The Butterfly Girl Read online

  Dedication

  For Luppi, Tony, Markel, and Tamira.

  Loving you gives me flight.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  One: Caterpillar Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Two: Chrysalis Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Three: Butterfly Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Rene Denfeld

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  One

  Caterpillar

  Chapter 1

  Celia knew a bad place when she saw it.

  The abandoned-looking house was in the industrial area next to skid row, where loading docks glistened with moisture and train tracks crossed the broken streets. The windows were covered with boards. What looked like blankets peeked out from under the slats. The front door was heavy and covered with locks.

  Celia had been hunting for returnable bottles when she noticed the place. The few houses left in this area were usually empty. Not this one.

  She balled her hands in the pockets of her jean jacket and studied the house. Her hair, dirty and musty, but still with a copper sheen, was cut short into wayward curls. She may have only been twelve, but she knew more than most. Or so she told herself. But deep inside her was the fear that she didn’t know enough.

  A shadow seemed to move behind the boarded-up basement window. Celia froze, then made herself breathe. Someone was looking at her through a tiny pane of glass. She could feel the heat of their gaze. For a second, it seemed that their eyes locked.

  Celia disappeared inside herself. She was used to doing that. She could make herself vanish even as she stood there, just another street urchin with no future in sight.

  Celia, who believed in nothing but herself and the butterflies, knew that the worst fears of the streets were always real. You can find this out the hard way, or you can be watchful. She backed away, and then ran back to skid row. But she could still feel those eyes in the window, burning into her with something that could have been anger—or might have been hope.

  Chapter 2

  Naomi awoke, and for one brief moment, she thought she was back there. In the place. She heard her sister’s voice, calling through the years: Come back and find me. I’m twenty-five now. The water drips we once felt are gone, and the chariot has flown away.

  Naomi opened her eyes to find herself in her friend Diane’s sunny guest room, curled with her husband, Jerome, in a bed once reserved for her alone during her rare visits. She breathed out in relief that the dream was over but still felt the anxious echo of the call.

  I’m getting closer, she thought. This was why she was here in the city with Jerome. After almost a year of searching for her long-lost sister, their investigation had brought them here.

  Her nose twitched. She could smell fried ham and coffee. The room was filled with sunshine, and Jerome was next to her, the cap of his shoulder rising against the sheet. In a moment she would get up and make her way down the narrow stairs to eat breakfast with her friend.

  Diane served the ham with redeye gravy and scrambled eggs flecked with chives. Naomi poured cream in her coffee. She knew Jerome was probably awake upstairs but giving her these few minutes alone with Diane—she appreciated that.

  Diane drank her own coffee black, wincing at the taste. She looked at Naomi’s cream like it might spite her. “To be young,” she said.

  “You never worried before,” Naomi said cheerfully, adding sugar to her cup.

  Diane had aged in the last year. Silver laced her abundant red hair, and lines crossed her face. Her usual warm demeanor had quieted, and Naomi could see the loneliness in the slack skin under her jaw. And in her eyes.

  “Staying long?” Diane said hopefully.

  “Probably not,” Naomi responded, cutting into her ham and tucking a piece into her mouth. “Thanks for letting Jerome come along.”

  “Of course. He’s your husband.” Diane said this mildly, but Naomi caught a whiff of disapproval. Disappointment with Naomi? The last time she had seen Diane was a year ago, at their wedding, right here in Diane’s living room. Both Naomi and Jerome were thirty. It was their first serious—and for Naomi only—relationship.

  She let it go, there among the matching breakfast plates with flowers on the rims, the linen-colored cups, the cream pitcher. Outside the birds were calling, and Naomi heard a crow silence them. She had been raised in the country and could identify a dozen birds by their sound. Yet she could not find her sister.

  Diane’s hand reached for hers. “You think she might be here,” she said, softly.

  “We heard about some missing girls,” Naomi said, cautiously.

  “One might be your sister?”

  Diane knew that Naomi had escaped captivity as a child. For most of Naomi’s life her only early childhood memory had been running through a strawberry field at night after escaping from a rotten trapdoor in the woods, deep in the Oregon farm valley. A group of migrants had found her and driven her to Opal, a small town an entire day away. Naomi had grown up there, with a loving foster mother named Mrs. Cottle. She was nine when she was found, but no matter how hard she tried, she could remember nothing more of her past. Terror had wiped her memory clean. Naomi had grown up to become an investigator, dedicated to finding missing children. She thought she wanted to find children like herself—but the real truth was that she wanted to find the little sister she had left behind.

  Naomi shook her head. “I don’t think so. They’re too young. But I wanted to check it out. They were dumped in the river here. Those who have been found, at least.”

  Diane frowned, letting go of her hand. “I hadn’t heard about that.”

  Naomi blinked at her plate. “The Green River Killer murdered at least seventy-five women. Dozens before anyone even noticed.”

  Diane looked sympathetically at Naomi. She knew how hard it must be to stay inside the center of the storm. “Were these prostitutes, too?” Diane asked.

  “Street kids. Does it matter?”

  “You know me,” her friend said tartly. “Of course it doesn’t.”

  Behind them, she could hear Jerome’s soft descent from their guest bedroom upstairs. The man who had once been her foster brother, now her lover, friend, and more.

  Diane reached for her coffee, sat back. She didn’t know Jerome well.

  Naomi looked up, smiled briefly. “Jerome. You explain.”

  The narrow form of her husband took a chair. He smiled at Diane, dark eyes on her, a hank of black hair falling. The shoulder cap of his missing arm—taken in the war—twitched. “We were visiting the task for
ce in Salem when we heard street girls are going missing here. They’re all Jane Does—even their street friends don’t know their real names. Some have been murdered; their bodies have turned up in the river. Naomi wants to talk to her detective friend, visit the medical examiner, put up some flyers about her sister—rule out that she might have been one of the girls.” He paused. “And maybe use her expertise to do something for these girls.”

  “I hope this all works out,” Diane said quietly, blowing on the hot, bitter coffee.

  Jerome reached with his one arm, found the cream pitcher with his long slender fingers, and, without asking, poured a rich stream into her cup. His eyes told Diane he understood what it was like to love Naomi. Diane found solace in his glance.

  “Hope is enough,” he said.

  Chapter 3

  A heavyset man with a mashed face was watching Celia. He wore a blue jacket zipped up to his reddened neck, the kind of jacket worn by guys who work in automotive shops, only this one didn’t have an i am pete name tag stitched on the front pocket.

  He could be anyone. That was the truth of the streets: If there was danger, anyone could hold it. No one could be trusted, not in the end.

  Celia believed this.

  The beefy man, his eyes like tiny periscopes on her, could be him. The man prowling the downtown streets, making her friends disappear. Some turned up as corpses, floating in the river. Others just vanished. Not that such things didn’t happen anyhow, but lately—in this heady spring of rain showers and streets that ran blood dark with freshets—it was happening more and more. Like all the time.

  She stole another glance at him. His mashed face, pinched through the nose and eyes, was still watching her. Under his damp silvery hair, two funny-shaped ears protruded like little cabbages. His mouth was torn with scars.

  Celia was down on skid row as dusk fell, the last of the businesspeople rushing, briefcases against their hips, like horses spurring themselves home. Oil puddles, sheened with water, made rainbows under the streetlights, and the night sky rushed away, reminding her the universe was vast. The gay bars were lighting up, the first of the cross-dressers coming out after dark when the night lights were kinder to their coarse faces, the stubble that the razors never quite got. Some had fake eyelashes so long they poked you when they came in for a hug. Which they liked to do, plenty.

  She told herself she had nothing to fear. She had her friends for protection: Stoner and Rich, the two boys she hung around, street kids like her. Numbers in safety, Rich once joked. The boys were on the corner now, panhandling, their cold palms damp and empty. “Spare some cash?” they asked the suits whirling by. “I’m hungry, mister.” Celia watched as the flood of commuters rushed down the street. Soon all that would be left would be the street people because the night was made for them.

  She looked back over at the scar-faced man, but he was leaving. She saw his back and wet shoulders as he walked down the street. The brick wall where he had stood was empty. There was a dry shadow where he had been, like the outline of a shape from an atomic war.

  Rich waved to her, a bill held triumphantly in his fist. “Some fool gave me a twenty,” he bragged as she came closer. “Let’s get some food.”

  Sometimes Celia thought she was a bird, flying over these streets. Sometimes she felt more like a slip of air that could disappear, like the tendrils of mist rising from the gutters. But mostly, in her secret heart, she was a butterfly, with magic wings beating hard for escape.

  * * *

  That night Celia called her mom.

  The other street kids didn’t know she had a mom. None of them talked about that stuff anyways—it was too raw. Some of the kids said they were orphans, but Celia thought probably they were not. Orphans of the heart, maybe.

  Celia borrowed a cell phone from another girl and tapped in the newest numbers written on the damp scrap of paper from her jacket pocket, fully expecting this number, too, would be out of service.

  But the number was still alive. Maybe, too, the voice on the other end.

  “Who is this?” her mom asked softly.

  “It’s me. Celia,” she said, turning away from her friends. She remembered the first time she had heard the term opioid addiction and realized they were talking about her mom.

  “My baby.” In the background Celia could hear the television blaring. She strained to hear any sound of her sister, Alyssa. Now six, the same age Celia had been when her sister was born. The voice lowered. “I miss you.”

  “How is Alyssa?” Celia asked.

  She could hear the airy high in her mother’s voice. “She’s fine.”

  When Celia talked to her mom her very pores cried with sadness, and in just moments she became heady with despair, dizzy enough she had to reach for something to hold on to, which turned out to be the brick wall where she so often stood.

  “You coming home?”

  “You know I can’t, Mom.”

  There was silence. She could hear her mother’s slow breathing. Celia wished she understood this world, the things it did to you.

  The other girl wanted her phone back—she poked Celia in her back with a broken nail. “I got to go, Mom. I was just saying hi.”

  Her mother yawned. “Celia. Is that you?”

  Celia ended the call. A life can now be extinguished with the swipe of a finger. Then she went and sat on the curb, the car lights scoping the dark. The men in these cars, like her stepdad, were part of her. Her very cells had tasted them. Her blood coursed with them. But this was her life now, and she had to make something out of it.

  * * *

  Oh, the butterflies. They soften the edges of this hard world. Caught up so high in the sky, they fall to earth like meteorites, their iridescent wings trailing red thunder and liquid gold and the kind of purple only nature can provide.

  Celia felt her back scrunch against her denim jacket, then relax. Sometimes she thought she had wings, bare nubs under the skin, and if others said these were her shoulder blades, she would say, Naw, that is where my wings are hiding. She could imagine the other kids along the row having wings, too, folded tight against their backs, wet and pulsating, opening now to feathered wonder. Bright green that flashed, the kind of silver that became light, white that became gold.

  There could be legions of us, she thought, flying into the night sky. If all the street kids suddenly took flight, why, the night sky would glow with gold currents. Or maybe, she thought, it would just be her.

  With a deep exhale, she flew.

  Chapter 4

  Naomi understood that in investigations, the ground matters.

  She had worked dozens of missing child cases, and each search began on the ground. It might be soft and dappled, with fir needles, as in one case of a Boy Scout who stepped off the trail. Or frosted and covered with snow, as in the case of a child gone missing in the Pacific Northwest woods. Or it might be rutted with concrete, a spill of black asphalt steaming on a city street.

  The ground mattered because it led her someplace, always. She would find her sister on this earth because of the steps Naomi took on the ground. The thought filled her with impatience to begin.

  Naomi knew to go to the darkest streets first. She went looking for the street people.

  The place was called Sisters of Mercy, and it existed on a street known for winos and junkies. As night fell, Naomi passed crowds of street nomads, dusty in black leather, and skid row alcoholics with faces like bruised cherries. She saw a skinny old woman with tufts of hair on her balding dome digging through the loam of a gutter, cackling. There was a troubling number of families—mother, father, one or two kids, all with the tired, tense faces of poverty but not much else to say they were homeless but this: the long line.

  It snaked around the corner, with the orderly discipline of the hungry. Having worked many missing cases involving the poor—they were usually the ones who needed her the most—Naomi had found they were the most orderly of all. Desperation was a profound governing force.
/>   Cutting past the line, Naomi walked in the front door with scarcely a murmur behind her. That, too, was being poor. They were afraid of not being served, of going hungry. The empty café was filled with tables and rickety chairs, like any other restaurant. Only this one had a nun behind the counter, and her tired, warm eyes caught Naomi’s.

  “It’s not time yet. Back of the line.”

  In the open kitchen, volunteers were busy cooking: giant vats of what smelled like beans and vast industrial sheets of cornbread coming out of the oven. At a table nearby stood self-serve jugs of water with paper cups. On the wall was a blackboard menu: Rice, beans, and cornbread, pay what you can. Or work for your meal.

  “I bet you get a lot of dishwashers,” Naomi said, stepping close to the counter. She pulled her investigator’s license out, expecting the suspicion. “I’m not a cop,” she said. “I’m looking for someone. My sister, actually.”

  The tired eyes met hers. There was a permanent wimple crease in the woman’s forehead. “We don’t talk about our customers.”

  “That’s nice, that you say ‘customers.’” Naomi smiled. “Usually I hear ‘client,’ like they are here on sufferance, or a boulder around our necks.”

  This nun apparently was not ready to be charmed. Naomi could feel the body across the counter, under the cloth: the exhaustion, the heavy-boned fight against injustice. “Look. I don’t want to make trouble,” Naomi said. “Do you have a community bulletin board where I could leave a message?”

  There was a terse nod. Then the nun looked over Naomi’s shoulder, and now she was genuinely smiling, because it was time. One by one the families and winos and street people filed in, and the nun’s voice met each of them with a personal greeting, a name, or a question that sounded like love.

  The bulletin board was in the annex of the soup kitchen, where Naomi also found a row of mailboxes so the homeless could get mail, as well as a message board plastered with notes. Tony, brother, please call me, read one. Looking for my birth mom, with details. Notices for AA meetings. Help for veterans. PTSD support groups.