The Butterfly Sister

by Amy Gail Hansen

  “I have no idea what a professional teachers’ journal has to do with Mark,” I added.

  The professor’s mouth popped open. “The new teacher orientation,” she blurted.

  “The what?”

  She stood then and began sifting through the contents of her magazine files on her bookshelf. “Back in August, at my orientation, I remember they gave accolades to certain professors for various achievements, and Mark Suter was one of them. He published a paper in a recent issue of the MCETC journal. I’m almost positive. It’s here. I know it’s here.”

  After knocking a few books from the shelf, she pulled out several quarterly issues of the journal in question, and we began rummaging through them, flipping pages violently. We didn’t even bother to sit down. Instead we stood side by side, the journals open before us on top of the shelving unit. The professor spoke first.

  “Here it is,” she said, before reading the title. “ ‘Feminine Depression and Literary Creativity: Revisiting the Works of Woolf, Plath, and Gilman,’ by Mark Suter, Associate Professor of English, Tarble College.”

  My jaw dropped.

  “He stole your work,” she said.

  I fixed my eyes on the article again and started reading it, my finger gliding over the words, hoping to find word choices and syntax and phrasing different from my own. A word or two had been changed, a paragraph had been omitted, but the majority of it was mine. Word for word.

  I hope you don’t mind, I remembered Mark saying in New Orleans, after the symposium, but I shared some of your ideas . . . I gave you credit, of course. Not by name. I just called you my star pupil.

  What a liar, I thought. I didn’t lose my notes in New Orleans. He stole them.

  The professor stabbed at the article with her index finger. “That’s why I couldn’t shake the feeling that I’d seen your thesis before or heard something to the same effect,” she noted. “No wonder he gave you a D. He couldn’t have you thinking your paper had value.”

  I swallowed a pool of saliva that had formed in my mouth from not breathing and looked again at the article, at Mark’s name in the byline. Heat flushed my cheeks.

  “He was always talking about how many papers he had to publish to please the tenure committee, how he needed to look prolific,” I said. “So instead of doing the work himself, he took it from me.”

  “Not only you. I’m willing to bet he stole work from Julie and Madeline too.” The professor returned to her desk to pick up Julie’s paper. “I bet Suter has this exact essay about Anne Bradstreet saved on his hard drive right now, only with his name at the top, ready to submit, another paper to add to his obnoxiously long CV.”

  Mark’s computer, I thought. What would I find there, if I had a look? More papers he stole from his students? Evidence of his countless affairs? Love letters to Beth?

  Certainly, Heidi’s master key would open his office door.

  Heidi wanted to do more than give me her master key; she wanted to snoop in Mark’s office alongside me. But she’d already risked losing her job by prying into private files. I couldn’t let her become a full-fledged accomplice. Begrudgingly, she let me go alone. She wanted to wait for me in her office, but I told her to go run errands instead, and come back to campus in an hour. That way, if I got caught, she wouldn’t be on campus, and I could lie and say I stole her key.

  The air inside Mark’s office was stale and musty, and I wondered if he’d been there since Meryl had trashed it the night before. Items—like the sofa cushions and paper piles—had been replaced but sloppily. Tissues, stained with Meryl’s blood, still sat in the wastebasket. Odds were, Mark wouldn’t return to his office until the next morning, but I moved swiftly and stealthily toward his desk, just in case.

  I booted up Mark’s computer but paused when the security log-in page loaded. I forgot that it would be password protected, since he used it to access the college’s main computer system and enter grades. I nosed around his desk for the password, even looking under the keyboard, thinking maybe he’d written it down in case he forgot. He didn’t. So my only option was to guess his password accurately before too many invalid tries locked me out.

  I looked around the room for clues. Was it something simple and straightforward, like his name? Or perhaps the name of an author? Was it an acronym of some sort? Or his birthday? My eyes soon went to the wastebasket, where Meryl had tossed the bloody tissues the day before. What had she called Beth? Mark’s one true love?

  I typed the word Beth into the blank space and held my breath as I clicked enter. No luck. Invalid password popped up on the screen. Staring at those two red words, I realized the odds were against me. I knew I’d just end up trying two more times, unsuccessfully, and the system would lock me out. Ditching the mission, I turned the computer off and got halfway to the door when I stopped abruptly at a thought. I raced back to Mark’s computer for another try. This time, a successful one.

  Beth was too short to be a password, I realized. But Elizabeth wasn’t.

  Once I had access to Mark’s computer, I saw he kept his hard drive as messy as his desk. Files and icons covered the entire desktop. I read the titles of the file folders quickly, hoping he’d named them simply, hoping he’d unknowingly made this task easy for me. Skipping folders generically titled Assessments and Book List, I clicked on one marked curriculum vitae.

  Mark’s professional résumé was, as Professor Barnard presumed, obnoxiously long. He’d included the standard credentials—his B.A. from Tulane and his M.F.A. from Northwestern—but also an exhaustive list of conferences he’d attended, as well as every paper he’d published professionally. His paper on Woolf, Plath, and Gilman—the one he stole from me—was his most recent publication credit, dated from that summer. But the entry listed just before it, titled Deconstructing Hester, also caught my eye. According to his CV, he’d published an essay on The Scarlet Letter just four months after his affair with Madeline Kohl ended, just four months after he’d slapped her essay on Hawthorne’s Puritan novel with a D. It couldn’t be a coincidence.

  There were a number of blank files on the desktop with no actual content. A couple of files were story starts, snippets of novels or short stories he never finished. Despite a concerted effort, a thorough check of his documents, I found nothing on Anne Bradstreet, nothing to suggest he’d also stolen ideas from Julie Farris.

  I found something more disturbing than that.

  The document was titled Her Fractured Mind: Where Creativity and Insanity Collide and that alone piqued my interest because it related to my thesis topic. I assumed it was another reworked version of my ideas. But once I opened the document and saw the words SUBMISSION—PSYCHOLOGY NOW, DRAFT at the top of the page, I questioned that assumption.

  What would Mark write for a psychology publication? I wondered.

  The answer was there in the text:

  Looking back, I’d liken her mind to my hometown public library, jam-packed with facts and stories and ideas. And like a precocious schoolboy, I wanted to read every book on her shelves. But I can’t sugarcoat the truth: she was delusional. She saw things that weren’t there.

  How could a mind so beautiful, so imaginative, malfunction? Why did it drive her to the brink of suicide? Was her mind predisposed to breakdown, to self-destruct?

  i.e. Was she destined to be crazy?

  The words—delusional, malfunction, suicide, crazy—bombarded my eyes like flashes of light as I tried to make sense of Mark’s essay. Checking the document’s properties, I saw Mark had created the file in December of the year prior, right after my near suicide. And my cheeks grew hot, my throat tight. My fists clenched.

  It’s me, I thought as I printed a copy of the document. I’m the delusional she.

  Chapter 15

  Professor Barnard had finished reading Julie’s essay by the time I returned to her office. It was close to three o’clock by then, and I saw the day wearing on her; her makeup had worn off, particularly under her eyes, and she was yawning when
I came in the door. I knew she would have gone home by then, if I hadn’t asked for her help, and I felt bad I’d ever questioned her intentions, especially based on Heidi’s comments about her sexuality. She may be quirky, and she may be radical, I thought. But she’s loyal. And in the end, that’s all that really matters.

  “Did you find anything?” she asked. “Anything on Bradstreet?”

  “No, but he published a paper earlier this year on The Scarlet Letter,” I said, pointing out the notation on Mark’s curriculum vitae. “He probably lifted it from Madeline Kohl. And I also found this.” I handed her Mark’s unfinished submission for Psychology Now. “It’s about me. I know it is. He created the document around the time I tried to kill myself.”

  “A psychology publication? But why would he . . . ?” She trailed off once she started reading. “Oh my,” she said. “I don’t understand. If this is about you, what does he mean by fractured mind and delusional?”

  I paused. Up to that point, I’d told only two people about my visions, Mark and Gwen. “Before I did it, before I overdosed on sleeping pills, I saw . . . You’re going to think I’m crazy.”

  She shook her head no. “What did you see?”

  And so I told her about Virginia Woolf, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Sylvia Plath.

  “Woolf, Gilman, and Plath? Is that why you did it, why you tried to kill yourself?”

  “I thought I was going mad,” I explained. “I didn’t know if I was seeing ghosts or hallucinating. My therapist later said it was reality manifested into surreality, something to that effect.”

  She frowned, and I could tell she questioned my sanity, even though she said she wouldn’t.

  “Can you believe his audacity?” I went on. “To write about me, like some sort of clinical subject?”

  She exhaled, deeply, through her nose. “What are you going to do?”

  I finally understood what Professor Barnard meant the day before when she talked about stars. I was never going to move forward, never going to be healed, until I faced my past head on, until I looked it in the eye and said, You don’t own me anymore.

  “I’m going to tell President Monroe everything,” I said.

  She smiled, her lips closed but her eyes wide and beaming, the way my mother had smiled when I made my First Communion, when I got my driver’s license, when I graduated from high school. And though she didn’t say it, I knew the professor was proud of me for making the right decision, a decision only I could make.

  “Can you prep me?” I asked. “Help me organize what to say and how to say it?”

  “I’d be honored,” she said. “Monroe is tough. I suppose that’s how she got where she is today. Sweet and nice doesn’t exactly move you up the administrative ladder. But she’s also a facts-and-figures person. She likes data. So you’ll need to go to her with as much concrete proof as you can. Keep trying to contact Tina Beyers. Secure a copy of Madeline’s essay if you can, and a copy of Suter’s paper.”

  I nodded earnestly, as if taking notes during a lecture.

  “With the coeducation vote only days away, it’s going to be hard to get an appointment with her on such short notice,” she added. “So you’ll either have to go first thing tomorrow morning or better yet, tonight.”

  “Tonight? But it’s Sunday. Her office is closed.”

  “I meant go to her house,” the professor explained. “She lives on campus for a reason. She’s supposed to be accessible to students at all times.”

  I recalled the president’s home at the south end of campus. It was not a mansion but close to it. Orange brick with wide, white columns and a manicured landscape, it had always reminded me of the Louisiana plantations I’d toured as a child.

  Just then, my cell phone rang. The Chronicle number appeared on the screen, and I answered, thinking it was exceptional timing for Craig to call. To buy time, I would have to tell him I was still working on the article about Beth, only now with a different slant. I would need to stay at Tarble another night to complete it.

  “Did you hear what happened?” Craig asked after I answered. “About that girl, your friend?”

  “The serial killer? Yeah, I saw it on the news this morning.”

  “I’m not talking about this morning.” He paused. “The Pittsburgh PD just released a new statement. Sounds like that Grenshaw guy lied. They haven’t found Beth’s body in the river yet, even though they’ve had divers in there all day.”

  “But why would he lie?”

  “I’m guessing to finagle a sentencing plea for the girls he did kill. Or maybe he was just dicking the police around for spite. Doesn’t matter why, really. They’re on major image protection mode now. They’re scrambling to find another suspect. And you know how these things usually go. It’s usually the boyfriend or husband. But she wasn’t married, was she?”

  Mark.

  “Beth was seeing someone,” I blurted. “They broke up before she went missing.”

  “What?” Craig’s voice was loud, as if he was trying to communicate to me over a bad connection. I didn’t hear any interference on my end.

  “I said, Beth was—”

  “No, wait, Ruby. Not you. Georgene is waving her arms at me. Something else just came in. Can you hold on?”

  While I waited I listened to murmurs and phones ringing in the background. I could almost see the gray peacoat wool partitions of my cubicle, and I realized I hadn’t missed work in the least.

  “What’s going on?” the professor asked, a wrinkle of concern separating her eyebrows.

  I was about to answer but Craig came back on the line. I held up a finger to say I would explain it all in a minute.

  “You’re not going to believe this.” He panted, as if he’d just run up a flight of stairs. “But a woman has come forward. The woman who sat next to Beth on the plane to Pittsburgh.” He caught his breath. “She’s saying that after seeing all the photos of Beth on the news this morning, she’s certain the woman who sat next to her was not Beth Richards.”

  “But didn’t the flight attendant verify Beth was on the plane?”

  “I suppose the person sitting next to Beth would remember her better than the flight attendant.” He paused. “Do you know what this means, Ruby? I mean, if this woman is right, if she’s telling the truth? Think about it. They’ve been looking for Beth in Pittsburgh.”

  I realized where he was going. “You mean, Beth could be anywhere?”

  “Maybe she never left Wisconsin. Maybe someone just posed as Beth on the plane, someone who looked enough like Beth to pass through security. It’s ingenious, don’t you think? It certainly set the police on the wrong track.”

  Someone who looked enough like Beth, I thought. Thin and tall. Blond hair. Light skin.

  “Craig, I have to go,” I said. “I have to call the detective right away.”

  His tone turned serious. “What’s wrong?”

  “I think I know who was on that plane,” I said.

  I didn’t have to explain much of the conversation to Professor Barnard. She got the gist of it from hearing only my end and reading my body language. But I relayed the most relevant information Craig told me.

  “So who was it?” she asked. “Who was on the plane?”

  “Julie Farris. She’s the spitting image of Beth Richards,” I said, looking in my purse for the detective’s business card. “I’ve got to tell the police about this. Mark’s a suspect too. Maybe he put Julie up to it.”

  “You mean he found out what Beth was up to and tried to silence her? And used Julie to cover his tracks?”

  “Maybe that’s why she tried to kill herself. She felt guilty. Unless she was the one who did it.” A shiver shimmied up and down my arm, remembering how calm and confident Julie had been when I visited her in the psych ward. “Either way, I have to call the detective and tell him what I know.”

  “What should we do about all of this?” she asked, gesturing to the mess on her desk, the paper trail we’d collected on Mark. “What ab
out talking to President Monroe?”

  I shrugged. “I guess it’ll have to wait.”

  My call to Detective Pickens went to voice mail after three rings, but I left a message, saying it was urgent, that I had crucial information about Beth Richards’s case.

  Once I hung up, Professor Barnard grabbed her messenger bag. “Would you mind if we stepped out for some fresh air?” she asked. “I’ve been cooped up in this office all day.”

  “Of course,” I said, standing too. “I get better reception outside anyway.”

  “I should probably run home too,” she added. “I just got a puppy a few weeks ago, and if I don’t let her out soon, it’s borderline mistreatment.” She placed a hand on my shoulder. “Will you be okay? By yourself?”

  I nodded. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

  She gave me a perplexed look, then lowered her voice. “What if Mark Suter really did do something to Beth? To keep her from exposing him? He might know you’re on to him too. He might try to . . . I’m just worried,” she said. “For your safety.”

  I remembered what Meryl had insinuated about Mark the night before. I too had no idea what he was really capable of. “I’ll be okay,” I said, checking my watch. “And Heidi will be back soon.”

  The professor nodded her approval. “It should take me twenty minutes. Tops,” she said. “Where should we meet up again?”

  “You don’t have to come back, if you don’t want to.”

  “I have to,” she said. “It’s too late. I’m way too invested now.”

  We decided to meet behind Langley Hall, on the boulders lining the beach. It was not only the best-known spot for cell reception—I didn’t want to miss the detective’s call—but also the best hiding place on campus. Tucked between the water and the academic buildings, it was where Tarble girls often took boys to do more than make out. If Mark was on campus, if he was looking for me, he wouldn’t see me there.