The Butterfly Clues (22 page)

A female officer starts scouring the grounds, aiming her flashlight beam into the dark. A fourth officer—tall and thin, pointy-chin, bird-beak nose—extends a hand to help me up. “Ms. Marin?”

I nod, facing him, six breaths in, six breaths out
.
Can’t stop seeing Mario’s dying body. His eyes wide open, corneas rolled back, every part of him shivering its life away. Six breaths in, six breaths out.

“I’m Officer Flack. And that’s my partner, Officer Menken.” Officer Menken—pug-nosed, button-eyed, a woman teetering on the verge of fatness—looks briefly up and then returns to her notepad to scrawl something. “So,” he continues, eyeing me carefully, “you called 911, right? Do you live in the neighborhood?”

“No,” I answer with difficulty—my throat feels full of choking thickness. “Just visiting.” I repeat under my breath, “Just visiting. Just visiting.”

“What was that?”

“Nothing. It was nothing.” One more time, too soft to hear: “Nothing.” My face is burning. I tap: nine, nine, six on the right leg; nine, nine, six on the left; nine, nine, six on the right again.

He looks confused. “So, how did you end up over here? Is the man inside a friend of yours? Relative?”

“No, not really,” I say. “I—I bought something from him at the flea market a couple of weeks ago, and I wanted to see if he had anything else like it. I was already in the neighborhood, on my way to the bus, so I thought I’d—” I hiccup twice.
Bad.
Blood. Stomach turning. My head feels like it is being squeezed between two dark planes. I don’t even know if I am making make sense “I went inside to—to see, and the door was, was open—”

Officer Menken comes to stand beside Officer Flack. “Reynolds radioed for backup. Davis and Frank will be here in under five.” She eyes me warily, still scribbling things into her notepad.

“What bus?” she asks me abruptly.

“Bus?”

“Yes. Bus line. You said you were on your way to the bus.” Her voice is curt. It makes my stomach hurt even more, the edge of this voice. Like a paper cut.

“The ninety-six.” I answer—the bus where onion-sack girl led me, the day Sapphire was killed in the daisy-yellow house.

Bullet.
Glass everywhere, spidery, sharp.

It wasn’t him. It wasn’t him.

“Hmm,” Menken says, disbelief curling from her voice like steam. She scribbles more information into her pad. “And what were you doing in the neighborhood in the first place, Ms. Marin, before you decided it would be a good idea to stop here for a visit?”

I dig my nails into my palms.
Don’t wince. Don’t scream.
“I was visiting my friend”—I have to stop myself from saying Sapphire—“Flynt.” The pain arrows through me again, just saying his name. “And I passed by here on the way back to the bus. I live in Lakewood.” The pain in my palms pierces through me.

“You shouldn’t be walking around here,” says Flack sternly. “This area is dangerous. You’re a young woman, alone. You’re a walking target.” He shoots me a disappointed-father look. “Still in school, I hope?”

“I’m a junior, at George Washington Carver Senior High.” The words sound funny leaving my mouth. Like they’re not mine. My eyes move to a piece of lint on Flack’s right breast pocket. It taunts, pierces every cell in my body—it’s off-kilter—demands to be removed, so the jacket will be clean again. Better.

My right hand shoots forward to capture the lint but before I reach it, Flack’s got a grip on my hand and I can’t. Can’t reach it. Frustration swells in my chest, in my hands; I let out a cry, begin to shake. The lint is still there. It needs to be removed.

“Whoa. Whoa,” he says softly, slowly releasing his grip of my hand, placing it back by my side. He tries to meet my eye; I focus on the laces on my shoes: six
X
s. They relax me a little. “I know you’ve just been through a trauma, but I need you to try and stay calm for me, okay?”

“I just—I needed to fix it,” I try to explain. “I couldn’t—it didn’t belong there—I couldn’t not fix it.”

He gives a strained little chuckle, pulls the bit of lint off his jacket himself and holds it up as though it’s a gun he’s planning on dropping, as though he’s trying to prove it won’t hurt me. When he releases it, it spins through the air, falling into darkness. “Let’s everybody stay calm, okay? No quick movements.”

“And keep your hands where we can see them,” Menken says. She cocks her head a bit, narrows her eyes. “Funny that you’d end up all the way down here, by the train tracks. Not the first place
I
would look if I was trying to find the bus.”

“I got lost,” I repeat. I’m starting to shake again now as I pull at the frayed bits of my own jacket. “I didn’t know where I was going.”

Just then, the door to Mario’s building whooshes open; two EMTs walk slowly down the steps, across the lawn to the ambulance. The stretcher is still between them, heavier this time. Heavy with a body. Covered in a white sheet. The blood rushes from my head straight down to my feet. Everything feels unreal.

Flack puts one arm on my back and begins shepherding me toward one of the police cars. “I’ll get a car to drive you home. Your parents are probably worried sick; I’m going to take a wild guess that you missed dinner two hours ago and never called. Trust me,” he says gently, “I’ve got two kids around your age—I’d ground them for a year if I found out they were out here, in this part of the city, alone.”

I almost tell him. I almost confess:
No one’s looking for me
. “Yeah, okay,” I whisper instead, balling my hands into my coat. I look back over my shoulder, to where Menken is standing, tapping her scuff-less black boots in the tall, cold grass. I look up at her; she’s gritting her teeth, staring me down.

“Oh, and”—he moves his hands off of my back, reaches into the pocket of his starchy-white uniform shirt and hands me a small white card:
Lieutenant Leif M. Flack: Cleveland PD
—“make sure you get in touch if you think of anything else, anything you might have forgotten. Anything and everything helps. And give me your John Hancock, will you? Name and a phone number should do it.” He extends his notepad out to me, shrugging his shoulders up to his ears, zipping his coat up a little higher. “Cold out here tonight.”

Penelope Marin,
I write. I grit my teeth, but I can’t stop from writing it again.
Penelope Marin.
And again.
Penelope Marin.

“Just once should do it,” he says, sounding wary now.

I bite the tip of my tongue three times and manage to write my phone number only once.

More cops have arrived, now, and everything is red and white spinning. I close my eyes. My head hurts.

“Hey, Flack!” That’s Menken, calling to him from the porch. “Come over here for a second, will you?”

“Hold tight, okay? I’m going to get an officer to take you home. Just give me a second.” Flack jogs over to Menken, and both of them disappear inside. As soon as the door is closed I
tap tap tap tap tap tap
, not waiting for my promised ride—can’t wait—and start walking quickly away in the other direction, burying my face into my coat, a new hopelessness jogging around my chest.

The bouncer couldn’t have killed Mario, obviously. Mario knew something, and someone was after him to make sure he didn’t speak. He had a
reason
to lie to me—he knew something he wasn’t supposed to know or he had something he wasn’t supposed to have. No way it was coincidence. Mario was wrapped up in this whole thing somehow, just like the bouncer was wrapped up in it, and now they’re both out of the picture.

I’m wrapped up in it, too.

I zip my coat all the way to my chin, pull my cell phone out of my pocket: 11:30 p.m.

No missed calls—Mom and Dad haven’t even realized that I’m gone.

Back in my room, I move my Limoges porcelain boxes up one shelf, arranging them in new groups of three, evenly lined, one inch between each. Then the paperweights—all glass, tiny universes frozen inside, planets the size of fingernails—all need to move to the opposite wall. Six on one shelf, six on the other. Directly above or beneath the others, respectively. Which means the copper daisies need to move from the left of my desk to my right and the bejeweled turtle combs to the left and my state-embroidered pennants (still missing: Delaware, Nevada, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota, West Virginia) three inches down the wall and two to the right.

No. Everything’s still off somehow. Tilted. Asymmetrical.

I’m so tired I can hardly stay on my feet. I stretch out—just for a minute—across three silk and pearl peacock cushions on the floor, and the ground starts to take me between all the fistfuls of sixes and nines and twelves, bordering each other, never touching, the wall clocks ticking together in a steady pulse: four thirty

A.M.
Just a minute—
I decide, letting my eyes close—
and then I’ll figure it out. Then I’ll make it right.

CHAPTER 19

Our old basement in Charles Village, in Baltimore: Oren, Sapphire, Mario, and I are sprawled out on our ancient yellowand-green tweed pull-out couch, watching TV. Sapphire gets on top of Mario, and they start rocking back and forth. Oren leans over to whisper into my ear, a gibberish language I don’t understand, and when he pulls away, we’re all lying on the carpet, which is now thick with blood, our heads pressed together in the middle. Mario, Sapphire, and Oren float up to the ceiling; Oren says,
Get up here, Lo.
Oren says,
Hurry, we’re going to lift away soon.
But I’m paralyzed, I can’t reach him; they float away, they’re gone.

I wake up gasping, my phone buzzing violently on my night-stand. I grab it. My voice comes out shaky: “Hello? Flynt?”

There’s a pulse in the background, a steady, pumping beat. “Uh. No. It’s Howard—the manager at Tens. I’m looking for Juliet?” A tinkling of glasses, a woman’s voice shouting from a distance: “So, should I just get up there
with
her, then?”

I shoot up in bed, smooth down my hair—
Tens—
Mustache: “Yes. This is Juliet. Hi. Hello.”

“Hi, Juliet. I’ve passed your application around to some of the other managers. There’s an amateur night tonight; if you’d like to come by, we can see about an audition. That work for you?”

“Yes,” I answer immediately. I had completely forgotten about the application, and the questions I didn’t have time to ask.

“Good. Just make sure you bring a non-see-through thong, high heels, and a dress to dance in, okay?”

“Okay.”

“Bye now.”

Click.

I sit on my feet on my bed for another minute, staring at the time on my phone. 11:45 a.m. I’ve missed the first five periods already. No point in going to school now. A mixture of terror and excitement courses through me. I can’t wait until tonight. I need answers now.

Now that Mario and the bouncer are out of the question, I realize I
have
to find Bird. Someone must have set up Vinnie to take the fall for the murderer, and someone killed Mario to keep him from speaking.

Mario, Sapphire, the bouncer. They were all linked together somehow—by something, by somebody.

Head pounding, I rock back onto my pillows. I’m missing something, I know it. Something important, a piece of information, hidden away—elusive. A shiver runs up the whole length of my spine, standing me upright: Sapphire’s journals.

She vibrates around me, through my ears, through my head:
keep looking.

June 5: Bird might be the only person I have left, and he’s driving me crazy.

June 12: Bird slept over all week. Even when I left him to go to work, I’d come home and he’d be in the same place on the couch or in my bed where I’d left him. I always ask if he wants to talk about it, but he shakes his head and starts kissing me so that I forget all about it. I think he’s manic or something. But I like the second part, the kissing part. It works.

I flip ahead farther, heart pounding.

February 11: Fuck. I love him. I fucking love him. Why can’t I just pull it out of me? I just want it gone. He wants to torture me. That’s why he hasn’t called in four days. I have to work tonight and pretend that everything’s okay because no one’s going to tip a stripper who’s sobbing all over their four-hundred-dollar suits and whiskey sours. Bird. You’re killing me.

He’s all she wrote about. He was responsible for her greatest joys and her most howling awfulnesses—aside from her mother, maybe, who remains only a scattered ghost, here and there, throughout the entries.

Bird.
Of course.

I close Sapphire’s journal and stare at the dusty red cover, a feather scrawled into the top left corner with a black felt tip pen, working something out.

Bird is the key to everything I don’t yet know. He is the missing link.

I throw off my blankets and get out of bed, then lift Sapphire’s bustier from the chair by my vanity and slide it over my body, feel it press and hug across every inch. It will protect me—Sapphire will protect me—I’ll be ready. For anything. I have to be—tonight, I am putting this all to rest.