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

they’ve ever produced hasn’t also been falsified?”

She was right.

Spectrum-H.

Spectrum-H(R) seeds.

All their GMOs.

If this got out, it would ruin them.

“Did Neil tell you about this?” I asked.

“No.”

“So you have no idea how he found this out?”

She glanced down at her lap, then back up at me. Her eyes softened. “He left a note in the safety deposit box. It said not to take the folder out of the box, to leave it there, to only use it in an emergency.”

“Like if they stopped paying?”

“I guess that’s what he meant.” She took a breath. “He said he stumbled on the pictures and documents when he was going back through the Sterile Seed data from when they first started doing research in the early nineties. Evidently, someone buried a folder in the Sterile Seed files. He opened it and saw the pictures and documents.”

“Let me guess, he confronted David Ramsey about it at work and they had a dust-up in the cafeteria?”

“That very day. He was extremely emotional about it.”

I’d had a hard time believing David Ramsey’s version of the dust-up at the luncheon. A shoving match over a raise?

“I can see why,” I said. “He’d been working for the company for twenty years.”

“That was part of it, but I think what upset him most was that it happened here.”

“What do you mean here?”

She grabbed one of the photos and showed it to me. “This dairy farm is in Tarrin.”

My breath caught.

I riffled through the pictures. Something in one of them had caught my eye, but I didn’t think anything of it until now.

I found the picture I was looking for. It was the picture of the single cow, udders grotesquely red and oozing pus. A man was standing over the cow.

His hair was fuller and his glasses a touch thicker, but there was no mistaking it.

It was Tom Lanningham.

Wheeler’s father.

Chapter Twenty-Five

I hit the small bell on the counter.

“Just a minute,” she called from the back.

A couple seconds later, she pushed through the back door.

“Hey,” Wheeler said. “What are you doing here?” Her face grew concerned, “Are Harold and May okay?”

“They’re fine,” I assured her.

I took a breath, then said, “I need to talk to you about something.”

Her concern faded and her arms crossed. “If this is about Caroline, I already heard.”

I let out a small sigh.

How did she find out? Had Caroline told people? Jerome? Or had it been so obvious everyone at the luncheon had known?

“In the high school bathroom,” Wheeler said, shaking her head. “Seriously?”

“That isn’t what I came to talk to you about, but since you brought it up. Yeah, it was stupid. She followed me into the bathroom, and we made out like hornball teenagers.”

Her arms crossed a couple inches farther. Her shoulders threatened to dislocate.

Against my better judgment, I asked, “What is it with you two, why do you hate her so much?”

I could see her debating whether to disclose her reasoning. Finally, after what seemed like an eternity, she said, “Miller.”

“Your ex?”

“Yeah. She slept with him the day after I broke off the engagement.”

“Which time?”

She huffed. “Both times.”

“Jeez.”

“Yeah, she doesn’t waste any time.”

I almost said, “If you broke up with him, then technically neither of them did anything wrong,” but the bell on the counter was within arm’s reach and I didn’t want it chucked in my direction. I went with, “I’m sorry.”

“Now she’s doing it again.”

I scrunched my eyebrows together.

“Don't act like you don’t know I have a thing for you.”

I grinned sheepishly and said, “If it’s any consolation, I have a thing for you too.”

Her arms relaxed slightly, then flexed once more. “Then why did you make out with that floozy in the bathroom?”

“I’m an idiot.”

I’ve learned over the years this is the best answer to a question that has no right answer.

“Yeah, you are.”

She took a couple steps forward, her white lab coat swaying, then said, “So what did you want to talk to me about?”

And just when we’d gone and made up.

I thought about turning and leaving, burning the photographs and documents. But I had to tell her. She had a right to know. And, to be honest, I needed to see her reaction. I needed to know she wasn’t aware her father was involved in a twenty-year-old cover-up with the Lunhill Corporation.

There was a bench in the small waiting room and I said, “We should probably sit down.”

For the first time, her eyes moved to the manila folder in my right hand. She followed me to the bench and sat down next to me. Our legs touched. I handed her the folder and said, “I found out what Neil Felding had on Lunhill.”

“Where did you get this?”

“Darcy Felding.”

“Neil gave this to her?”

“He left it for her in their safety deposit box.”

She swallowed, then pulled the documents from the folder.

I watched as she peered down at the first photo. The one of the fifteen dead cows lying in various positions on their sides.

“Oh my God,” she said.

She moved to the next photo. Then the next. I didn’t need to see her face to know when she reached the one of her father standing over the sick cow. I would have known by her audible gasp. She whipped her head around. “That’s my dad.”

One of the hardest emotions to fake is surprise.

Wheeler didn’t know.

“I know,” I said.

She was silent for the next few minutes, moving through the remaining photos and the documents.

Finally, she looked up at me. “No.”

“No?”

“No, my father was not involved in this cover-up. If he was there, he was there to help those animals.”

“That’s possible.”

“Possible? No, that’s what happened. He was the most loving, gentle man on the planet. He would never have signed on for anything that would hurt an animal.”

“Did he ever tell you about this?”

She inhaled sharply, then said, “That doesn’t mean he did anything wrong.”

“Fifteen of the seventeen cows they treated with their hormone died. You don’t think that’s a story your dad would have shared with you? If not as his daughter, then as