The Butterfly House

by Katrine Engberg

  Bo shook his head angrily and looked away.

  “I need to understand this,” Jeppe said after a moment’s hesitation. “Do you mean that Rita Wilkins and her employees were partly responsible for Pernille’s death?”

  The father’s face crumpled up, as if someone had just run a piece of chalk down a clean blackboard.

  “Rita apparently had the all right connections, and managed to convince the local authorities to give her grant money to start a residential program in her private home. Several of the social workers weren’t certified. They didn’t have the necessary credentials. The staff was either incompetent or too lax to do anything.” Bo’s hand dropped back down onto the pillow.

  “Where were you Sunday night and Monday night?”

  “Here. Both nights.” Bo looked Jeppe straight in the eye, completely calm. “With my daughter and my wife. We were asleep, or trying, at least. Sleep has been pretty challenging since Pernille’s death.”

  “And your wife can confirm that you were here?”

  He flung up his hands as if to say, Duh. Jeppe took that as a yes.

  “Where is she, Lisbeth?” Jeppe asked.

  “At a retreat, near Växjö in Sweden. She’ll be home Thursday.”

  “We need to ask for her cell phone number so we can contact her.”

  “Phones aren’t allowed at the retreat, but there is a landline in the office in case of emergencies.”

  “Daddy?” The skinny girl had snuck in and was standing by the end of the sofa. “We’re supposed to answer that thing for school.”

  “Yes, honey. I’m coming.” Bo smiled tiredly at his daughter and looked pointedly at his watch. “Well, you’ll have to excuse me, but I need to take care of my daughter and get started on dinner.”

  “We’re almost done.…” Jeppe held up a finger to show that they only needed a minute. “Do you know anything about the other three teenagers who lived at the home?”

  “Marie, Kenny, and Isak. We tried to get them to talk, too, after Pernille killed herself, but… not a peep. Watertight bulkheads. I have no idea where they are today.” He got up and tossed the pillow onto the sofa. “Dinner calls. Do you guys need anything else?”

  “If you could give us the number for your wife’s retreat.” Jeppe stood up and handed his notepad to the father, who found a number on his phone and wrote it down. “Oh, you don’t happen to own a cargo bike, do you?”

  “A cargo bike? No, the front yard is full of bikes of all sizes, but no cargo bike. Why, do you need to haul something heavy?”

  Jeppe ignored this, and they walked back past the moving boxes to the front door. He stopped there for a moment to do up his jacket, then turned around as an afterthought.

  “Who do you think is killing the staff from Butterfly House?”

  “No idea,” Bo said, his eyes dark, “but when you find out who it is, I’ll be the first to thank him.”

  CHAPTER 10

  There are two kinds of people: those who eat to live and those who live to eat. Over the twenty-odd years of their marriage, Anette and Svend had frequently said so to each other, both knowing that he fell in the latter category. When he opened his eyes in the morning, the first thing Svend thought of was what he would make for dinner. He often started preparing bread or a casserole right after breakfast. It was one of the many qualities that made her love him.

  Anette pushed what was left of the factory-breaded chicken breast around on her plate. You truly don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone.

  “Are you done?” Svend reached for her plate, their daughter in the crook of his arm.

  She nodded and let him clear the table as she emptied her glass of tap water. When breastfeeding it is important to drink plenty of water, preferably two liters a day. Well, fine! If that’s what it took.… “Not the most exciting meal, I know, but there’s really not much time for real cooking with the princess here.” Svend kissed the baby’s chubby cheeks and made a goofy face at her.

  “It’s fine. I wouldn’t mind being able to fit into my jeans again soon.” Anette looked down at her spare tire, resting unattractively in her lap. Childbearing machine, milk cow. When would her body start feeling like her own again?

  “Did you buy diapers?”

  Diapers! The one thing she was supposed to remember today.

  “Ugh, damn it. I forgot. Sorry! Are we totally out?”

  “Hm, well, we might make it.…”

  “I can run over to BabySam now, before they close,” Anette said, jumping up. “Then I can pick up wipes, too.” She hurried out to the front hall and yanked her raincoat down from the hook. “There’s breast milk in the freezer, you can feed her a bottle.”

  Svend followed her with the baby, who was beginning to fuss.

  “You don’t need to drive anywhere. We still have a few.…”

  “I’m going! There’s nothing worse than running out of diapers. It’s fine. I kind of need some air.” Anette kissed her daughter on the forehead and ran out to the car. It wasn’t until she let the clutch out that she realized she had forgotten to kiss Svend goodbye.

  Gundsømagle. If she drove fast, she could be there in twenty minutes, about the same amount of time it would take her to drive to the baby supply store in Køge. Then she could get the diapers on the way home afterward.

  Anette pulled the envelope with the home’s address out of her pocket and entered it into the car’s GPS, her eyes sort of half on the road. If the bigwigs knew she was heading out by herself to do some investigating in the middle of her maternity leave, she would be suspended on the spot. Luckily they did not.

  In a few minutes she was on the highway and could speed up. The wipers whipped back and forth across the windshield, and she turned on the radio, not caring what they were playing. Enjoyed the simple pleasure of being on the move and by herself for once.

  Anette had never speculated much about love. Either it was there, like with Svend and the dogs, or it wasn’t. In reality, love between parents and children was probably a modern phenomenon. She would bet that her great-grandparents had a more practical approach to parenting; something about having extra manpower and someone to take care of you when you got old. An exchange of goods and services like so many other relationships whose ultimate goal was to ensure the survival of the species.

  She drove through Østrup and then sped up again. Love could be a burden as much as a gift, especially when it was expected and demanded.

  On the outskirts of the village Gundsømagle, a dirt road called Dybendalsvej ran like a furrow through the muddy autumn fields. The disused home was easy to find, for there was only one house on the street, a For Sale sign out front marking the spot. Set back a little from the road and hidden behind an overgrown hedgerow at the end of a bumpy driveway sat Butterfly House, a main house with two wings, blue plaster walls, red tile roof, and a flagpole out front. Boarded-up windows and bushes that had started to take over the courtyard in front were the first signs that the place was no longer inhabited. If the place had closed two years ago, why hadn’t the house been sold yet?

  The rain beat down on her face. She wasn’t going to get anything out of standing there in the fading light getting wet. Quickly, she walked up to the main house and tried the door.

  It creaked but was locked and didn’t push open. She wouldn’t be surprised if an abandoned building like this was used by the homeless or teenagers looking for a place to party. There must be a way to get in.

  Around back, Anette found a set of crumbling stairs, which, sure enough, led down to a door with a lock that had been broken. She cautiously opened it and stepped into a cellar with a low ceiling, turned on her phone’s flashlight, and moved down a dusty gray hallway, past a large room with tiles on the walls and a series of metal shelves that no one had bothered to take with them.

  She edged her way around a chest freezer, which sat with the lid open, leaning against the wall, and wound up in front of a metal door just next to the stairs that led up to
the ground floor. Anette tried the handle. The metal door was locked. Hm, maybe something of value had been left in the cellar after all.

  Anette continued up the stairs, moving cautiously on the mildew-covered steps while holding on tightly to the handrail. Her foot hit a bottle, and it rolled down, hitting the concrete floor with a clink that sent a little chill up her spine. Suddenly she was acutely aware of the slackness of her pelvic floor and her nonexistent abdominal muscles. Good thing she knew the house was abandoned!

  The first floor had high ceilings and was more pleasant, despite the same damp smell and stacks of junk as in the basement. She shone her light around and saw a mostly gutted kitchen. The appliances had obviously been too valuable to leave behind. Her footsteps echoed between the bare walls and empty rooms. What had happened here that had ended up costing two people their lives in the most gruesome way?

  After the kitchen she came to a long hallway with doors on both sides. She opened the first one: a bathroom. After that, a room with a closet and an outline on the wallpaper where the bed had once been. She stepped in and walked around the room, looking closely, trying to read the space, the way Jeppe always did, but didn’t detect anything other than her own increasingly full breasts. She really needed to head back home soon.

  The next room looked exactly the same. Anette shone her light around at the empty walls; on one of them someone had written a few words down by the floor, where the bed appeared to have been. She walked closer. Two words in felt tip marker, the handwriting childish and bold: INVISIBLE MARIE.

  Marie? Anette turned on her flash and took a picture. On impulse, she checked outside the door. Well, I’ll be, an old name sign. This room had once been inhabited by a Marie Birch.

  She checked the other doors along the hallway but didn’t find any other name signs. Who was Marie Birch, and why was she invisible?

  Anette heard the sound of something scraping against the floor in the dark and jumped, knocking her breast against the doorframe. The pain made her curl over, her chest throbbing. She ought to be too mature for unexpected noises in an abandoned house to frighten the wits out of her. Anette cursed out loud. Here she was traipsing around in a deserted house for a murder investigation she wasn’t even part of while her baby was missing her back home. It was just wrong.

  She fumbled her way through the darkness, toward the front door, too anxious to get out to bother using the phone’s flashlight. By the time her hand finally hit the door handle, her palms were so sweaty she almost couldn’t turn the dead bolt.

  The car engine broke the silence with a roar. Anette raced back down the country road, taking no notice of either potholes in the gravel or possible crossing animals. When she reached the highway, the car clock showed that she had been at the home for more than half an hour. BabySam was closed. Now she had to hurry back much faster than the permitted fifty miles per hour speed limit and either lie or fess up when she returned home without diapers. Both seemed equally unappealing.

  * * *

  MARIE BIRCH CLOSED her eyes and inhaled the sea breeze until her head felt light. It was a salty smell, fresh and good with hints of diesel oil, seaweed, wood, and glue, a scent that painted adventures and distant horizons on her retinas. Just like the Japanese garden she had once built on the windowsill of her room after she read a book about Japanese dolls. She had collected rocks and twigs, found scraps of fabric, and clipped cardboard for months, gluing and folding by the window in her room. As soon as she came home from school, she would vanish into her garden. Homey yet at the same time full of longing. Her mother had cried when she first saw it. A couple of months later, she had thrown it out without even asking Marie.

  She got up from the bench in the camper, filled a pot, and fired up the little camp stove. Marie had gathered herbs at Refshaleøen all summer, sweet chervil and yarrow, and hung them to dry from the ceiling. Now she drank them as tea.

  Pernille was the one who had taught her to drink tea. She had drunk it to smother her hunger, bucketsful of calorie-free, hot tea between all those meals she didn’t eat. Tea to make it cozy, tea for hunger, tea to wash down the pills.

  Marie poured boiling water over the herbs and watched as it turned brown. The steam billowed up from her cup to settle under the low ceiling, like Mother’s long baths that used to fill the bathroom with thick steam for hours. One time the door was closed for so long that Marie ended up going in. She found Mother on a footstool with her terry-cloth bathrobe open and her hand full of pills, bottom lip trembling unsettlingly. When Mother noticed her, she threw the pills in the trash can and went to bed.

  The next morning her mother hugged her tight. I’m doing my best with you, sweetie. I’m really doing my best, so much so that sometimes there’s no room for myself.

  Marie fished the sweet chervil out of her cup, burning her fingers on the hot tea. She sat down on the bench and looked out at the city’s reflection in the dark water. Two were dead. Still, she was calm.

  When you’ve suffered from panic attacks most of your life, calm is never something you take for granted. The panic attacks sit in your body until you die. Marie remembered each and every one of them. One morning at Butterfly House she had woken up with blood on her thighs; her first menstruation and no mother to discuss it with. She wasn’t prepared and didn’t know what to do about the stained sheet. Bettina had taken care of the situation in her usual no-nonsense manner, finding pads and changing the sheets without commenting. But in the kitchen over breakfast Bettina had shared the news with everyone. Nicola had congratulated her and played a celebratory song. Marie had cringed.

  Was it the experience, the unwanted reveal, or her own insecurity that had triggered the attack?

  Or was it the antianxiety medicine she took after breakfast that felt invasive and wrong? Like a foreign body that was trying to destroy her from inside, planting compulsive suicidal thoughts and claustrophobia in her head and body?

  Whatever the trigger, the attack came on, forcing her to lie flat on her stomach to dull the nausea and the cold sweats. She threw up her breakfast and her mouth went dry from trying to explain what was wrong.

  He had come and sat with her. Too close, uncomfortable, she pulled away from his touch. What had he said? Gently, as he stroked her forehead, his hands lingering on her skin: Don’t be afraid, Marie. I’ll help you. Everything will be all right again.

  She drank the tea in little gulps. It tasted bitter and healthy.

  The anxiety that had crippled her for years seemed far away now. It was almost as if the deaths alleviated her agony, erased Bettina’s rough hands, and reduced Nicola’s clumsy guitar playing to faint ripples on her past. But then she was the lucky one. She had escaped the system and was able to live on her own. Things were different now.

  She had to go see him, even though the thought of stepping into a hospital and having to talk to nurses and social workers turned her stomach.

  There was no way around it.

  * * *

  “IS THERE ANYTHING else you need?”

  Esther de Laurenti kept her tone more accommodating than she felt. There was something about Gregers that occasionally made it hard—no, impossible—to practice normal courtesy and consideration.

  “Is a little peace and quiet too much to ask?” Gregers scowled at the poor other patient, who had the misfortune to be sharing the hospital room.

  Esther lifted the tray with its dirty plates off the bed and set it on a table by the wall. She had brought a portion of the homemade pasta for Gregers and let Alain have the rest.

  “Why don’t you just be happy the tests are over with and you’re finally allowed to eat again?”

  “Those spaghetti things were cold.” Gregers pulled the blanket up to his chin like a spoiled child. “And I’m not a big fan of macaroni!”

  “Well, I’m sorry I couldn’t warm them up right here by your bed. Although obviously you could have eaten the hospital chicken breast for dinner if my homemade ravioli weren’t good enough f
or you.” She drew the curtain between the two beds, smiling apologetically at the other patient. Listening to other people’s bellyaching is about as much fun as getting a root canal.

  “Just tell me if you want me to leave, Gregers. I am not here for my own personal amusement.”

  Gregers lay there fuming, looking at the dark windows and then grumbled, “You can stay for a bit.” Then he pointed to an armchair in the corner of the room.

  “Oh, how kind of you,” Esther said sarcastically.

  He cleared his throat.

  “Wouldn’t you please stay for a bit, Esther? I’m having such stupid thoughts.”

  Knowing that was as close to an apology as she would ever get from Gregers, she sat down and smiled at him encouragingly.

  “Would you like to tell me about them, your thoughts?”

  “Just, you know,” he said, looking down, “am I going to get out of here alive? That kind of thing. There’s no point in talking about it.”

  She hesitated, suspecting that her next question would not be welcome. “Gregers, have you considered that we should maybe contact your kids? If maybe now…”

  “No way!”

  Gregers had lost touch with his three adult children when he and his wife divorced twenty-one years earlier, and whatever the reason for the falling-out, the wound was so deep that it didn’t seem like anything could heal it. Esther, who had given up a child for adoption at birth herself and hadn’t had any opportunity to make contact, had a really hard time understanding his stance. Not a day went by when she didn’t regret giving up her baby and wished she could go back and change it.

  “I guess I could just sit here and read the paper. How’s that?”

  Gregers nodded gratefully. He looked tired.

  She found the iPad in her purse and started reading Politiken online. Browsed the newspaper and found the most recent article about the murders in the city’s fountains. She always read the culture and crime sections first; something might miraculously inspire her to start writing again.