The Butterfly Girl

by Rene Denfeld

  Teddy, greasy in his jail jumpsuit, had no answers. The defense attorney sat nearby, in the plastic chair. He was there to make sure Jerome didn’t ask Teddy about his crimes. That was their deal. Jerome could only ask if Teddy knew where Celia might be, or knew anything about the man who had taken her. As if pedophiles had a secret grapevine. Jerome thought of the games he used to play with Naomi as kids, making phones with two orange juice cans and string, talking from room to room.

  Teddy didn’t know anything. “Sorry I can’t help you, brother,” he said, as if they were kin, and Jerome wanted to spit in his face.

  * * *

  After long hours of searching, Naomi fell apart, sobbing on a street corner. “We have to find her,” she kept saying, and Jerome noticed that for all of Naomi’s determination to find her sister, it was this homeless child that had sparked the terror.

  Jerome held her with his one arm, wishing he had two.

  Do you have any idea where she might be?

  No, said Mrs. Wilkerson, tears in her eyes as she passed them an old school photograph of Celia. Naomi had filed a missing persons report and was making flyers.

  No, said Alyssa, trembling between her foster parents, each holding one of her hands in their laps.

  No, said Rich and the others. No, said the nuns at Sisters of Mercy. No, said the manager at Aspire, turning her head into the locker to weep. No, said everyone they asked on skid row, until at long last Naomi turned a corner a week after Celia went missing, and a junkie scratching his neck said he had never heard of the girl.

  Chapter 40

  Even now, more than ever, the butterflies came. They blanketed Celia in the darkest night. They filled the foulness and beat back the air. The ceiling was not a ceiling; the room had no doors. The butterflies kept Celia from asking the wrong kinds of questions, the questions that would unlock the scream of panic from her throat. They told her, It’s nothing, and Let’s focus on that window. They told her, Shhhh, and they covered her face with their glowing beauty when the pain got too much. Nothing, not even he, could penetrate her glory.

  But sometimes the predators come no matter how hard you try. They want to pin you down. They want to kill you. Celia knew that’s what he planned to do. Shhhh, said the butterflies, filling the room. Think only of your escape.

  When she got ahold of herself, Celia let the butterflies carry her gently back down to earth—and she watched the young woman who came with the food.

  The young woman was ageless, her face like plastic stretched to some unseemly point. She had eyes that turned inwards. She came in twice a day, first turning the deadbolts from the outside. She brought crackers on a plate. I am looking for my sister, the flyer had said. She is about twenty-five.

  The young woman handed her a dirty towel, her face mute. Celia wiped blood off her chin. The towel smelled impossibly bad, like it had never been washed. Someplace in this horrible house, Wesley breathed. Celia could feel his dragon breath from afar.

  Her name is Sarah, Naomi had said.

  This, Celia thought, is Naomi’s sister. They even looked alike.

  Looking over her shoulder, Sarah held her left arm out. She opened her palm. Rising from her corner, Celia carefully, painfully, hobbled close. Celia opened her mouth to speak, but Sarah shook her head. Wesley might hear them. So instead Celia tilted her own head, in question. Is there something there I should see?

  Sarah nodded, eagerly.

  Celia looked into the empty palm.

  Tell her I miss her. Celia remembered the flyer. Tell her I am sorry.

  Celia opened her mouth and stopped. Be careful, something inside warned her. She might not be ready.

  Together they peered into the palm. Sarah’s lips moved. She was talking to whatever was there. Celia closed her eyes in relief. She knows she is in hell, she thought, and if she knows that, she wants to escape.

  At nights Wesley locked Sarah in the closet. Little Self liked it there. She climbed the metal rod above Sarah, swinging upside down above her. Sometimes she sang the same songs Sarah’s big sister had sung so long ago. The best one was about a sweet chariot. Sarah didn’t know what that meant except her sister was coming back. It was taking a long time.

  The girl reminds you of Big Sister, doesn’t she? Little said.

  Yes! Sarah breathed, sleep filling her. She does.

  Stay awake, Sarah. You have to think.

  Think about what? Sarah asked, fearful.

  How to escape, Little said. You have to take the girl with you. She can show you the outside. Ask for her help. You can find your sister out there.

  He said he will keep me forever, Sarah’s lips murmured.

  No. It is time. Before he—

  Yes, Sarah breathed out, her eyes closing.

  * * *

  After about a week, Celia had, miraculously, found a way to talk to Sarah. She did it without making any sound. Sarah was remarkably good at reading lips. Sarah had learned to read lips from watching Wesley. It was easier, and better, than looking in his eyes.

  The cracker plate was on the dirty floor between them. Wesley was somewhere in the house. It was enough to make a breath drop with fear.

  Sarah smiled at Celia, showing a line of teeth pebbled from neglect. Celia felt sorry for her, seeing those teeth, feeling this house. What a tender heart Sarah must have—as scared as any street kid. Sarah looked over her shoulder, held her left arm out again, and opened the palm. Celia stepped closer and carefully put her arm around Sarah’s waist. The flesh was soft, and at first stiffened in fear and surprise. Then it softened.

  Little Self wants us to leave, Sarah’s lips moved.

  I will help you, Celia answered, her heart rising with hope.

  One window in the basement, Sarah said. That’s where I saw you.

  That was you! Celia was astonished. I thought—

  Don’t say his name.

  But how can we get out? He is always watching.

  Sarah frowned, thinking.

  I have an idea, Little Self said from Sarah’s palm.

  Chapter 41

  You left me, her sister was saying, whispering down an empty street. You left me and you left her.

  Naomi woke with a start. The night was wet outside her window. The foul hours of dawn, she remembered a fellow survivor saying. The time when those in pain remember. The knowledge that tomorrow has brought yesterday back.

  Her mind was grainy with lack of sleep. Next to her Jerome was in the deep, soundless slumber of the exhausted. His gun holster was slung over the armchair. Naomi remembered Diane laughing when they first met, outside the courtroom where they were both testifying.

  Her sister had been about to say something else in the dream. Naomi turned to the window. No, it was Celia. Naomi winced as she remembered that last, explosive talk, the child’s cheeks lathered with tears. Celia had been saying something Naomi hadn’t wanted to hear. But she did now.

  “You can’t! She’s dead!” Celia had yelled. “She probably fucking died or died fucking, years ago, I bet in that house, and you didn’t care because you are too late.”

  I bet in that house.

  Oh my God, Naomi thought, sitting straight up.

  “Celia knew where the house was,” Naomi told the gathered men.

  They were sitting around Winfield’s desk. Sean Richardson was there, and so was Specialist McConnell. It was very early morning, and they all looked sleep deprived. A row of takeout coffee cups circled the desk. Naomi had bitten hers.

  “The question”—Winfield cleared his voice—“is how we find out what Celia knew.”

  “We’ve talked to all her friends,” Jerome said. “None of them know anything. That boy Rich is beside himself with worry.”

  “What did she tell you again, Naomi? That house.” Specialist McConnell spoke in his warm brogue. “Nothing more?”

  Naomi shook her head, sick with herself for not asking when Celia had told her.

  “What about her mom?” Sean Richardson aske
d.

  Everyone had read the court transcripts. The trial had been a travesty. “Celia the liar.” That the judge had allowed the jury to hear this still inflamed Naomi. Of course Teddy was going to call her a liar—she was speaking the truth.

  Jerome had done an interview with Celia’s mother because Naomi didn’t think she could handle it. “She’s in a treatment center. She says that losing both Celia and Alyssa made her get clean. I don’t know what to think. But she doesn’t know anything.”

  “It seems like Celia didn’t tell anyone where this house was,” Richardson said.

  “She told someone,” Naomi replied obstinately.

  “How do you know that?” Richardson asked, respectfully.

  “It’s like the fairy tales,” Naomi said, remembering her other missing child cases. “Celia was trapped and lost, alone in the wilderness. She will have left a trail of crumbs somewhere. All children do.”

  “Then let’s find the trail,” Winfield said, ending the meeting.

  Jerome stood outside next to his truck with Naomi. He wanted to drive down to the reservation. If there was the smallest chance the cousin who had raised Tasmin Tarseed knew anything about Wesley, he wanted to find it. “Will you be okay?” he asked, as if he were leaving for a week and not just a day.

  Naomi didn’t say anything. Instead she pushed at him with her mind: Go, help me find her.

  Jerome found Ed in the reservation library, small and overly warm, in a clapboard building. The parking lot outside was almost empty.

  “You still got that bundle?” Ed asked, sorting books.

  “I gave the photo to Tasmin Tarseed. That’s the daughter of the woman whose picture it was. She lived in that farmhouse. Her older cousin still lives here.”

  “Mrs. Tarseed? Tell her she’s got fines.” He chuckled.

  “Naomi’s little friend is missing. A street girl by the name of Celia.”

  Ed’s entire demeanor changed. The two men walked out of the building. Moss hung off the stunted trees, and mist coiled around their feet. Ed poured strong coffee from his thermos, which once said oregon ducks on it, most of the letters worn off. He passed Jerome the lid cup, and he took a swallow. The coffee was strong and sweet, and tasted like birdsong.

  “I’m here to see if there is anything her cousin might know, about where Wesley Thurman went,” Jerome explained. “My heart is breaking watching my wife right now. She thinks it’s her fault that Celia has gone missing.”

  “Does she know it isn’t?”

  “I don’t think that matters to her.” Jerome handed back the cup, and Ed finished the coffee, screwing the cup back on the thermos. Jerome dug in his jacket pocket, the empty sleeve brushing against Ed. “Pardon my sleeve,” he said. He pulled a slip of paper out of his pocket, and Ed smiled. Notes. “This is the address I found.” He showed it to Ed, and Ed gave him quick directions. Once in the mountains, Jerome knew, his GPS would chirp off.

  His truck bouncing up spring-washed roads, Jerome found the house. It was low and ramshackle, a series of rooflines like the sky. In a pen was a shaggy pony, its hooves split from neglect. At the door was an older woman, curious and waiting. Jerome turned to her as though he had known her his entire life.

  * * *

  Spring rains lashed the windows. Cousin Tarseed made a living by collecting wild salal to sell to florists. It was hard work, she said, showing her leathery hands. The beds of her nails were stained an eerie fluorescent green. “Looks like I got moss for hands, doesn’t it?” she asked, and then grew serious. “I was a bookkeeper once. But the economy went south, so now I live in the mountains and cut salal.”

  The blanket was open, the tender belongings of Mary Tarseed spread across the table. The cousin thought she would like to keep the teacup for herself, give the rest to the tribe. “I liked Mary,” she said. “She was hardheaded. That doesn’t do for a woman, most of the time.” She sat in her chair, primly, green hands folded in her soft lap. “She shouldn’t have taken on that judge.”

  “So you heard about all that?” Jerome asked, brushing his hair from his eyes.

  “Of course! I practically raised Tasmin. It was all she could talk about for ages. But then she stopped. Once she got big enough, she went away to university. She comes home on occasion—works for one of those migrant labor outfitters.” She gave a brief laugh that faltered. “I ought to get her into the salal business. They sure work us hard.”

  “I’m wondering if there is anything you ever heard—anything at all—having to do with the judge’s son, and where he might have ended up.”

  Her eyes met his. She waved a green hand. “All I know is what I heard. I will repeat it for you.”

  “Okay,” Jerome said, and she began.

  It was the judge who had gotten the praise, Mrs. Tarseed said. Owner of the Thurman Family Strawberry Farm, big and bluff with those grandfatherly eyes. Imposing on the bench—she had seen him once, while visiting her cousin before she died, and he had been kind to her, waiving a speeding ticket she had gotten out of town. No one had paid much attention to Wesley, small and priggish. He had a sniveling way about him that would have led to teasing had he not been the judge’s son. As he got older, he was the one who fixed the problems with the reluctant migrant workers, cajoling and threatening in turn. If a child’s body turned up every now and then, it was easy to chalk it up to field accidents. Especially when the son of the judge also began to make a name for himself doing good works. Like volunteering at the orphanage.

  The year her cousin died, there had been a restlessness in the town. The people were starting to suspect. They could feel it, Cousin Tarseed said. But they went on with their town parade, a festive march of children on Main Street, pulling their Radio Flyer wagons decorated with flowers. It was the height of strawberry season, and the air was filled with their rotting scent. That was the last time she had been in town, trying to recover her cousin’s remains, hoping their ancestors had walked her home.

  Around that time, Mrs. Tarseed said, there was talk of two sisters gone missing from the orphanage. That got the town’s attention. The evil was moving closer to home; it was crawling up their doorsteps in the middle of the night. There were now hushed conversations on sidewalks, quiet as the judge and his son walked up. The judge was aging, and maybe in their secret hearts the townspeople thought whatever was happening would die with him. Instead they now had Wesley and his stove-dial eyes.

  The judge passed away and was duly cremated. The bodies stopped appearing in the fields. Maybe because Wesley kept what his father had thrown away. The town swallowed their fears of the missing sisters. They didn’t want to think about the graves or the memory of the judge, so complacent in his chair. The last Mrs. Tarseed had heard, Wesley had left town himself. By then most of the people around had either died or moved away.

  “What about a mother?” Jerome asked as the story concluded. The rain had stopped. “Didn’t Wesley have a mother?”

  “Oh, her,” Mrs. Tarseed answered. Her green hands suddenly clenched in her lap, as if grabbing a bough. “The story was she left the judge, long ago. Divorced and went to the city and died there. They say she lived in some awful house.”

  It was then that Jerome knew just what to do.

  “What was her maiden name?” he asked.

  Rushing back to the city, Jerome saw the coming night sky as he parked by the downtown courthouse, moments before closing. The sheriff deputies frowned at him, hurrying through the metal detectors, until he mentioned their boss by name. Darting up the stairs, proud that he could balance so well even after missing an arm, Jerome bounded up all the flights and sprinted down the echoing hallway of the top floor until he came to the door at the back.

  probate, it said.

  He ran in to find a lonesome clerk, ready to close for the night. “I need a copy of a will,” Jerome breathed, and gave them the mother’s name. “It is going to have an address I need.”

  Chapter 42

  Wesley was at th
e kitchen table of what was once his mother’s house, eating baked beans again, this time with a tuna sandwich.

  After Naomi had escaped when she was nine, he had brought Sarah here. It had been easier to disappear than he would have assumed, just as it had been easy to take children. He had survived on the proceeds of selling his father’s strawberry fields and the family home, and when he needed a last name to use, he used his mother’s maiden name. He lived a subterranean life, surprised at how quickly time passed even when you didn’t have much of anything to do besides dream in the vast expanse between murder and hate.

  It had been twenty years since Naomi’s escape, he had realized when he saw the flyers around skid row. A woman looking for her sister. The details were clear. Naomi had not only tracked him to the city; she had, in the interlude, become an investigator specializing in finding children like herself.

  Yet he hadn’t worried. He didn’t worry for the same reason he didn’t worry about all the girls he had taken over the years. No one had ever stopped him. Or his father.

  In his earliest memory he was playing with his father’s gavel on the bench, wondering why it was called a bench and not a desk. In the chambers nearby—which looked like just a plain office to him—the door was closed, and his dad was doing something in there to a child around his own age. The gavel was warm and smooth and had heft in his own hand. He remembered holding it, seeing the way the light came in the windows, and had the sudden realization that he might never figure himself out. From the other room came sounds he did not want to hear.

  Soon after that, his mother left and his father began building something deep in the woods behind the strawberry fields. No one was allowed to go back there, and young Wesley wasn’t sure they would have been able to find it, anyhow. One day he had followed his dad without his dad knowing it. But his father, dressed in the worn trousers and baggy shirt he wore away from the bench, had acted like it was okay. “You will come to like it,” he had said.