Peggy Nicholson - An Angel In Stone

8:30 p.m. September 23

F ramed by the murderous claws of the Allosaurus, the man stood. Looking at her.

Whoa. The hairs stirred at the nape of Raine Ashaway’s neck. Here was something…different. His impeccable black dinner suit fit in with this glitzy Manhattan crowd, but his utter stillness…

“See somebody you know?” inquired Joel Whittaker. An assistant fund-raiser for the Manhattan Museum of Natural History, he’d been assigned to smooth her path through the evening’s gala. It was Joel’s job to see she met the right people and stroked the right egos.

“No-o. But who is that guy? He sure seems to know me.”

Joel scanned the drifting guests on the far side of the museum’s most famous dinosaur exhibit. “Which one, that oh-so-distinguished blond to the left of that fabulous diamond choker?”

“No, no. Mr. Tall, Dark and Forgot-how-to-smile. See the woman with the ruby earrings? Just to her—arrr, he’s turned away.”

Which was just as well. They were neglecting their current prospect. Raine smothered a sigh. God, did she hate fund-raising! But the deal she’d cut with the museum had included her coming to New York to help make this event a success.

Judging by the sapphire necklace that draped Mrs. Lowell’s ample bosom and matched her blue hair, the old girl could afford to bid in the benefit auction tonight. Minimum opening bid was a million dollars.

“Now Raine,” said Mrs. Lowell, waving a plump little hand at the rearing dinosaur skeleton beneath which they stood. “Could a Brontosaurus really stand up on her hind legs like that?”

The MMNH’s most spectacular exhibit featured a five-story-tall mother Barosaurus rearing to defend her baby from the attack of an Allosaurus. The tableau was heart-stoppingly dramatic. It was the first thing a museumgoer saw, after pushing through the big bronze revolving entrance doors and into the echoing rotunda. The fossil castings stood on a knee-high dais that filled the middle of a hall the size of a basketball court. Raine adored the display.

“Well,” she said diplomatically, “if a circus elephant can stand on its hind legs with only a rope of a tail for balance, then why couldn’t she, with a forty-foot caboose for a cantilever?” Raine was more troubled by the fact that the baby dino, huddled behind his defending dam, stood astride her massive tail. In the coming battle, mama would surely whip her tail around, and her horse-size baby would go flying.

“And who do you think won the fight?” Mrs. Lowell worried.

Knowing what she did about Tyrannosaurus rex’s older, nimbler cousin, Raine hadn’t a doubt who’d triumphed. “Hard to say. She’d outweigh him four to one. If she lands a punch…”

“And what are you going to name our new dino, Mrs. Lowell, if you win the bidding tonight?” Joel broke in with a twinkle as he squeezed Raine’s elbow.

Mrs. Lowell chuckled. “I’ll name him Erwin Elwood, of course, after my dear papa. He was the fossil hunter in our family. My sister and I collected ostrich eggs, and my brother…”

Once Joel had eased them off through the crowd, Raine muttered, “Your patrons are bidding tonight for the right to name the specimen—this particular dinosaur that I gave you guys. You’ve got to make sure there’s no confusion.” She nodded at her distant find, the object of tonight’s auction.

In the far corner of the gallery, they’d stacked the six-foot-square wooden crates in which she’d packed the fossil bones, months ago in Patagonia, into a pleasing jumble. A giant child’s fallen tower of building blocks. Out of the top box thrust the massive skull of the beast—all that the museum’s preparators had had time to clean so far. He was as fearsome as his carnivorous cousin across the room, and more exotic with his horns. Couples stood below him, gazing up as they gestured earnestly with their champagne flutes.

“Somebody’s buying the right to name the museum’s example of the already named species—Carnotaurus. There’re going to be some hurt feelings if you don’t make the difference clear.”

“We will, we will, Raine. Now here’s someone you absolutely have to meet. Mr. Fish? Have you met Raine Ashaway of Ashaway All?”

“You’re the little lady that collected that ol’boy there?” demanded Mr. Fish, in a West Texas drawl.

Little lady? He barely came up to her chest! And he’d made his fortune in oil, Raine remembered.

“I picture me a bone hunter tromping around Patagonia, I see some kinda Indiana Jones. I don’t see a leggy blond filly,” Mr. Fish assured her.

“Picture it.” Raine showed her teeth as she reclaimed her hand. “And when I meet a Texas oil tycoon, I expect a ten-gallon hat—if not a twelve.”

Fish hooted as he rubbed his age-spotted dome. “My girl’s been workin’ on me. Alice says boots and a Stetson just don’t cut it with a tux. That if I want to step out on the town with her, then I better look sharp.”

“You name my dinosaur after Alice, and I bet she’ll let you wear whatever you like, Mr. Fish.”

“Might be worth a try,” the oilman allowed, his shrewd eyes crinkling.

“That’s the most complete Carnotaurus skeleton ever discovered,” Raine assured him. “Once she’s prepared and mounted, she’ll stand two-stories high. People will come from all over the world to ooh and ah over her.”

“Alice’d like that, all right.”

“There’s only one to compare her with,” Joel chimed in. “The T. rex Sue, at Chicago’s Field Museum. And when Sue was auctioned off at Sotheby’s, she went for almost eight and a half million.”

“That was to buy the entire dino, not the right to name it!” Raine hissed as they moved on, stopping to shake a hand here, or make a pitch there.

“True. But that was ten years ago. Think about inflation.”

Raine was thinking about what time it was. Half an hour max for cocktails, they’d told her, before they went in to a sit-down dinner, served in the Hall of African Mammals. The museum was charging twenty-five thousand a table. Then, after that pricey meal and before the auction, she’d promised to rev up the crowd. A short speech on My Adventures in Patagonia, more or less. She’d give the patrons more on the genuine thrill of making a major fossil find—and less on the choking dust, the constant gales, the scorpions that kept snuggling into everybody’s boots.

“Getting tired?” Joel asked.

“Hanging in there.”

She assured a prince of Wall Street that his brokerage could buy no finer marketing image for itself than a Carnotaurus. “That’s Latin for ‘meat-eating bull,’” she told him. “Your firm could style itself the top predator of the next bull market.”

“Dynamite pitch, but why’d you duck his invitation to dinner?” Joel grumbled as they drifted on. “His eyes just give me the shivers. So masterful!”

“I promised my sister Jaye that I’d check out her dig this weekend. She’s struck a major vein of amber in southern New Jersey, can you believe it? Besides…” If there was one thing Raine demanded in a man, it was competence in the natural world. Forget how he handled the bulls and bears of the stock exchange. She wanted a man who could deal with a water buffalo, or face down a grizzly. Her father had spoiled her for indoortypes forever.

“Well, I’d have dated him if he’d asked.”

“Then go back and chat him up. I’m doing fine on my own.”

“I…really shouldn’t. I’m supposed to take care of you.”

“So be a sweetheart and get me another drink. And take the looong way round, okay?”

Circling the island of battling dinos, Raine stopped for some girl talk. A fashion designer wanted to know where she’d gotten her stunning gown?