There were two Gemmas. The first Gemma knew the truth. But the second Gemma had the power to silence the first. The second Gemma could invent a story and make it so true that the first Gemma would believe it. Almost. The first Gemma always retained some awareness of what was real, but she went along with the charade. Even her thoughts were the thoughts of the second Gemma—usually. It was easier to do what the second Gemma wanted.
“I didn’t know about the freezer room when I brought Hayley here,” she cried at Tate. “I didn’t know about the dead people. I didn’t know about the rapes. I didn’t know about any of that. I just thought the farm was a big family. It seemed like the most pure thing I’d ever found. Except… it wasn’t.” The words came from deep inside the real Gemma, twisting and bitter on her tongue.
A slow, curling smile dimpled Tate’s sculpted jaw. “But when you did find out, you made a decision, didn’t you?”
She didn’t answer.
“You’re trying to block me out, even now. You’re trying to tell yourself a new story. I won’t let you do that. After you saw the cold room for the first time, you decided to join me, didn’t you, Gemma?”
Exhaling slowly, she nodded.
“It was a night of firsts. It was also the first time I tried my memory drug on you—as well as Hayley. I was successful in erasing the memory of the cold room from Hayley’s mind, but not from yours. I’d been able to take that memory from every test subject before—including Ellie, Clay, and Eoin.”
Her body grew limp at the mention of Clay’s name.
“And when I discovered that you had retained the memory, we made a deal,” he said. “You would remain with me and continue to help me, despite knowing all that you did. And you said yes. You chose to stay with me, Gemma.”
“I was terrified.”
“But you overrode your fear.”
That wasn’t true. She hadn’t overcome her fear.
What she’d done was to invent a new story. She’d made herself believe that Rodney and Hayley were behind the murders in the monstrous cold room. Because she hadn’t been ready to accept that Tate could do such a thing. Not Tate, her mentor, her saviour, the man she adored.
She’d made herself believe that she had to stay and protect the man who’d saved her.
Tate didn’t understand why she’d been able to resist his drug, but she knew why. It was because while Rodney was driving them back to Tate that night, she’d altered her memory of the cold room. Tate hadn’t been able to erase a memory that she’d altered so completely.
“I don’t know why I stayed with you,” she whispered in a broken voice. “I shouldn’t have. Please, I promise I’ll go away and I’ll never tell. I haven’t told the police anything. And I won’t, either. I’ll make myself believe that I never saw a thing.”
“I could almost trust you on this, Gemma… almost. Except you made one wrong choice, didn’t you? And that choice sealed your fate.”
“It was wrong of me. I won’t make such a stupid mistake ever again.”
“Sadly, actions are more telling than words.” His eyes grew flinty, cold. “If you hadn’t killed Rodney, things would have stayed on course. The farm would have continued to fly under the radar.”
“He was going to rape Hayley,” Gemma told him between gritted teeth.
“And that’s regrettable,” he agreed. “But it wasn’t as if he hadn’t done so before. And a murder on the highway was going to be an extremely messy affair, and you would have known that.”
“It was the heat of the moment. I won’t ever—”
“It’s too late for your promises. You’ve demonstrated that you can’t be trusted.” He sighed. “Everything has been shot to pieces. And now the damned tanker driver has woken from his coma. I would have arranged it so that he never woke if I could, but he had family that never left his side.”
She swallowed. “The driver will tell a different story to the one I told.”
“Tell me what happened. The real story. I need to know exactly what happened a week ago on that highway. If the police come back to me—and I have a pretty good idea they will—I have to be fully prepared. I need you to tell me exactly what happened the night of the accident. I haven’t heard any of it from you yet, and I need to know every last detail.”
“You’re going to kill me, anyway.” She eyed the hypodermic needle in his hand. “And you’ll kill Hayley too. I don’t have to tell you anything.”
“You owe me, Gemma. I gave you a place to stay and call home. You always knew what the price was. Complete loyalty. But you didn’t give me that.”
Her lower lip quivered. “Do it, then. But not Hayley. Don’t hurt her. You can make it so that she never remembers. And then you can send her home.”
“Oh, I fully intend to send her home. But I’ll destroy her mind to the extent that she’ll want to take her own life. I’ve been forced to do that a few times to past employees of the farm. That’s the unfortunate consequence of testing on humans. It gets messy.”
A gasp stuck tight and hard in Gemma’s throat. She hadn’t known that he could do that. “No, please. You can just make her forget returning to the farm. I’ll tell you what you want to know.”
He studied her for a moment with cold, predator eyes. “Okay. I’ll make that deal with you.”
“You promise?”
“Of course.”
She wrapped her arms around herself, trembling again.
“Are you cold, Gemma?”
She shook her head. “I can’t feel… anything.”
“Tea? It’ll help you relax.”
“I don’t want your tea. Ever again…”
“Then please begin.”
She forced herself to remember all the things she’d been shielding herself from. It was physically painful as the memories returned—like her skin being flayed from her by invisible whips.
In a voice that sounded emotionless to her ears, she began talking. “The night that it all started, Hayley saw a rape happening in one of the cabins. It was… Eoin. Rodney raped Eoin.”
“Eoin didn’t tell me that,” Tate remarked.
“He might have been… ashamed,” Gemma said. “Hayley ran to tell me. She was scared and confused. And it was obvious that seeing Eoin’s rape had jolted her memory. She recalled Rodney doing the same things to her. She begged me to run away from the farm with her. I tried to calm her, but she wouldn’t listen. She stole one of the farm’s SUVs, and she drove off.”
“Good girl.” Tate nodded. “Please… continue.”
“You know the next part of it,” Gemma said. “I went straight away to tell you that Hayley had stolen a car. You sent Rodney and me after her.”
He nodded. “Tell me everything that happened after that.”
“We found Hayley down the highway,” Gemma said. “She’d crashed the car into a tree. She was barely conscious when I pulled her out. That's how she got her concussion. Rodney pushed the wrecked car far off the road to hide it, into the bushes. He tied Hayley’s wrists and shoved her into his van. I sat beside her.”
Gemma’s heart began hammering. She’d locked these memories away and now they were flashing back into her mind all at once. “We were supposed to go straight back to the farm. But Rodney decided that he was going to teach Hayley a lesson for running away. He drove the van off the side of the highway. He opened up the door on her side, and he started pulling her out. He was going to rape her. She was tied up, defenceless, for God’s sake.”
Shaking, she could almost smell the filth and grease inside Rodney’s van. “Hayley was screaming and fully awake now. He had a knife at her throat. He was sticking his disgusting tongue in her mouth. I couldn’t… I couldn’t let him do it. I leaned across Hayley and grabbed the knife from him. Then I stuck the knife straight in his chest. Rodney’s blood went all over us.”
Gemma was completely transported back to that night. She no longer saw the white room around her. Everything went dark. “Hayley kicked at Rodney with b
oth feet, and he fell backwards. She trampled him as she ran from the car. I ran after her. Everything would have been okay if Rodney had stayed down. But he didn’t. He got up and chased us onto the road. That’s when the fuel tanker came over the peak of the hill. The driver flipped the tanker, and it skidded straight for us. It exploded into a fireball.”
Her breaths quickened, and she began hyperventilating. “Rodney grabbed me. But I got him off-balance and pushed him straight into the fire. He went up in flames. Hayley and I watched him burn, and we didn’t even try to help him. We were glad. But I knew that the explosion would bring the police, and I needed to explain Rodney’s dead body. I asked Hayley to help me drag the driver out. I untied her, and we went and pulled the driver free.”
“I see,” said Tate. “So, the driver wrestling with Rodney was just a story you made up. Please… slow down. You’re getting difficult to understand, Gemma.”
Gemma nodded, trying to still her erratic breathing. Her head felt faint. Everything was spinning. “I took Hayley back to the car with me. Before she knew what was happening, I injected her with the memory drug. Rodney had the drug kit that he always kept in his van. I used the methods that you taught me, Tate. I had to insert new memories into her mind. I needed a story to explain Rodney’s dead body and our cuts and bruises, as well as the rope marks on Hayley’s wrists. You taught me to take a real and true memory and then twist it. And so that’s what I did.”
She remembered the raw pain in her throat and eyes from the heat and smoke from the blaze. She remembered the pain inside her, knowing that she’d brought Hayley to the farm in the first place, knowing what Tate and Rodney put her through, knowing that she’d just stopped her from escaping.
“I told her that we’d only been at the farm for two weeks,” Gemma continued. “And I told her that we’d been kidnapped and locked up in a birdcage at Rodney’s house for the other two and half months. Rodney did lock us up in there once—after the first time he took us to the freezer room.”
“So, that’s what took him so damned long that night.”
“Yes. We weren’t in the cage long. But it was enough to construct a false memory in Hayley’s mind. You taught me well, Tate. And I made her remember the times he’d raped her. Those times were real, but I got her to believe that they had happened in the birdcage. After that, I knew I needed to look as if I been tied up by Rodney, too, and I made rope burns on my wrists.”
Tate eyed her with a look that almost seemed impressed. “I told you, Gemma, you’re a clever girl. A brilliant mind. You could have been the one to run this place one day. Such a shame, because after killing Mr White, that is never going to happen. Your one big mistake.”
“My one big mistake was in ever trusting you.”
“We’re running out of time. I interrupted you. What happened between then and when the police came?”
“I buried Rodney’s drug kit, because I knew the police would search the van. Then I just sat there in the van with Hayley, while the police were coming in cars and helicopters. And during the time I was waiting, I made myself believe the story that I’d just told Hayley. I made myself believe that I was the innocent and that Hayley was the one who knew everything. Because that was the only way I could live with myself.”
She raised her eyes to him. “That’s all. You know the rest.”
Tate squeezed her shoulder, sighing. “You made a tangle out of what could have been so simple, Gemma. You should have just let Rodney do as he desired. I could have then simply taken the memory away from Hayley upon her return to the farm.”
“It’s not that easy, though, is it?” Gemma cried. “Dreams and nightmares still break through. You can’t erase everything. It always leaves a trace…”
He shrugged. “My drug is getting better with every test. Hopefully, I’ll soon find a way of leaving people’s minds undamaged when I remove their memories.”
Gemma’s skin prickled with cold shivers. “I once saw you as some kind of god, Tate. Like the sun itself. I somehow forced myself to accept the bad things you were doing because I knew they were part of your experiments. You needed terrible things to happen to people, and then you’d see if you could take their memory away. I even made myself think that the freezer room was unavoidable. Sometimes your experiments made people die. Or they betrayed you and you had no choice.”
“I did what I had to do,” he insisted. “At first, I had to inject the memory drug directly into people’s brains. It sometimes didn’t go well. I refined my methods over time.” He raised the hypodermic needle.
Her throat almost closed up. “Your experiments were wrong. So wrong. As much as I loved you, I was terrified of you. Part of me always understood how wrong all of this was. But I was afraid, and I went along with it. I hate myself.”
Her mind went numb as Tate brought the needle close to her arm. “Where will you put me… after I’m dead?”
His expression turned unexpectedly gentle. “Maybe in a field, somewhere that wildflowers grow. That would be fitting, wouldn’t it? You were never a hothouse orchid. You were too fierce for that.”
She bowed her head. “Tell Hayley I’m sorry…”
Across the room, the display on one of the surveillance screens swapped to showing a car driving in through the gates.
Tate tutted in annoyance. “I told her to come at eleven. Can no one manage to follow directions?”
A camera closed in on the woman’s face as she stepped from her car and looked about with an uncertain expression.
Gemma recognised the psychologist from the hospital.
Megan.
35
Megan
A burst of heat hit Megan as she stepped from the car. Sweat instantly wet the back of her neck. Terror coiled low in her stomach.
How am I going to pull this off?
Llewellyn Farm appeared eerily empty of people, apart from the music filling the air. A long stretch of flat ground led to a huge mansion-style house. From this vantage point, the whole place looked as picture-perfect as it did online, with its green mango tree plantations.
Scanning the grounds from left to right, she then noticed a small scattering of workers harvesting fruit, some of them absently nodding along to the music that blared as fiercely as the sun.
A woman zipped towards her in a cart that resembled a golf buggy. From another direction, a young man with a walkie-talkie headed her way on foot. He stopped as the woman reached her first.
It was all innocent enough—the people who ran the farm coming to greet her. But at the same time, it seemed almost military in speed and precision. Obviously, they kept a close watch on who came in and out of the gates.
With a close-lipped smile stretching her narrow, milky face, the woman parked the buggy next to Megan’s car. Megan guessed she worked in an office here and didn’t get out in the sun much.
“I’m Sophie. Llewellyn Farm’s manager. I’m assuming you’re Megan?” Without waiting for a reply, she turned to the man with the walkie-talkie. “S’okay Freddy,” she called. “I’ll take it from here.”
The man nodded but didn’t move from his position. He remained there watching on.
Sophie extended a hand in greeting. “Hope you found us without too much trouble.” She raked back wisps of blond hair from a face that was unblemished but for some fine lines.
Megan shook her hand. “It’s quite a distance out from the main road, but apart from one wrong turn, I made it okay.” Giving a short laugh, she braced herself to tell a lie. “Look, I’m sure that everything’s fine. But the department has to follow up on the complaints it receives. You have a lot of international backpackers here, and backpackers make up a big percentage of the seasonal harvest jobs. I’m guessing the government doesn’t want any negative publicity.”
“Of course. If I could get you to come this way, I’ll get you out of this maddening sun. Mr Llewellyn will be coming to meet with you shortly.”
Megan walked beside her to a set of greenhouses
. The air inside the greenhouse that Sophie took her into was far more humid than the air outside. Megan would have almost preferred to stand in the hot sun and bake. Rows of bright orchids ran from end to end in the greenhouse, some of the orchids under separate glass housing, as if they were museum displays. One side of the greenhouse was attached to a large building. Through an open door, Megan caught a glimpse of a room filled with lab equipment and felt a cool stream of air.
A woman wearing a hairnet peeked out at Megan from the room and then closed the door quickly.
Sophie crossed and then uncrossed her arms, her brief smile seeming more of a twitch than a friendly gesture. “So, can you tell us some details about the complaints you’ve received?”
“I’m afraid I’m not able to give specific details, as they could be identifying. But as I said over the phone, it’s to do with concerns about cultlike events and teachings.”
“Crazy,” Sophie scoffed. “It’s a mango farm, for goodness sake. But we certainly don’t need nonsense like that floating about. It’s a good thing you’re here to clear things up.” She bent to pick up some pieces of broken ceramic pot from the floor. Megan detected a vague mocking tone in the last thing Sophie said, giving her the uneasy impression that Sophie wasn’t taking her seriously.
She decided to start taking down some notes and try to appear more official. Her pen was missing from her clipboard. Amid the anxiety she’d felt in the short trip with Sophie, she must have dropped it. Already, she was looking like an incompetent ninny.
“Just a sec. Dropped my pen out there. I’ll go grab it.” Megan headed for the exit.
Pieces of ceramic clattered on the floor as Sophie dashed up behind her. She grasped Megan’s shoulder. “I forgot to offer you a cold drink.”
Poison Orchids: A darkly compelling psychological thriller Page 28
