The Butterfly Clues (16 page)

Flynt slides a bobby pin from his pocket into the rusted lock of the odd yellow house and jimmies it open easily, like breaking into houses is something he does every day. He swings the door open, waiting for me to step inside first.

“You’re
really
good at that,” I say.

“I have to break into storage sheds and locked buildings all the time when I need a quick place to crash,” he replies, without hesitation. “Believe you me, Lope—hey, has anyone ever called you ‘Lope’ before?”

A tightening feeling in my stomach: Oren used to call me Lope once in a while, because he knew it annoyed me. “No,” I answer shortly. “Never.”

“Anyway,
Lo
, I wasn’t this good when I started. I had to sleep in the alley all too frequently on account of my poor de-locksmanship.”

“That must have sucked in the winter,” I say, trying to push away my suspicions.
He’s here. He’s helping me
.

“Ho-Lee shit
—yes.
It sucked. It more than sucked. I don’t even think there’s an adequate word to convey the intensity of the suckiness I endured.” He winks, but there’s a weird curve to his lips—like it’s taking every single cell in his body to force them into a smile. “M’lady,” Flynt says, motioning me inside the open door.

But I can’t move—the weight of a thousand hands suddenly pressing pressing pressing into my chest, sucking all the air out with a single downward shove. The whole thing feels like a dream—this threshold before me—the insides of Sapphire’s daisy-yellow house trembling and vibrating with a deathly cold.

“Lo,” says Flynt quietly, “we shouldn’t just stand here.”

Six deep breaths. Nine taps. Three
banana
s. Again. Again. Again. I don’t know what Flynt’s face looks like right now, and I don’t want to know. And, right now, I can’t care; it’s the
only
way.

Finally, I finish the cycle, and I can enter: yellow arch of the doorway shuttering as I pass, Sapphire’s voice whispering through all the walls. Flynt follows, closing the door behind us, locking it. “Lo,” he says again softly, “why do you do that stuff?”

Stepping inside, the darkness wraps around me with a watery thickness. He saw; he knows. My throat burns as I answer, the only words that come: “Have to.” I shake my head and say it again: “Have to.” And once more, to make it three: “Have to.”

I think I see him nod, but I don’t know. Too dark to know. A chemical smell comes up from the floor like sanitizer and metal and must. I shiver. The landlord must have shut off the heat pretty soon after they found the body. Flynt flips a light switch in the hallway and nothing happens. The dark beats its way around us, threatening.
Just try me,
it sneers. Flashes of waning light cut through the dark from a billowing curtain, sharp and sudden. My eyes work to adjust.

“I’m going to look in the kitchen for a flashlight or some candles,” Flynt says, his voice shivery; I feel the heat from his body retreating as he walks forward, and, seconds later, I hear clanging, reaching, searching sounds resounding from a different room. Moments later, he reemerges with flashlights beaming. Two. One in each hand. He comes to stand next to me, handing me one. My hands feel suddenly massive and too heavy to lift.

We both just stand there for a minute with our flashlights, sucking cold into our lungs. Sucking in the smells of covered-up dead person. And blood.

The cat again: yowling through my head, mouth open, frozen in terror. My stomach cinches up, curls into itself like a freaked-out animal. The curtain billows like someone’s punched it: a square of weak light fills the room and disappears again with the wind.

Flynt clicks his flashlight on and off. I see Sapphire’s bruise-colored lips, patterned up and down the walls, flicker in the stream of the flashlight. I blink and they’re gone, and she’s gone, too. I put my hand into the air, wave it around.
Can you feel me?
I think to her, waiting for a sign.
Are you here, somewhere?

Flynt waves his arm through the air, too, aping me. “Christ, it’s cold,” he says. “I’m going to explore, okay?” He walks forward, shining his flashlight into corners, walls, floorboards as he goes.

“Me, too,” I say to his back. I turn my flashlight on and follow just behind him, floating left into the living room as he’s carried away somewhere else.

The weirdest thing is this: everything looks totally normal. There’s a long blue couch, an afghan spread out on one of the cushions like someone’s just taken a nap there, a glass with a dark lipstick rim on the little wooden folding tray next to it still half filled with water, a Chinese-style dragon rug just a little askew across the wooden floor, a pair of black flats in front of the TV set.

My body floats me over to the card table, to the glass with the lipstick rim. Her lips. I reach my fingers to it, expecting wax and warmth, as though she’s just taken a drink and gone to find something in another part of the house. I expect her to flood back into the room any second and catch me—a total stranger—standing in

the middle of her living room.

But then I remember that she won’t. She can’t.

She never will again.

And her lipstick print on the rim of the glass isn’t warm and waxy; it’s cold.

Creeeak
. I jump, my hand fluttering to my chest.
Creeeak. Creeeak—
more and more, farther down the hall. My heart races faster.

“Flynt?” I call out. There’s no answer.

My stomach: a sick knot, full of razor blades. Squeezing. Sharp. A humming sound now. A voice.
Sapphire? Are you here?

“Heading upstairs, Lo!” Flynt’s voice drifts down to me.

I exhale, but the panic lingers as the waves of darkness gather, push me out of this room and into the next.

The bathroom: behind her mirror, five samples of different perfumes in delicate glass bottles. I picture her standing in here, dabbing each one onto a different spot of her neck, her wrists. I grab one—the middle one—from the row, slide it into my pocket. More of her—I want more of her.

A small, framed drawing of a bird above the toilet catches my eye. I like the drawing—it reminds me of the one that was taped into her locker at Tens. I wonder if it’s from the same person.
Bird.
There are two photographs of Sapphire tacked above the light switch—one where she is standing with Marnie, obviously at a bar, half turned away from the camera; one with a girl I don’t recognize.

I float forward again. The kitchen: yellow walls, dried flowers in mason jars, boxes of Corn Flakes and Cheerios lined on top of the refrigerator. Magnets advertising local businesses, a Post-it note that says,
Laundry!!
in a girl’s handwriting, more photos of Sapphire with her friends. I run my flashlight across each of them. In every one she’s wearing that blue-black lipstick. I feel momentarily troubled by that detail. Where is her lipstick?

From upstairs, there’s a clattering sound, as though Flynt has just knocked something over. A second later, his voice, distant, watery: “Nothing doing up here. A lot of cool crap, though.”

I’m swept back out to the hallway and double back down the hall, toward what must be her bedroom—toward the room where she was killed, and the window that was blown outward by the bullet that missed my head by inches. I’ve been avoiding it. The door is just slightly ajar. I angle my flashlight inside.

Standing just outside the doorway for a moment, paralyzed, I take in the same blue walls, carpeting, furniture I saw through the window in the grainy, pixelated cell phone pictures that were posted to the crime blog. The plastic shades over her window are only halfway down, letting in a thin stream of light from the streetlamp outside. The wind blows through the shattered window, now crisscrossed with police tape, causing the shades to sway lightly, tapping against the wall.

Tap tap tap, banana.

The air is heavy, tense; the smell metallic. There is a vibrating feeling between the walls. This is exactly how it feels to walk by Oren’s room. We can feel the particles of him, swimming around. Parts of him that will never equal the whole.

That’s why we never go into his room anymore. If we did, we’d run around, frantic, trying to collect the pieces, hoping we could pull him together again. And we’d say,
We’ll never let you go again. Stay here. Stay here. Stay here.

But then he’d disappear. And we’d be alone again. Staring at the maroon comforter drawn across his empty bed.

I feel Sapphire draw together around me now, like if she could, she’d reach out and take my hand, pull me in for a long hug and say,
Go for it.
Because that’s the kind of person I know, in my bones, that she was.

Six deep breaths. Two stuffed bears on her bed. Three pillows. One Rorschach spatter of blood against her wall. Sapphire’s blood. Sapphire’s face—it flashes before me—the gunshot—the cat—Oren—one bursting, terrible fist rising from the carpeting, holding all of them in its grip.

I close my eyes and open them again. Take another six breaths, three seconds each.

The first thing that catches my eye is her closet, to the left of her bed. It is a dark little cavern, brimming with colorful clothes. I step inside of it, sweep my flashlight across the dense wall of fabric—glittery, sparkly, scandalous-looking—skirts and dresses and shirts with complicated hooks and zippers up the center. I find a velvety black, rhinestone-encrusted bustier and run my fingers over its surfaces—different extremes of hard and soft. I’m filled with a growing urge to take it, different from my urge to lift three little plaster frogs from her desk—which I do, my heartbeat quickening, my face flushing with a familiar mixture of shame and elation—but my feeling about the bustier is a slower, more sober urge.

She wore this bustier. She moved in it, and sweated and ate and lived. That’s what it means.
That’s what I’ll think of when I touch it, Sapphire, when it’s mine
. I unzip my backpack and shove it, and the frogs, inside. Mine.

Ours
.

So much to look through: but who knows how much time we’ve got before someone, a neighbor or a passerby, sees flashlights beaming on and off in different parts of the house and calls the police.

I pass the bloodstain near her bed on the way to the desk. It’s still there, a hardened, ghostly shape on the carpet. Suck in my cheeks nine times as I pass. In and out. In and out. In. Dimly, I’m aware of footsteps. Flynt must have come downstairs again.

Her desk is a mess: stacks of old Moleskine notebooks and edge-crumbled day planners and funny hand-drawn calendars. I open one up and flip through; little scraps of dislodged paper flutter out and onto the carpet. They’re disorganized, dates on the loose, fallen papers from different years
,
even. I can hardly breathe I’m so excited. She’s led me here, to this treasure. I know it. She sent the wave that carried me here, afloat. She meant for me to find these, I can
feel
it.

I’m squeezing the last of the notebooks in my bag, about to call out to Flynt, when I notice one final, large, wrinkled piece of paper. I flatten it out with my palm: an ink sketch. I squint, look at it more closely—oval face, dark eyes, dark lips—it’s her. It’s Sapphire.

I pan my flashlight all along the image. It’s beautiful. Graceful. Stark lines, lots of shadow. And in the left corner, in messy, loopy script, there’s a signature.

Flynt.

My blood turns to ice: deep freeze, organs like trapped rocks.

He said he didn’t know her, but he lied. Lied lied lied. He drew her picture. Knew how to get in—knew where the kitchen was, I suddenly realize—has been here before.

Oh my God. Everything burning in and out of focus, solar-eclipse-style.

A voice echoes from behind me, reaching my ears in slow, hollow waves: “Find anything good?”

CHAPTER 13

I turn around slowly, still clutching the sketch in one trembling hand.

Flynt’s standing in the doorway.

Flynt sees the sketch in my hand. His face goes full-white.

Terror pulses through me, rising up from my feet and into my skull.

I’m shaking. I think:
Run
, but I can’t.

He’s coming toward me, reaching for me.

I stumble backward, stepping into a small nightstand with a porcelain lamp on it and knocking it over. The lamp crashes to the floor. Small painted bits of it shatter across the ground. My chest feels tight, so tight, the words sticking painfully in my throat.

“You said—you said you d-didn’t know her… .” My voice comes out stuttering, a gasp.

“What are you talking about, Lo?” He reaches for me, and I twist away.

“You lied,” I croak. “What did you do to her?”

“What are you talking about? What the hell are you trying to say?” His eyebrows knit together as he focuses on the paper trembling in my hands before pulling it from me.

“Jesus,” Flynt whispers after a few seconds, so agitated that he whips off his bear hat and runs a hand over the top of his head. It’s the first time I’ve seen his head exposed. “Okay, Lo. Look,” he says, sighing deeply, shakily, “I didn’t want you to know this, but—she was a friend of mine. I mean, not a close friend, but … I knew her.”

My chest feels tight—I rock forward on my toes—I try to form words. “But—but if you
knew
her, why—why didn’t you tell me? Why did you lie?”

“I didn’t want to get involved, okay! I mean, you get that, right? She was killed. This is a big deal, Lo. It isn’t a game.”

“I know it’s not a game,” I spit out. “You’re the one playing games. You’re the one who lied—”

“You lied to me, too, when you said that you knew her.” Flynt sighs and rubs the top of his head. “Look. I decided to help because I saw how much you cared, and, Lo, it inspired me.
You
inspire me, to be a better person. To do something worthwhile.” He pauses, taking another deep breath. “But this is why we shouldn’t be messing around with this stuff in the first place. You’re clearly freaked out,” he rushes on, “and
I’m
clearly freaked out, and I think we need to just … call it a day. Get out while we still can.”