Page 42 of Sunny Undone

“What did we re-set this lock to last week?” Evan asks, nudging the toe of his tattered sneaker against the cabinet door.

I roll my eyes. “Your birthday. Like you asked.” I don’t know how a man as academically bright as Evan can forget even the simplest of logistics. He can remember the most complicated chemical formulas yet can never find his car keys. “What’s the freezer status?”

“Which answer will make you least violent?” Evan asks as he opens the cabinet to get what he needs.

“Lie,” I tell him.

“Then it is working beautifully and there absolutely wasn’t a fire that resulted in it being hauled out by maintenance this morning.”

I should be angrier than I am. But I find myself wishing it had burned the whole place to the ground so we could claim on the insurance and rebuild to create the perfect lab setup.

The lab should steady me. Usually, it does. Here, I’m not too plain or too much or too clever. Here, competence matters. Here, intellect is valuable currency as long as it’s mixed with the humility that much about the universe remains unknown. But today, the room only sharpens the dull ache I’ve felt since I crawled out of Sunny’s bed.

I open the cooler and begin to unload vials. “Mina, if you’re not in the middle of something, I need data entry on every new sample. I’ve noted the time, coordinates, collection depth, et cetera on the temporary label.”

“On it,” Mina says. “Are you okay? Did something happen? You seem frazzled.”

That’s one word to describe it, but I realize she couldn’t possibly be talking about Sunny. “Something keeps happening. I was chased away from the site by someone, and then, they ransacked my motel room and stole my laptop and notebooks.”

“Shit,” Evan said. “You kept everything in those books. I kept saying you should take the time to photocopy them as backup.”

Mina looks at me and rolls her eyes.

I glance over at the know-it-all grad student who sometimes doesn’t know when to stop pushing. “That’s helpful, Evan,” I say with a healthy dollop of sarcasm. “Most of the stuff in there has been documented digitally in various places. But I liked being able to just flip backwards through my book because I knew where every single bit of information was in them.”

For the next hour, after I inhale a cup of sharp, black coffee, I turn myself into the machine I can be when I focus. My father used to refer to them as mental blinkers, like the ones they have for horses to stop them getting distracted. Once I lower them, I can focus for hours without distraction.

I log into my archive and pull the sensor exports from the Everglades site. Water temperature and pH. Dissolved oxygen levels. Conductivity, turbidity, and nitrogen markers. Phosphate. Hydrocarbon traces. Most files are intact; some are not.

I lean closer to the screen. Then, I refresh and look again.

Three sensor logs show gaps from the same twelve-hour window, starting three hours before I was chased out of the wetlands and onto the back of Sunny’s bike.

It’s not a failure, exactly. There is some metadata there. If it were just one sensor log, I’d put it down to battery drain or interference from wildlife. But it’s the fact the sensors are missing data from the exact same window of time that’s weird.

“Mina,” I say. “Come look at this and tell me I’m not reading more into this than there should be.”

She comes over, hands tucked into her lab coat pockets and looks at the screen for less than ten seconds. “Yeah, you’re not being paranoid.”

I check the sample inventory logs, next, on the spare lab laptop. The collection of data I made on the last visit before this one is already stored. The general water sample results remain untouched, same with the lighter sediments. But a number of the deeper marsh sediment cores data is gone.

The phone in the lab rings. It’s an archaic system connected to the main office. It rarely gets used anymore, as people rely more and more on cellphones.

“I have a call for you,” Wynona, who works the switchboard, says. “Wouldn’t say who it was.”

When I hear the click, I know the call has been transferred. “Hi, this is Doctor Della Hart.”

There’s the sound of someone blowing out a breath.

“Hello,” I say.

Then, nothing. My heart skips a beat.

“Is there anyone there? I can’t hear you if you are.”

A dud call in isolation doesn’t mean anything. But when put in context with everything else that has happened this week, it makes me wonder who might be trying to confirm where I am or call me to scare me off.

I wait another second or two, and then I hang up the phone.