Page 47 of Sunny Undone

“What? It’s broken, like the last cooler?” I angrily pick at a loose bit of cotton on my bedding.

“No. It had been turned off at the switch. When I turned it back on, it worked just fine. But I don’t know how long it had been switched off for.”

Which means, all the samples in there are ruined.

“Shit. Did they touch anything else? Did someone call the police?”

“I thought you might want to start with campus security. Maybe they can use footage from the corridor cameras or something. It could be as simple as a new cleaner who didn’t know to not switch it off or something.”

I sigh. “Good idea. I’m on my way in.”

Thirty minutes later, I stand in utter disbelief as I look at Jacob Stern, the absolutely unbothered head of campus security. “So, that camera stopped working four days ago, and you just haven’t gotten around to fixing it?”

Stern taps a list on the clipboard he’s holding. “We’re under the same financial pressure as everyone else. We’re just prioritizing what we can work on, and your lab area is pretty quiet, so we just deprioritized fixing the camera.”

I let out a sigh of frustration. “I understand the reasoning, even if I don’t like the result. But now that we know someone messed with my lab, can we get it fixed, quickly, so we can see whoever it is if they try again?”

Stern nods. “We’ll get to it by the end of this week.”

“This week?” I ask.

“Fine. By Wednesday.”

Two days from now. “Fine.”

Once I get to the lab, the hits keep coming.

“What do you mean, our order was cancelled?” I ask Evan.

He shrugs helplessly. “I don’t know. Just that the bursar said we couldn’t order it. He wouldn’t sign off on it.”

“So, it never got placed?”

Evan shrugs again. “I guess. I didn’t think it was my place to argue with the bursar, seeing as I’m here on a scholarship.”

I know his financial situation is just as precarious and stretched as our department budget is. Money is so tight, he somehow holds down two off-campus jobs to make ends meet. My parents may not respect what I do, but they didn’t quibble about paying for it. I suppose the idea of a daughter not having a degree was one step worse than them not having a degree in something they respected.

I blow out another breath. Maybe that’s the theme of the day, my breath going off kilter. Next thing I know, I’ll be letting out a breath I didn’t know I was holding, like all those romance books my college roommate Carolyn used to read. “It’s okay. I’m not blaming you. I’ll sort it out,” I say, even if I have to pay for the damn order myself.

I head to my station with the feeling of a vise clamping around my chest. My data set is one of the most valuable and comprehensive of any wetland in America. And I feel ill at the idea of missing even one month. I plan vacations around it, use all my time off to go on the same day every month for consistency. And someday, when I’m too old to do it, I’ll hand the responsibility to a successor. Someone who cares just as much. My mind spins at the idea there could be even one missing data point as a result of the fridge situation.

“You okay?” Mina asks.

I shrug. “Got a lot on my mind.”

“You want to share any of it?”

I tell her about the security camera. And how we’re going to need to be careful. Never in the lab alone…for now. She loves wetland ecology as much as I do. When I first met her in one of my classes, she was shy, barely said a word. Then, one day after class, she came to ask me a question and completely geeked out over the answer.

I could see that kindred spirit. The overall vibe of a quest for knowledge and a pursuit of something morally good. So, I gave her a shot. When she told me she couldn’t afford to stay to do her master’s, I fought every single person here to get her a scholarship.

The thought that Dean Whitaker could take it from her as part of the cuts we’re all facing unless the donation comes through makes me ill. But I’m not sure where all these cuts will end without it. Is it the closure of my department and the end of Evan and Mina’s academic careers when they’re so close to finishing their courses?

But I can trust Mina with one thing, as a friend.

“I’m worried about why I ran into so much trouble getting that last round of data and why we keep having these problems here,” I admit quietly.

She glances over at Evan, who has headphones blasting loud music, as usual. “Let’s work through it. Tell me all the details. Even the ones you already shared. What happened?”