Show Me (Thomas Prescott 4), Nick Pirog [classic children's novels .TXT] 📗

it didn’t tell me much, other than the fact that Mike Zernan was being extremely cautious.

I glanced down at the mailing address: Humphries Farm, Tarrin, MO 64607.

Like the return address, everything was written in block lettering.

On closer examination, there was something slightly odd about the word TARrIN. The second “R” in the word was only about two-thirds the height of the first “R.”

It was only noticeable because the rest of the letters were so uniform.

Almost too uniform.

I thought back to what Bree had said about the handwriting.

It’s too neat.

I bit the inside of my cheek and made my way back to the table and the Moleksine. I opened it up and slowly, moving my finger over each number, letter, and symbol, I looked for any discrepancies in height.

It was painfully slow.

One page.

Five pages.

Seven pages.

Twelve pages.

Nothing.

Not a single anomaly.

Ten more pages.

Nothing.

I was on the twenty-seventh page of the notebook and I was dangerously close to throwing in the towel. I traced my finger over the third-to-last entry on the page.

Paul / St. Louis Cardinals / -135 / $75.

I smiled.

The last “L” in Cardinals was slightly smaller than all the other letters.

“You sneaky sonofabitch,” I muttered with a smile.

I continued flipping through pages. I was starting to think it was a fluke when I found a second height discrepancy.

Morgan / Houston Rockets / +150 / $100.

The “U” in Houston was distinctly smaller than all the other letters around it.

I pushed forward in my chair a few inches.

May and Harold pawed at my legs. They must have sensed my rising adrenaline.

Six pages later, there was another entry, this time the “N” was slightly smaller.

It took me another hour of combing through all the entries. There were seven letters in all that stood out: L-U-N-H-I-L-L.

I pushed back in my chair. My hands were shaking.

Lunhill Corporation.

Big Biotech.

And the most hated company in the world.

Chapter Eighteen

I didn’t know a whole lot about Lunhill, but my sister, who became extremely food-conscious after she was diagnosed with MS, and rightfully so, mentioned them a few times.

GMOs are destroying the planet, Thomas!

Lunhill is poisoning people, Thomas!

You have no idea how fucked up this corporation is, Thomas!

They are the most hated company in the world, Thomas!

She’d even gone to a couple anti-Lunhill protest rallies when we were living in Maine.

I searched “Lunhill” on my phone and spent the next hour reading everything I could find.

In a nutshell, Lunhill was an agrichemical and agricultural biotechnology corporation. They had been around for more than a hundred years, starting out as a chemical company in the early 1900s. At some point in the 1980s, they turned their focus to biotechnology, and in the last thirty years had become the leader in genetically modified organisms.

Controversy followed them at every step, from their involvement in the creation of Agent Orange during Vietnam; to being the leading producer of saccharine in the 1930s; to DDT, one of the most dangerous insecticides ever created; to a horrible dioxin spill that destroyed an entire town; to their glyphosate-based herbicide Spectrum-H; to most recently, their Spectrum-H(R)—Spectrum-H resistant—line of genetically modified seeds.

According to Lunhill, they were saving the world.

According to most of the world, they were destroying it.

Many people believed genetically modified organisms (GMOs) were making people sick and Big Biotech firms, specifically Lunhill, were suppressing data that showed GMOs cause harm. Others felt Lunhill was going so far as to deliberately cause food shortages to promote the use of genetically modified food.

There were several other allegations, including Lunhill’s incestuous relationships with government agencies like the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). An unprecedented number of Lunhill employees either worked at the FDA or EPA before they were hired or went on to work at the FDA or EPA after working for Lunhill.

Then there was the Lunhill Protection Act, signed into law by President Barack Obama, which essentially gave biotech companies like Lunhill immunity in federal court. The bill stated that even if future research showed GMOs caused significant health problems, cancer, infertility, birth defects, kidney or liver damage—anything really—the federal courts no longer had any power to stop their spread, use, or sales.

My favorite of all the accusations against Lunhill was that they had banned GMOs from their own cafeteria while promoting them for sale and consumption by the public.

All science mumbo jumbo aside, most disturbing was the fact that Lunhill spent millions of dollars each year to strike down GMO labeling laws even though the vast majority of the world supported such laws and wanted to know what was in their food.

Why didn’t Lunhill want people to know their food contained GMOs?

I made a mental note to keep this in mind the next time I went to the Harvest Food and Market.

Lacy had mentioned they were the most hated company in the world, and I wondered if this was hyperbole or gospel truth. According to a number of different websites, it was closer to the latter. Though Lunhill wasn’t always ranked number one, they were usually in the top three, surrounded by the likes of BP, Dow Chemical, Haliburton, Bank of America, and Bayer.

But get this, though Lunhill might be a global company, they were based less than a hundred miles from Tarrin, just outside of St. Louis.

“Shit,” I swore under my breath.

Still, their proximity didn’t explain their connection to the Save-More murders.

I Googled, “Lunhill and Tarrin, MO.”

There were several hits, but only one that caught my eye.

Save-More Victim Worked at Lunhill.

I clicked on the link.

It was from a blog called GMOs, Guns, and the Uprising.

It read:

November 17, 2012

Last month, there was a horrific massacre in the small Missouri town of Tarrin, population just over two thousand. A disgruntled ex-employee returned to the grocery store he worked at and took his revenge on the manager who fired him, as well as five other individuals (there was a sixth, one lone survivor). Lowry Barnes, a convicted felon, had legally—yes, legally—acquired a semi-automatic pistol just the week before. Nice work, Show-Me state. Show