The Butterfly Garden (34 page)

But I’d gotten a taste of that in the apartment, and I’d learned the rest of it here. We were a fucked-up family, but a family nonetheless.

Keely looked at Danelle and shrank against me. “Why does she have a tattoo on her face?” she whispered.

Danelle knelt down in front of the bed, taking both of Keely’s hands in hers. “This is another thing you have to be brave for,” she said gently. “Do you want to hear it now, or do you want to wait for a little bit?”

Biting her lip, the child gave me an uncertain look.

“It’s your choice,” I told her. “Now or later, you can choose. If it makes it easier, I promise that it’s not going to happen to you.”

With a deep, shaky breath, she nodded. “Now then.”

“The man who keeps us? We call him the Gardener,” Danelle said simply. “He likes to think of us as Butterflies in his Garden, and he tattoos wings on our backs because it helps him pretend. When I was first brought here, I thought that if I made him like me more than anyone else, he’d let me go and I could go home. I was wrong, but I didn’t learn that quickly enough, and he did the wings on my face to show others that he thought I was happy with what he did.”

Keely looked up at me again. “You have wings too?”

“On my back, yes.”

Her eyes flicked over to Bliss, who nodded. “But you won’t let him do that to me?”

“I won’t let him touch you at all.”

We took her out into the Garden in the early afternoon, Bliss going ahead of us to warn the other girls. Normally most of the others stayed away from the new girl until she was settled. Keely was different. Singly or in pairs, as nonthreateningly as possible, every girl but Sirvat came to say hello, to introduce herself, and, maybe most importantly, to promise that they’d help protect her. I was okay with Sirvat absenting herself from that.

Marenka knelt down and let Keely trace the white, browns, and black of the wings on her face so she wouldn’t be scared anymore. “I’m going to move my things so you’ll be right next to Maya,” she told her. “That way if you get scared or don’t want to be alone, you won’t have to worry about getting lost. You’ll be right next to her.”

“Th-thank you,” she managed.

Lorraine roused herself enough to put together a cold lunch for us, though she was crying the entire time. I wanted to believe that maybe she’d finally realized just what the Gardener was, that she was horrified that a child so young had been taken, that she was mortified over how she’d been mooning and jealous of dead girls. I really wanted to believe that little bit of good of her. I didn’t, though. I didn’t know why she was so shocked and upset, but I didn’t think it was for anyone’s situation but hers. Maybe buying the wig—or, more likely, Bliss not getting in trouble for the attack—finally made her realize that the Gardener was never going to love her again.

We took our lunches up on the cliff, where the sun was warm and the space around us open. Keely still didn’t have much of an appetite, but she ate to humor us. Then she saw Desmond walking up the path and she buried herself against me. Bliss and Danelle moved in close, as well, protecting her from all sides.

Desmond wasn’t the threat, but he was a male. I understood the impulse.

He stopped a safe distance away, kneeling down on the rock and spreading his arms wide. “I’m not going to hurt you,” he said quietly. “I’m not going to touch you, or even come any closer than this.”

I shook my head. “Why are you here?”

“To ask her name and where she came from, so I can do what’s right.”

I started to scoot off the rock, but Keely’s arms tightened around my waist. “It’s okay,” I whispered, hugging her close. “I’m just going to go talk to him. You can stay right here with Bliss and Danelle.”

“What if he hurts you?” she whimpered.

“He won’t. This one doesn’t. I’ll be right back. You’ll see me the whole time.”

She slowly released me to transfer her grip to Danelle. Bliss was soft and curvy, but she was not cuddly.

I walked past Desmond to the very edge of the cliff and, after a moment, he followed me. He stood a foot or so away, shoving his hands deep in his pockets. “What are you doing?”

“What’s right,” he answered. “I’m calling the police, but I need to know her name. There’s got to be an AMBER Alert out for her.”

“Why now? You’ve known about the Garden for six months now.”

“How old is she?”

I glanced back at her over my shoulder. “She and her friends were hanging out at the mall to celebrate her twelfth birthday.”

He swore and studied his feet, the toes of his shoes a little over the edge of the rock. “I’ve been trying so hard to convince myself that my father is telling the truth, that even if you’re not here by choice you at least came from something he could rescue you from.”

And still, in the face of this twelve-year-old girl, he was deluding himself.

“The streets, maybe, or bad families,” he continued. “Something that made this just a little bit better, but I can’t . . . I know it was Avery who took her, not Father, but this has to stop. You’re right: I
am
a coward. And I am selfish, because I don’t want to hurt my family, and I don’t want to go to jail, but that girl is . . .” He stopped, panting with the force of his words and the tangle of emotion behind them. “I kept telling myself that I needed to learn to be braver, and Jesus, what a stupid thing to think. You don’t learn to be brave. You just have to do what’s right, even if it scares you. So I’m calling the police with as many names as I know and telling them about the Garden.”

“You’re really calling?” I asked.

He flashed me an angry look.

“Yes, I’m asking, because I can’t go tell that girl that help is on the way if you’re going to back out or bury your head back in the sand. Are you really doing this?”

He took a deep breath. “Yes. I’m really doing this.”

I reached out and lightly touched his cheek to bring his eyes to mine. “Her name is Keely Rudolph, and she lives in Sharpsburg.”

“Thank you.” He turned to walk away, then stopped, walked back, and pulled me into a searing kiss.

And then walked away without another word.

I returned to the rock. “We need to stay in my room for the rest of today,” I told the girls. “Go ahead without me, I’m just going to tell everyone else.”

“Do you really think he’s going to do it?” Bliss asked.

“I think he’s finally going to try, and God help him if it doesn’t work. Go, quickly.”

It was like the ultimate game of hide-and-seek, tracking down each girl and telling her to stay in her room. I didn’t care if they were in their own rooms, just that they were out of the Garden proper, because as soon as the Gardener learned about that call the walls were coming down, and I didn’t even want to think about what would happen to any girl he found outside of them. Every word was whispered because I didn’t know how strong the mics were and didn’t know if the Gardener had already heard what his son intended.

I found Eleni and Isra in the cave, Tereza in the music room, Marenka in the room that would no longer be hers, with Ravenna and Nazira helping her pack all of her embroidery stuff. Willa and Zulema were in the kitchen watching Lorraine cry hard enough to set her wig askew, Pia was at the pond studying the sensors for the water level. One by one I found them and passed the news along, and they walked quickly away.

Sirvat was the last one I found, her entire front pressed against the glass of Zara’s display case. The intricate black, white, and orange-yellow wings of a Pearl Crescent filled her back, and her eyes were closed as she stood motionless.

“Sirvat, what the fuck are you doing?”

She opened one eye to look at me. “Trying to imagine what it’s like in there.”

“Seeing as she’s dead, I don’t think she can help you with that. She doesn’t know either.”

“Can you smell it?”

“The honeysuckle?”

She shook her head and backed away from the glass. “The formaldehyde. My biology teacher used it to preserve specimens for dissection. They must have a ton of it in that room, because the smell is so strong here.”

“It’s where he prepares us for the cases,” I sighed. “Sirvat, we need to stay in the rooms. The shit’s hitting the fan.”

“Because of Keely?”

“And Desmond.”

She touched the locked door, protected by its lock code. “We always had to be really careful with the formaldehyde. Even diluted in alcohol, it’s not always stable.”

I never felt bad for not being closer to Sirvat. She was a strange duck.

But she let me pull her away and toss her into her room. I ran back up onto the cliff and up one of the trees to try and see if anything was going on, but I couldn’t even see the house, much less the front of the property. The Gardener had plenty of money and plenty of space, a bad combination when it comes to psychopathic tendencies.

The lights flickered violently and I hurled myself over the edge of the cliff, scraping and banging as I clambered down the rough holds and through the waterfall to get to my room before the walls came down.

Bliss handed me a towel. “It occurs to me, half an hour too late, that we might have been better off all getting together in one place in the Garden. If Desmond tells the cops that we’re in the inner greenhouse, they’d insist on checking it out, right? If we were out there, they’d see us.”

“Believe it or not, I thought of that.” I stripped off my soaked dress and pulled on the dress I’d been given at Desmond’s arrival, the one with the back. It wasn’t one of the Gardener’s favorites because it obscured the wings, but at the moment I didn’t care. I wanted to be running, to be fighting, to be doing almost anything but sit in that tiny room and wait. “If he’s able to talk the police out of investigating, or if he was able to convince Desmond not to make the call, what do you suppose he’ll do to anyone who disobeyed the room call?”

“Dammit.”

“Bliss . . . I’m scared,” I whispered. I sank down onto the bed and reached for Keely’s hand. She took it and curled into me, seeking comfort. “I hate not being able to hear anything.”

Marenka and I had once experimented with shrieking at the top of our lungs during a maintenance session. Our rooms were right next to each other’s and we couldn’t hear a thing. Even the vents closed when the walls came down.

Hours passed before the walls went up. We stayed in the rooms at first, too scared to move, for all we’d hated sitting still. Then we couldn’t stand it anymore and walked out into the Garden to see how our world had changed.

Maybe, finally, it was for the better.

“Was it?” Eddison asks when it’s clear she’s not going to continue.

“No.”

III

Inara rubs her thumbs against the sad little dragon, one of her scabs catching on the brow ridge and tearing away.

Victor trades a look with his partner. “Grab the coat,” he says, pushing back from the table.

“What?”

“We’re going to take a little ride.”

“We’re doing what?” Eddison mutters.

The girl doesn’t ask any questions, simply takes his jacket and shrugs into it. The little blue dragon stays in one hand.

He leads them down into the garage, opening the front passenger door for the girl. She looks at the car for a moment, her mouth crooked in an expression he can’t really call a smile. “Something wrong?”

“Except for coming here and to the hospital, and presumably from New York to the Garden, I haven’t been in a car since the taxi heading to my Gran’s.”

“Then you’ll understand if I don’t offer to let you drive.”

Her lips twitch. The easy laughter and comfortable atmosphere they’d finally achieved in the room is gone, vanished in the face of what they’ve been working toward all along.

“Is there a reason I have to sit in the back?” Eddison complains.

“Would you like me to invent one?”

“Fine, but I get to pick the music.”

“No.”

The girl arches an eyebrow, and Victor grimaces.

“He likes country.”

“Please don’t let him pick,” she says pleasantly as she slides into the seat.

Chuckling, he waits for her legs to be clear before he closes the door.

“Where are we going on our little field trip?” Eddison asks as the men cross to the other side of the car.

“First stop is coffee, then we’re going to the hospital.”

“So she can check on the girls?”

“That too.”

Rolling his eyes, Eddison lets it go and settles into the backseat.

When they arrive at the hospital, coffees in hand—tea, for Inara—the entire building is surrounded with news vans and gawkers. The part of him that’s been doing this job for too long wonders if every parent who’s ever lost a girl between sixteen and eighteen is out there with a candle and a blown-up picture, hoping for the best, or maybe even hoping for the worst so long as the nightmare of not knowing is finally over. Some stare at their cell phones, waiting for a call that, for many, will never come.

“Are the rooms blocked off for the girls?” she asks, angling her face away from the passenger window and letting her hair fall forward to hide her further.

“Yes, with guards at the doors.” He squints ahead at the emergency entrance to see if he can get away with bringing her in through there, but four ambulances fill the bay with a flurry of activity around them.

“I can walk past a few reporters if I need to. They can’t honestly expect me to talk about it.”

“Did you ever watch the news in the city?”

“We caught it every now and then at Taki’s when we were getting food,” she answers with a shrug. “We didn’t have a TV, and most of the people we hung out with only had their sets hooked into game platforms or DVD players. Why?”

“Because they do expect you to talk about it, even when they know you’re not allowed to. They will shove their microphones in your face and ask you personal questions with no sensitivity and they’ll share your answers with anyone who cares to listen.”

“So . . . they’re like the FBI?”

“First Hitler, now reporters,” Eddison says. “I’m thrilled you have such a high opinion of us.”

“I clearly don’t know enough about reporters to find them offensive, so I don’t know that it’s too terrible.”

“If you don’t mind wading through them, we can head in,” Victor says before either of them can add anything else. He parks the car and walks around to open the door for her. “They’re going to be yelling,” he cautions her. “They’ll be loud and in your face, and there will be cameras flashing everywhere. There will be parents asking questions about their girls, wanting to know if you’ve seen them. And there’ll be people insulting you.”

“Insulting me?”

“There are always some people who feel that the victim must have deserved it,” he explains. “They’re idiots, but they’re often vocal. Of course you don’t deserve it, no one
deserves
to get kidnapped or raped or murdered, but they’ll say it anyway because they believe it or because they want a few seconds of attention, and because we protect free speech, we can’t do anything about it.”

“I guess I grew so used to the horrors of the Garden, I forgot how awful Outside could be.”

He’d give anything to tell her that it isn’t true.

But it is, so he stays silent.

They walk out of the garage to the main entrance, the agents flanking the girl protectively, and the lights and sounds rise to a fever pitch. The girl ignores them with grave dignity, staring straight ahead, refusing to even listen to the questions, much less answer them. There are barricades to keep everyone back from the path to the hospital, with local police manning them. They’re almost to the doors when one enterprising woman crawls under the barricade and between an officer’s legs, her microphone cord trailing behind her.

“What is your name? Are you one of the victims?” she demands, waving her mic in front of her.

The girl doesn’t answer, doesn’t even look at her, and Victor signals for the officer to take the woman away.

“With a tragedy such as this, you owe the public the full story!”

Her thumb still rubs thoughtfully against the little blue dragon, but she turns to look at the reporter, who struggles against the officer’s grip on her arms. “I think if you actually knew anything about the case you’re claiming to report,” she says softly, “you’d have better sense than to suggest I owe
anyone
a thing.” She nods to the officer and resumes her progress to the sliding doors. Cries follow her, those closest to the door asking after missing girls, but everything fades to a dull roar when the doors hiss shut behind them.

Eddison actually grins at the girl. “I was expecting you to tell her to fuck off.”

“I thought about it,” she admits. “Then I remembered that you two were likely to be in the frame, and I didn’t want Hanoverian’s mother to wash his ears out for hearing such filthy language.”

“Yeah, yeah, come on, children.”

For a hospital, there’s a significant police presence, even in the main lobby. FBI, local police, representatives from other police departments, child services, all of them talking on phones or clicking away on laptops or tablets. Those not tied into the technology are dealing with something far more difficult: the families.

As Eddison drops their empty cups into the bin by the doors, Victor waves to the third member of their team, seated beside a couple in their mid-thirties. Ramirez nods but doesn’t take her arm from around the shoulders of the exhausted woman next to her. “Inara, this is—”

“Agent Ramirez,” Inara finishes for him. “We met before I got taken away. She promised to keep the doctors from being assholes.”

Victor winces.

Ramirez smiles. “Overbearing,” she corrects. “I promised to
try
to keep them from being
overbearing
. Though I think you were Maya then.”

“I was. Am.” She shakes her head. “It’s complicated.”

“These are Keely’s parents,” says Ramirez, gesturing to the couple.

“She keeps asking for you,” says Keely’s father. He’s pale and red-eyed but he offers his hand to shake. She holds up her burned, gashed hands in silent apology. “I understand you helped protect her once she was there?”

“I tried,” she hedges. “Not that she’s lucky to have been there, but it’s fortunate she wasn’t there long.”

“We were going to have her moved to a private room,” his wife adds through a sniffle. She clutches a Hello Kitty backpack and a handful of tissues. “She’s so young, and the questions the doctors are asking are so personal.” She trails off into her tissues, and her husband picks up the thread.

“She panicked, said if she couldn’t have you, she wanted to stay with . . . with . . .”

“Danelle and Bliss?”

“Yes. I don’t . . . I don’t understand why she would . . .”

“This is all an awful lot to take in,” Inara tells them gently. “It’s frightening. Keely wasn’t in there long, but for those couple of days, she wasn’t alone. The three of us were with her the entire time, and often some of the other girls as well. It’s comforting to be with people who know exactly what you’ve gone through. It’ll get better.” She glances down at the dragon in her hand. “It’s not that she’s not over the moon to see you; she is. She missed you terribly. But being alone in a room right now is . . . likely to cause her panic. Just be patient with her.”

“What did they do to our little girl?”

“She’ll tell you that as she can. Just be patient with her,” she repeats. “And I’m sorry, I know you must have a million questions and concerns, but I really need to go check on the others, including Keely.”

“Right, right, of course.” Keely’s father clears his throat several times. “Thank you for helping her.”

His wife stands and embraces the startled girl, who throws a wary look at the grinning Victor. When he makes no move to help, she grimaces and gently pulls away from the woman’s arms. “How many other parents are here?” she mutters as they walk away.

“About half of the survivors, with a few more on the way,” Ramirez answers, jogging to catch up with them by the elevators. “They haven’t notified any of the parents of the dead girls yet; they want to be absolutely sure it’s them.”

“That would be good, yes.”

“Agent Ramirez!” calls a strident voice, followed by the swift clicks of heels on tile.

Victor groans. They were so close to passing unnoticed.

But he turns, along with his partners, to face the approaching woman. Inara just keeps looking at the screen above the elevator, watching the numbers descend.

Senator Kingsley is an elegant woman in her fifties, her black hair arranged around her face to give an impression of softness that her severe expression counteracts. She still looks fresh despite having been at the hospital since last night. Her crisp red suit is striking against her dark skin, the small American flag pin on her lapel nearly drowned by the color. “This is her, then?” she demands, stopping in front of them. “This is the girl you’ve been hiding?”

“We’ve been interviewing her, Senator, not hiding her,” Victor says mildly. He reaches out to grip Inara’s shoulder, gently but firmly turning her around.

Inara’s eyes flick over the woman. She musters a smile so obviously fake it makes him wince. “You must be Ravenna’s mother.”

“Her name,” the senator says tightly, “is Patrice.”

“It was,” Inara agrees. “And it will be. Right now it’s still Ravenna. Outside isn’t real yet.”

“And just what the hell does that mean?”

The smile disappears. Inara’s thumb rubs against the sad dragon. After a moment, she straightens and looks the woman in the eye. “It means you’re too real for her to handle yet. The past two days have been too much. We’ve spent so long living in someone else’s terrible fantasy that we don’t know how to be real anymore. It’ll come, in time, but your real is very . . .” She glances at the knot of aides and staff members hovering a respectful distance away. “Very public,” she says finally. “If you can get rid of the entourage, maybe it’ll be easier for her.”

“We’re just trying to get to the bottom of this.”

“Isn’t that the FBI’s job?”

The senator stares at her. “She’s my daughter. I’m not just going to sit by and watch—”

“Like every other parent?”

Victor winces again.

“You stand for the law, Senator. Sometimes that means standing back to let it work.”

Eddison spins to hit the call button for the elevator again. Victor can see his shoulders shaking.

But Inara isn’t done yet. “Sometimes it means being mother
or
senator, not both. I think she’d like to see her mother, but with what she’s been through, the adjustments she’ll have to make, I don’t think she can handle the senator. Now, if you’ll please excuse us, we need to check in on Ravenna and the others.” The elevator dings and she steps through as soon as the doors open. Ramirez and Eddison join her.

Victor waves them up. The senator may be speechless for the moment, but that never seems to last long.

And it doesn’t. “I’ve been informed that that woman, Lorraine, was complicit in what was done to my daughter. I promise you, Agent, if I hear even the slightest hint that that girl is part of this, I will bring the full weight—”

“Senator. Let us do our job. If you want to know what happened to your daughter, if you want to get to the truth, you have to let us do our job.” He reaches out to touch her elbow. “I have a daughter only a little younger than Patrice. I promise you, this is not something I take lightly. They are incredibly strong young women who have been through hell, and I will honor them by giving them my best, but you have to take a step away.”

“Could you?” she asks shrewdly.

“I hope I never find out.”

“God help you, Agent, if this blows up in your face.”

Victor watches her walk away, then hits the Up button. As he waits for the elevator, he can see her rejoin her knot of people, giving orders and asking questions, her younger staff members scrambling to respond. The older ones are steadier, less overwhelmed.