He nodded. “So we shouldn’t stand too close to that rock face.”
She laughed quietly. “Open air and all that. But yeah, you should shower at night, and when we start working on it, we’ll wear dust masks as a precaution. I doubt any part of that is radioactive enough to make someone sick, but why chance it when we’re going to be exposed all summer?”
“I agree.” He drained his coffee cup, then asked, “Okay, a geologist is joining the team. Any other paleontologists?”
“For right now, interns. Mostly grad students, some of them mine.”
At that moment her attention was drawn by a sound at the east end of the cleft, from within the trees. Gray Cloud? Not likely. That man moved with enviable silence. Who then?
After a half minute or so, a figure emerged from the trees into the clearing not far from the rock face. Renee wasn’t certain anyone else was allowed here, so she stood at once.
Cope apparently picked up on her unease and stood too, calling out, “Could you hold it there, please?”
The rider stopped. “Sorry if I’m disturbing. I’m Loren Butler from the ranch to the south. I heard something was going on up here and wanted to check it out.”
Renee chewed her lip. Was she going to have to defend this site from everybody who decided to take a ride?
“This is tribal land,” she called back. “Sacred. We have permission to work here. Do you?”
The man chuckled. He tipped back his head a little, revealing a pleasant face as the sun slipped beneath the brim of his cowboy hat. “Nope,” he said frankly. “I heard there was some kind of rockslide up here last summer. Frankly, it’s a weird-looking one. Not exactly a cleft like Gray Cloud said. Or maybe part of the cleft is broken. Guess I won’t find out today. You can tell the elders I was here. I prefer to stay on good terms with my neighbors. But you can also tell them I was curious about what exactly happened.”
He paused, then added, “Just a couple miles south of me, on Thunder Mountain, they had rockslides a few years back ago that put a halt to building a ski resort. Makes you wonder if Gray Cloud ain’t right about this mountain having a brain. See ya.”
He turned his horse with a few clucks of his tongue and rode slowly back into the woods.
“I guess he has a reason to be curious,” Cope remarked. “If the mountain’s going to get busy making rockfalls, he might have something to worry about.”
But Renee’s thought had turned in a different direction. “It was a cleft.”
Cope turned to face her. “Was?”
“Last fall I was visiting my cousin and Gray Cloud brought me up here to show me.” She turned, taking care with the placement of her feet. “Right now it looks like a slide,” she said, pointing toward the rock face, “but when he showed it to me last fall, there was a narrow cleft in the rock, just enough for one person to walk through. The part to this side, where you can see the creek below, was thin but still tall and upright. It didn’t contain anything interesting I could see, so I wasn’t upset when I came back this year to discover that part of the top of the narrow piece had apparently crumbled. Gives us more room for work.” She shrugged. “But we’re still going to have to check all the stuff that fell below as well as what’s beneath us in the cleft.”
“Obviously,” he agreed. “What about farther up, like that guy just mentioned?”
“He’s right. It’s more of a cleft beyond those trees there, but you can’t tell if it all happened at once. Maybe Claudia will be able to. Regardless, I looked at it last fall and it didn’t appear promising. Which doesn’t mean I won’t check it out anyway.”
Cope fell silent, and Renee continued to stare at the rock face, but her thoughts were moving through time, not space. “You know,” she said after a minute, “it’s really weird that part of that narrow wall of rock collapsed like that.”
She fixed her gaze on Cope. “It’s almost as if someone deliberately knocked it down. As if they wanted samples and disturbed more than they intended.”
She watched Cope’s face darken, but he didn’t respond. Of course not. He was the one who had suggested security that she couldn’t afford. On the other hand, who the hell would want anything from here other than a cool fossil? And freeing something from the rock would take many hours. The most any trophy hunter could have hope of finding was something that was already loose.
That hardly required full-time rent-a-cops.
Another bunch of small rocks tumbled down from above. “Let’s get your hard hat,” she said. “Then I need to think about how we can stabilize the top of that wall.”
“I’ve got some ideas.”
She didn’t doubt it for a moment.
Copyright © 2018 by Susan Civil Brown
ISBN-13: 9781488093166
Colton’s Twin Secrets
Copyright © 2018 by Harlequin Books S.A.
Special thanks and acknowledgment are given to Justine Davis for her contribution to The Coltons of Red Ridge miniseries.
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