Dead as a Dinosaur by Frances Lockridge Page B

“He’s a little Chas Addams, certainly.”
    â€œI don’t mean that,” Pam said. “Oh, that too. I mean what he said. The—the way he thinks. Feeding us to—to what? Prehistoric bovoids?”
    â€œI imagine they ate grass,” Jerry said, and made another right turn. He ought, now, to be headed back toward the parkway. He was going east, at any rate; the industrious windshield wipers shuddered in the wind; water slithered on the glass.
    â€œA mad scientist,” Pam said, and was told to come, now. She was told, also, that she should begin to avoid television.
    â€œNot that kind,” Pam said. “Mad about science. Don’t you see? He’d—he’d grind people up. For knowledge.”
    â€œNonsense,” Jerry said. “You’re being sensitive, baby.”
    Pamela North denied this. She said it was plain to anyone who listened.
    â€œHe said it,” she told Jerry. “I think you have to turn down this one first and then get on.”
    Gerald North said he knew, and turned right on the feeder road to the parkway.
    â€œAbout poor Dr. Preson,” Pam said. “That it was a good thing he died, so his money would go to—to more old bones. To plug gaps in the bovoids. He really meant it.”
    â€œAcademically,” Jerry said and stopped where a sign commanded. He peered back into the rain and started again, bound downtown on the Henry Hudson Parkway. “By the way, why did you say we’d go to the Institute? Now, I mean? I’ll have to go over the book and—”
    â€œOh,” Pam said, “I’d think somebody there would know about Mr. Landcraft, wouldn’t you? Whether it is, really, academic. Or whether, if he thought—oh, science—was in danger of losing something, he would really—”
    â€œLosing something?” Jerry said, taking the easiest first.
    â€œLike money,” Pam said.
    â€œWould really what?” Jerry asked her, but by then he could guess.
    â€œDo something,” Pam said. “Even—kill something.”
    It should, Gerald North told himself, sound grotesque. It went against all they knew; against the obvious fact that nobody had been, in the sense Pam meant, killed. It was because of the rain drumming on the car roof, because of the wind crying through an aperture somewhere in an old house, because of a too-thin man with dangling arms, that the suggestion was not immediately absurd. If the sun had been shining, if Jesse Landcraft had not been of so curious an appearance, Jerry would have laughed easily at Pam’s imaginative flight into—well, into something close to the macabre. As it was he laughed. The laughter did not sound as he had hoped.
    â€œYou see?” Pam said. “Somebody at the Institute will know him, probably. Maybe he is famous.” She paused. “In one way or another,” Pamela North said, darkly in the dim car, only just audibly above the beating rain.

7
    F RIDAY , 11:45 A . M . TO 2:55 P . M .
    The Broadly Institute of Paleontology, which has exhibit rooms open to the public between the hours of ten and five, Monday through Friday, ten to ten, Saturday and Sunday, occupies a large, square building on upper Fifth Avenue, but it is by no means as large as the American Museum of Natural History, on the other side of the park. Hurrying up its broad steps, in a futile effort to run between raindrops, Pamela North was a little surprised that the Broadly Institute was not larger, since it had begun to loom so large in her thoughts. But inside the door, in the Great Hall—which is two stories from floor to ceiling, and occupies most of the width and almost all the length of the building—she was sufficiently impressed. The Great Hall, shadowy in spite of numerous ceiling lights, was to a considerable extent occupied by a rearticulated Tyrannosaurus, which showed teeth at her and, impartially, at Gerald North also. Pamela