It’s awkward with the younger woman’s knees between them, but Ripley sighs and leans in. It’s not that she doesn’t like hugging or love Cara. It’s that not long from now, her lease at Clever Girl will expire. When that day comes, they’ll both be looking for the same fossils, and her fourth rule will go into effect.
She’d rather keep a firm line between work and relationships. That way, no one gets hurt when she takes her cut and leaves Yellowtail at summer’s end.
Grimacing, Cara unwinds her long arms from around Ripley’sback. “Thank you. I know human contact burns your vampire skin, and I appreciate your sacrifice. So what do we do now?”
Ripley shakes her head. “Our only option is to find the rest of Beauty and get her out of the ground before the other fossil is announced in…early September?” She’ll find out when the APS meeting is. “We’ll skip the specimen prep, throw the bones in the scanner, and upload the images to one of the public paleontology databases. We might still be able to claim the holotype.”
“We don’t have CT scan money anymore, Rip. We can’t even pay the crew through this month.”
“I’ll reach out to some people who were considering funding us the last time around.” Ripley tries to sound confident, but most wealthy sponsor types want aT. rexor something even bigger. A bird needs someone both rich and a little offbeat.
But James Smithson—aristocratic, connected James Smithson—has access to a world of wealthy, eccentric philanthropists Ripley can’t reach from this side of the Atlantic.
And Smithson wants something from her.
Ripley makes a pained face, steeling herself for what has to be done. “We could ask Smithson for help in return for my doing his investigation.”
Cara brightens. “Ooooh. Clever Girl can’t have too many rich, well-connected friends. Are you sure you want that?”
“I don’t, but unless we get another offer, he might be our only hope.” Time away from the dig, uncomfortable encounters with people she used to know, hours in the company of a man who gives her secondhand embarrassment for her past self—it’ll be agonizing, but for Beauty and Clever Girl, she’d endure much worse.
“I’ll drive in to the big house and see if Geraldine knows wherehe’s staying. Maybe I can catch him before he goes back to California.”
“Want me to come with?” Cara asks, climbing down from the rock.
“It’s better if I go alone.” Ripley checks her pockets—wallet, keys, phone.
She’s going to talk to a man about a bird.
5
A plume of dust follows Ripley’s jeep as she bounces along the rutted dirt road. The big house is visible for miles in the rolling farmland, the red pine siding and slate-blue aluminum roof popping against fields striped with neat rows of pale green hay.
She pulls up next to a well-used light pickup and a dusty Dodge Charger. A dozen bird feeders, a few rocking chairs, and a woven hammock in black, white, and blue decorate the wraparound porch. At lunchtime, Geraldine will ring the iron triangle that swings gently in the wind in defiance of Cara and the numerous ranch hands who’ve suggested thatwe could, y’know, make a group text.
That’s the way Geraldine is—stubbornly warm, lavishly hospitable, with a raspy laugh and a weakness for charity bingo nights at the Tribal community center. The day the two of them met, Ripley had been shouted off the farm next door by Mr. Shipman, who wanted a payout whether or not she found any fossils. She was braced for more profanity when she knocked on the door of the big house to ask for permission to scout Yellowtail Ranch.
Instead, Geraldine came out to inspect the canyon with Ripley, then sat her down at the kitchen table. “My granddaughter isfinishing her bachelor’s in agriculture, but she’ll need more than a degree to keep the agribusiness companies from swallowing this land. You teach her how to run a fossil operation, and I’ll give you half of whatever you find.”
The day they signed the lease, the canny, slightly terrifying seventy-something wrapped Ripley in a surprise embrace and barked, “Get out there and find me some fossils, my girl.”
She’s careful not to accept too many of those hugs, due to her unfortunate tendency to act like a newly hatched duckling around other people’s mothers. In Ripley’s sophomore year, her roommate Sophie had uninvited her to Thanksgiving dinner, saying, with equal parts pity and annoyance, “My mom wouldn’t tell you to your face, but she’s kind of uncomfortable with you. I mean, you hang with her almost more than you do with me.”
Ripley turned down every invitation from Sophie and her family after that. She upped her work hours at the campus bar and focused on saving enough money to travel to her own home on holidays.
It’s a lonely realization, but her dad might be the only person she hugs without overthinking it.
Ripley knocks before opening Geraldine’s never-locked front door. “Hello?” Her voice bounces off the exposed beams and tall windows of the foyer. It smells like a farmhouse—dirt and leather mingling with bacon and frybread.
“In the kitchen!” Geraldine shouts back.
Ripley kicks off her boots so she doesn’t catch hell for tracking dirt across Geraldine’s spotless floors. The low, sprawling ranch house was built in the days before open-concept design, the kitchen hidden by a swinging door. Ripley pulls her sleeve over her dusty fingers before pushing the door’s gleaming brass plate.
“Morning, Geraldine. I was hoping you might know where—”
“Sit. Eat,” Geraldine orders, taking a piece of frybread from thepan with her bare fingers and setting it on a speckled stoneware plate with eggs and bacon.
“I will, but—”
