Relic (2 page)

“It was luck,” Lisa said. “Dumb, stupid luck.” She blew out a frustrated breath. “What is taking the Society so long, anyway? I mean they said they'd be in touch, so where are they?”

She looked at me as if I had an answer. I shrugged and was about to remind her that the
Congregatio de Sacrificio
—the society I was now a part of, thanks to my visions—hadn't reached out since they left me a note over six weeks ago. But before I could say anything, my phone vibrated with a text message and I checked the screen…and groaned.

“What?” Colin asked.

I replied to the text and then looked up at my friends. “I have to meet my mom and my sister.”

“Oh, right, I forgot about your little playdate with your sister,” Colin said.

“I kind of think it's sweet,” Lisa said.

“It's not sweet,” I said. “It's weird and it violates the laws of sibling interaction.”

Ever since I'd “accidentally” jumped in front of a moving vehicle to save her life, my parents had been on a big push to make Becky and me better friends. Step one in their little plan was for me to be more encouraging of her hobbies—which, by anyone's standards, were freaking weird. Mostly she collected stuff. But not normal stuff like stamps or coins or bottlecaps. A few weeks back she was collecting insects. My parents were still making me pay for stabbing one of her spiders with a fork.

“The laws of sibling interaction?” Lisa asked.

I nodded. “And they shouldn't be messed with.”

“What are you guys doing today?” Colin asked. “Chocolate sundaes at the beach? Hopscotch in the park?”

Lisa laughed at that one, which made me smile. It seemed she didn't laugh these days nearly as much as she used to.

“Museum,” I said. “Apparently they have an exhibit Becky's interested in.”

“Sounds boring,” Colin said.

“It will be.”

My mom was an art history professor and the museum had a whole floor of paintings she'd helped curate several years before. I couldn't count how many times she'd dragged me there when I was younger. “You guys should come.”

Colin laughed like that was the funniest thing he'd ever heard.

“I'll come,” Lisa said. “I'm kind of in the mood for
boring
after what we just did.”

“Thanks, Lisa,” I said.

Colin stopped laughing and groaned. “Fine. I'll come.” We started walking around the perimeter of the mall and Colin asked, “What's your sister collecting that would be on display at a museum, anyway?”

Now it was my turn to groan. “You wouldn't believe me if I told you.”

“Sounds mysterious,” Lisa said.

“Trust me,” I said, “it's the least mysterious collection you've ever seen.”

 

When we got into the car, Colin asked to see Becky's collection. She smiled and handed the box back into the back seat. I leaned away from it as Colin lifted the lid.

“It looks like rocks,” Colin said.

“It's coprolite,” Becky said from the front seat. “They're fossils, and pretty valuable.”

I rolled my eyes. “I doubt that.”

“They are!” Becky snapped. “The one at the museum is from a
Tyrannosaurus rex
.” She looked over her shoulder from the front seat and sneered at me. “That's a dinosaur.”

“You don't say,” I muttered.

“Okay, you two,” my mom said. “I don't want you guys to argue. Besides, Becky is right: if they are coprolite, they can be quite valuable.”

“They're fossils?” Colin said. He reached in and picked up one of the pieces and held it up to his face. “Fossils of what?”

I started to laugh.

“It's fossilized excrement,” Becky said.

Lisa was seated between Colin and me and she practically crushed me against the door trying to lean away from him and the box.

“Extra-what?” Colin asked.

“Ex-cre-ment,” Becky said.

Colin blinked and then turned and looked at me.

“Turd,” I said, laughing. “You're holding animal crap right now.”

The coprolite dropped from his hand and he just sat there staring into the box shaking his head. “You're collecting animal turds?” His face twisted and he turned back to me.

Lisa and I burst out laughing. Even my mom laughed. Becky didn't find it very funny and reached into the back seat and grabbed the box back.

“Wait,” Colin said. “They have a giant piece of dinosaur crap at the museum? On display?”

“Along with a T. rex skeleton,” my mom said.

Colin dusted his hands off and then shrugged. “Actually, that sounds pretty cool.” Then he whispered, “But your sister's still mega weird.”

“Trust me, I know.” An itch started under my cast. I tried to reach my finger down the side to scratch it. The worst part about casts is the itching. Dry spaghetti was the best thing to use for scratching, but it always broke. When the cast finally came off in a few days, I wondered how much broken spaghetti would be in there and what the doctor would say when he saw it.

I looked up when my sister gasped.

“You think they're all here for the coprolite exhibit?” she said.

A police officer leaning against his cruiser blocked most of my view, but there seemed to be a crowd gathered just beyond the officer, near the entrance. Plus, news vans from at least three different stations were parked along the street.

“Maybe,” my mom said excitedly. “Or maybe they got a new art exhibit. That would be fun.” She turned to face us in the back seat. “Don't you guys think so?”

“Oh, yeah, goody,” I mocked.

I wasn't sure what to expect when my mom parked and we walked around the corner and headed for the entrance. I wouldn't have been too surprised to see TV reporters interviewing the museum curator. I was even ready to see a few photographers snapping pictures of a giant turd, but all five of us stopped dead in our tracks as soon as we reached the front of the building.

A dozen or so people stood just off to the side of the main doors, moving together in a tight circle and chanting, “Give it back. Give it back. Give it back.” Others held signs with slogans like, “Buddha is not for display,” and “Overton Supports Thieves.” There were other signs too, but they were covered with seemingly random squiggles and dots, almost like a painted snake had slithered across the cardboard. I wasn't sure what the language was, but it wasn't English.

The most interesting thing, though, were the four Asian men standing near the main entrance. They all wore identical orange robes that exposed one shoulder and hung to their ankles. They had shaved heads. Three of the men were withered and wrinkled and looked so old they should probably have been on display in the museum themselves, but the fourth guy was young enough to pass as my older brother—if I had a bald Asian brother who liked robes. He kept his head down, and it took a moment, but I realized he had a cell phone and seemed to be texting someone.

“Are those monks?” Lisa asked.

“They look like monks,” Colin said. “Except for that young one. Are monks supposed to have cell phones? And can monks be
that
young?”

“Yes, Colin, they can.” My mom inched us toward the short line of normal-looking folks at the entrance. “I don't think this has anything to do with the coprolite exhibit, Becky,” my mom added.

One of the protestors, a middle-aged woman with tight curly hair and a “Free Tibet” t-shirt, broke away from the group and rushed us as we got in line. “Don't you care that you're supporting thievery?”

Becky pressed tighter into my mom's side as the woman first sneered at us and then pointed a stern finger at my mom. “They're displaying stolen artifacts.” She gestured to the monks. “These monks came all the way from Cambodia to get them back.”

A couple of news crews rushed in and pointed their cameras and bright lights at us. My mom cleared her throat. “If there's something in the museum that was stolen, you should report it. There are better ways than trying to intimidate people.”

“Report it?” The protestor laughed. “Who should we report it to? Cambodian authorities don't care, and the curator doesn't care. All they care about is making money and drawing a crowd.” She scowled at the camera crew and then back at my mom. “Which is exactly what you're helping them do. You make me sick.” She turned to the camera. “Imagine a woman bringing her kids to see a stolen head.”

“Stolen head?” Colin's eyes widened to the size of Roman shields, and a smile tore his face in half. “As in an actual human head?” He laughed. “I thought we were here to see a giant turd. This is way better than I expected.”

The protestor blinked. “A giant what?”

Colin looked up at the camera. “Can I say
turd
on TV?” The cameraman smiled and gave Colin a thumbs-up.

Museum security stepped up and blocked the crazy lady from getting closer to the entrance. She grumbled, raised a fist over her head, and then returned to her group and resumed chanting, “Give it back. Give it back.”

We stepped inside. A man in a dark suit stood just inside the door. “Good morning, ma'am,” he said to my mom. “My name is Jonathan Overton. I'm the curator of the museum. I just wanted to extend my apologies for any discomfort caused by the protestors.” He pursed his lips and blew a breath through his nose. I imagined he'd been giving the same apology to everyone who'd come in. Then he seemed to give my mom a second look. “Professor Curse?”

She extended her hand. “I'm sorry, Mr. Overton, do we know each other?”

“No, no, but my predecessor mentioned you had a lot of input on our art exhibit, and I was at your lecture on Caravaggio this past spring. Riveting.”

My mom's grin widened. “Why, thank you. I was trying to introduce the…”

I stopped paying attention to the conversation and glanced at my friends. The three of us slipped away—or in my case, crutched away. Becky did too, but she went the opposite direction.

“Let's go find that head,” Colin said.

A map situated in the middle of the foyer showed that each floor of the museum was shaped like a giant U.

“Second floor is artwork,” Lisa said, muttering mostly to herself as she read the map. “Here.” She tapped a section marked in red. “New exhibits and items on loan. I bet the head's here. First floor.”

She pointed to the right. “That way.”

 

The three of us made our way through the Native American exhibit and past the display of medieval weaponry. Colin stole one of my crutches and had a mock sword fight with a knight on display. He only stopped when he noticed the models of early man and jumped the ropes. He hunched over, situating himself among a trio of cavemen roasting something over a fake fire.

“Aw, that's sweet,” Lisa said. “Colin's found his birth family.”

“Don't listen to her, Dad,” Colin said, speaking to the wax caveman to his right. “She's just jealous.”

We laughed and Colin stood up and took a step but his foot clipped one of the logs in the display and he stumbled backwards through some fake foliage and smack into the back wall, then disappeared.

“Colin?”

“A little help,” he said, groaning.

Lisa and I exchanged glances and I gestured to my leg. “I can't climb over all that.”

Lisa sighed and glanced down the hallway. Museum security must've been mostly outside because there weren't any guards in sight. She sighed again and quickly stepped over the barrier, pushing aside the fake bushes to reveal a door. She disappeared through it and emerged a second later, pulling Colin by the wrist.

“That hurt,” Colin said, once he was back on the correct side of the display.

“Serves you right,” Lisa said. “You're just lucky no one saw you.”

“Where did you disappear to?” I asked.

“A garage or a loading bay of some kind,” Lisa said as we started walking again. “There was a door a truck could fit through, and the room had loads of boxes and crates.”

Near the end of the corridor, the hall widened into a large circular atrium, where people on the second and third floors could look down at the exhibit below. A humongous skeleton of a
Tyrannosaurus rex
stood directly in front of us. It must've been nearly twenty feet tall and forty feet long. Its head—about the size of a small car—leaned out over half the atrium, and its mouth, filled with teeth that looked bigger than my leg, opened threateningly to the people on the second floor. The colossal beast stood on a large platform covered in dirt and thick plastic bushes and large ferns that I guess were supposed to resemble its natural habitat.

The museum had had dinosaur exhibits in the past, but usually they were small, like the size of a truck. This was bigger than anything I'd ever seen. “Hard to believe they were so big,” I said.

As if the skeleton were made out of some giant kid magnet, the three of us gravitated toward it until we were at the velvet rope barrier.

“I have to touch it,” Colin said.

Lisa shook her head. “No, you don't. This isn't like messing with mannequins dressed like cavemen. I'm sure there are real fossils in there. You could get in loads of trouble.”

“Oh, c'mon, Lisa. I could duck behind some of those bushes and they'd never see me. Besides, if they didn't want people going across, they'd have put up something more threatening than velvet ropes.”

“Like razor wire and a Rottweiler, perhaps?” The voice came from over our shoulders, and the three of us spun around. The security guard was a sinewy older man with graying hair. He had a name badge on his chest that said FISHER. He wore a tired expression and tapped the end of his oversized flashlight into his hand like it was a baton, seemingly prepared to bash us with it if we dared to inch too close to the dinosaur. “Just look,” he said. “Don't touch.”