sitting cross-legged next to the creature’s back. Mindy had chalk and was drawing tic-tac-toe on its side.
“What are you doing?” Gail cried, grabbing the chalk. “Have some respect for the dead.”
Mindy said, “Give me my chalk.”
“You can’t draw on this. It’s a dinosaur.”
Mindy said, “I want my chalk back or I’m telling Mommy.”
“They don’t even believe us,” Joel said. “And they’re sitting right next to it. If it was alive, it would’ve eaten them by now.”
Miriam said, “You have to give it back. That’s the chalk Daddy bought her. We each got something for a penny. You wanted gum. You could’ve had chalk. You have to give it back.”
“Well, don’t draw on the dinosaur.”
“I can draw on the dinosaur if I want to. It’s everybody’s dinosaur,” Mindy said.
“It is not. It’s ours,” Joel said. “We’re the ones who discovered it.”
Gail said, “You have to draw somewhere else or I won’t give you back your chalk.”
“I’m telling Mommy. If she has to come down here to make you give it back, she’ll scald your heinie,” Mindy said.
Gail started to reach out, to hand back the chalk, but Joel caught her arm.
“We’re not giving it,” he said.
“I’m telling Mother,” Mindy said, and got up.
“I’m telling with her,” Miriam said. “Mother is going to come and give you heck.”
They stomped away into the mist, discussing this latest outrage in chirping tones of disbelief.
“You’re the smartest boy on this side of the lake,” Gail said.
“Either side of the lake,” he said.
The mist streamed in off the surface of the water, and Mindy and Miriam walked into it. By some trick of the light, their shadows telescoped, so each girl appeared as a shadow within a larger shadow within a larger shadow. They made long, girl-shaped tunnels in the smoke. They extended away into the vapor, those multiple shadows lined up like a series of dark, featureless matryoshka dolls. Finally they dwindled in on themselves and were claimed by the fishy-smelling fog.
Gail and Joel did not turn back to the dinosaur until Gail’s little sisters had vanished entirely. A gull sat on the dead creature, staring at them with beady, avid eyes.
“Get off!” Joel shouted, flapping his hands.
The gull hopped to the sand and crept away in a disgruntled hunch.
“When the sun comes out, it’s going to be ripe,” Joel said.
“After they take pictures of it, they’ll have to refrigerate it.”
“Pictures of it with us.”
“Yes,” she said, and wanted to take his hand again but didn’t.
“Do you think they’ll bring it to the city?” Gail asked. She meant New York, which was the only city she’d ever been to.
“It depends who buys it from us.”
Gail wanted to ask him if he thought his father would let him keep the money but worried the question might put unhappy ideas in his head. Instead she asked, “How much do you think we might get paid?”
“When the ferry hit this thing back in the summer, P. T. Barnum announced he’d pay fifty thousand dollars for it.”
“I’d like to sell it to the Museum of Natural History in New York City.”
“I think people give things to museums for free. We’d do better with Barnum. I bet he’d throw in lifetime passes to the circus.”
Gail didn’t reply, because she didn’t want to say something that might disappoint him.
He shot her a look. “You don’t think it’s right.”
She said, “We can do what you want.”
“We could each buy a house with our half of Barnum’s money. You could fill a bathtub with hundred-dollar bills and swim around in it.”
Gail didn’t say anything.
“It’s half yours, you know. Whatever we make!”
She looked at the creature. “Do you really think it might be a million years old? Can you imagine all those years of swimming? Can you imagine swimming under the full moon? I wonder if it missed other dinosaurs. Do you think it wondered what happened to all the others?”
Joel looked at it for a while. He said, “My mom took me to the Natural History Museum. They had a little castle there with a hundred knights, in a glass case.”
“A diorama.”
“That’s right. That was swell. It looked just like a little world in there. Maybe they’d give us lifetime passes.”
Her heart lightened. She said, “And then scientists could study it whenever they wanted to.”
“Yeah. P. T. Barnum would probably make scientists buy a ticket. He’d show it next to a two-headed goat and a fat woman with a beard, and it wouldn’t be special anymore. You ever notice that? Because everything at