“Maybe it would be better if we talked later,” Lacey whispers, playing along, and the woman’s probably perfectly harmless, but she puts one hand protectively on the box, anyway. “They might be listening,” she says and nods her head towards the teenager and the priest. “They might hear something we don’t want them to hear.”
The woman makes an angry, hissing sound between her yellow teeth and runs the long fingers of her left hand quickly through her tangled white hair, slicking it back against her scalp, pulling a few strands loose and they lie like pearly threads on the shoulder of her black raincoat.
“You think you got it all figured out, don’t you?” she growls. “Put some fancy letters after your name and you don’t need to listen to anybody or anything, ain’t that right? Can’t nobody tell you no different, cause you’ve seen it all, from top to bottom, pole to pole—”
“Calm down, please,” Lacey says, glancing towards the other passengers again, wishing one of them would look up so she could get their attention. “If you don’t, I’m going to have to call the conductor. Don’t make me do that.”
“Goddamn stuck-up dyke,” the woman snarls and she spits on the floor, turns her head and stares furiously out the window with her bulging blue eyes. “You think I’m crazy. Jesus, you just wait till you come out the other side and then let’s see what the hell you think sane looks like.”
“I didn’t mean to upset you,” Lacey says, standing, reaching for the satchel with her laptop. “Maybe I should just move to another seat.”
“You do that, Miss Morrow. Won’t be no skin off my nose. But you better take this with you,” and the woman’s left hand disappears inside her raincoat, reappears with a large, slightly crumpled manila envelope, and she holds it out to Lacey. “They told me you’d figure it out, so don’t ask me no more questions. I’ve already said too goddamn much as it is.”
Lacey sets her satchel down beside the cardboard box and stares at the envelope for a moment, yellow-brown paper and what looks like a grease stain at one corner.
“Well, go on ahead. It ain’t got teeth. It ain’t gonna bite you,” the white-haired woman sneers, not taking her eyes off the window, the farms and houses and “Maybe if you take it,” she says, “the crazy woman will leave you alone.”
Lacey snatches the envelope, hastily gathers her things, the satchel and the box, and moves quickly up the centre aisle towards the front of the car. The priest and the girl don’t even look up as she passes them. Maybe they don’t see me at all, she thinks. Maybe they haven’t heard a thing. The door to the next car is stuck and she’s wrestling with the handle when the train lurches, sways suddenly to one side, and she almost drops the box, imagines the fossil inside shattering into a hundred pieces.
Stupid girl, stupid silly girl.
And she forces herself to be still, then, presses her forehead against the cool, aluminium door. She takes a deep breath of air that doesn’t smell like dead fish, that only smells like diesel fumes and disinfectant, perfectly ordinary train smells, comforting familiarity, and the cadence of the rails is the most reassuring sound in the world.
Go on ahead. It ain’t got teeth. It ain’t gonna bite you, the whitehaired woman said, nothing at all but a crazy lady that someone ought to be watching out for, not letting her ride about on trains harassing people. Lacey looks down at the grease-stained envelope in her hand, held tenuously between her right thumb and forefinger.
“Do you need me to help you with that?” and it’s only the priest, scowling up at her from his newspaper; he sighs a loud, irritated sigh and points at the exit. “Would you like me to get the door for you?”
“Yes,” she says. “Thank you, Father. I’d really appreciate it. My hands are full.”
Lacey glances anxiously past him towards the back of the car, and there’s no sign of the white-haired woman now, but the door at the other end is standing wide open.
“There,” the priest says and she smiles and thanks him again.
“No problem,” he says, and as she steps into the short, connecting corridor, he continues speaking in low, conspiratorial tones, “But don’t wait too long to have a look at what’s in that envelope she gave you. There may not be much time left.” Then the door slides shut again and Lacey turns and runs to the crowded refuge of the next car.
* * *
Her twenty-fifth birthday, the stormy day in early July when Lacey Morrow found the Innsmouth fossil, working late and alone in the basement of the Pratt Museum. Almost everyone else gone home already, but nothing unusual about that. Lacey pouring over the contents of Cabinet 34, drawers of Devonian fishes collected from Blossburg, Pennsylvania and Chaleur Bay, Quebec, slabs of shale and sandstone the dusky colour of charcoal, the colour of cinnamon; ancient lungfish and the last of the jawless ostracoderms, lobe-finned Eusthenopteron and the boxy, armour plates of the antiarch Bothriolepis. Relics of an age come and gone hundreds of millions of years before the dinosaurs, a time when the earliest forests lined the shores of lakes and rivers teeming with strange and monstrous fish, and vertebrates had begun to take their first clumsy steps onto dry land. And that transition her sole, consuming obsession since Lacey was an undergraduate, that alchemy of flesh and bone—fins to feet, gills to lungs—the puzzles that filled her days and nights, that filled her dreams. Her last girlfriend walking out because she’d finally had enough of Lacey’s all-night kitchen dissections, the meticulously mutilated sea bass and cod, eels and small sharks sliced up and left lying about until she found time to finish her notes and sketches. Dead things in plastic bags crammed into the freezer and the ice cubes starting to taste more like bad sushi, their Hitchcock Road apartment stinking of formalin and fish markets.
“If I grow fucking scales maybe I’ll give you a call sometime,” Julie growled, hauling her boxes of clothes and CDs from their front porch to the back of her banged-up little Honda. “If I ever meet up with a goddamn mermaid, I’ll be sure to give her your number.”
Lacey watched her drive away, feeling less than she knew she ought to feel, wishing she would cry because any normal person would cry, would at least be angry with herself or with Julie. But the tears never came, nor the anger, and after that she figured it was better to leave romantic entanglements for some later stage in her life, some faraway day when she could spare a spark of passion for anything except her studies. She kept a picture of Julie in a pewter frame beside her bed, though, so she could still pretend, from time to time, when she felt alone, when she awoke in the middle of the night and there was nothing but the sound of rain on the roof and the wind blowing cold through the streets of Amherst.
But that August afternoon she wasn’t lonely, not with the tall rows of battleship-grey steel cabinets and their stony treasures stacked neatly around her, all the company she needed and no thoughts but the precise numbers from her digital callipers—the heights and widths of pelvic girdles and scapulocoracoids, relative lengths of pectoral fins and radials. Finishing up with a perfectly preserved porolepiform that she suspected might be a new species, and Lacey noticed the box pushed all the way to the very back of the drawer, half-hidden under a cardboard tray of shale and bone fragments. Something overlooked, even though she’d thought she knew the contents of those cabinets like the back of her hand and any further surprises would only be in the details.