When she hit a news station, she almost skipped right over it.
“—local officials confirmed the fire . . . at the Haven Institute for—”
“Come on, DJ, how about playing a song?” Pete spun away from the station just as Gemma froze, stunned. The radio skipped to a Jimmy Buffett song.
“No. Stop. Go back, please.” Gemma turned the radio back, past the crackle and hiss of silent frequencies, until she heard the newscaster’s voice tune in again.
“. . . unconfirmed rumors . . . a deliberate attack . . .”
Pete was pretending to pout. “Jimmy Buffett, Gemma. That’s, like, Florida’s national anthem. I think it’s mandatory that we hear ‘Margaritaville’ at least once a day. Otherwise we might get kicked out of the state.”
“I’m begging you. Please. This is important, okay?” She cranked the volume button, but the sound quality was awful. She had no idea where the station was broadcasting from, but it must have been closer to Barrel Key, and the voices kept patching in and out, interspersed with snippets of music from another station.
“Tom, is it true . . . actually took credit on Facebook?”
“. . . problem is . . . nobody talking . . .”
“Police say stay away until . . . situation under control . . .”
“Military presence . . .”
“Rumors of a protest at Barrel Key . . .”
But by then the interference was too great, and they were listening to some old-timey singer warbling about heartbreak. Gemma punched the radio off. She needed silence to think. There was a fire at Spruce Island—possibly an attack. But by whom? And what did it mean? Why would anyone attack a research institute? She thought of the man who’d grabbed her in the parking lot, with his coffee-stink breath and the wide frenzy of his eyes.
“Barrel Key,” Pete said slowly. For once, he wasn’t smiling or twitching or trying to make her laugh. He was just frowning, holding tight to the steering wheel with both hands. “That’s where you’re going, isn’t it?”
“That’s where you’re going to take me,” Gemma said. And maybe it was the way she said it, or the way she looked, but he finally stayed quiet after that.
They got to Barrel Key just after six o’clock. Gemma had powered down her phone hours earlier, after sending a single text to her mom—Gone to see April in Florida—just so Kristina wouldn’t be tempted to call out the police or the National Guard. Still, she knew her mom would be frantic. She had probably called Gemma’s dad by now, too, and this gave Gemma her only satisfaction: he was thousands and thousands of miles away and couldn’t punish her.
Barrel Key was one long chain of warehouses and boat shops, big metal storehouses and bait-and-tackle shacks leaning over on their foundations. The sky, she noticed, was greenish, and only when she rolled her window down and the acrid smell of burning reached her did she realize that the wind had carried ash from Spruce Island.
“Wow,” Pete said as they passed a single motel, the M in its sign burned out, buzzing the word vacancy at them like a threat. “Great vacation spot. Very, um, authentic.”
“It’s more of a working vacation,” she said, because she knew he wouldn’t drop it otherwise.
“What kind of work? You a world-class fly fisherman or something? Or trying to re-up on ammunition?” This as they were passing a lean-to advertising both farm-fresh eggs and major firearms. “Do you want to tell me what you’re really doing here?”
Gemma hesitated. “I can’t,” she said. It wasn’t a lie. She didn’t know exactly what she expected to find, only that the universe seemed to be pointing here, toward Haven. A battered sign showed the way to the marina. “Turn right here.”
She kept the window down, straining for a glimpse of Spruce Island, but the buildings kept intruding and the ocean was only visible in brief flashes. Here, at least, the town was not nice, exactly, but nicer: another motel, this one with all its letters intact; diners and bars, stores with colorful lures displayed in the windows, a T-shirt shop and a restaurant with outdoor seating. In the distance she heard a sound she thought must be the roar of waves, but as they grew closer she made out human voices. A helicopter passed overhead, then another.
The road curved and they were prevented from going any farther by a series of sawhorses in the road and cops grimly gesturing them to turn around. Beyond the roadblock was the marina, and hundreds and hundreds of people gathered there, shouting and chanting and waving homemade signs. Beyond them, the spiky masts of small sailboats bobbing up and down in the water. A column of smoke was visible here, tufting up into the sky from somewhere up the coast and smearing the sun to a strange orange color.
A cop rapped on the driver’s-side window, and Pete rolled it down. “You’re going to have to turn around,” the cop said. He was suited up in riot gear and carrying three guns that Gemma could see.
“That’s where we’re going,” Gemma said, gesturing to the angry crowd at the marina, and Pete gave her a look like, We are?
“Turn around,” the cop said. “Nothing to see here.”
“Except for the huge fireball and all the people going nutty,” Pete said. Gemma elbowed him as the cop leaned down to stare at them through the window. “But otherwise you’re right, nothing to see. Nothing at all.” A second cop was moving toward them, and Pete quickly put the car in reverse. “Have a nice day!” he shouted, even as he was backing haphazardly up the street. The two cops stood there, staring after them, until they’d turned around in the parking lot of a hardware store and started back in the direction they’d come.