoy it while I could.

  Chapter Seventeen

  The afternoon flashed past. Charlie paced about the perimeter, looking for anything he might have missed during his preliminary examination. He found frustratingly little, and eventually he came to assist Horner and me, carting wheelbarrows full of dirt down the hill while we dug and swept the site. I had only just started exposing the upper jawline, when the sun began to sink beneath the treetops on the far side of the valley. I strained my eyes, trying to brush out the contours of a few more mighty teeth before we lost our light completely. Horner had been right about the ideal conditions of the dig, but I felt like I had barely made any progress at all. It was maddening to think how much of the skeleton still lay waiting beneath the soil.

  Only when Hugo Brisbee came to coax us from the site with the offer of a hearty meal did I realize that I had seen nothing of Jackaby all afternoon. Brisbee welcomed us into the farmhouse, and as we crossed through toward the kitchen, I spotted my employer in the parlor. He was holding a pair of slim glass tubes side by side, turning them in the light of the lamp. One was filled with something dark, the other with something pale that rattled about against the glass.

  “Good evening, Mr. Jackaby,” I said, stepping in to join him. “We were about to sit down to supper. What’s that you’re looking at?”

  “Graveyard dirt,” he answered without turning, “acquired from Mrs. Brisbee’s plot.”

  “Can graveyard dirt tell you anything?”

  “Not enough. The soil is unsatisfied,” he said, “and so am I. Mr. Brisbee seemed to need a moment alone, so I paid a visit to the funeral parlor while we were on the grounds as well. I found the mortician away, so I let myself in. They were preparing another body. Denson. Male. Fifty-seven. I find two sudden and unexpected deaths by mysterious malady a mite suspicious, particularly in so small a town. From the look of things, the late Mr. Denson succumbed to his supposed illness the same night as our farmer’s wife died. He lived alone, however, and was not discovered until more recently. He had traces of the same aura. It is becoming unmistakably familiar. He bore the same mark as well, just beneath his collar. Livor mortis has added a good deal of discoloration, so it seems the injury has once again been overlooked. The medical examiner in this little town is deeply disappointing. In the interest of giving the deceased some justice to take to the grave, I liberated a rear molar before he could be entombed.” He gave the second vial a little shake, and it rattled.

  “You stole a dead man’s tooth?”

  “He made no objection. It is my hope that I might glean something useful from a closer study. Much of the essence of a living thing is distilled in its teeth. Did you know that? It’s why the tooth fairies are so fond of them.” He held the vial up reverently. The thing was slightly yellowed, its root a dirty pink.

  “Have you found anything distilled in Mr. Denson’s molar?” I asked.

  Jackaby scowled. “There is something infuriatingly familiar here, but identifying it is like trying to pick out the smell of a clover in a bouquet of roses.”

  “Well, perhaps you’ll have better luck at the dig site tomorrow,” I said. “Horner showed me what went missing, and it turns out it’s a tooth we’re after there as well. Not one you could fit in your little vial, either—the thing must be the length of my forearm.”

  Brisbee came to fetch us, and the vials disappeared into Jackaby’s coat. We filed into the dining room, where Charlie and Mr. Horner were already sitting down to eat. As we helped ourselves to fresh greens and steaming cuts of pork, Brisbee leaned in toward Jackaby.

  “So, Detective,” he said, “you were explaining your special talent to me on the road earlier. Tell me, does it only work on spooky creatures, or can you read people, too?”

  Jackaby raised an eyebrow. “The categories spooky creatures and people are not as separate as you might imagine. I can read people. The truth is I can’t not. Your aura, for instance, is a burnt orange.”

  “Huh. How does that work, then?” Brisbee said. A spark of intrigue lit his eyes. “Can I change my own aura? Make it lighter or something?”

  “Not exactly. Auras are complex manifestations of intangible factors. It’s not something you can adjust like a knob on a gas lamp.”

  “All right. What else do you see?”

  “I’m not sure that is a good idea,” Charlie interjected. “Mr. Jackaby’s ability is not a parlor trick.”

  “It’s fine,” said Jackaby. His eyes narrowed as he surveyed the farmer, taking a silent inventory. “You are tethered,” he announced. “Bound from somewhere deep inside of you. You resent your bonds, and yet you cling to them. You are proud and you are willful, but most of all,” he said, his head cocked to one side as he spoke, “you are profoundly and wretchedly lonely.”

  Brisbee’s expression sank gradually and unevenly. “Huh,” he said. “I suppose that’s . . .” He cleared his throat. The eager light in his eyes had dimmed, and he suddenly looked tired and embarrassed. “That’s true.”

  “Of course it is,” my employer said, casually scooping a large helping of mashed potatoes onto his plate. His voice was still obliviously earnest.

  “We built this farm from nothing,” Brisbee continued. “Maddie drove more than a few of the nails in this very room. Our boys grew up here, too. There was a time you could barely take a step without one of them underfoot. This place was supposed to be their inheritance—it’s all I have. I always thought that they would . . . but Johnny left for the city first chance he could, and then Percy made it into university. I don’t blame them. We were both so proud, we didn’t even mind when it was just the two of us again. But now . . .” He trailed off and pushed a bit of broccoli around with his fork.

  “There’s something I can see as well, Mr. Brisbee,” I said.

  “Hmm?” Brisbee looked up from his plate. Jackaby eyed me curiously.

  “I can see that you’re not alone. Not tonight,” I said.

  Brisbee glanced around the table at the four of us. Charlie looked reassuring and affable, but I believe it was Horner’s broad, goofy grin that did the trick. The smile tiptoed back up into the farmer’s cheeks.

  “Ah, now I see it,” said Jackaby. “Perhaps I was wrong, Mr. Brisbee. You do look a little brighter.”

  Silverware clinked, and the conversation around the dinner table grew boisterous and optimistic as the night wore on. Horner ruminated dreamily about what he was going to name his dinosaur, and Brisbee could scarcely wait to hear back from the re
porter at the Chronicle. Jackaby, Charlie, and I finally bade good night to the others and headed down the road to Charlie’s cabin.

  The night was cloudless, and the moon and stars cast more than enough light to illuminate the path. With murder and mystery still hanging in the air, I might have found the walk intolerably eerie—but the happy energy of the evening hung around us.

  “You would have been very proud to see Miss Rook at the site today, sir,” Charlie told Jackaby as we trod along. He gave me an admiring smile, and I felt the heady warmth of a day’s successes spread through my chest.

  “You were no slouch yourself,” I said. “You were very clever to spot those flints so quickly.”

  “Charlie helped with the dig as well?” Jackaby said.

  Charlie nodded.

  “Surprising—I should think that unburying bones would go against generations of instinct to do just the opposite, wouldn’t it? Ouch! Watch your step in the dark, Miss Rook—you just kicked my shin. Where was I? Right—I was saying that coming from a family of dogs—ouch! You’ve done it again, rather hard that time. Really, the path isn’t even bumpy here.”

  “Mr. Jackaby, please try to be a little more sensitive,” I said.

  “What on earth are you talking about? I am quite sensitive enough, thank you—and getting downright tender in the vicinity of the legs, at the moment.”

  “It’s all right, Miss Rook,” Charlie said. “The hound is not everything I am, Mr. Jackaby. I am not controlled by his instincts, but I am not ashamed of them, either. In fact, I have enjoyed the freedom and privacy of the country more than I expected. It has been a great relief to let myself run on all fours from time to time, away from the prying eyes of civilization.”

  Jackaby spoke before I could voice the same caution. “That might not be wholly advisable. Your excursions into the wilderness may not have been as covert as you presume.”

  “Your friend, the trapper?” said Charlie. “I think he might find me a bit more difficult prey to track than his typical fare.”