He frowned. “The website was my dad’s thing,” he said. “I have nothing to do with it.” He started to turn away.
“You must have something to do with it,” Gemma said. The words leapt out of her mouth before she could stop them. Slowly he turned back to face her.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
Gemma licked her lips. “You’re here, aren’t you?” she said. “We’re about as close as we can get to Haven. You’re taking pictures. You must be interested, at least a little.”
He didn’t agree. But he didn’t deny it, either. He just stood there, watching her. Gemma couldn’t tell whether he found her amusing or irritating. His face was too perfect. It was unreadable. Just being around him made her feel like she was fumbling her way through a restaurant that was far too fancy for her. She found if she avoided looking directly in his eyes, and instead focused her attention on his nose or eyebrows or cheekbones, she could at least think.
“Look,” she said. “I came all the way from North Carolina. My dad was involved with Haven somehow, or at least people think he was involved. He’s not scared of anything, but he’s scared of that. I want to know why. I have to know what they do at Haven. I have to know why it matters to him.” And to me, she added silently.
For a long time, Jake said nothing. Then, just for a second, a smile went fast across his face. “Not by a long shot,” he said, so quietly that Gemma wasn’t sure he meant for her to hear. He started to turn around again, and Gemma’s heart sank.
“What did you say?” She was sure, now, that fate had led her here, to Jake Witz. Sure that no matter what he claimed, he knew the truth about Haven.
“You said we were as close as we could get to Haven. But we’re not. Not even close.” He inclined his head and Gemma recognized the gesture for what it was: an invitation. He wanted her to follow him. This time, his smile was real, and long, and nearly blinded her. “Come on, Gemma Ives. I’ve been in the sun all day. I could do with a waffle.”
Jake explained that there were two ways out to Haven. One was to take a launch from Barrel Key and circle around to the far side of the island, where the coast dissolved into open ocean, staying clear of the marshes. This was the way the passenger boats ferried employees back and forth, and the way that freight was moved. No boat of any size could navigate the marshes.
But there was another way: the Wahlee River, which passed the tiny fishing village of Wahlee and fanned out into the marshes—miles of winding, narrow channels and half-submerged islands that reached nearly all the way to Haven’s northern coast.
“How do you know all this?” Gemma asked. They’d found a diner tucked off the main drag, empty except for a mom and her toddler and two older men in hunting vests huddled over coffee, with faces so chewed up by wind and weather it looked like their skin was in the process of dissolving. Although from here the ocean was invisible, there was still a rubber-stink smell in the air, and they could hear the occasional threshing of helicopters overhead.
Jake lined up four containers of half-and-half and emptied them one by one into his coffee. “I’ve lived in Little Waller my whole life,” he said. “That’s forty miles from here. My dad was big into fishing, camping, that kind of thing. We used to camp on the Wahlee. Spruce Island used to be owned by some timber company but Haven bought them out to build the institute. I remember they were still doing construction on some of the buildings when I was a kid.” He shrugged. “Maybe that’s when his obsession started. I never got the chance to ask.”
Gemma swallowed. “Is he . . . ?”
“Dead,” Jake said matter-of-factly, without looking at her. He stirred his coffee with a spoon but didn’t drink. “Died four years ago, when I was fourteen. Drowned in the marshes. That’s what they said, anyway.”
Gemma felt suddenly cold. “What do you mean?”
Jake just shook his head. He leaned forward on his elbows, staring out the window, and was quiet for a bit. A small TV mounted above the coffeepot was tuned to the news and kept scanning across the marina they’d just left behind. The waitress, a woman with hair shellacked into a bun, was parked in front of the TV with her arms crossed.
“I never really understood my dad,” Jake said. His voice was rough, as if it were sliding over gravel. “He wasn’t like the other dads. He worked at one of the plants cleaning out fish guts, but he carried a business card everywhere like he was the president of the United States or something, never left the house without a blazer, no matter what else he was wearing, Bermuda shorts or a bathing suit. He was always talking about his theories. He talked so goddamn much. He used to joke that’s why my mom left, because she couldn’t stand the talk. But I don’t know. He might’ve been right. As a kid I just wanted him to shut up sometimes, you know?” He leaned back, meeting Gemma’s eyes again, and she was startled by their darkness, their intensity. She couldn’t help thinking that Jake and Pete were complete opposites: Pete walked like he was jumping, Jake as if the gravity were double for him what it was for anyone else. Pete was all lightness, Jake all weight. “I was ashamed of him, you know? Even as a kid, I was ashamed. Does that make me a bad person?”
“No,” Gemma whispered.
He smiled as if he didn’t believe her. He was neatening his empty plate, lining up his silverware with the table, his cup and saucer with the plate. He was the neatest eater Gemma had ever seen. She was embarrassed to see a ketchup blob and some crumbs by her elbow, and quickly wiped them up when he wasn’t looking.
“My dad liked to say he missed his calling as a journalist. He always saw cover-ups, conspiracies, that kind of thing. JFK was killed because he was about to do a public memorandum on sentient life on other planets. Chicken pox was actually a biological agent released from a government lab. But Haven. Haven was his white whale.” Jake pressed his hands flat against the table, hard, as if he could squeeze the memory of his father out through his palms. Even his fingers were perfect. “He used to take me with him on fishing trips out on the marshes. Or at least, I thought they were fishing trips, at first.”
“Reconnaissance,” Gemma said.
Jake nodded. “Being on the marshes is like being inside a maze. Red maple and cordgrass, needle rush, palmetto—it grows ten, twelve feet high and swallows up the horizon. My dad had friends who’d gotten lost for hours, even days out there, floating around trying to lick water from plant leaves and eating grubs for dinner and there they were, not a half mile from camp. Once we got really close, within shouting distance of the island. Well, all of a sudden there must have been eight, ten guards with guns, shouting for us to turn around and head back. My dad was furious. I was just a kid, you know. They acted like they were about to blow our heads off. They probably would have. They’ve fired on people before, civilians. I know a fisherman from town, says he almost got a hand blown off. Says he thinks it must have been a sniper to get him from that distance. Of course they’re all from the military.” He shook his head, smiling faintly. “In all the years I’ve lived down here, I know of only one person who made it onto the island—some kid snuck under a bad bit of fence in the middle of the night. Got chucked out just as quickly.”
Gemma was having trouble following everything that Jake was saying, but she understood the main points: crazy-tight security, no one allowed to talk. “What about the people who work out there?” she asked. “The guards and the staff? Someone must be going on and off the island.”
Jake nodded. “Freight goes in and out, sure, and trash gets collected on Sundays. But no one goes past the gate. The staff goes out on launches from town. Some of them live there and come back to the mainland on leave. Some of them commute. But they won’t talk. They won’t say a word about what goes on there. Like they’re all scared.” He took a breath. “Everyone except for Nurse M.”
“Nurse M?” Gemma repeated. “Who’s Nurse M?”
“I wish I knew.” This time, Jake’s smile was crooked, as if he was too tired to make it line up. “Before he died, my dad sai
d he was working some big angle. He said he was going to blow the lid off the whole operation. That’s how he talked, you know. Like we were all cast members of some Hollywood spy movie.” A look of pain seized him momentarily. “He told me he’d found a woman, Nurse M, who’d agreed to talk to him. She wanted everyone to know the truth. But the day before they were supposed to meet up, she died. Killed herself, allegedly.” He straightened his fork and knife again, avoiding Gemma’s eyes.
Although it was warm in the diner, Gemma felt as if a cold tongue had just licked the back of her neck. “But you don’t believe that,” she said slowly, watching him. He shrugged. “You think she was . . . murdered? So she wouldn’t be able to talk?”
Now he picked at the surface of the table with a thumbnail. “I don’t know. But it looks strange, doesn’t it?” He shook his head. “My dad left notes. Tons and tons of notes about Haven, some of them nonsensical, some of them just irrelevant. I never found her real name. He was trying to protect her, I think. But he failed.”
Gemma felt suddenly nauseous. Her father was wrapped up in this. Her family was wrapped up in it. “You said they told you your father drowned. You don’t believe it.” She was afraid to ask. But she had to know.
He looked down at his lap. “After that time we almost got shot, my dad stopped taking me with him when he went out on the marshes. He was scared. But he was getting closer, too. I know that now. He died only two months after Nurse M was found hanging. That’s no coincidence.” A muscle in his jaw twitched. “I still remember the smell of that morning, like this kind of aftershave one of the cops was wearing. Isn’t that crazy? I can’t remember his face, but I remember his goddamn aftershave.” He laughed softly. She had the urge to reach out and take his hand, but of course, she didn’t. “I was fourteen. They told me he’d been fishing when a storm blew in. Said he must have flipped his kayak, got turned around.”
“And what do you think?” Gemma said.
He looked up. His eyes were like twin holes. There was so much pain at the bottom of them, Gemma wanted to look away, but couldn’t. “My dad was a lot of things,” he said softly. “But he wasn’t an idiot. He could navigate those marshes blindfolded. He was happier on the water than anywhere else. He said it was the only place he belonged, you know?” He looked away again. Gemma wondered what it would be like to lose a parent so young, and found she couldn’t imagine it. Would she be unhappy if her father died? She had always fantasized about simply deleting him from her life, pressing backspace and watching him vanish. But the truth, of course, was more complicated than that.
“What do you think really happened?” she asked.
He sighed. “I think he made it,” he said. “I think he got onto the island. And then I think he was caught. They would have made it look like an accident.”
Gemma felt as if there were a spider caught in her throat, trying to claw its way up her windpipe. She didn’t want to believe any of it.
But she did.
“Do you know what they do at Haven?” Gemma asked. It was the question she’d come to Florida to answer—the only question that mattered.
“No,” Jake answered bluntly, and Gemma’s heart fell. “But I have some idea.”
She waited, almost afraid to breathe. Jake looked around the diner as though trying to judge whether they were safe. No one was paying them any attention. Still, he called out to the waitress. “Excuse me? Would you mind turning up the volume?” he said. She barely glanced at him before punching up the volume on the remote.
A bug-eyed woman behind a news desk was staring earnestly into the camera, and for a moment Gemma latched on to her voice. “. . . Dr. Mark Saperstein, who is listed as the current director of the Haven Institute, cannot be reached for comment. It is unknown whether he too was on the island when the explosion . . .”
Jake leaned forward and cleared his throat. “Human experimentation.”
“What?” Gemma looked away from the TV, which was again showing images of the coastline, and the sun setting behind a veil of smoke.
Jake shoved his hand through his hair. “Human experimentation. I know it sounds crazy,” he added, before Gemma could say it. “And I’m not talking about your usual drug trials, either. I’m talking illegal experimentation. Weapons development. Chemical trials. That’s why all the security, and why they’re so far out of the way. No oversight.”
Gemma frowned. Every medication or treatment that went to market had to go through human clinical trials. Gemma’s dad was always railing against the medical ethics board’s shortsightedness and how difficult it was to drum up volunteers for certain treatments. He was convinced that thousands of people died every year because the drugs that could have saved them were still being reviewed for safety by the FDA or hadn’t been approved yet for human trial. Could Haven be a place designed so researchers could skirt the normal rules, and do their work with no oversight? She could understand, if so, why her father might have refused to pour money into Haven, and might have left Fine & Ives before his name could be associated with the deal. There had never been a bigger fan of rule following than Geoffrey Ives.
Still, the whole thing was pretty far-fetched. And it wouldn’t explain why Gemma’s father was so afraid. If he really had refused to participate, if he’d left his own company just to avoid the association with Haven, he would be praised as a hero.
“Where do they get the volunteers?” she asked. Her coffee was cold by now, but it was comforting to hold the mug between her palms.
Jake bit his lip, looking at her sideways. “That’s the point,” he says. “I don’t think they’re volunteers.”
Gemma stared at him. “What do you mean?”
“They’re not getting volunteers—not for these experiments. They’re forcing people to participate.”
“But . . . how?” Gemma asked. The french toast she’d eaten seemed to be sticking in her throat. “They can’t just—I don’t know—kidnap people.”
“Why not?” Jake leaned forward. “Look, Gemma. This was my dad’s work. This was his life. However nuts it sounds, I think he was onto something. Fine and Ives has military contracts, money coming directly from the top. Half of Fine and Ives’s budget comes from military contracts. This is the government we’re taking about.”
Gemma thought of her father and his old company, and her stomach squirmed. She remembered Christmas parties as a kid at the Carolina Inn, the ceiling draped in tinsel and plastic snowflakes, and everyone standing to applaud her father as he entered, clutching Gemma’s hand. She remembered visiting the White House with her dad on a trip to DC, and how he shook the president’s hand, and Gemma and her mother got to go downstairs to play ninepins in the White House bowling alley. And men suited up in crisp uniforms pinned with shiny medals going in and out of her father’s office, smiling at her, hefting her into the air, tossing and catching her with big muscled arms.
Jake leaned forward, lowering his voice. “You’ve heard of Dr. Saperstein?” Gemma nodded. She remembered reading that Dr. Saperstein had taken control of Haven after Richard Haven had died in a car accident—the very same year she was born. The coincidence now seemed ominous. “About fifteen years ago, Saperstein weaseled his way onto the board of a nonprofit called the Home Foundation up in Philadelphia. It still exists today,” he added when Gemma shook her head to show she hadn’t heard of it. “He spent a few years growing its operations, expanding the volunteer forces, crowing about it in the media. Anyway, my dad dug up all the details. The Home Foundation places kids in foster care. These are the worst cases, children who’ve bounced around for years, or got dumped in front of the fire station or the hospital. It was the perfect setup. Kids get shuffled and reshuffled, moved around, drop out of the system, run away, disappear. Nobody’s going to look too hard for them, right?”
Gemma felt now as if her thoughts were all gummed up and sticky. Maple Syrup Brain. “I don’t get it,” she said. “What are you saying? You can’t mean—” She took a deep breath. “
They’re not doing experiments on kids?”
“They’re only doing experiments on kids,” Jake said gently—almost apologetically, Gemma thought. “I think Saperstein stole them. He stole them and brought them to Haven. That’s why all the security. It’s not just to keep us out, you know. Not by a long shot. It’s to keep them in.”
Gemma felt dizzy, even though she hadn’t moved. It was too terrible. She didn’t want to believe it. She wouldn’t believe it. “There’s no proof,” she said. Her voice sounded tinny and far away, as if she was hearing it through a pipe.
Jake turned to look out the window. The smoke was still smudging the horizon, turning the setting sun to a smoldering orange. He said something so quietly Gemma nearly missed it.
Nearly.
Suddenly her heart was beating so hard, it felt as if it might burst through her chest.
“What?” she said. “What did you just say?”
He sighed. This time when he looked at her, she was afraid.
“I saw them,” he repeated.
“How?” Gemma felt like she was choking.
“Remember that boy I told you about, the one who made it onto Haven through the fence?” Jake half smiled. “I was the boy.”
Turn the page to continue reading Gemma’s story. Click here to read Chapter 7 of Lyra’s story.
EIGHT
THE TWO BASS MOTEL WAS just outside of town—a long, low, shingle-sided building with only a single car in the parking lot. When Gemma requested a room, the ancient owner knocked over her tea in surprise, as if she’d never before heard the words. But the room was clean, although slightly musty-smelling, and decorated, predictably, with lots of fish: an itchy coverlet woven with images of leaping salmon, a framed picture of fly-fishing hooks above the TV, a plastic bass mounted on the wall in the bathroom. Gemma hoped it wasn’t the singing kind.
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