Page 81 of Sunny Undone

I don’t have a lawyer. But my parents do. I’ll bite my tongue and ask them if he could take a look at this for me too.

“Della, Della, Della,” the dean says.

Just. Like. My. Father. Does.

“You don’t need a legal review. I’m sure you understand that my job is to prioritize this school and its future. If you cared about it too, you would sign it, now.”

He slides a pen towards me, but I look at it with disgust. “Do you remember what it says beneath the college seal downstairs?”

His expression tightens because he does; he just doesn’t want to say it out loud.

“It says, ‘Knowledge in the service of truth.’ Not knowledge in the service of whoever offers to pay for the new science center.” I push the pen back across the desk. “I’ll have my lawyer review it.”

“I want it back within the week,” the dean says as I make my exit.

By the time I get back to the lab, it’s quiet. Evan and Mina are gone. The short walk has done something to my brain. I’m seeing the data and everything we’ve done a little differently, as if the possible shortened deadline brought clarity.

I lay out all my sample records chronologically. I cross reference time stamps against my concentration readings. And I find it in the sawtooth rise and fall of concentration increase and decay.

The gap between the spikes lines up with the half-life of the compound the mass spectrometer keeps flagging in every cycle.

I shrugged it off for months because a neonicotinoid insecticide in a wetland that borders farmland isn’t exactly out of place. But the steady heartbeat of the sawtooth pattern means someone is constantly and routinely coming back to top it up.

I dial Sunny, and he answers on two rings. “Indy, what’s up?”

“I think I found something.”

“Yeah? I’m with Knox. Should he listen in?”

As he asks the question, Mina comes in. “Sure,” I say, waving her over, “Mina just came back into the lab.”

“Della,” Knox says roughly when we’re all connected.

Mina points to the phone and whispers, “Real-life bikers?”

I nod, and she does a little dance. “Sunny and Knox are on the phone,” I explain.

She pulls herself together enough to say hello.

“What did you find, Indy?” Sunny asks.

Mina puts her hand over her heart. “Indy,” she mouths, like it’s the cutest thing she ever heard.

I roll my eyes and nudge her to look at the graphs. Now, it’s her turn to go slack jawed. “I’ve just been looking at the concentration graphs for the samples over time for a neonicotinoid insecticide. Imidacloprid.”

“In English, Della?” Knox says.

“It kills insects. But it doesn’t necessarily stay where you put it. It can get picked up by rain or marsh water and get moved around. So, it’s not unheard of for it to end up in cycles. Imidacloprid won’t just sit on sunlit surface water indefinitely. Photolysis breaks it down and that can happen fairly quickly.”

“Is there too much of it?” Sunny asks over the phone.

Mina leans closer. “In farming, it gets used quite frequently. Some EPA imidacloprid labels allow for repeat foliar applications five days apart, some ten. There’s also a cap on how many applications a farmer can use in a season.”

“Our samples show sharp and repeated concentration spikes every three to five days,” I say.

“And it’s always exactly the same amount,” Mina says, “which is even more suspicious.”

“Della,” Knox says. “If we could check with the landowners around the swamp, we might be able to find out what their regular application has been. Because this sounds like it’s way too much, way too often, to be an accident.”