The Butterfly Clues (10 page)

Jeremy approaches me by my locker as I’m placing my books in my bag, preparing to leave. His hair blazes in the late-afternoon light.

“Hey, Lo.” He’s wearing a soft-looking Cleveland Indians T-shirt and the same gray skinny jeans he wears every day. His bag is slung over his shoulder.

“Mm?” I turn away from him, pretend to be mining for something in the back of my locker. I keep thinking of what Keri said in the bathroom, and wondering if there’s something wrong with me for not seeing how cute I’m supposed to think Jeremy really is, for not wanting him, like a normal person would.

Stupid. Of course there’s something wrong with me. There are about a million of them.

“Did you get my notes? Either of them? I mean … I mean, I guess I know you got the second one because I was there. You know. In class and stuff.”

“Notes … ?”

He coughs. “I know we’ve never really talked all that much before—outside of class—but you, like, you really seem like you’ve got this SAT stuff down, and I thought, sometime, if, you’re ever not doing anythi—”

“I’m sorry, but I really can’t talk right now,” I interject. I can’t look him in the eye to see the disappointment crowding in. “Mom needs me at home. Now. She—she’s been kind of sick. We should talk soon, though, okay?” I force an apologetic smile. “I’m—I’m really sorry. See you tomorrow in class.”

I slam my locker shut and walk quickly toward the big exit doors near Principal Powell’s office.

“Okay. Um, see you tomorrow, then!” Jeremy calls out after me. I respond with a half wave over my left shoulder. Then, when he′s not looking, I wave twice more.

Jeremy’s nervousness makes me nervous. When his whole face goes red as he speaks to me, it gives me a sick feeling, because I understand it. I understand how every cell in his body must be burning and painful, just getting the words out.

Flynt isn’t like that at all; he’s not like me, or Jeremy. He knows how to talk to people. He has a million stories. Flynt makes my stomach hurt in a different way. Because he lied to me. Because he’s free, unburdened by things. Because he’s the most mysterious person I’ve ever known. I’ve never met anyone like him. And because he thinks I’m beautiful.

I count the tiles as I walk. Forty-nine between my locker and the back exit doors, five of them studded with gum.

For years I never had to walk home from school alone, no matter where we lived, because Oren was there. In the fall, in Minnesota, when the leaves were everywhere, he’d double back behind me and push me into the big leaf piles people made on their lawns. We’d get home and Mom would pick all the leaf-bits out of my hair and sweater while I sat on the carpet watching TV and Oren would bring me cookies to make up for pushing me.

He had a big wicker basket full of baseball hats that he’d collected since he was a little kid. He always liked baseball. He arranged them in a particular way, and he always knew if I’d gone in and touched them. And I’d go into his room sometimes when he wasn’t there, when he was in the basement with friends or listening to music in the kitchen, and toss the whole basket of them all around his room, just to rile him up.

I always knew when he had come back to his room by the roars of anger, the pounding of his feet coming after me. Dad would sit us down, cross-legged on the carpet, insisting we apologize. Mom would come, too, stand beside him, nodding. She’d say,
You two are lucky you’ve got each other. Now, hug, make up.
By dinnertime he’d have forgotten all about it, and his hats would be back in the basket, just as he liked them to be.

Now I hold my breath when I walk past his room at home. Part of me is worried I’ll breathe too hard and mess up his hats. No one’s touched them; no one’s touched anything.

We all thought he’d come back. He’d been picking up and leaving for days at a time for six months before he disappeared for good. He’d return home without a word, like this was a thing people did all the time, like Mom and Dad and I should have known our concern was not a factor in his comings and goings. And then weeks passed. And then months. We still thought he’d be back: maybe he’d left Cleveland, maybe he’d left the country, but he was somewhere, breathing. We were sure.

We were wrong.

I take Oak Street most of the way home from school, a straight shot along clean sidewalks and big, new cars. A cold mid-March breeze zips through the trees, and I reach into the pockets of my coat in search of the fuzzy blue mittens Mom knit for me three Christmases ago. My hand brushes against Sapphire’s butterfly inside my pocket; I’ve started carrying it with me when I leave the house.

I notice the neighbors’ old plastic Christmas reindeer has fallen over in their yard. And a few houses down, the Lowmans must have had their car washed today; it gleams. The winter sun is already beginning to set, casting long shadows off porches, all the houses on the block haloed in red-oranges and dark blues.

Nine ravens perch on the telephone wire stretched high across the boulevard behind my street, nine perfect black silhouettes. One reaches its wings to the sky, like it might fly off, but it doesn’t. It stays and settles back down, and the nine of them—the perfect amount, a safe, full, comforting number—huddle closer, a family of solidly knit shadows. Watching them, a warmth fills me, like it used to on Saturday mornings when I was a kid and I’d wake before anyone else to watch cartoons, wrapped in my fuzzy pale blue blanket, waiting for everyone else to wake up, too, and for the kitchen to fill with the sounds of egg yolks being whisked in bowls, the hissing and popping of bacon, and the gurgling murmur of the coffeemaker: warm, buttery, earthy smells.

As I approach my house, I notice a package on the porch—a lumpy-looking dark thing—probably something for Dad, from work. Many of the companies he helps restructure send him products through the mail, compulsory sort of thank-yous; he used to give most of the crap they’d send to Oren and me. We’d build bridges of pen caps and robots of light-up key chains and beer cozies. Everything we built is saved in some box in the basement, a box we carry with us everywhere we move, its edges sealed in duct tape years ago.

I climb the steps of my porch, preparing to scoop up the package, when I stumble backward.

Not a package.

A cat. Scrawny. Mangy. Dead.

I curl into myself in horror; I might vomit. I force my eyes back onto the animal and see the white spots around its neck and torso matted in dried brown blood, its throat spilling something sick and foul-smelling. There’s a note pinned to its neck.

Hands trembling, I rip the note off. I breathe slowly as the words swim into focus.

Now you know what curiosity did
.

Be careful, or you’ll end up like the cat
.

CHAPTER 8

I barely make it to the edge of the porch before I puke over the whitewashed wooden rail. I thud to the ground, trembling, my throat burning, then
tap tap tap, banana
and push through my front door, pull my cell phone from the pocket of my coat. Nine-one-one. I say it aloud, twice more, as I dial. Through the ringing, through the heavy seconds of waiting: nine-one-one; nine-one-one.

Click.
A man’s voice; low, throaty: “Nine-one-one. What is your emergency?”

The words sputter from my throat, choked shards. “I—someone. Someone—” I hiccup, try to make the words clean, even— “killed a cat. There’s a dead. A dead cat on my porch.”

A sigh on the other end. Buzzing. “A dead cat, Miss? And where is it that you’re located?”

“Lakewood. My porch—it’s on my porch, here. Lakewood.”

There’s a pause. “Let me get this straight. A cat
died
on your porch?
Somewhere
in Lakewood? I think this might be an issue for the humane soc—”

“No!” I shout, bubbling with a tugging, tiding anger; “A cat was killed on my porch. It didn’t die. It was
killed.
There was a note—”

The operator cuts me off. “All right, calm down, Miss. This sounds like some kind of prank to me. Are you having a conflict with anyone? An ex-boyfriend, maybe, or a current—”

I hang up.

I press
END
again. And once more. To make three. I glimpse the cat from the window and double over—almost puking, but not—before going to the kitchen and pulling out a plastic trash bag from under the sink. My mind is on an endless loop.
The cat’s out of the bag,
I think.
Look what curiosity did.
Everything beneath the sink is in complete disarray, terrible. I
tap tap tap, banana
and return to the porch with the bag and wrap it around the dead cat, grimacing as I slide its body in, gingerly, and then push the lumpy mass into a darkened corner of the yard, near a tree. I will bury it later in the backyard. My hands are shaking fiercely, stomach still turning. I
tap tap tap, banana
, go back inside, and rearrange the cleaning products underneath the sink by color and height, separating them into three groups of three and placing the additional two bottles—squat, heavy, opaque white—in a separate cabinet because they don’t fit in, and I can’t stand to see them beside the slim-necked, transparent things that do.

I’m still shaky, foggy, so I crawl upstairs to my room and move all twelve antique brass wall-clocks to the opposite wall, breathing in and out in six-second increments. I lift the first of the Roman-numeral clocks (nine in total, three regular numbered)—this one salvaged from a musty little junk shop in Baltimore—and hold it to my chest to feel our hearts beating in tandem, twin metronomes.

Six seconds in, six seconds out—no choice anymore.
Don’t mess this up
. If I mess up, even by a second, I have to start the breath cycle all over again. That’s the rule. The unbreakable rule.

Now the first Roman-numeral clock needs to be where the long red Minnesota sundial clock hangs and every part of me knows it, to the smallest atom, and I have to fix it—
now.
How did I not see it before, that I’d arranged them totally wrong? I fix it. Then I lift my Cleveland Flea mantle clock with the three birds dangling from its underside from the wall to give it a dusting-off. Three swift swipes between its mottled top ridges; back to the wall.

Six seconds in, six seconds out: I don’t mess up the breathing. I get it right. It feels good in my stomach to get something right. It feels good in my hands.

I step back and assess my work on the wall. Twelve clocks. The number spins through my head. Twelve clocks. The number starts to calm me until the dead cat vibrates once again into focus. The note seems to write itself into the air before my eyes—
Now you know what curiosity did… .
I see matted fur and blood in sick flashes, the wooden planks of the porch sodden with stain, with death.

I heard the gunshot. I bolted. Could the killer have seen me? Could he have identified me? He
must
have seen me, followed me without my knowing, seeing, hearing. Now he’s warning me. No—threatening me. I move to the window and scan the street below—whoever did this might still be around, might be watching the house, might be watching me right now.

Clouds are gathering in the sky. Maybe a storm will come and wash the cat blood away—wash everything away.

Boom.
Thunder, breaking through the rain-streaked sky. I shiver, scanning the parked cars and high trees and streetlights beginning to click on for the evening. Sapphire’s murderer could be anywhere, everywhere.

I reach for Sapphire’s butterfly inside the pocket of my coat and clutch it tightly in my fist. Something hot rises in my throat as the reality of the situation clarifies itself in peaks and jolts: I’ve got to find him before he finds me.

Because if I don’t, I’m going to be next.