Replica (31 page)

GEMMA FELT CLAUSTROPHOBIC EVEN ONCE she was outside. She'd felt in that small bright box of a living room as if the ceiling were going to collapse—for a second she'd almost hoped it would. Now she knelt and plunged her head into the pool, which was shockingly cold, and came up gasping, her hair running water down onto her sweatshirt. But still she sensed a terrible pressure all around her, as if an invisible hand was trying to squeeze her into a sandwich bag. But she knew that in fact the pressure came from inside, from the weight of the truth and all that Jake had found out.

Ask and ye shall receive.

They had wanted to know why and now they did. They knew why. But now more than ever her mind reeled away from the truth, careened off it pinball-style. Instead she latched onto the ancillary mysteries, the other
questions still unanswered: What had really happened to Emily Huang? Why had she left Haven? Was she really killed so she couldn't talk to Jake's dad?

Jake had gone home with a promise to call later. She was glad. She needed a break from him, from what they had learned together. He was
implicated
. She would forever associate Jake with the marshes, with the replicas, with the terrible thing growing inside of them.

Through the lit windows of the guesthouse she could see Lyra and 72 sitting together on the sofa, or at least, sitting side by side. Each of them seemed bound up in individual space, totally discrete, totally other. She wondered whether they knew she could see them, or even cared. They were likely used to being looked at. She couldn't imagine what they'd seen, and she shivered thinking about how matter-of-factly Lyra had talked about all the children in the yellow cluster dying, as if she were talking about a field being mowed or the garbage taken out for collection.

She felt trapped. She couldn't face the replicas again. But she couldn't face April either, who appeared every two minutes at the kitchen window, cupping her face to the glass to peer outside, obviously dying to peek at the replicas in the guesthouse but doing her best to respect their privacy, at Gemma's request.

Gemma knew she'd been unfair—she'd asked for help and hadn't told April anything—but the more she
learned, the more impossible it was to explain. Gemma didn't want to be forced to say the words out loud. She thought the words might scorch her vocal cords, leave permanent damage, make blisters on her tongue. She wished in that moment she'd never come down to Florida, that she'd never heard of Haven at all. She imagined Whole Foods takeout and the big couch and her father safely away on the other side of the world. Kristina happy-zonked on her nighttime pills. April Snapchatting the funny-looking dogs she spotted in Florida. Even Chloe Goddamned DeWitt and her skinny-bitch wolf-pack friends. She would give anything to go back to caring about Chloe DeWitt.

But she couldn't. She sat down on a sagging lounge chair and began running a search for Emily J. Huang on her phone. It was a common name. She tried Emily J. Huang, nurse, and a result surfaced immediately: a four-year-old funeral announcement. The announcement was accompanied by a picture of a pretty Asian woman smiling into the camera. The service had been held at the First Episcopal Church in Palm Grove, Florida—she'd seen an exit sign for Palm Grove on the highway earlier.

Emily J. Huang recently returned from a seven-year tenure with Doctors Without Borders, where she was dispatched to remote places in the world to volunteer with underserved medical communities . . .

Emily must have made up a cover story to tell her friends and family while she was working at Haven. No wonder Nurse M's identity had never been established. Emily had been sure to keep her personal and work lives separate.

. . . and had previously served as a staff director at a charity that placed children from high-risk backgrounds in stable
environments
. . .

Gemma reread the sentence a second and then a third time. Jake had mentioned that Dr. Saperstein had founded a charity responsible for placing foster kids and orphans into homes. Could it be a coincidence? She searched Emily J. Huang and the Home Foundation and sucked in a quick breath. There were hundreds of results, many of them from newspapers or crime blogs. One of the first articles, from a Miami-based paper dated only six months before the funeral announcement, showed Emily Huang leaving a police station, her hand raised to shield her face from the cameras. Gemma took a notebook from her backpack and made notes as she was reading, hoping a pattern would emerge.

            
The state attorney's office has declined to file charges against the charity the Home Foundation, after an initial inquiry showed that a number of foster children may have gone missing under its supervision. Our research puts that
number at anywhere from twenty-five to more than two hundred over a three-year period beginning in 2001, during explosive growth that eventually resulted in the Home Foundation's expansion nationwide, and consolidation into one of the most powerful and well-endowed charities in the country. Several relatives of the children who allegedly came under the Home Foundation's care have come forward to suggest that the charity be charged with abuse, neglect, and fraud. One plaintiff has even filed a suit charging the Home Foundation with abduction.

                
“After a careful review of the cases in question, and in consideration of the thousands of children that the Home Foundation has successfully placed and monitored in homes across the nation, we don't think there's a case here to pursue at this time,” said Assistant State Attorney Charles Lanski.

                
The Home Foundation has released only a single statement, in which it referred to the accusations as “wild, bizarre, and absolutely invented.” Initially, they did not respond to a request for further statement. But later, Megan Shipman, director of publicity for the Home Foundation, followed up in an email.

                
“It's unfortunate that the accusations of a small group of very troubled individuals is calling into question the work of a twenty-year-old organization, which has placed more than two thousand children in safe and happy homes,” she
wrote. “Anyone who takes the accusations in context can see that they are no more than attempts to exploit human tragedy for financial gain.”

                
All three accusers who have come forward were, at the time of the incidents in question, heavy substance abusers. Sarah Mueller was only nineteen and a crack-cocaine addict when a woman she claims was from the Home Foundation offered her the sum of two thousand dollars for temporary custodial guardianship of her infant child, Diamond.

                
Speaking from the state-run rehabilitative halfway house where she currently lives, Mueller told the
Highland News
: “I didn't think it was for good. I thought I could have her back soon as I got clean.” But when Mueller sobered up, after a long period of bouncing between the streets, jail, and rehabilitation programs, she found that the Home Foundation showed no record at all that Diamond had ever come through their system.

                
Mueller's story has eerie parallels to that of Fatima “Tina” Aboud, who was barely out of her teens when a woman she describes as a Home Foundation “nurse” came knocking. Aboud claims she was offered three thousand dollars for her son, then two years old. Aboud, who suffers from schizophrenia, agreed, believing that if she didn't, the CIA would come for her child. Ten years later, Aboud is stabilized through medication and has
tried to locate her son, Benjamin, only to find the trail completely cold.

                
The last plaintiff to come forward is Rick Harliss, and his story is the most difficult to untangle. The
Highland News
has learned exclusively that Harliss, a sometime-handyman, was in jail after an altercation involving his then-employer, Geoffrey Ives, formerly of the pharmaceutical giant Fine & Ives.

Gemma's stomach dropped through the soles of her feet. For a second the words blurred. She blinked, trying to make them come into focus again. Still her father's name was there.

            
Harliss left his daughter in the care of his ex-wife, Aimee (now deceased). Aimee subsequently claimed their daughter, Brandy-Nicole, was kidnapped from the car while she was at the grocery store. But Harliss became suspicious when her account of the story changed, and when he noticed that she came into a large sum of cash at the same time Brandy-Nicole vanished.

                
After the
Highland News
officially broke the story of Sarah Mueller's accusations more than a year ago, Rick Harliss claims to have recognized two people from a photograph of the Home Foundation staff, including a staff nurse, Emily J. Huang, whom he claims to have seen
several times with his ex-wife.

                
Adding to the difficulty of disentangling the truth—and fueling the idea that these claims are fraudulent—is the fact that Sarah Mueller and Fatima Aboud may have known each other previously. Both women were in a state-run rehabilitation facility during the same period of time, although counselors from the program do not recall the women being friendly. . . .

Gemma stopped reading. Her head was pounding again. She couldn't make sense of any of it. Rick Harliss had once worked for her family. Why didn't she remember him? It must have been when she was young. But how did the story of those missing children connect to Haven, to the clones, to the charity, to her father?

All she knew was that it
was
connected. Jake had originally believed Haven was doing drug experimentation on orphaned children—and he was 50 percent right. But why, if Haven was also manufacturing clones?

She did some more Googling and found out most of the alleged disappearances had occurred during the
exact same three-year period
as her father's lawsuit against his former business partner. The facts, then, were these: Dr. Saperstein got control of the institute the same year Richard Haven died and was, potentially, murdered. Around the same time, her father sued for control of the company,
possibly because his business partner wanted to invest in Haven. He lost.

Meanwhile Dr. Saperstein was busy “misplacing” children through his charity, possibly stealing them for some unimaginable purpose. Then Fine & Ives swooped in and took ownership of Haven, at least financially, and the institute began to breed clones in large quantities for its own sick purposes.

Her father had said
follow the money.
She was sure she was missing something, and she was sure it had to do with money, with the flow of cash from the military to Fine & Ives to Haven.

She Googled Rick Harliss, but although he was mentioned several times in articles related to the Home Foundation, he'd done a pretty good job of avoiding the photographers. She found a Rick Harliss who was a lawyer in Tallahassee and a Rick Harliss who had his own personal training business, but she could not find a single picture of the Rick Harliss who believed his daughter, Brandy-Nicole, had been sold to the Home Foundation. Then, remembering that he'd been in jail, she added
mug shot
to the search terms. Almost immediately, she was bounced to a website unimaginatively named Mugshot.com.

For one, two, three seconds, her heart failed to beat.

He was younger in the picture, and although his eyes
were raw-red and his expression ferocious, he was handsome. She thought of his stale, coffee-breath smell, the curtained greasiness of his hair. He had aged terribly. And yet despite the differences, there was no mistaking him.

It was the guy from the gas station.
What do you know about Haven?
And she remembered now that she had had the impression of familiarity. She'd remembered him, at least vaguely, and now she knew why. He had done work for her father. Probably he'd been one of the rotating series of guys who kept the grounds, or cleaned the pool, or painted the house.

Always she came back to her father and Haven. That was the center of the mystery, the original cancer, the tumor that had metastasized into a hundred other mysteries.

“Gemma?”

Gemma looked up. She hadn't heard April come outside. Quickly, she pocketed her phone, as if April might read it from across the pool deck.

“What are you doing out here?” April frowned, shaking her bangs from her eyes.

“Nothing. Thinking. Trying not to think.” Gemma stood up. The distance between her and April suddenly felt very great.

“You promised to explain.” April's voice was all pinched, like it had been zipped up too tightly.

Gemma rubbed her forehead. “I know. I'm sorry. I'm still sorting it out myself.”

April came down off the porch. She was barefoot and already dressed for bed, in cotton shorts and an oversized T-shirt from Bubba Gump Shrimp Company. Gemma was struck in that moment by how normal she looked: tan, rested, beautiful. She and April had always talked about being co-aliens, members of a different species dropped on this planet to suffer among the humans, maybe pay penance for crimes committed in a past life on their home planet. But April wasn't an alien. April belonged.

And for a split second, Gemma hated her.

“Well?” April stopped a few feet away from Gemma, hugging herself. She wasn't smiling. “I'm listening.”

Gemma looked away, ashamed. April had helped her. April was
always
helping her. But how could she begin to describe what she had seen? How could she talk about the other-Gemma, the nightmare twin? It was like something out of a horror movie.

“Haven was using the replicas,” she said, because it seemed as good a place to start as any. “They were engineering them for a specific reason. We think Haven was infecting them with some kind of disease,” she added quickly, before she could lose her nerve.