The Butterfly Clues (21 page)

I need to find out why he lied.

Tap tap tap, banana.
Almost every vendor is in a state of partialpack-up by the time I enter.

“Mario. Mario. Mario,” I say aloud, clapping the syllables against my thigh, the diner bells jangling in my pocket as I do. Nine. A good sign, even though I know it’ll be hard to find him here, in this maze: fewer vendors than I’m used to, but still, hundreds, in a wayward mass of curtained off tables and booths and stands, hooked together with metal and rope, strung with starry lanterns and cords of tiny lights, the landscape even more blinding and intoxicating and scattered and impossible at night. I squeeze Sapphire’s butterfly in my pocket hard.
Help me
. I feel her fingers lock around mine for a second inside my pocket.
I’m here,
she’s saying.

I weave madly through stalls in no particular sequence or order; it makes my head spin to violate my rules. I don’t see him. I tap the syllables of his name again against my thigh—
Ma-ri-o
(break)
Ma-ri-o
(break)
Ma-ri-o
. Maybe he already packed up, went home. Maybe, like me, he only comes on days with three syllables.

I can’t hold on to this weaving—every six steps I have to stop and put first my right hand to the ground, and then my left, and then my right again. I try to pull my collar up so that it conceals my face, so that people can’t see me. Nine, nine, six. Nine nine, six until—finally—I arrive back in the spot where I first saw Mario, where he gave me Sapphire’s butterfly as payment for my reticence, where I swiped the horse-pendant necklace, where Flynt blurred past me, sending me shooting into Mario’s table in the first place.

A jagged pain arrows through me when I think of him.

I touch the ground—right, left, right—and walk up to the booth where Mario’s should have been, approaching the new man behind the table. He is loading records into milk crates, his goatee like too-stiff cotton, thick black eyeglasses, a red bowtie clipped to the top of his button-up.

I clear my throat. “Excuse me.”
Ma-ri-o, Ma-ri-o, Ma-ri-o.
No time to waste.

The new vendor looks up at me over his glasses, dumping an armload of records onto the table. “Closing up now. But I’ll still take your money, if that’s what you’re wondering.” He flashes me a warm grin as he stacks and rearranges.

“No. I’m wondering—” Mario’s sick, cherry-red hair flashes through my head for a second. “I’m trying to find this vendor who was here last Saturday—Mario.”

He thinks for a second. “You mean Marty? Big hairy guy who sells baseball bats?” He motions with his thumb to the left. “He’s about ten booths that way.”

I shake my head no, pumping my hands in my coat pockets. Nine times. Nine times. Then six. “No. Not Marty. Mario. Dyed red hair? He sells vintage stuff.”

“Hmm. No. I don’t know about anyone named Mario. But I’m only here every other week and never on Saturdays.” He flashes me a tight-lipped
sorry
, and I bow out of the booth, breathing quickly. I see the clouds part, a spine of red-gray sky. Sapphire’s butterfly grows warmer against my skin:
keep looking.

I go down the line, booth by booth, ground-touching, ninenine-six, interrupting whoever I have to—sidling between conversations, box-packing, cigarette-smoking, whatever—to ask about Mario. No one knows anything. Some people, like the record-booth guy, have never even heard of him, and the people who have say that he wasn’t a regular at the flea—if they remember him at all, it’s that he’d set up shop maybe three days total the whole year—and so they never had the chance to find out anything about him: who he was, where he lived, what he did otherwise with his time.

I’m starting to feel sick, when an older lady, packing up her eyeglasses display with intense concentration, calls to me as I pass her.

“I heard you down there,” she says. “You’re looking for Mario, right?”

“Yes.” I say. My heart skips a beat.
Ma-ri-o, Ma-ri-o, Ma-ri-o.
“I—I need to ask him about something he sold me last week. It’s important.”

“His booth was next to mine a few Saturdays ago,” she tells me, lifting a pair of studded specs, rubbing the glass with a soft yellow cloth. “Nice man … said saying something about how he was only selling here to earn some extra money, so that he could move out of The Juniper. You know, over on Euclid Street, all the way at the end? I hear nasty stuff about that place.”

My heart starts pounding faster.
The Juniper.

I grip Sapphire’s butterfly in my pocket, pulse it three times. She pulses back:
yes yes yes.

“Hope that helps.” She sighs, turning away to grab a new box. Her back to me, the
urge
wages its full-scale attack—two pairs of silver glitter-framed cat-eye glasses sing to me on the edge of the table—my fingers fill with heat and speed. But, as my hand starts to shoot forward to grab them, I pull back, jam it hard into my pocket, and squeeze the butterfly instead. She turns back to me, lifts another pair of glasses, begins to clean them.

“It does,” I say, breathless, realizing for the first time, maybe ever, I did it. I resisted the
urge
. “A lot.”

The evening darkens around me as I head to Euclid Street. I remember where it is because I’d passed it, running from Sapphire’s house; only three blocks from Lourraine Street. I’m not worried right now about what I’ll do when I find Mario.
Just get there,
Sapphire whispers through me.
Just keep going.

I put Oren beside me, too, as I run. I give him the
let’s race
eye. And I go, torpedoing through streets that seem to narrow into each other, so thin.

Power lines zigzag above me—hanging dangerously low and giving off little sparks every so often that have, at some point, probably set most of the trees on fire—their bark now charred and chapped and raw. The houses spring up in seemingly random tufts, some leaning into each other for lack of alternative support, big holes gnawed through the brick and concrete.

By the time I angle a sharp right turn onto Euclid Street, Oren has disappeared, vanished behind me; I’m alone again.

“I won,” I pant out, into the freezing air, slowing to a walk. My lungs are burning and tears prick up at the corners of my eyes.

The cracks in the pavement are getting wider and the wind is howling wilder as I walk, my heart banging around in my chest. I pause at a deep hole in the street to let an enclave of rats complete their apparent exodus to a different alleyway. Looking up, I see it: The Juniper. Number 222 Euclid Street, next to a pillared highway bridge at the end of the street.

Two
—
terrible. A split-apart ghost of a number.

The Juniper is a squat, run-down building, eerily isolated but with the appearance of being almost squeezed to the point of suffocation. It has sliced-up, painted-chipped wood for a face and half-boarded-up windows for eyes.

My blood goes cold; I tap:
Ma-ri-o, Ma-ri-o, Ma-ri-o, Ma-ri-o, Ma-ri-o, Ma-ri-o.

I practice what I’ll say in my head:
Tell me the
truth
or I’m calling the cops this time.

The sky is steel-wool gray as I climb the stairs, legs like hot lead, diner bells jangling with each ascending step and the butterfly biting jaggedly into my fist. I consider my obstacles: no working streetlights, a murderer inside, no one around but rats to hear me cry for help.
Tap tap tap, banana.

The door clicks open. Easy. It wasn’t even locked. Of course: the lock is broken.

There’s a directory inside. Tenant’s names, listed by first initial and surname. I don’t know his last name.

Two different tenants whose first names start with
M
.

M. Vecchio; 103

M. Egorin; 212

Tap tap tap, banana.
I walk through the open entranceway, beneath the sagging plaster in the ceiling, beige carpeting rife with stains, walls darkened by deep gashes and holes. Everything reeks of cigarettes, of the sweet, dull, stale tongue of liquor.

My body floats, underwater again, to the first door. I stare at it. Everything feels wrong; bad; I should leave.

But my body is starting to twitch. I need in, need to know. The crazy feeling is blooming, the storm-type thing in my torso, climbing into my throat and down my arms and legs and into my eyes, even. If I don’t knock on this door I’ll hear Oren in my dreams for weeks, demanding,
Why why why. Why didn’t you try, Lo? Why didn’t you just do something for once, something important?

Even when he doesn’t say it—when it’s just his face, staring at me from some dark, distant place—I know it’s what he means. Why didn’t I
do
something?

Why do I let things slip away?

I knock on the door. Nothing happens. No answer. I knock again.

Seconds and seconds and bleeding seconds of the creeping, silent stuff.

I’m turning away from the door, ready to try the next one—

M. Egorin; 212—when I hear something like feet, scuffling quickly along a splintered floor. The knots in my stomach pull tighter. He’s in there. I just know it.

Things are fluttering up into my mouth—butterflies—stretching their wings between my cheeks, teeth-tickling, pressing against my lips. I open my mouth to let them out, but nothing comes.

I turn back and knock again. No answer, but, still: the feet, scratching, scraping. If I don’t do this, something bad will happen, anyway—to my family, to Flynt, to someone I care about. If I don’t put my hand on the doorknob in six—no, in twelve seconds—it’ll happen. Something so awful I can’t even imagine it yet. I count to twelve and my hand shoots to the doorknob and I turn it.

It opens.

Tap tap tap, banana
. I step inside to inky blackness, a wall of thick, cold air. The darkness of this place wraps straitjacket tight; it’s the sensation of having stumbled directly into a coffin.

An invisible avalanche of mud, kicked down from the living world above, is rising, filling the room, rising choke-high. I’m struggling to breathe. I can’t find the light. I reach my hands out and walk zombie-like, slow, until I find the wall, run my fingers along the drywall and insulation.

The earth’s still rising around me, but it’s just the blackness, a fist gripping tighter and tighter. I really might die here. In the dark, with no one, like Sapphire. They’d museum my room, judge it. I’d be the freak who stole things, who tapped and counted, who couldn’t walk in a straight path to her bed.
Tap tap tap, banana
.

The wall is an endless, pocked valley.

This is what death is like, right here.

I feel something.

The light switch on the wall.

Something against my leg.

I’m screaming, huge, as the lights click on.

A black cat curls its tail around me, claws at the rip in my tights. Relief almost doubles me over. Just a cat. A cat, scratching around the empty apartment. I kneel, grateful, take its face into my hands.

“You’re all wet, kitty.” I remove my hands slowly, look down at them. They are coated in red. Blood. They’re covered in blood.

I stand up dizzily, stomach heaving, take two stumbling steps forward. There, in the center of the room, I finally find Mario: wormy mass of his intestines pouring onto the linoleum floor; wings of browning blood pooled slimy and spread around him, eyes open wide, terrified. Mouth half open. Trying to breathe. A weak, barely audible sucking sound. Throat—spilling. Three more cats circle around him; skeletal, hungry.

Pipes exposed. Cut. Lacerated.
Oh God.

Like the cat. Like the cat.
Now you know what curiosity did.

But Mario isn’t dead. Yet.

I turn away. My head spins.

I don’t know how I get outside, but, suddenly, I am—shaking, choking. I fall into the cold wet grass and dirt and dark, door swinging closed behind me. The world is swinging, loose and wild.

Moon huge. Breath heavy.

CHAPTER 18

I stare at my hands. They’re shaking, red-palmed. I collapse onto my knees, rubbing them into the grass and dirt. Full of death—full of blood—
his
blood. I need them clean.

I need help.

Somehow, I manage to dial 911. Somehow, I speak the address, speak the facts: “There’s a man… . He’s dying. Please. Come.” They tell me they’re on their way.

I hang up the phone. No noise. Stillness all around me. A few minutes later, two pairs of headlights wind through the dark toward me. The cops. An ambulance.

My breath comes in uneven hiccups. Two officers slam their car doors shut, an insect-like buzz coming through their walkietalkies. I struggle to stand, but it’s like I’m sinking—unsure right now where my body ends and the muddled ground begins.

The insects buzz: “Ten-four. Possible homicide at the corner of Euclid. No. We got a bus already.” A swathe of static.

Two EMTs leap from an ambulance, carrying a stretcher; one of them is a woman with very, very short hair and the other is a man wearing a dark blue jacket and carrying what looks like a defibrillator and some other equipment. They run across the dying lawn to the run-down building, push inside.