Calvin glanced at the clock on the bedside table. “It’s four in the morning. I got in about an hour ago.”
I climbed to my feet, knees cracking. “I’m sorry.” I leaned over the bed to kiss him. I missed his lips, catching the corner of his mouth.
Calvin put his hand on my jaw. It still shook slightly as he redirected the kiss.
“Oh my God,” I mumbled against his lips.
He pulled back a bit. “What?”
“Samuel G. Dixon. Hope you’re satisfied!”
“I need you to use complete sentences.”
I grabbed my glasses off the table, walked across the room, and picked up my messenger bag from the floor. “I know where the phrase is from!” I took my laptop out, set it on the desk, and powered it on. I pulled out the computer chair to sit but turned to look at Calvin. “No! I know—wait. Oh shit. This is big.”
He was staring at me as if that fall to the floor had done some actual damage to my brain. Even Dillon had his head cocked and ears up in apparent befuddlement.
“I fell asleep with that phrase in my head. The meaning was right in front of me the entire time. I simply wasn’tthinking.” I turned when the computer sounded its start-up jingle, typed in the password, then looked at Calvin again. “I had a dream about a dinosaur skull—like what we talked about.”
Calvin rubbed his jaw and nodded for me to continue.
“In my dream I realized the skull had been put on the wrong end—on the tail. So I was going to fix it. Anyway, the skull turned into decapitated Jack-in-the-Box, and that freaked me out and woke me.”
“Who’s Dixon? You shouted Dixon when you woke up.”
I finally sat in the chair and rolled it toward the foot of the bed. “I did a project junior year of college on illustration plates and how the printing industry for books and newspapers was shifting to accommodate a growing population during the second half of the nineteenth century. One of the books I cited in the report was….” I snapped my fingers a few times and then tapped my forehead. “Fuck… oh.Vertebrata of the Tertiary Formations of the West. It was written by paleontologist Edward Drinker Cope, and—where’re you going?” I asked as Calvin climbed out of bed.
He said nothing but held up a finger to indicate he needed a moment while walking to the stand beside the desk. He collected a disposable cup, went into the bathroom and filled it with tap water, then returned and poured it into the tiny coffeepot. He popped one of those K-cup knockoff brands into the top and turned it on. The machine gurgled, sputtered, and then began brewing.
“All right. I’m listening,” he said quietly. Calvin looked down at me and combed his fingers through my sleep-mussed hair before giving me an encouraging smile.
“Cope was brilliant. But he was also a total asshole.” I spun around in the chair, opened a web browser, and did a quick search for the photograph I had stored in my long-term memory. It was found easily with a few keywords. “This is a picture of the study in his home the year he died.”
A picture, dated 1897, showed a room with large bay windows letting in daylight, completely packed to the gills with books, endless stacks of paperwork across multiple desks and chairs, as well as scientific specimens.
Calvin rubbed his eyes and studied the screen for a moment. “Okay,” he said at last.
“When I was doing research about his bible—as theVertebratawas called—I came across this story about Cope doing dissections on snakes at the academy in Philadelphia he was a curator for, and bringing the organs to his home to study without permission. The executive officer of the board—Dixon—asked him to return the missing items, which Cope did by leaving them on his desk, soaked in alcohol solution, with a note.”
“Hope you’re satisfied,” Calvin concluded.
“Right.” I smiled. “Iknewthat phrase was familiar.”
Calvin reached for the cup of coffee and took a sip of the undoctored beverage. “So this Cope guy….” He looked down at me again. “Did he steal a skull too?”
“Here’s the good part,” I declared. “The thing in my dream, about the skull? That’s a true story. It sparked the Bone Wars.”
Chapter Five
CALVIN SLOWLYsat down on the edge of the bed. “The Bone Wars?”
“A period of intense fossil-hunting in America. Hmm… 1870s to 1890s. I’ll get you the specific dates,” I said, putting the computer on my lap.
“It can hold,” Calvin insisted. “It wasn’t an actual war, though.”
“No. I mean, not technically. Scientific rivalry between Cope and another paleontologist named Othniel Charles Marsh. They literally spent their entire professional careers and wealth trying to sabotage, embarrass, or one-up the other.”
“Over dinosaurs,” Calvin stated dryly before taking another sip of coffee.
