The Dinosaur Feather Read Free

forthcoming thesis defense. No matter how much Anna missed her daughter and knew very well that the temporary arrangement had gotten out of hand, there simply was no room for Lily in the equation. And, as she kept telling herself: Lily liked being with Granny.
    “Stop it, Lily,” she snapped. “I have to go now. Granny will pick you up today. You’re sleeping at Granny’s tonight. Now let go of me!” She had to tear herself loose.
    “You go,” the nursery teacher said, “I’ll deal with her.”
    When Anna had finished locking up her bicycle, she caught sight of Professor Moritzen in her office on the ground floor. Anna tried to catch her eye, but the professor was hunched over her desk and didn’t look up.
    Hanne Moritzen was a parasitologist in her late forties, and four years earlier she had taught Anna in a summer course at the university’s field center in Brorfelde. One night, when neither had been able to sleep, they had run into each other in the large institutional kitchen that belonged to the Earth Sciences department. Hanne had made chamomile tea, and they started talking. At first the topic was biology, but Anna soon realized that Hanne, in contrast to other professors she had met, wasn’t particularly interested in talking shop. Instead they discussed favorite books and films, and Anna found herself genuinely warming to Hanne. When dawn broke, they agreed it was pointless to go back to bed, and when the bleary-eyed kitchen staff arrived, they had just started a game of cards.
    Later they had bumped into each other in the faculty lounge, said hello, exchanged pleasantries, and then had lunch together several times. Anna admired Professor Moritzen’s serenity and sense of purpose. It was now a long time since their last lunch. Once she had defended her dissertation, she would make it up to all the people she had neglected: her daughter, Hanne Moritzen, herself.
    Finally, Hanne looked up from behind the window, smiled, and waved to Anna. Anna waved back and walked through the revolving doors to Building 12.
    The department of Cell Biology and Comparative Zoology consisted of offices and laboratories arranged on either side of a long, windowless corridor. The first office belonged to Professor Lars Helland, Anna’s internal supervisor. He was a tall thin man without a single wrinkle. This was remarkable. Biologists, as a rule, made a point of never protecting their skin when doing fieldwork. The only clues that revealed he was in his late fifties were white flecks in his soft beard, a slowly spreading bald patch, and a photograph on his desk of a smiling woman and a teenage girl with braces on her teeth.
    Anna was convinced that Professor Helland loathed her; she certainly loathed him. During the nine months he had been supervising her dissertation, he had barely taken the time to offer her any guidance. He was permanently crotchety and uninterested, and when she asked a specific question, he would go off on an irrelevant tangent and couldn’t be stopped. It had angered Anna from the start and she had seriously considered making a formal complaint. Now she had resigned herself to the situation, and she tried, as much as possible, to avoid him. She had even left her dissertation in his cubbyhole last Friday, rather than hand it to him in person. When she checked the cubby for the fourth time, her dissertation was gone.
    The door to Professor Helland’s office was ajar. Anna tiptoed past it. Through the gap she could see part of Helland’s recliner, the last centimeters of two gray trouser legs, feet in socks and one shoe lying carelessly discarded with the sole facing up. Typical. When Helland was in his office, he spent most of his time lying in his recliner, reading, surrounded by a Coliseum-like structure of books and journals piled up in disarray around him. Even on the very rare occasions they had met, Helland had been reclining as if he were a nobleman receiving an audience.
    Helland wasn’t