Threshold (29 page)

L
ATE Sunday morning, and Chance cooked breakfast for Deacon and Sadie before she left the house—bacon and runny scrambled eggs, steaming black coffee, toast and Bama apple jelly—and no one said anything during the meal. Not a word about Dancy or the water works, menacing phantom dogs or what they should do next, and when they were finished she drove away to school alone, to the unavoidable meeting with Alice. Because the crate was still missing, everything in the crate and everything that came out of the crate still missing, as well—the chunk of hematite, the trilobites, the ugly pickled thing and the old jar of alcohol that had held it for more than a century, all the specimens that Chance hadn’t even unpacked yet—all of it simply gone.

And now Chance is sitting in an uncomfortable molded plastic chair in Alice Sprinkle’s office, modular chair the color of yellow Play-Doh in the middle of this cramped and disorderly broom-closet excuse for an office. She tries to sit still, rubs at her eyes and tries hard to look like she isn’t thinking about a dozen things that seem more important than what Alice is saying to her.

“Girl, I
promise
if it was anybody else, I’d be asking for your keys right now,” and Alice glares at Chance from the safe, other side of her papercluttered desk, other side of her thick bifocals, and Chance knows she’s telling the truth. Knows that Alice is so protective of the shoddy little building and the treasures inside that she’d probably have done a lot worse than take back a set of keys if it had been someone else who ran off and left both doors standing wide open for two hours. Part of Chance wants to feel grateful, and part of her still suspects she should be ashamed of herself, jumping at shadows like a child, like a silly girl, letting her imagination take the place of common sense, but after the last two days she isn’t much of either.

“I’m sorry,” she says again, whether she actually means it or not; she’s already lost track of how many times she’s apologized in the twenty minutes since she walked into the office.

“Yeah, that’s what you keep
saying,
” and Alice takes another stick of Juicy Fruit from the pack lying in front of her, slowly peels the silver foil away from the chewing gum without ever taking her eyes off Chance. “But I still haven’t heard you sound like you actually
mean
it.”

“Of course I mean it,” Chance says. “That was my grandmother’s work, and it was important. I don’t know what else you expect from me, Alice. I don’t know what you want me to
say.
”

Alice stares at her silently for a moment, the cold, familiar scrutiny in her eyes like Chance is just another one of her fossilized bugs beneath a microscope, something to be classified and cataloged, something to be labeled and filed sensibly away, and “Maybe if you tried a little bit harder to help me understand,” she says finally.

“How? I’ve told you what happened. I’ve told you three times what happened.”

“Right. A stray dog came into the lab and it chased you,” Alice says, making no attempt to hide the skepticism in her voice. “It scared you so badly, you went home and didn’t even think to call anyone about it for nearly two hours. That’s what you said.”

Chance sighs and glances anxiously down at her backpack sitting on the floor between her boots. Her grandmother’s ledger is in there, and she was up half the night reading the damned thing, understanding less and less with every page she turned. Meticulous notes that eventually disintegrated into undated, rambling speculation and strings of numbers, lengthy linear and quadratic equations and geometrical diagrams. The book frightens her, but right now it’s better than facing the doubt on Alice Sprinkle’s face, the doubt that might as well be an accusation, and she wishes Alice would tell her that she imagined the whole thing or that she’s lying and be done with it.

“It just doesn’t make any goddamn sense,” Alice mutters, almost whispering now, talking to herself, and she inspects the puttygray stick of Juicy Fruit before she folds it double and puts it in her mouth. “Why would someone want the stuff from that crate and, in fact,
only
the stuff from that crate? As far as I can tell, they didn’t so much as touch the computers or the scopes or any of the cabinets, all the things they might have been able to sell . . .” and she trails off, chews her gum and stares intently down at the confusion of reprints and ungraded papers littering her desk, picks up a pencil and begins tapping the eraser end against the coffee-stained cover of a stratigraphy textbook.

“What I’m about to ask you next,” Alice says, and she leans a little ways towards Chance, but she’s still looking at the desktop, still tapping the pencil against the textbook. “I wouldn’t even ask you something like this, except I figure that the cops are probably gonna do it, and I’d rather you heard it from me first.”

“Ask me what, Alice?”

Alice lays the pencil down and looks up at Chance; there’s something reluctant in her eyes, something more than hesitant and out of place on her face that’s always so damned sure of itself, always so entirely confident.

“Yesterday you were pretty adamant about keeping the contents of that crate a secret. So I was wondering, is it possible, after I left, that you had second thoughts. Decided maybe you shouldn’t have shown it to me, that maybe you shouldn’t have brought it down to the lab at all—?”

“Oh,
please,
” Chance moans, and she stands up, indignant and angrytired sigh to sum up almost everything she feels, and she reaches for her backpack, just wanting to be anywhere else in the world right now, wanting to get away fast.

“No, Chance. Wait,” Alice says. “You have to understand, I’m only trying to make some kind of sense out of this.”

“I did not fucking
lie
to you. Why the hell do you think it makes sense that I would have lied to you? I’ve
never
lied to you.”

“I’m sorry, but it makes more sense than a thief who steals nothing but that one crate. You
have
to see that, Chance. You have to try to look at this from my position.”

“Yeah? And how do I know that
you
didn’t take the crate, Alice? I mean, shit, that makes sense, too, doesn’t it? You were the one that wanted to start showing that stuff all over campus—”

“Hey, hey, okay,” and now Alice is standing up, too, the paperstrewn bulwark of the desk still safe between them, but the impatience and anger coming off Alice Sprinkle no less immediate for that barrier. “Just calm down, all right? If you say you didn’t take it, then you didn’t take it. Fine. I have no reason in the world not to believe you.”

Chance’s heart is racing, heart like a scared rabbit, heart like something hunted, something cornered, and she leans against the edge of the desk because her legs feel too weak to support her as the adrenaline drains away, quickly as it came, and leaves her feeling nauseous and dizzy.

“Then why the hell did you ask me that? I didn’t take it,” she says, her voice as unsteady as her legs. “It was mine already, and if I’d changed my mind, I would have told you and then I would have carried it back home. That’s all. I certainly wouldn’t have needed to concoct this sort of crazy, bullshit story.”

“Okay,” Alice says and she sits back down. “That’s cool. I believe you, Chance,” and she takes another stick of Juicy Fruit from the pack on her desk.

Chance slides her arm through one of the canvas straps of the backpack and nods her head. “Yeah. Look, I’ve got to
do
something. Get some work done, anything to take my mind off this for a while. I’ll be at the lab.”

“That sounds like a good idea,” and Alice rolls the gum wrapper into a tiny silver ball, tosses it in the general direction of a wastepaper basket and misses. “You see why I didn’t go into basketball.”

“I’ll be at the lab if you need me,” Chance says, and then she leaves Alice in her messy office with her suspicions and unanswered questions and closes the door behind her.

Moments of discovery, conspiracies of the unlikely and the inevitable, the dustdim glint of a rock from a quarry wall, a hammer’s careless blow—one instant at the shining end of a billion billion coincidences, and the course of a life is decided.

It’s been almost three years since the day that Chance found her first tetrapod fossil in the scabby, bulldozer wastes of a Carbon Hill strip mine. Still only an undergraduate then, but she was already teaching the laboratory course and field trips for Introduction to Historical Geology, and one rainy March morning she drove a vanload of freshmen fifty miles to give them a firsthand look at the Walker County coalfields. They listened or pretended to listen while Chance explained the cycle of transgressive and regressive marine sedimentation that had created these rocks, as she guided them through the autumn-colored beds of sandstone and shale, the siltstones and conglomerates of the Pottsville Formation, all the countless earth-tone shades of red and orange and brown, tawny yellows and pale violetgrays, and here and there a preciousthin seam of anthracite coal like pure and crystallized midnight. The miners had scraped away the pine woods and topsoil to reveal the stratified remains of peat bogs and vast river deltas, lowland forests and barrier islands that had long ago lined the shores of a shallow western sea at the edge of a great floodplain. A time when all the world’s land masses were being driven together into the great Pangean supercontinent, almost a hundred million years before the first dinosaurs appeared.

It was late afternoon when she finally finished with her lecture and turned the students loose to clamber over the towering spoil piles in search of fossil seed ferns, sandstone casts of
Calamites
trunks and the garskin bark of extinct scale trees. Earlier in the day, Chance had found a thick layer of shale studded with rustbrown siderite concretions, and she retraced her steps to that spot, picked out a reasonably comfortable place in the rubble to sit, and began breaking the hard nodules open with her crack hammer. If she were lucky, she might find the imprint of an insect inside one of them, or perhaps a jellyfish or a primitive shrimp-like crustacean, something uncommon and delicate from the steamy Carboniferous rivers and brackish lagoons. Most of the concretions were empty, of course, but still more interesting than ferns, and she had almost an hour to kill before it was time to load up the van and head back to Birmingham.

Chance had split sixty or seventy of the rounded, oblong concretions, and nothing to show for her trouble but a couple of pyritized snails and a few tonguebroad leaves of
Neuropteris
and
Asterotheca,
that and the heap of broken stone scattered about her feet. Bored and discouraged, she looked at her watch, was thinking of calling everyone in fifteen minutes early, and then she noticed a nodule the size of a softball embedded firmly in the quarry wall. She popped it free with a chisel, and the stone split cleanly in two on the very first blow, cleaved easily along the bedding plane created by the dead thing inside, and Chance stared amazed at the extraordinary fan-shaped fossil she’d exposed.

Something that was no longer a fish’s fin, but not yet precisely a foot either, eight tiny “fingers” formed from the arrangement of hourglass carpals and metacarpals, and each petrified bone in perfect articulation with the next; a less tidy confusion of wrist bones towards the center of the rock, the upper end of the “fingers,” before the stocky radius and ulna, and finally the short, squarish humerus, and she realized that she was holding the forelimb of an animal that had never been found in that part of the country, much less the state, some new species from the wide gray territory between fish and amphibian. Half an hour later, Chance was still sitting on the ground, still gawking at the fossil, when one of her students finally wandered over and asked if they shouldn’t be heading back to town soon.

After that, two months of field work at the strip mine and a nearby railroad cut turned up seven more specimens, mostly limb material and a few vertebrae, but Chance also discovered a toothy lower jaw and a few bits of a broad froglike skull in another concretion. And that October she attended the annual meeting of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology at the Field Museum in Chicago where she presented a preliminary report on the Carbon Hill tetrapod, and the following summer a formal description of the fossils was published in the
Journal of Paleontology
—“A new temnospondyl amphibian from Alabama”—in which she christened the creature
Walkerpeton carbonhillensis.

Her grandfather had always wanted Chance to begin her graduate work somewhere besides Birmingham, someplace with a vertebrate paleo program or at least a geology department with money for research and an interest in science beyond the purely pragmatic economic aspects. And though he did manage to talk her into applying to a few southeastern schools, North Carolina State and the University of Florida, Duke and Louisiana State, and even though she was eagerly accepted by every one of them, Chance didn’t want to leave him alone. One heart attack already, and he was all the family she had left in the world, so she stayed at UAB and took her place among the teaching assistants, mostly practical-minded microfossil geeks headed for high-paying jobs with oil companies and private consulting firms.