Replica (23 page)

She slipped unnoticed into the crowd.

She passed a man wearing a plastic Viking helmet that had been outfitted with different antennae and metal coils. He kept pacing in circles, gesturing to an invisible audience and muttering, and when he caught Gemma looking, he whirled on her and continued his monologue even more loudly “—and why we couldn't drink any of the water when we were stationed in Nasiriyah, fear of poison, of course some must have gone in the food supply
and that's why the doctor says holes in my brain—”

She turned quickly away. Several people wore gas masks that made them look like the bad guys in a horror film, or like enormous insects, which made it even weirder that they were standing around in jeans and beat-up Top-Siders, gazing out over the water. The protesters, she saw, were calling for Haven's shuttering.
Our Land, Our Health, Our Right,
read one sign, and another said,
Keep Your Chemicals Out of My Backyard
. But among them were signs with other, stranger messages: signs that referenced Roswell and Big Brother and zombies, and several posters screaming about the dangers of hell. One girl who couldn't have been older than twelve was holding a colorful handmade sign with bubbly letters:
And Cast Ye the Unprofitable Servant into Outer Darkness
.

Gemma picked out a sunburned middle-aged couple who looked normal enough and fought her way over to them. The man wore leather sandals and a baseball hat with the logo of a hunting lodge on it. The woman was wearing a fanny pack. Both of them were staring out toward the billowing clouds of smoke in the distance, which made it look as if a volcano had erupted mid-ocean.

“What's going on?” Gemma asked them. It was funny how disasters made friends of everyone. “Is anyone saying how the fire started?”

The man shook his head. “Nothing official. Heard
maybe a gas line blew up. Of course the island's loaded with chemicals, would have caught fast—”

His wife snorted. “It was no gas line,” she said. “We've talked to a dozen locals say they heard at least two explosions, one right after another.”

“Explosions,” Gemma repeated, shifting the backpack strap on her shoulder. Sweat had gathered under the collar of her shirt. “Like a bomb or something?”

The woman gave Gemma a pitying look. “You're not from around here, are you? People have been calling for the institute or whatever it is to be shut down for years now. I wouldn't be surprised if someone decided to take a shortcut. Of course the rumors . . .” She spread her hands.

“What kind of rumors?” Gemma pressed, although she remembered from the Haven Files a long list of all the different things supposedly manufactured at Haven—everything from incredibly contagious diseases to human organs.

“Some people think they got aliens out there on that island,” the husband said. Now Gemma understood the reference to Roswell, where an alien spaceship had supposedly crashed and then been concealed by the military. “Well, I tell you, we come up every year from Orlando to do a little paddling and bird-watching in the reserve. Great birds up here—white ibis, knots, and dowitchers on the old oyster bars. You interested in birds?” Gemma
arranged her face into what she hoped was a polite expression and nodded. He harrumphed as if he didn't believe it and went on, “I've got a pair of binoculars can spot a pine grosbeak at a distance of eight hundred yards, and I've done a little sighting of the island and never seen any glowing green men.” He kept his eyes on the fire in the distance. “But I'll tell you they have guards in mounted towers, barbed-wire fences sixteen feet high. They'll shoot you if you get too close and won't blink about it. They say they're doing medical research out there, stuff for our boys overseas, but I don't buy it. They're hiding something, that's for sure.”

Another chopper went by overhead, and Gem felt the staccato of its giant rotor all the way in her chest. It seemed obvious that no one knew what was happening or had happened out in Haven, but still she fought through the crowd, searching for an official, for someone in charge. Forcing her way through the knot of protesters, she saw a policeman arguing with a dark-haired boy with the kind of symmetrical good looks that Gemma associated with movies about superheroes. The cop was holding a professional-looking camera and appeared to be deleting pictures.

“. . . no right to confiscate it,” the boy was saying, as Gemma approached. “That's private property.”

“What did I say about taking pictures?” the cop said,
angling away and blocking the boy with a shoulder when he tried to reach for his camera. “This isn't the goddamn Grand Canyon. We've got an emergency on our hands. Show some respect.”

Gemma couldn't help but feel sorry for the boy. He looked furious. He couldn't have been much older than she was, and the camera looked expensive. “I'm not a tourist,” he said. “And I can take pictures if I want to. This is America.”

“This is a crime scene, at least until we say otherwise,” the cop said.

The boy clenched his fists. Gemma found herself momentarily frozen, watching him. For a second his eyes ticked to hers, but they swept away just as quickly. She wasn't offended. She was used to being invisible to other people, preferred it, even.

“All right.” The cop had finished with the camera. He popped open the back of the camera, removed the battery, and then returned the now-useless camera to Jake. “Now for your phone, please.”

“You can't be serious.” The boy had gone completely white. Gemma was getting angry on his behalf. Why wouldn't he have the right to take pictures if he wanted to?

The cop was obviously losing patience. He raised a finger and jabbed it right in the boy's face. “Now look here, son—”

“My name is Jake,” the boy said smoothly. “Jake Witz.”

“All right, Jake Witz. You want to make trouble, you just keep on yapping. But I'll bring you down to the station—”

“For what? Having an iPhone?”

“That mouth is gonna get you into trouble. . . .”

Gemma was too stunned to move. Jake Witz was the name of the guy who ran the Haven Files website. It had to be a coincidence—he bore no resemblance to the guy in the profile picture on the site. This guy looked like he could be a Clark Kent body double, just without the glasses.

And yet . . . When she looked closer, she thought she saw certain similarities. The line of the boy's jaw, which in the older man had been blurred. The same slightly-too-large nose, which on the boy looked strong and perfect and on the older man had just looked comical. Relatives, then? She couldn't be sure.

Finally the boy had no choice but to pass over his phone. The cop made Jake unlock the screen, and then sorted through the pictures, deleting the ones he deemed inappropriate. Jake stood there, his face hard with anger, which somehow made him even
more
attractive.

Finally the cop returned the phone and gave Jake a big thump on the back, as if they were best friends at a baseball game. “Good man,” he said. “Now don't make me
ask you again, all right? Clear on out of here. Nothing to see.”

Almost immediately, the cop swaggered away, pushing roughly past Gemma without sparing her a second glance, this time to yell at two teenage girls who were trying to record a video with their phones. Jake aimed a kick at a crushed Coca-Cola can, which skittered across the sand and gravel and landed in a patch of grass. Either he hadn't noticed Gemma or he was pretending not to have.

So she cleared her throat. “Jake? Jake Witz?”

He looked up finally and her heart stuttered. His eyes were large and dark and mournful, and reminded her of the way Rufus looked when no one was paying him any attention.

“Yeah?” he said. He sounded tired. He looked tired, too, and she wondered how long he'd been out here, watching.

“My name's Gemma Ives,” she said. She realized she hadn't exactly planned what she was going to say. She still didn't know what connection this Jake Witz had to the guy who ran the Haven Files, or whether there
was
a connection. If he recognized her last name, he gave no indication of it. “I know you. Well, I know of you. You're from the Haven Files, right?”

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.”