“Why didn’t you tell me that they were coming?” She asked Roach because she was fairly sure that Hal had a really stupid reason.
“Hal made it sound like it was your idea,” Roach said in defense. “You were just too busy to ask me.”
“You would have said no!” Hal stated his stupid idea. “You’ve been in maximum paranoid mode since Sandcastle!”
Hal meant getting Boo back.
“For good reason!” Jane glared at him and then switched focus to Roach. “How many people on that boat are your cousins? All of them or just the pilot?”
“Two are my cousins. One is engaged to Addison so he’s almost a cousin. One is their cousin on their mom’s side so that’s still family. The rest are their best friends from since they were little. It’s old school Pittsburgh. If we couldn’t trust them completely, I wouldn’t have called them. And if you can’t trust them, then trust me. I wouldn’t screw up something as this important.”
She trusted Roach. He had his father’s level business head. He lived and breathed risk assessment. “You need to tell me this shit ahead of time so I don’t shoot the wrong person.”
Jane opened the bolt on her rifle and took out the chambered round. She pocketed the bullet. She looked up to see that Taggart was grinning at her. It made her blush.
Sean found the Three Rivers Queen’s horn and blew it. It made his cousins toot their horn again, and Sean answer in kind. For a few minutes, no conversation was possible over the din of stunningly loud boat horns.
After a radio conference, it was decided that the nest would be marked by a buoy. The Queen would then back off and let the tugboat maneuver the barges into place. While the boats repositioned, the naturalist transferred the two eggs into an aquarium that had been set up on the first level of the boat. Through the glass sides, they studied the eggs intently.
“Well, they’re not following crocodile development, which is unfortunate,” Nigel said.
“Why is it unfortunate?” Jane asked.
“Crocodiles and alligators take weeks to develop,” Nigel said. “The Nile crocodile is reported to have an incubation period of ninety days while the American alligator can be as long as a hundred and twenty days. The namazu are keeping closer to a catfish, which is the six days we initially thought. It might be thirty or forty hours longer than a normal catfish but not much more, judging by this sample.”
“So we still can find the last nest in time?” Jane asked.
“These were definitely laid after the ones at Sandcastle,” Nigel said. “If we’re lucky, then the last nest was laid the same time as this one and not before the one at the hatchery.”
“But if it wasn’t, then we only have until Sunday to find it.” Jane said.
“Yes.”
Once the boats were repositioned, they filmed Hal being shown how all the equipment worked, although he was strictly forbidden to touch any controls. (Hal was a known quality to Roach’s cousins. He’d gotten bored at Sean’s wedding and started to show off different flaming cocktails. Roach was even more paranoid and thorough than Jane and had a fire extinguisher in hand. Sean’s mother-in-law had only lost part of her ponytail before Roach put her out. Luckily the woman was rabid fan and had an amazing sense of humor.)
The McAvoys were careful people. They’d worked on the river all their lives. They scooped up bucket after bucket of the yellow globes and dropped them into the waiting empty barge. When multiple buckets came up with only sand, it was decided that they had done the best they could. They shifted both boats again and let Hal drop dynamite from the Three Rivers Queen’s long nose gangplank. The explosions made the water froth. Fish bobbed to the surface, killed by the blast. They scooped the free dinner out of the water. It did not surprise Jane that Roach had chests of ice waiting.
“That’s one down,” Taggart said when Jane called a wrap to the filming.
“Let’s find the other.”
They found the second nest two hours later. Everyone cheered every step of the operation. Hal made it a point of thanking the McAvoys, calling them “Hal Heroes” and rewarding them with boonie hats. Nigel recorded a wrap up on the hunt that was more haunting and elegant. Jane had pre-screened the footage to make sure nothing dangerous made it to film. No comments of Boo, Geoffrey’s spell casting or her impending wedding.
“Now all we need to do is one monster editing session at the station.” She stretched. “We’ve got more than enough video for both shows”
“If we’re going to Oakland, we should go to the Carnegie Museum,” Nigel had said. “The box may be there and our worries are for naught.”
“Things are never that simple.” Jane checked her watch. They had two hours before the museum closed. Until they determined if the box had arrived or not, they were spinning wheels. “Okay, let’s hit the Carnegie.”
They decided that Hal would spearhead their invasion of the Carnegie Museum. Yes, in part, it was to salve his ego. More importantly, his reputation was firmly in “beast stalker” territory. Nigel’s partnership with a war correspondent made him a “respectable journalist” which might equal to an unwanted element if the museum was controlled by oni. They took the PB&G truck and camera to reinforce the impression that Chased by Monsters had nothing to do with the foray.
Jane hadn’t been to either library nor museum for a decade. She wanted to go carefully forward, unsure of what they would find. The century old, limestone covered and statue festooned massive building took up an entire city block at the edge of Oakland. They found street parking on Schenley Drive instead of using the museum’s limited access parking garage. It put them at the corner of the Carnegie Library that connected with the museum.
Nigel insisted that they film the block long walk along the building’s massive stone façade.
“Andrew Carnegie was Scottish.” Nigel let his burr accent his pride. “He was born in my home town of Dunfermline in 1835. His family immigrated to the new world when he was just a boy. Carnegie became the richest man in the world but he gave ninety-percent of his fortune to charities before he died. His greatest gift to the world were his public libraries. He built his first one in Dunfermline. He did so because a Pittsburgher by the name of Colonel James Anderson would open his personal library of four hundred books to working boys. Carnegie had taken his first job at the age of thirteen to work as a bobbin boy in the local cotton mill. Without the chance to educate himself, he’d never have been able to improve his lot in life. Before his death, he’d built over three thousand public libraries in cities around the world. The man was not a saint, but he left legacy that reached out over a century to improve the lives of millions of people. I spent most of my childhood at the Dunfermline library. It’s a grand old building, much like this one, but smaller.”
At the far corner a life-size fiberglass statue of a long-necked dinosaur stood guard.
“A diplodocus!” Nigel pointed.
“Yes, we’re very proud of Dippy,” Hal patted the dinosaur on its stumpy foreleg. Jane backed up to stay out of shot as Taggart filmed the naturalist discussing the large statue. “In 1899, Carnegie funded an expedition to the Wyoming badlands to find fossils. They found a nearly complete diplodocus skeleton. King Edward VII personally asked Carnegie for a plaster cast to be displayed in London. After that Kaiser Wilhelm II and other European heads of state came begging. There are still copies of ‘Dippy’ on display in museums around the world. The Carnegie museum had the world’s largest collection of Jurassic dinosaurs at the time of the first Startup.”