box with the Bible.
She was stupid to have shared them. She should have hidden them all away.
She remembered the day, only a month ago, when she had perused the Bible cover to cover to confirm that every single mention of God was feminized.
Molly carried the box back to her cubicle and pushed it as far under her desk as possible.
Now she felt a little bit safe. She was, she realized, breathing hard.
Then she remembered that there was a sixth object. The penny she had found in the Pit and quickly dismissed—the penny from Moll’s world.
She remembered change scattering out of her pocket as she slid to the bottom of the Pit, laden. She remembered a penny in the mud. Her daughter is always on the lookout for pennies, heads up for good luck.
But where was that penny now?
In Molly’s wallet, still, probably, where she had dropped it along with the control penny on Friday.
She pulled her wallet out of her bag. She felt as though she could sense the penny in there, burning with its otherness, the change purse suddenly toxic.
She dumped the coins out onto her desk and pulled all six pennies toward her. There were only two possible contenders, as only two had been minted in the current year. One penny belonging to her, one belonging to Moll. But there was nothing to distinguish them from each other. She found herself wishing for a hint, some telltale sign (a fleck of blood?) so that she could know which penny was the dangerous one—and then was horrorstruck by her wish.
She tossed both pennies into the cardboard box along with the other objects and tried to forget about them.
The Phillips 66 felt acutely abandoned. She kept having the sensation that this wasn’t quite the same workplace she had left on Friday. It was always odd to reemerge from the fog of the weekend into work on Monday mornings, but today it was a hundred times so. She questioned every object—the dimensions of her desk, the hue of her chair, the angle of her computer monitor.
She turned the computer on. She had to write a notice for today’s tourists. And then would borrow the language from that to write a press release. And then would send it to all the relevant news outlets.
As she waited for her computer to awaken, she began to compose the letter in her head: Dear Tourists. But that sounded off somehow. Dear Customers? Dear Guests? Dear Enthusiasts? Dear People? To Whom It May Concern? Her mind was too frenetic. She could sort out the salutation later. It has come to our attention that the artifacts that have been (lately? recently? in recent times?) discovered at our site alongside our (notable? noteworthy? legendary?) fossils are, in fact, as originally suspected by many, a hoax . . . an elaborate hoax . . . please forgive our . . . when initially unearthed, these objects defied our understanding, but . . . it has been proven beyond a doubt . . . with 100 percent confidence . . . with absolute certainty . . . after consultation with (multiple? numerous?) experts . . . have been found to be . . . including, most significantly, the Bible . . . we hope you can forgive . . . upon this revelation, were immediately removed from the eye of the public . . . the thorny road of truth . . . the thorny path of science . . . the . . . the . . .
The computer screen, now bright, confronted her with the photograph: the kids hugging each other, wearing adult backpacks and fearful expressions.
She couldn’t last a minute with those four eyes on her.
She had to get rid of the picture before doing anything else. She clicked on her desktop settings and began scrolling through the ravishing stock images: a waterfall cascading through ferns, a beach under a red sun, a forest of aspen and columbine.
“Molly!” Corey startled her. She had been absorbed in toggling back and forth between the waterfall and the forest.
“Hey,” she said. He had yanked aside the curtain in the doorway.
“We have to call the police.”
“Why?”
“Someone broke in. The cases are open. The Bible and everything is gone.”
“No,” Molly said. “I have it all. Right here.”
“Oh.” He gave a quick laugh. “Okay. Good. Shit. I was freaking out.”
“I don’t think we should display them anymore.”
“What?”
She didn’t know what to tell him or not tell him.
“Molly?” he said.
“The culprit,” Roz said dryly,