Chapter 8

Olivia rubbed her eyes. “Are we really staying here all night?” she asked, yawning and reaching for the can of Coke sitting on a stack of journals.

“All night—or until we find the answer,” I replied.

I tossed a copy of Proceedings of the Society of Marine Biologists onto a massive pile in one corner of the office and grabbed another one from the stack. I flipped quickly to the table of contents and ran a finger down the list of chapter titles.

“Flipper deformities, red vs. white herring, communication dialect found…” I trailed off. “No, no, and no. Nothing in this one about pollutants.”

Olivia and I had been holed up in the office for three hours. My parents were long since asleep, as was everyone else in the sanctuary. And for good reason—it was two in the morning. We’d snuck down after everyone went to bed.

It had to be a pollutant. Olivia and I agreed on that. We’d smelled that awful gassy smell twice—first on the day the dolphins arrived and then again when we were out on the boat. If it wasn’t a leak, it was getting into the dolphin pen some other way. We just had to find out how.

“OK, look!” I held up a copy of Updates on Environmental Toxins and Pollutants.

“Ooh, good one.” Olivia crawled over. “Ah, my leg’s asleep.” She propped herself next to me and looked over my shoulder.

“Hmm…” I stopped. “Oh my gosh. Wait. Just wait.” I flipped through the pages, tearing a couple in my hurry until I came to the article. “‘Louisiana Bayou Dumping Major Cause of Turtle Extinction.’”

Olivia looked at me like I was crazy. “Um, Elsa? We’re not worried about turtles. Remember? They live in a tank here.”

“Not the turtle part! Look! The dumping part!” I jabbed the page with my finger and read aloud: “Scientists were at first baffled by the presence of pollutants in the bayou waters as the plants nearby had been thoroughly inspected. But further investigation revealed that the polluters in question were hauling barrels to the bayou under cover of darkness and dumping the toxic chemicals into the fragile ecosystem.” I inhaled. “Did you hear that? Hauling barrels to the bayou and dumping the chemicals!”

“Oh my gosh.” Olivia was sitting straight up, her eyes wide, her hand covering her mouth. “Barrels.”

I looked at Olivia. An image formed in my mind—the same image I knew Olivia was picturing. Blue barrels lined up in rows on a loading dock. Drips of liquid around them. A worker loading them into a—

“Olivia! A white van! Remember, that first morning we met Ms. Germaine? A white van had been blocking the driveway! The dolphin tech was complaining it was in his way, remember?”

Olivia suddenly stood up, the journal in her lap fluttering to the floor. “And there was a white van the morning of the ultrasound, remember? My sister was on the phone saying something to your mom about it! It seemed like nothing then.”

“But it wasn’t.” My cheeks were burning, and my heart was beating fast. The pieces were coming together.

If we were right, CACM had been filling the barrels with some kind of pollutant and then hauling them to the cove at night to dump them. That’s why we hadn’t been able to find signs of a leak at the factory, I realized. There wasn’t one.

I jumped up. “OK, but where are they dumping this stuff? They wouldn’t do it right into the cove. It would be too risky to come into the sanctuary. They must be doing it close enough for the pollutant to get into the pens, but far enough away that they think they won’t be detected. But where is that?”

Olivia was already pulling up a map of our section of coastline on her laptop. She clicked a couple of times, zooming in. “OK, here’s us.” Her finger traced the edge of the coast where Seaside Sanctuary was located. “And here’s the dolphin cove.”

“What’s over here?” I asked, motioning to a stetch of land not far away. Olivia had lived in Charleston way longer than me, so she knew the area better.

“These are cottages on the beach,” she replied. Then she pointed to another section. “But there aren’t any cottages on the other side. It’s too close to the waterway. And the intracoastal waterway flows—”

“—right into the ocean,” I finished.

“You mean, right into the cove,” she said.

We both stared at each other. “I guess we know where to start looking.”