The Butterfly Garden (11 page)

I’d been there almost two months before he came looking for me. Lyonette was with a new girl who hadn’t been named yet, and Bliss was putting up with the Gardener, so I was on the little cliff above the waterfall with Poe, trying to memorize “Fairy-land.” Most of the other girls couldn’t go up on the cliff without wanting to throw themselves off, so I usually had it to myself. It was peaceful up there. Quiet, but then, the Garden was always quiet. Even when some of the better-adjusted girls would play tag or hide-and-seek, they were never loud. Everything was subdued, and none of us knew if that was how the Gardener preferred it or if it was just instinct. As a group, all our behaviors were learned from other Butterflies, who had learned it from other Butterflies, because the Gardener had been taking girls for over thirty fucking years.

He didn’t kidnap under the age of sixteen, erring on the side of older if he wasn’t sure, so the maximum lifespan of a Butterfly was five years. Not counting the overlaps, that was still more than six
generations
of Butterflies.

When I met Avery at the restaurant, he was in a tuxedo like his father. Sitting with my back against a rock, the book across my knees as I basked in the warmth of sunlight through the glass roof, I looked up when his shadow fell over me and found him in jeans and an open button-down dress shirt. There were scratches on his chest and what looked like a bite mark on his neck.

“My father wants to keep you all to himself,” he said. “He hasn’t talked about you at all, not even your name. He doesn’t want me to remember you.”

I turned the page and looked back at the book.

His hand grabbed my hair to pull my face up and his other hand cracked painfully across my face. “There’s no busboy here to save you this time. This time you’ll get what you’re asking for.”

I kept hold of the book and didn’t say anything.

He hit me again and blood splashed onto my tongue from a split lip, colored lights dancing in front of my eyes. He yanked the book from my hand and threw it into the stream; I watched it disappear over the edge of the waterfall so I wouldn’t have to look at him.

“You’re coming with me.”

He led me by my hair, which Bliss had put up into an elegant French twist that soon came unraveled in his grip. Whenever I didn’t move quickly enough for him, he turned and cracked me again. Other girls looked away as we passed them, and one even started crying, though the girls nearest her quickly shushed her in case Avery decided a weeper would be more entertaining.

He hurled me into a room I hadn’t been in before, one near the tattoo room at the very front of the Garden. This was a room that was closed and locked unless he was playing. There was a girl in there already, her wrists bound to the wall with heavy rings. Blood thickly coated her thighs and parts of her face, trailed down from a nasty bite on one breast, and her head lolled forward at an awkward angle. She didn’t look up even though I landed on the floor with a loud smack.

She wasn’t breathing.

Avery stroked the girl’s flaming hair, curling his fingers into it to pull her head back. Handprints wrapped around her throat and bone protruded against the skin on one side. “She wasn’t as strong as you are.”

He dove at me, clearly expecting me to fight, but I didn’t. I didn’t do anything.

No, not entirely true.

I recited Poe, and when I ran out of lines I knew, I thought them again and again and again until he threw me against the wall with a disgusted snarl and stalked from the room with his jeans undone. I guess you could say I won.

At the moment it didn’t feel like much of a victory.

When the room finally stopped spinning, I stood up and looked for a key or a latch, whatever would let the poor girl out of those wide cuffs. Nothing. I found a locked cabinet that, when I pulled the door as far as the lock would allow, showed whips and flails; I found bars and clamps and things my mind shuddered away from; I found any number of things, in fact, except a way to give her any shred of dignity.

So I
found
the remnants of my dress and
found
a way to drape it around her until the most important bits were covered, and I kissed her cheek and apologized with everything in me, as I’d never apologized to anyone before.

“He can’t hurt you again, Giselle,” I whispered against her bloody skin.

And I walked naked into the hallway.

Everything hurt, and each girl I passed hissed in sympathy. None of them offered to help. We were supposed to go to Lorraine for that, so she could catalogue every injury and report it to the Gardener, but I didn’t feel like looking at her stony face or feeling her press harder than she had to against forming bruises. Retrieving the ruins of the poetry book from where it had fetched up in the pond, I returned to my room and sat in my narrow shower stall. The water wouldn’t come on until evening—we each had an assigned time, unless we’d just been with the Gardener. The girls who’d been there longer could turn their water on themselves, another earned privilege, but that wasn’t me yet. Not for another few months.

I wanted so badly to cry. I’d seen most of the other girls do it time and again, and some of them always seemed to feel better afterward. I hadn’t cried since that fucking carousel when I was six years old, when I sat trapped on that beautifully painted horse and went round and round as both of my parents walked away and forgot all about me. And, as it turned out, sitting in the shower stall waiting for water that wouldn’t come for hours wasn’t going to flip that switch back on.

Bliss found me, water still trickling down her skin from her own shower, her hair wrapped in a brilliant blue towel, the color of the wings inked on her back. “Maya, what—” She stopped short, staring at me. “Fucking hell, what happened?”

It even hurt to talk, my lip swollen and my jaw aching from so many slaps, among other things. “Avery.”

“Wait here.”

Because there were so many places I was likely to go.

But when she came back, it was with the Gardener, who was unwontedly disheveled. She didn’t say a word, just led him into the room, dropped his hand, and walked away.

His hands were shaking.

He stepped slowly across the room, the horror on his face growing as he catalogued each visible injury, each bite mark or scratch, each deepening bruise or handprint. Because the sickest thing was—and there were so many to choose from—he genuinely did care about us, or at least what he thought of as us. He knelt down in front of me and inspected me with concerned eyes and gentle fingers.

“Maya, I am . . . I am so sorry. Truly I am.”

“Giselle is dead,” I whispered. “I couldn’t get her down.”

He closed his eyes with a look of genuine pain. “She can wait. Let’s get you taken care of.”

Until then, I hadn’t realized he actually kept a suite in the Garden. As we passed through the tattoo room, he bellowed out Lorraine’s name. I could hear her scrambling from the infirmary in the next room, her grey and brown hair fluffing around her face as it escaped her updo.

“Get me bandages, antiseptic. Something to help with the swelling.”

“What hap—”

“Just get it,” he snapped. He glared at her until she disappeared, returning moments later with a small mesh bag bulging with haphazardly packed supplies.

He punched a code into the pad on the wall and a section slid back and away, revealing a room done in burgundy and deep gold and mahogany. There was a comfortable-looking couch, a recliner positioned under a tall reading lamp, a television mounted on the wall, and that was all I got a chance to see before he led me through another doorway into a bathroom with a floor-set whirlpool tub bigger than my bed. He helped me sit down on the edge and started running the water, then wet a cloth to wipe away the worst of the blood.

“I won’t let him do this to you again,” he whispered. “My son is . . . my son lacks control.”

Among other things.

And just as I let him do other things, I let him fuss over me, and take care of me, and tuck me into his bed while he went to get a tray from Lorraine. I wouldn’t have thought I could sleep, but I did, all night with his breath against the back of my neck as he stroked my hair and sides.

The next afternoon, as I relaxed in my own bed with Bliss keeping me company, Lorraine threw a package at me. While Bliss muttered something about foul-tempered bitches who needed to stick their heads in an oven, I unwrapped the plain brown paper and started to laugh.

It was a book of Poe.

“So the Gardener didn’t approve of what his son did?”

“The Gardener cherished us, and genuinely regretted killing us. Avery was just . . .” She shakes her head, folding her legs beneath her on the chair. She winces and presses a hand against her stomach. “I’m sorry, but I
really
need to use the bathroom.”

The tech analyst opens the door a minute later. Inara gets up and joins her there, then glances back at Victor as if asking for permission. At his nod, they leave and close the door behind them.

Victor shuffles through the photos of the hallways, trying to count the individual sets of wings.

“Do you think that’s all the girls he took?” Eddison asks.

“No,” Victor sighs. “I wish I could say yes, but what if a girl was injured in such a way that it damaged her wings or back? I doubt he displayed them then, because these are all in perfect condition.”

“They’re dead.”

“But perfectly preserved.” He lifts one of the close-ups. “She said glass and resin; have the scene techs confirmed that?”

“I’ll find out.” He shoves back from the table and pulls his cell phone from his pocket. As long as they’ve been partners, Victor’s never seen him able to stand still while he’s on the phone, and as soon as the number’s dialed, he starts pacing back and forth across the narrow room like a caged tiger.

Finding the pen attached to Eddison’s notebook, Victor scrawls his initials across the bag with the collection of IDs and slits it open, letting the plastic cards spill out over the table. It gets a curious look from Eddison that he largely ignores as he sifts through them until he finds the name he’s looking for. Cassidy Lawrence.

Lyonette.

Her driver’s license was only three days old when she was taken, and the pretty girl in the picture beams with excitement. It’s a face meant for smiles, for joy, and he tries to age that into the fierce-eyed girl who welcomed Inara into the Garden. He can’t quite manage it. Even when he places the ID against the picture of those pumpkin wings caught in glass, he can’t make himself accept the connection.

“Which one do you suppose is Giselle?” Eddison asks, shoving the phone back in his pocket.

“Too many redheads to guess, unless Inara can tell us which butterfly she had.”

“How can he have been doing this for thirty years without us ever noticing?”

“If the police hadn’t gotten that call and noticed our flags on some of those names, how much longer do you think he would have gone unnoticed?”

“That’s a fucking terrible question.”

“What did the techs say?”

“They’re closing up the scene for today, giving a tour to the guards for tonight. They said they’d try to open the cases tomorrow.”

“Closing up?” He twists his wrist to check his watch. Almost ten o’clock. “Christ.”

“Vic . . . we can’t release her. She could just disappear again. I’m not convinced she’s not part of this.”

“I know that.”

“Then why aren’t you pushing harder?”

“Because she is more than smart enough to turn it back on us, and”—he laughs sharply—“more than enough of a smart-ass to enjoy doing it. Let her tell it in her own way; all it costs us is time, and this is one of the few cases where we
have
the time.” He leans forward, clasping his hands against the table. “The suspects are not in good condition; they may or may not survive the night. She’s our best chance of learning the larger picture of the Garden.”

“If she’s telling the truth.”

“She hasn’t actually lied to us.”

“That we know of. People with fake IDs aren’t usually innocent, Vic.”

“She may be telling the truth about why she has it.”

“It’s still illegal, and I still don’t trust her.”

“Give her time. That will also give
us
time for the other girls to recover enough to talk to us. The longer we keep her here, the better our chances of getting the other girls talking.”

Eddison scowls but nods. “She’s irritating.”

“Some people stay broken. Some pick up the pieces and put them back together with all the sharp edges showing.”

Rolling his eyes, Eddison scoops the IDs back into the evidence bag. He stacks each photo neatly into a pile and lines the edges with the corner of the table. “We’ve been up more than thirty-six hours. We need to sleep.”

“Yes . . .”

“So what do we do about her? We can’t let her disappear. If we take her back to the hospital and the senator hears about her . . .”

“She’ll stay here. We’ll get some blankets, see if we can find a cot, and in the morning we’ll resume.”

“You really think that’s a good idea?”

“A better idea than letting her go. If we keep her here, rather than moving her to a holding cell, it’s still an active interrogation session. Even Senator Kingsley isn’t going to butt in during an active interrogation.”