The Butterfly Clues (28 page)

All the hairs on my arms tingle, perk upright. And very faintly, Sapphire’s ghost rises around me.

“What word?” I ask. My voice sounds tinny, as though I’m hearing it from far away. Officer Lucile Gardner’s cider-sweet voice rafts toward me, she clears her throat. “Slut.” She lowers her eyes briefly before raising them again to meet mine, searching. “Do you know anything about the people in Sapphire’s life … ? Anything that might have happened … ? Any enemies she might have had?

Sapphire wavers, slides from my skin, pooling like electric eels at my feet, stretching all along the carpet and infecting everything with their surprising sting.

I think of Flynt: how easily he got into her house, how he knew where everything was—the sketch he’d made—her near-bare body, the shadows penciled into her chest and ribs—how he’d lied about her. About everything. About the journals—about
Bird—
how she’d written of his violent streak, his blow-ups.

But I can’t. Part of me doesn’t want to say it aloud. Once I do that, it makes it true. And despite everything, I still don’t want it to be true. “I don’t—I really don’t know,” I say. I think of Sapphire’s face disintegrating into ash beside me.

“Penelope?” Officer Lucile Gardner stands from Oren’s Christmas chair. “Are you all right?”

I’m pulling, hard, at my scalp. Nine pulls per side. Officer Gardner tries to put her hands on my shoulders, and I back away. No. Interference means I have to start again. I don’t want to start again.

“I’m fine,” I finally respond once I finish all eighteen pulls, gasping a little. “I had, um, a bad itch.” I stare at the floor. “Lots of homework to do. I’m pretty stressed right now.”

“It’s okay,” she says gently. “I’ve got a lot of work to do myself; I remember how much homework they give you in high school. Too much, I think.” She laughs a little, awkwardly, making her way to the front door. “Penelope, I know how easy it is to get frustrated by the way things work, but sometimes all it takes is someone who cares. Someone who forces other people to care.” She reaches the door, resting her hand on the knob. “I’m not ready to give up just yet.” She lets herself out, leaving me standing in the hallway.

Just my luck: Dad’s Accord pulls into the driveway, as Lucile gets into her white Cleveland PD car. The trees are quiet outside, the wind is slow.

Their doors slam at the same time; her wheels crunch over the gravel and spin gently away; his footsteps plunk through the garage and the door whooshes open and shut.

“Lo?” He’s already almost yelling as he barges inside. “What was a policeman doing here?”

“Police
woman
,” I respond flatly.

He peels his coat from his shoulders, his fingers going white as he clutches it, and his suitcase and his briefcase. “Don’t be smart with me, Lo. Answer the question.”

“It was
nothing
, Dad. Not important. Routine.” The word
slut
is skidding through my brain. So. Jealousy. A jealous boyfriend– type.

Bird. It’s the only explanation. I think I’m going to be sick.

“Routine?” he growls at me, resting his suitcase against the wall, clunking his briefcase to the floor. He steps closer to me. “Do you think I’m that stupid, Lo? That I don’t know when you’re lying to me?”

I don’t respond. I rub my hand on my right leg. Then my left. Then my right. Nine, nine, six.

“Stop doing that
shit
and answer me.” I see the muscles strain in his neck, the vein in the center of his forehead bulge. “What did you do? Huh? Are you stealing again?”

He interrupted my count. Have to start again. This time, I count out loud. It’s the only way to make sure I’m doing it right.

“PENELOPE. MARIN.
STOP
.” He lunges toward me, ripping my hand away from my right thigh. I struggle with him, pushing my other hand into his hard-gripping arm, pushing him away from me with every ounce of my strength.

“Let go of me!” I cry out, fighting my hand toward the wall. Need to tap. Need to pull.

“Stop, Penelope! Just stop and listen to me!”

“Let me
go
!” I wrench away from him.

Something shifts: he gives up sagging a little into himself, defeated, small. Liberated, I rub my hand against my corduroy— nine, nine, six, and then the other side, and then the first side again. He watches me wearily, in silence. As soon as I finish, I push past him, grab my coat, and run out the door.
Tap tap tap, banana; tap tap tap, banana; tap tap tap, banana.
I don’t even know where I’m going. I don’t have anywhere to go. But I want out and away.

Waiting, alone, on the cold bus stop bench, I swallow the taste of salt before I realize I’ve started crying again.

I remember the time I went with Dad to a movie when I was probably five or six. I’d fallen asleep in the car on the way home and he’d carried me inside, my hair long and bubble-gumshampoo clean down his back. He thought I was asleep but was singing anyway, lullabying softly into my ear. “Riders on the Storm” by The Doors. He used to sing it to me every night before bed. Never missed a night. I couldn’t sleep without it.

The bus arrives. The doors swing open to swallow me, then creak shut. The suburbs twist and wind around me, and before I know it, the streets have transformed into a puzzle of dips and cracks, the buildings: cobbled board-ups, boxy creatures with knocked-in heads.

I’m back in Neverland.

I wander aimlessly, and somehow find my way to Lourraine Street. Back to Sapphire’s house—puke-yellow, daisies shining and stagnant in the limp late-afternoon sunlight.
Slut slut slut—
the word tattoos itself into my mind.
Wrong,
I want to scream
, you got it all wrong
.

A moving company’s here, packing all of her things away into boxes, piling them sloppily onto the curb for tomorrow’s haul. I reach instinctively into my pocket for the butterfly. Not there. I took it out; I placed it high on a shelf. I thought I could get rid of her that way.

I creep closer to the sad stack of boxes.

My own life, too, will one day amount to this. Sad little boxes of things. Garbage to be taken out.

The
urge
peaks through me. I reach into a box, pull out the first thing my fingers find: a nail clipper. I’ll save it. I brush my fingers against its rusted silver. I’ll make it important, even just this one tiny thing that she probably kept in her medicine cabinet or in her bedside table, used once every two weeks or whenever she remembered to. A new grief swells in my chest as I walk away without paying any attention to where I am going.

The sun folds itself below the hollow trees and spine-shrunk buildings of Neverland as I finger the nail clipper in my pocket, turning down a random narrow street sandwiched between two gray concrete warehouses. I think of the men who packed Sapphire’s belongings away into cardboard boxes—men hired by the city, men who never knew her and will never think of her again after today, when they slink home to their own small, tired lives.

For a
slut—
the word, the word again—there will be no grieving. I run my palm against the metal, feeling its teeth sink into my skin. Sapphire’s teeth.

Screeeeeeeek—
the sound of tires scraping pavement close by.

Very close by.

Gravel hits my back, a few tiny rocks ricocheting off the wool of my coat, a beam of heat—a new light reflecting off the sleeves of my jacket, burning, too hot.

I turn. The breath sticks in my chest.

I try to scream, but my throat is like steel wool; the sound gets trapped, strangled.

I try to see, but twin beams of a vehicle are barreling toward me through the narrow alley, blindingly bright. The walls close in, cinch up, trapping me here.

There’s nowhere for me to go—no space on either side.

I wave my arms frantically in the middle of the street, back and forth, hoping the driver will see me and slow down.

But I quickly realize: the car isn’t going to slow down.

It’s coming for me.

It’s going to hit me.

CHAPTER 25

The engine revs behind me, speeds up, lights bore into my back. My shoes rip across the uneven brick as I run.

Closer, it’s coming closer—I have nowhere to go—my heart leapfrogs through my chest. I’m not fast enough.

Bird wants me dead.
Flynt
wants me dead, so I won’t talk. Roadkill. They want to crush me, flatten me, bury me.

Closer. I trip, barely manage to right myself.
SCREEEEEEEEE.
My legs start to give way.

No time. No time. No time to scream.

And then, suddenly—the wall ends—an empty space—
an entrance
. An alleyway. I
tap tap tap, banana
and throw myself desperately into its dark mouth as the car passes me, missing by inches—seconds, milliseconds—and careens away. I pant as I run, mad, through the narrow alleyway, sliver of sky shivering above me.

I stop running at the opposite end of the alleyway, plant my head against the brick wall, and try to catch my breath, next to a stitch of graffiti that reads
Lil’ Dev
in loose, loopy scrawl, red and green. I hear voices ahead of me and tense up. But it’s just two older men, pushing their way out of a grimy bar.

I
tap tap tap, banana
, right and left, then step inside.

It’s dim in the bar, and it takes my eyes a few seconds to adjust.

“You got ID, little lady?” the bartender asks me. His thin, ropey arms are covered in tattoos, blending into his dark skin. The left displays a large-breasted Pegasus-girl surrounded by birds, banners between their twin beaks; the right, three lithe polar bears, one with a can of Coca-Cola in its paw like in those old commercials.

“No, I—” I stammer, breath catching in my throat. I shake my head, three times; my bangs slide back and forth, my face hot with shame, still trembling from my very near-escape. “I just need—”

“I’m sorry, but I can’t letcha stay here unless you’re twenty-one.” He balloons his bony cheeks for a second, pounding his fist lightly against the bar; the large-breasted Pegasus-girl dances. “Not my rule, but I got to—”

“Followed—I think I’m being followed,” I blurt loudly. One of the customers—tweed cap, crooked teeth—swivels in his seat to look at me. “I—I just need to make a phone call.” Of course I don’t have my cell phone—the one time I truly need it. “Please.”

His brows curve downward. “You okay?” he asks, his voice low and serious. “You having some kind of problem with a boyfriend? Need me to call the fuzz?” The bony cage of his chest is visible through his Alice in Chains T-shirt. “I mean—I’ll do it. They know me
pree-tty
well over there.”

The other customer—electric gray hair, excessively droopy eyelids, massive-bellied, and toothpick-legged—laughs loudly. “Yah. They sure do, Joey. Sure do.” He looks at me. “Joe did eight years. Armed robbery.” He smiles. One tooth missing; right cuspid. “It’s no secret,” he reassures me, leaning closer, his voice a raw bellow. “First thing he tells most people, really and truly. He’s rehabilitated now, though, right? I’m not spilling no beans, am I, Joe?”

I look around: it’s a dingy, scuffed-up place; a dirt-and-oldcigarette scent has burrowed itself into every surface. A sign on the mirror reads
CLEMENTINE
’
S
.

I step closer to the sticky bar, closer to Joe, tugging on both sides of my coat as I count the Kentucky Gentleman bottles lining the back wall: eighteen. Dad drinks Glenlivet. He told me once that it tasted like caramel, which prompted me to sneak some from his glass when he wasn’t looking. It was
nothing
like caramel. “No,” I say too quickly. “Don’t call the police. Please. I just—I need to make a call.”

There are no other options. I have no one else.

Joe squats and reaches for something on a shelf close to the ground. When he stands back up, there’s an old rotary phone in his hands; he sets it gently onto the far end of the bar.

“All yours,” he tells me, stepping away, grabbing a half-full bottle of Kentucky Gentleman and refilling both customers’ glasses.

I pluck my fingers through the number holes, winding them around and around. It rings. I wait, hold my breath.

Click.

“Hello?” Dad’s voice.

“Dad?” my voice creaks through the line.

“Lo?” His voice snags. He clears his throat. “Penelope—what’s going on? Where are you?”

I cup my palm around the receiver, trying to muffle the swiveling of chairs and
tink tink
of glasses and the
thunk
as they hit the bar. What if he’s so mad when I tell him, that he refuses to come? “I got lost,” I say. “I’m using the phone at a bar.” My throat feels very tight. “Can you come pick me up?”

I can imagine the vein, pulsing deep blue in the center of his forehead. “Where
are
you, Lo?”

I put my hand over the receiver, turn to Joe, who’s fixated on a tiny elevated TV in the corner: Monday Night Football. Browns versus Bears. “What’s the address here?”

“One-Six Hayes,” replies Joe, eyes not leaving the game.

I whisper the address to Dad and he curses. “I’m on my way.”

Click.

The bar is low-lit, a strand of half-broken Christmas lights casting a dull glow onto the rows of liquor bottles. I sit shakily down on a swivel seat at the bar and lower my eyes to count glass-stain rings—
twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, fifteen-and-a-half
… .

A door at the other end of the room swings open, and a long-haired, stoop-backed man comes rattling out, broom between his hands. He whistles ear-splittingly off-key, as he starts to sweep, gathering up the clots of crumpled napkin, split shells of peanut, all of the other crap on the floor. I start my count again.
Nine, ten, eleven, twelve …

Joe pulls his eyes off the TV screen to holler at him: “Jesus, Paul. Lay off it, okay?”

“Hey—Joey,” he says, the man croaks. He has the voice of a bullfrog. “Put some music on in here, and I won’t have to make my own.”