She almost lost it and started to cry. But Perv was still watching her—he wasn’t actually bad-looking, with very clear skin and straight teeth and messy blond hair that looked as if he’d just had his head out the window of a moving car—so she kept it together.
“I’m okay,” she said. “I—I missed the bus. And I’m not feeling well.”
She’d said the magic words: not feeling well. Her mom’s tone instantly changed. She became brisk, businesslike, as she always was about her daughter’s health.
“I’m coming,” she said. “Where?”
Gemma explained and hung up, passing the phone back to Perv and scowling at him so he would know not to ask questions. As soon as her mom came, she would tell her everything. She wished now she’d paid more attention to the car—it was a white Chevrolet, she knew, and old, but she hadn’t caught even one digit of the license plate. Jesus. She’d always thought she would be good in a crisis: cool, ironic, detached. But her knees were shaking. She hadn’t picked up even one good detail they could tell the police, except that the guy liked McDonald’s. That narrowed it down to a bazillion people.
It took her mom fifteen minutes to get there, and Gemma spent the whole time ignoring Perv’s looks of concern, trying to keep Rufus from going after the display of beef jerky, and doing her best to recall every single detail of the man’s interaction with her. And by the time her mom pulled up—leaving the BMW door open as she jogged out of the car, still in yoga pants, scanning the parking lot for Gemma as though she expected her to be curled up in a fetal position on the ground—and then gripped both of Gemma’s shoulders and demanded to know what was wrong, what had happened, Gemma only smiled tightly.
“I got tired,” she said. She knew she probably looked like shit and wouldn’t have to fake it. “I did too much walking, I think.”
Because by then her mind, grinding slowly through its memory spool, had glitched on a few small details that in retrospect became huge, all-important: the shopping bags from Party City, which sold Halloween masks—like Frankenstein’s—year-round. The fact that he’d called her Gem.
More importantly, the last thing he’d said to her, which in memory became clarified, distilled, amplified. Not: What do you know about heaven?
But: What do you know about Haven?
Turn the page to continue reading Gemma’s story. Click here to read Chapter 4 of Lyra’s story.
FIVE
GEMMA WASN’T ACTUALLY EXPECTING TO find much of anything by Googling Haven. She thought she’d heard her parents talk about Haven before, although other than their fight of the previous week she couldn’t remember specific instances of it.
The first time she typed in the search term, she got back a random assortment of articles and web pages: a band named Haven was releasing its fourth studio album; a woman named Debbie Haven had recently been convicted of seducing one of her teenage students; a bioethicist named Richard Haven, founder of a famous research institute, had driven his car off the road in Florida the same year Gemma was born; the same Richard Haven had left a large sum of money in his will to the University of Pennsylvania, where for years he had been a professor emeritus. Nothing that pertained to her, nothing that made sense. She felt almost relieved.
But then she had the idea to type in Haven plus her last name, Ives.
Instantly, there were over a million results, all of them pertaining to the Haven Institute—Gemma quickly realized this must be the same research facility founded by Richard Haven—located on Spruce Island, somewhere off the coast of Florida. She found a PDF credited to her father’s old company, Fine & Ives Pharmaceuticals. In it, a letter to the shareholders, the board wrote of hiring Haven to perform the company’s research and development. But it was dated several years after her father had ruptured with the cofounder of the company and been ousted from the board.
She kept clicking and eventually turned up a picture of her father, standing at some kind of a gala next to a blond guy who looked like he belonged in a commercial for surf gear but who was, according to the caption, the famous Richard Haven. Next to them was a man with a dark curling beard and a forehead, sharply angled, that gave him the look of a shark: Dr. Mark Saperstein, a name that again registered very dimly with her from childhood. She remembered that her father had mentioned Saperstein the other night. I knew what Saperstein was planning. A quick Google search revealed that Saperstein had replaced Richard Haven after his death at the institute that bore his name.
She kept toggling through results, increasingly confused. If Fine & Ives hadn’t contracted Haven for its research until well after her father left, why were there so many photos of him getting chummy with Richard Haven? She found an interview with Haven himself for the Scientific Medical Association, crediting her father for his “tireless support of medical research and advances in stem-cell technology.”
She resumed her search, this time typing in Haven Institute. The official website was one of those bland templates that all research facilities seemed to share, filled with yawningly boring terminology like neurobiological resolution and cutting-edge biotech services. She found nothing listed on the website to indicate what kind of research Haven did, exactly—at least nothing she could understand. The institute, she noted, had been opened the year before she was born. Whatever her father felt about Haven now, Haven couldn’t have been the reason he’d left Fine & Ives. The timing wasn’t right.
More interesting were the websites about Haven: millions of results, half of them blogs, conspiracy websites, and speculative articles about what really went on there, what kind of research was performed, and whether any of it was legal. Some articles were straight-up sci-fi, and claimed that the island was a place where hybrid animals were being manufactured for military use, or where aliens were being studied and even trained. Other bloggers speculated that at Haven scientists performed illegal stem-cell research.