of dinosaurs with tiny fanciful unicorns the artist hid in all the paintings.
Her former boss, Gregory Lincoln, liked to look at Vermeer paintings when he was out in the field. Gregory carried postcard-sized representations of his favorites. He would look at the everyday scenes painted by Vermeer for hours—the love letter, woman with a water pitcher, the guitar player, the geographer. They seemed to put him in a meditative trance. Diane once asked what he was thinking when he looked at his pictures.
“I’m trying to figure out what’s going on in them. What’s the woman thinking about as she’s handed the letter? What map is the geographer drawing, how many places has he been?”
Diane had adopted Gregory’s habit of looking at beautiful art when she needed a break from a particularly grim assignment and had kept it up even after she gave up human rights investigations. Tonight the soothing shapes of the seashells held a particular appeal.
It would be a couple of hours before the low-level night lighting came on. Museum lighting is a science all its own. Because light is both destructive and necessary, she had staff whose only job was to tend to the peculiar needs of museum lighting. At night there’s the bare minimum of lights, and most of them are low to the floor so no one trips over anything. It’s good for the exhibits, but not good for viewing. She could of course override the day-to-night lighting change, but she would not do that simply for her own personal viewing.
The RiverTrail Museum of Natural History resided in a nineteenth-century three-story granite building. The interior decor contained ornate moldings, polished granite floors, wood paneling, brass fixtures, wall-sized murals of dinosaurs, and very large rooms.
Using her master key, she entered through the west-wing entrance where the Aquatic Animal section was located. The guard on duty at the information desk nodded a hello. Diane smiled at him. She cast a glance at a brachiosaurus in the dinosaur room in front of her before she turned left and walked straight to the seashell section.
Seashells are the houses and bones of mollusks—soft-bodied creatures that mostly inhabit aquatic environments. The museum had a fairly decent collection from among the more than fifty thousand possible varieties.
As in bones, if you know the code contained in seashells, you can read the history of the animal. The distinctive pattern of pigments laid down on a shell is governed mostly by DNA but is shaped by the experiences of the animal. Even among the members of the same variety, no two individuals have exactly the same pattern. A mollusk enlarges its shell along the edge, just like human bone growth at the epiphysis. On these growth edges the pigmentation pattern is laid down. Whatever happens to the mollusk—feast, famine, injury, temperature changes—has an effect and is recorded in the pattern. The mollusk wears its history on its back. A computer monitor in the shell room graphically illustrated the process, but Diane skipped that tonight. She’d seen it many times when it was being created.
She lingered a moment by the Humans and Shells exhibit to wonder at the cowrie shell necklaces from Africa, the mother-of-pearl jewelry, the carved conch shells loaned from the Archaeology Department depicting religious and ceremonial engravings of the southeastern Indians of the United States. There were display examples of kitschy souvenir shells from Florida. One of the prize specimens in this particular exhibit, acquired by Diane’s assistant director, Kendel Williams, was a gilded saltshaker in the form of a rooster made from the shell of a chambered nautilus.
Just beyond the Humans and Shells exhibit was the Math of Seashells. Not a favorite with most visitors, but Diane liked it, as did all the math teachers in the area. They often brought classes on field trips to watch the video explanation of the mathematics of the spiraled chambered nautilus based on the Fibonacci sequence of numbers. The video went on to show that pinecones, sunflowers, spiral galaxies, movement of bees, and even the Parthenon contain the same mathematics. Teachers loved that. For those really into the math of seashells, there was a video of the algorithmic process involved in the laying down of the pattern. Not very popular, but Diane left it on the computer, anyway. The instructors of higher mathematics loved her for that.
The fossil shells were a favorite of visitors mainly because they loved looking at the spiral shells whose component minerals had been replaced by pyrite so that they looked