“I’m sure there’s a reasonable explanation,” Robyn answered with dignity.
“Like what?” I said suspiciously.
“Mr. Joe has every reason to have fossils with him,” Robyn said flatly. “He’s an instructor.”
“Yeah, but you know as well as I do that fossils from South Dakota wouldn’t be at the Tyrrell Museum,” I countered.
“Well, maybe just the bag is from the University of South Dakota,” Robyn insisted stubbornly. “Or maybe Mr. Joe has his own private collection.”
“I don’t know,” I said slowly. “There’s something I don’t quite trust about him.”
“What are you talking about? He’s nice.”
“You just like him because he’s good-looking,” I accused. The tip of Robyn’s nose turned pink.
“Trevor!” Hailey called from the doorway. “The carnival’s over. Mr. Kowalski needs help putting away all the tables from the booths.”
“Why me?” I ask.
“Because the caretaker leaves early on Friday afternoons,” Hailey answered. She walked over to us, her eyes widening as she saw the fossils in the cabinet. “What’s that?” she said.
“Nothing.” I shoved the drawer shut with my foot. “We were just looking for the museum forms. Can you get them for Mr. Joe?” I asked Robyn.
She frowned. “Of course. I think I can do a simple thing like that without you.”
“Sure. If you can find them in this mess.” I glanced at Mr. Joe’s untidy desk.
“It wasn’t so messy before you dumped half the papers on the floor,” Robyn grumbled. She began sifting through a mound of paper, and Hailey and I took off to help Mr. Kowalski in the gym.
“Robyn. Robyn!” a girl shouted over the clamor in the hallway on Monday morning. I recognized her as a friend of Alyssa’s. “Robyn, you have to do a prediction for me. I need to know—”
What she needed to know was cut off by another girl shoving her way toward us.
“Listen, Robyn, I really need to talk to you. Can you meet me after school?” Her eyelids were heavily rimmed with black eyeliner. She wore black clothing from head to toe. I knew she was in grade nine, but I’d never spoken to her before.
“Well, uh…I don’t know,” Robyn hedged.
“Listen, it’s okay.” The girl touched Robyn’s sleeve gently. “What you can do is totally amazing. Only really special people have the gift. And it can’t be forced. If you can’t see anything for me, that’s cool.” She smiled.
Robyn looked embarrassed and pleased at the same time. “Well, maybe.”
“I’ll see you at your locker. 3:15. Don’t forget.” The black-clad girl moved off down the hallway. Robyn drew a deep breath. “This is really getting out of hand.”
“You’re becoming quite a celebrity,” I observed.
“People should have more common sense,” Robyn snapped. “Fortune-telling isn’t real.”
“They think it is,” I said. “And that’s what counts. People really believe you can do it.”
Mr. Joe stopped us next. “Robyn, could I talk to you and Trevor for a minute, please?” His face looked so serious that Robyn and I glanced at each other in alarm.
“What’s the matter, Mr. Joe?” Robyn asked.
Mr. Joe rubbed a hand through his hair. “On Friday when you picked up the fundraiser forms from my desk, did you notice anything else?”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“I mean like whether the filing cabinet was open or not,” Mr. Joe said.
“It was,” Robyn admitted. “Trevor knocked a bunch of papers off your desk, and some of them fell inside the cabinet. We pulled them out and put them back right away though,” she added quickly.
“That’s good. But I’m more worried about what was in the cabinet. I can’t believe I didn’t lock it,” Mr. Joe said, more to himself than to us.
“What happened?” I said.
“Did you see anything…else…inside the cabinet?” Mr. Joe said.
Robyn and I exchanged looks. “There were some plastic bags with a bunch of rocks inside,” I answered.
Mr. Joe exhaled. “So they were still there on Friday afternoon.” He shook his head. “Those rocks were fossils on loan to me. I brought them to show the students here at the school. But now they’re missing,” Mr. Joe said.
I noticed he didn’t mention anything about the University of South Dakota label.
“If you guys know anything about the fossils at all, I need to find out. They’re very valuable,” Mr. Joe pressed us.
“Hey, Robyn, maybe you could predict where they are. You’ve done okay so far, telling fortunes,” I joked.
Robyn scowled at me.
“I’m serious, Trevor,” Mr. Joe said. “This is a big deal.”
“We saw the fossils inside the bag before I went back to the gym to help clean up. There were quite a few inside a black duffel bag. But we never touched them. Right, Robyn?” I answered.
Robyn’s face grew red. I looked at her quizzically. “No, that’s right,” she said quickly. “I did look at them again after I found the museum forms, and then I shut the cabinet.”
“Did you lock it?” Mr. Joe said hopefully.
Robyn shook her head. “It wasn’t locked before, so I just pushed it closed.”
Mr. Joe sighed. “All right. I’ll have to make an announcement. I need those fossils back. My career could depend on it!” He strode off down the hallway in the direction of the office.
Nick had joined us in time to hear Mr. Joe’s last comment. “He’s right,” Nick said. “Because if he doesn’t come up with those fossils, he might be going to jail.”
“What?” Robyn gasped. “What are you talking about?”
Nick handed her a sheaf of computer printouts. “I was just in the library working on my science booklet, and I ran an Internet search. By the way, did you know that some scientists think the Ichthyosaur was a giant marine reptile that evolved from a land reptile that no one knows anything about?
Robyn rolled her eyes. “Get to the point, Nick!”
“It was during the Triassic period. Isn’t that kind of cool? I mean, they were on land, then whoops…they developed fins or something and jumped into the sea. I never knew dinosaurs were this cool.” Nick grinned.
“Nick! Mr. Joe…jail…remember? What were you going to tell us?” Robyn looked as though she might throttle Nick at any moment.
“Oh, yeah. Well anyway, I was searching all this stuff, and I found a newspaper story from South Dakota that said someone ripped off a bunch of fossils a few months ago.”
“I knew it!” I exclaimed.
“No way.” Robyn shook her head. “There has to be some mistake.”
“Think about it,” Nick said. “The guy shows up here from that exact university, and suddenly he has a bunch of rocks from their collection? Sounds suspicious to me.”
“Why would he leave them labeled then? Isn’t that totally stupid? Of course someone would figure it out,” Robyn argued.
“He did say the fossils were on loan to him,” I pointed out.
“And what about customs officers when Mr. Joe came across the border?” Robyn said. “Wouldn’t they have stopped him?”
“Who knows?” Nick shrugged. “Maybe he didn’t store them in the bags, and the security guys just thought Mr. Joe has some weird habit of collecting gravel. But I’m telling you, it’s way too much of a coincidence. Check out how much money the article says they’d be worth to a private collector!” He waved the computer printout under my nose.
“Ten thousand dollars?” I gasped. “Are you kidding? For old rocks?”
“Old fossils,” Nick reminded me, reading over my shoulder, “that are obviously really rare.”
Our next class was about to begin. We stepped through the doorway to find an excited knot of kids clustered around Hailey. She was gesturing wildly, but froze when she saw us. Immediately everyone else grew quiet, their eyes on Robyn.
“What’s going on?” I said.
“Another one of Robyn’s prediction’s came true,” Hailey said.
Robyn looked apprehensive. “Which one?”
“The one you gave me,” Hailey answered. “Remember, you said yellow school buses were a problem for me?”
I started to laugh. “Yellow school buses are a problem? How stupid is that?”
Robyn gave me a thin smile, but Hailey’s face remained serious. “I thought so too. But guess what? This morning the buses pulled up to the school for the second field trip to Drumheller. And look what they did.” Hailey pulled up a battered, squashed backpack. Tire-tread marks ran right down the middle.
“I dropped it by accident, and it rolled off the curb, just as the buses pulled up. Before I could grab it…well, you can see what happened. It wrecked the whole backpack and everything in it, including my lunch.” Hailey’s eyes widened. “But at least it was only my backpack, and not me!”