Replica (Replica #1)(75)

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.