CHAPTER 2

Just a Glimpse

The Big Lawn — its official name — was an expanse of manicured green, crisscrossed with sidewalks and low bushes. It sat at the top of the hill between the four Capitol City museums. While it was usually quiet and calm — sometimes used by museum visitors to get from one museum to another — today the Big Lawn was being utterly trampled.

Clementine chained her bike to the rack behind the Art Museum, where her mother, Dr. Abigail Wim, worked, and moved toward the crowd. Almost immediately, she was sucked into the mass of people.

“Oh, boy,” Clementine muttered. “There’s no way I’ll find them!” Every kid in Capitol City must have been there, along with his or her entire family.

The Dino Festival was a special event for kids of all ages, but Clementine hadn’t realized people took that expression so literally. She’d expected to see kids around her age and her friends’ ages, but there were babies and grandparents here, toddlers and moms and dads.

“Chaos!” Clementine exclaimed, taking her head in her hands. Still, she pushed on through the crowd, making her way through the maze of tents and kiosks and animatronic dinosaurs that the museum had moved outside from the courtyard of the Natural History Museum.

After shoving and getting shoved, delivering dozens of excuse me’s and beg your pardon’s, Clementine found herself on the far side of the Lawn, still without having found her friends.

“Clementine?” a voice called, not far off. “What are you doing here all alone?”

Clementine turned and found the speaker right away — Dr. Carolyn Kipper, Wilson’s mom and one of the Natural History Museum’s paleontologists.

“I am quite alone,” Clementine said. “Unfortunately. I’ve been searching and searching for your son — and Raining and Amal. Have you seen them?”

Dr. Kipper shook her head. “Not in the last hour or so,” she said, planting her fists on her hips and twisting her face in thought. “They were at the Fossil Dig tent, but I can’t imagine they’d still be there.”

“Okay,” Clementine said. “Thanks anyway. If you see them, will you tell them I’m looking for them?”

“Of course,” Dr. Kipper said. “I’d better get back to my post.”

“Oh, what exhibit are you at today?” Clementine asked.

Dr. Kipper clasped her hands in joy. “The Dino Family Tree!” she said. “It shows how a Tyrannosaurus rex is more closely related to a chickadee than to a Stegosaurus!”

Clementine laughed. “And people say I’m weird!” she said. “See you, Dr. Kipper.” She turned away and spent several minutes wandering the edges of the festival. She’d nearly given up hope when she stumbled into a man. “Oh, excuse me.”

“Why don’t you watch where you’re going?” the man snapped. He was a bit taller than Clementine and had a big black beard. On his head he wore a black baseball cap, and in his arms he held the back end of a huge, covered rectangle.

“Oh, be nice,” the woman holding the front end of the rectangle admonished him. “Can’t you see the poor girl is lost?”

“Oh, I’m not lost,” said Clementine. “But my friends are. That is, I can’t find them. Have you seen them?”

“Well, I don’t know,” the woman said with a little laugh. “Who are they?”

Clementine described her three best friends and then added her phone number to the other woman’s cell phone. Her hands were full, so Clementine made sure to save it in the list of contacts. “If you see them, please call me,” she said.

“I sure will,” the woman said, taking her phone back and jamming it into her back pocket. She gave Clementine a big grin. “We’d better be moving on now.”

“Finally!” the man snapped.

They started shuffling off, carrying that big rectangle between them, when Clementine felt a tug under her foot. She’d somehow stepped on the white sheet that was covering their load.

“Oh, whoops!” Clementine said, hopping off. A bit of the sheet slipped off the bottom of the rectangle, though, exposing a small patch of blue and white. “What is that?” she asked.

“None of your business!” the man snapped, quickly covering the exposed corner. “Just watch your step before you do some real damage.”

“I’m sorry,” Clementine said with a frown. She really was sorry, but she was still thinking about that patch of blue and white.

Suddenly, Clementine knew exactly what it was. She’d seen those blue and white squares hundreds of times — maybe more than hundreds. It was the corner of a painting of three men sitting at an old-fashioned lunch counter. Her mom had the poster hanging in their kitchen because it was going to be the main feature of her upcoming exhibit on Photorealism at the Capitol City Art Museum.

The original painting was worth millions. And the two people she’d just met should not have been carrying it around. In fact, it was supposed to be hanging in her mom’s art museum right now.