The Bone Bed

tweeting,” she says. “Which isn’t a good idea. Not after hours, when he tends to be a little less inhibited.”
    “I’m confused.”
    “Did he tell you he’s moved an inflatable AeroBed into Investigations?” she says.
    “We don’t allow beds. We don’t allow people on call to sleep. Since when is he on call?” I repeat.
    “Since he’s been having fights with what’s-her-name.”
    “Who?”
    “Or he’s ornamenting and doesn’t want to drive.”
    I have no idea what Lucy is talking about.
    “Which is rather often these days.” She looks me in the eye. “What’s-her-name he met on Twitter and had to unfollow in more ways than one. She made a real fool of him.”
    “‘Ornamenting’?”
    “Minis he turns into ornaments. After he drinks what was in them. You didn’t hear it from me.”
    I think back to July eleventh, Marino’s birthday, which has never been a happy occasion for him and is only worse the older he gets.
    “You need to ask him yourself, Aunt Kay,” Lucy adds, as I recall visiting him at his new house in West Cambridge.
    Wood-sided on a sliver of a lot, it has working fireplaces and
genuine hardwood floors
, he likes to boast, and a finished basement, where he installed a sauna, a workshop, and a speed bag he loves to show off. When I drove up with a birthday basket of homemade asparagus quiche and white chocolate sweet salami, he was on a ladder, stringing strands of lighted small glass skulls along the roofline, Crystal Head vodka minis he was ordering
directly from the distillery and turning into ornaments,
he volunteered before I could ask, as if to imply he’d been buying empties, hundreds of them.
Getting ready for Halloween,
he added boisterously, and I should have known then that he was drinking again.
    “I don’t remember what you’re doing today except maybe another pig farm somewhere that you intend to put out of business,” I say to Lucy, as I push away every horrible thing Marino’s ever done when he’s been drunk.
    “Southwest Pennsylvania.” She continues looking around my office as if something has changed that she should know about.
    Nothing has. Not that I can think of. The juniper bonsai on my brushed-steel conference table is a new addition, but that’s all. The photographs, certificates, and degrees she’s glancing over are the same, as are the orchids, gardenias, and sago palm. My black-laminate-surface bow-shaped desk she is staring at hasn’t changed. Nor has the matching hutch or the black granite countertop behind my chair, where she’s now wandering.
    Not so long ago I did get rid of the microdissection system, replacing it with a ScanScope that allows me to view microscopic slides, and I watch Lucy check the monitor, powering it off and on. She picks up the keyboard and turns it over, then moves on to my faithful Leica microscope, which I’ll never give up because there isn’t anything I trust more than my own eyes.
    “Pigs and chickens in Washington County, more of the same,” she says, as she continues walking around, staring, touching things, picking them up.
    “Farmers pay the fines and then start in again,” she adds. “You should fly with me sometime and get an eyeful of sow stalls, piggeries that cram them in like sardines. People who are awful to animals, including dogs.”
    A whoosh sounds, a text message on her iPhone, and she reads it.
    “Plumes of runoff going into streams and rivers.” She types a reply with her thumbs, smiling as if whoever sent the message is someone she’s fond of or finds amusing. “Hopefully we’ll catch the assholes in flagrante delicto, shut them.”
    “I hope you’re careful.” I’m not at all thrilled with her newfound environmentalist vigilantism. “You start messing with people’s livelihoods and it can get mean.”
    “Like it did for her?” She indicates my computer and what I’ve been watching on it.
    “I have no idea,” I confess.
    “Whose livelihood was Emma Shubert messing with?”
    “All I know is she found a tooth two days before she disappeared,” I reply. “Apparently it’s the first one unearthed in a bone bed that’s a rather recent discovery. She and other scientists had just started digging there a few summers ago.”
    “A bone bed that may end up the most productive one anywhere,” Lucy says. “A burial ground for a herd of dinosaurs that died all at once, really unusual, maybe unprecedented. It’s an incredible opportunity to piece together entire