The Butterfly Garden (37 page)

“And then the ambulances, and the hospital, and the room where I met you,” she sighs. “And that’s it. The whole story.”

“Not quite.”

She closes her eyes, bringing the hand with the little blue dragon to her cheek. “My name.”

“The Gardener has his name now. Is yours really so terrible?”

She doesn’t answer.

He stands and brings her to his feet. “Come on. One more thing to see.”

She follows him out the door, passing by a frowning Eddison talking to a scene tech in a windbreaker, and into the door across the hall. This time he takes her all the way to the bedside before she can see who it is, and when she does her breath hitches.

Desmond’s eyes open slowly, unfocused from drugs, but when he sees her, a faint smile curves his lips. “Hey,” he whispers.

She has to shape the word several times before her voice catches up to the impulse. “Hey.”

“I’m sorry.”

“No . . . no, you . . . you did the right thing.”

“But I should have done it a lot sooner.” His hand moves atop the blanket, plastic tubing curling under the tape keeping the needle under his skin.

She moves as if to take his hand, but her fingers clench into a fist before they touch him. She stares at him, mouth slightly open, her lower lip quivering with shock.

His eyes slowly close as he falls still. Asleep or unconscious is anyone’s guess.

“He’s still weak,” Victor says quietly. “He has a long recovery ahead of him, but the doctors say he’s probably out of the woods.”

“He’s going to make it?” she whispers. Her eyes gleam wetly, but no tears fall. Clutching the little blue dragon in one hand, she folds her arms across her stomach, a sense of protection she shouldn’t need anymore. “He’ll be tried as complicit,” she says eventually.

“That isn’t up to us. There may be a deal of some sort for him, but—”

“But he should have called six months earlier, and soon everyone will know it.”

Victor scratches at his scalp. “I admit, I thought you’d be more relieved to see him alive.”

“I am. It’s just . . .”

“Complicated?”

She nods. “It might have been kinder to leave him without the consequences of his cowardice. It was far too little and far too late, but he finally did the right thing, and now he’ll be punished for taking so long. Maybe he could have died brave, but he’ll live a coward.”

“So it never became real?”

“Real enough to leave scars. So not very real at all. How could it have been more?”

“He’ll very likely stand trial to some degree. You will probably be called to testify against him.”

Still looking at the young man in the bed, she doesn’t answer.

He’s not sure there’s anything to say. “Inara—”

“Inara!” calls a female voice from the hall. “
Ina
—yes, I see your badge, you arrogant bastard, but that’s my family in there! Inara!” There are sounds of a scuffle, then the door slams open to frame a woman of average height and maybe thirty years old or so, faded auburn hair threatening to tumble from a scraped-together bun.

Inara freezes partway through turning to the intruder, her eyes impossibly wide. Her voice creeps out as little more than a breath. “Sophia?”

Sophia runs into the room, but Inara meets her halfway, and the two of them cling to each other with white-knuckled grips. They sway from side to side from the force of the embrace.

The
Sophia? The apartment mother? How did she even know Inara was here?

A thunder-faced Eddison stalks into the room, glaring at the woman as he passes. He thrusts a plain black scrapbook, thick with pages, into Victor’s hands. “It was in a locked, hidden drawer in his office desk. The techs were running the names when they found something interesting.”

Victor almost doesn’t want to know, but this is his job. Tearing his eyes away from the two women, he sees a green sticky note fluttering from the edge about two-thirds of the way through. He opens to a few pages before it.

A young woman with terrified, tearful eyes stares back at him from a photo, shoulders hunched and hands partly raised as if caught in the process of trying to hide her naked breasts from the camera. Beside it, a picture from behind, showing fresh wings. Beneath it, those same wings in a fresh display case, the crisp edges of the wings blurred by the glass and colorless resin. In the empty space, there are two names—Lydia Anderson, on top, and below, Siobhan—in a firm masculine hand, followed by “Gulf Fritillary” and dates four years apart.

The next page has a different girl, and the one after, the one with the sticky, has only two pictures. And only one date. Beneath the picture of an auburn-haired beauty with wary hazel eyes, the writing says—

“Sophia Madsen,” Victor reads aloud, stunned.

The woman looks at him over Inara’s shoulder. She says the next line for him. “Lara.”

“How—”

“No one would have talked of a Butterfly escaping if one never had,” Inara mumbles into Sophia’s hair. “It would have hurt too badly.”

“The escape was real. You . . . you escaped?”

They both nod.

Eddison scowls. “The tech analysts typed in the name and it hit against our list of Evening Star employees. They sent someone to the restaurant and both listed residences, but she wasn’t there.”

“Of course I wasn’t,” retorts Sophia. “How could I be there when I was already on my way here?” She pulls back from Inara. Doesn’t let go, just steps back enough to take all of her in. Sophia’s shirt is worn and overlarge, the gaping neck sliding down one shoulder to reveal a bra strap and the edge of a faded wingtip, stretched with gained weight. “Taki saw you on the news, being brought into the hospital, and he ran to the apartment to get everyone. They called me, and oh, Inara!”

Inara wheezes in Sophia’s renewed embrace, but doesn’t ask her to let go.

“Are you all right?” asks Sophia.

“I will be,” Inara replies quietly, almost shyly. “My hands are the worst, but if I’m careful, they should heal.”

“That’s not all I’m asking, and I
am
asking. I have my own place now, I can break the apartment rules.”

Inara’s face lights up, all the uncertainty and shock vanishing. “You got your girls back!”

“I did, and they’ll be so glad to see you. They’ve missed you as much as the rest of us. They say no one reads to them as well as you do.”

Eddison doesn’t quite manage to turn his laugh into a cough.

Inara gives him a sour look.

For his part, Victor’s almost relieved to see her sidestep the more probing question. At least she does it with everyone. He clears his throat to get their attention. “I’m sorry to interrupt, but I have to insist on an explanation.”

“He usually does,” Inara mutters.

Sophia just smiles. “It’s pretty much his job. But perhaps . . .” She glances over at the boy in the bed, Victor’s eyes following. Desmond hasn’t so much as twitched in all the noise. “Elsewhere?”

Victor nods and leads them out of the room. In the hallway, he can see Senator Kingsley standing alone in front of the door to the Butterflies’ room, taking deep breaths. She should look softer in just the blouse and skirt; instead, she just looks scared. Victor wonders if her suit is like Inara’s lip gloss, a way to armor up against the rest of the world.

“Do you think she’ll go in?” Inara asks.

“Eventually,” he answers. “Once she realizes this isn’t something she can be ready for.”

He takes them into a room in the buffer zone between the Butterflies and the MacIntosh family. It’s private, at any rate, and one of the guards shifts down to make sure they’re not disturbed. Inara and Sophia settle side by side on one of the stripped beds, facing the door and anyone who might try to enter. Victor sits on the opposite bed. He’s unsurprised that Eddison decides to pace, rather than sit.

“Ms. Madsen?” Victor prompts. “If you please?”

“You do like to get right down to it, don’t you?” Sophia shakes her head. “I’m sorry, but no, not yet. I’ve been waiting longer than you have.”

Victor blinks, but nods.

Taking Inara’s hand, Sophia wraps both of hers around it, holding tight. “We thought something from before had caught up with you,” she says. “We thought you ran.”

“It was a logical assumption,” Inara tells her gently.

“But all your clothes—”

“Are just clothes.”

Sophia shakes her head again. “If you were going to run, you would have taken your money. Whitney and I started an account for you, by the way. We didn’t feel comfortable with that much cash sitting around.”

“Sophia, if you’re trying to find a way this is somehow your fault, you’re not going to find it from me. We were all running from something. We all knew that. We all knew not to question it if someone disappeared.”

“We should have. And the timing . . .”

“There was no way to know.”

“The timing?” Victor asks.

“The event that the Gardener—Mister MacIntosh—”

Sophia gives a startled laugh. “He has a name. I mean, of course he does, but . . . how bizarre.”

“The event at the Evening Star,” Inara continues. “I didn’t say anything about Mister MacIntosh being creepy, just about the run-in with Avery. But then we came home with all those costume butterfly wings.”

“I drank myself damn near insensible,” Sophia says grimly. “It was like being back in hell.”

“I took her out to the fire escape to get some fresh air, and she ended up telling me all about the Garden.”

“I’d never really told anyone before.”

“Why not?” Victor asks. From the corner of his eye, he sees Eddison’s pacing stop.

“At first, there didn’t seem to be anything to say. I didn’t know his name, I’d been so panicked on leaving that I didn’t pay any attention to what was around me. I didn’t know where the estate was. All I had was a tattoo and a growing fetus and a crazy story. I thought if I went to the police, they’d be just like my parents: assume I was drunk or high or screwing around and lying to avoid consequences.”

“You went back to your parents?”

She makes a face. “They kicked me out. Said I was an embarrassment. I didn’t have anywhere to go. I was nineteen and pregnant and didn’t have anyone to help me.”

Eddison perches on the very end of Victor’s bed. “So Jillie is the Gardener’s?”

“Jillie is
mine
,” she retorts, baring her teeth at him.

Eddison holds up both hands in a placating gesture. “But he is the father.”

Sophia deflates, and Inara leans against her for comfort. “That was the other reason not to say anything. If he’d found out about her, I could have lost her. No court in the world would have let her stay with a heroin-addicted hooker when she could live with a wealthy, well-respected family. At least when social services took my girls, I could work to get them back. If he’d taken Jillie, I would never have seen her again, and I don’t think Lotte would ever have gotten over it. They’re my girls. I had to protect them.”

Victor looks at Inara. “Isn’t that what Desmond was doing? Protecting his family? You didn’t think very well of him for it.”

“It’s not the same.”

“Isn’t it?”

“You know it isn’t,” she says dryly. “Sophia was protecting her children. Innocent children who don’t deserve to suffer for what happened. Desmond was protecting criminals. Murderers.”

“How did you escape?” asks Eddison.

“I was going to have to take a pregnancy test,” Sophia replies. “I’d been gaining weight, and I was sick sometimes after lunch. Lor—our nurse brought the test to me, but got called away to deal with an injury before she could watch me take it. I just panicked. I ran around looking for any way out I might have missed in the past two and a half years. And I saw Avery.”

“Avery was already in the Garden.”

“He’d discovered it just a few weeks before. His father gave him a code but he had trouble remembering it. He was very slow when he put it in. That day I hid in the honeysuckle and watched him fumble through it. He even said the numbers while he pushed the buttons. I waited for a bit, then punched it in myself. I’d almost forgotten that doors could open normally.”

Victor rubs at his cheek. “Did you tell any of the others?”

She starts to bristle, but then her shoulders slump. “I guess I can see why that’s a question,” she admits. “After all, by not going to the police, I left them there to die, didn’t I? But I did try.” She meets his eyes firmly. “I swear to you, I did try. They were just too scared to go. I was too scared to stay.”

“Scared?”

“What happens if you only almost escape?” asks Inara, but it feels more like a reminder than a question.

“It had been less than a month since a girl named Emiline stayed out during maintenance,” Sophia says. “She tried to tell the gardeners what was going on, but the Gardener must have smoothed it over somehow. The next time we saw her, she was in glass. Escape is a hard thing to attempt when you see it punished like that. But you blame me for leaving them behind.”

“No.” Victor shakes his head. “You gave them the chance. You can’t save someone against her will.”

“Speaking of which, Lorraine is here.”

Sophia turns to Inara with dismay. “Oh no. Still?”