[Sean O'Brien 03.0] The Butterfly Forest

by Tom Lowe

  Molly held her hand to her throat, pushed away the remains of her pie and stood. “So this creep followed me, right?”

  “It appears that way,” I said.

  “I’m getting a chill.” She hugged her upper arms.

  “Why?” Elizabeth asked. “Why would some sick person follow my daughter?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Please, Sean.” she said. “You’ve got to help us.”

  “The police are better at that than me.”

  “But you’re here. That says something.”

  “I’m here because you asked me to come by, and that’s—”

  “That’s what? Please! What if he comes back? What do we do?”

  “You need to tell the detectives working this case everything we’ve discussed here today. You need to call them right now and give them this new information.”

  Molly fed Max another little piece of cheese. “He’s gonna come back.”

  I said, “Maybe not. For some reason, it appears this Frank Soto had followed you from Gainesville to your home here in Sanford. The question is why?”

  Elizabeth said, “Because he’s a pervert, one of those predators who stalk young women like Molly. He could have seen her come and go from the restaurant.”

  “You may be right,” I said. “But I think it’s something deeper than that. When do you return to school, Molly?”

  “I’m supposed to go back tomorrow. I’ve got classes and need to be at my lab job, too, on Monday.”

  “Maybe you should stay here for a few days. Give police time to sort this out.”

  Her eyes lifted toward the open window where she focused on the limbs of a mimosa tree blowing in the breeze and the tinkling of wind chimes coming into the room. Her face filled with thought. “Have you ever held a live butterfly in the palm of your hand, Sean? They like the human touch…the warmth that comes from our hands, and maybe our hearts.”

  “It’s been a long time since I held a butterfly, not since I was a boy.”

  Molly smiled, her eyes darkening. “I’m not going to let some jerk cause my brain to freeze with fear. Mom, remember you kept Dad’s .38 pistol after he died? He taught me how to use it. I’m gonna take it back to school with me.”

  Her mother’s left eyebrow rose. “Molly, maybe that’s not such a good idea. And you don’t even have a permit.”

  “I don’t care! He pulled a gun on you and me. If he comes around again, this time I’ll have a gun, too.”

  Elizabeth looked up at me, searching for words.

  I said, “Remember this, Molly: if you have to use it, you won’t have time to think about it. You’re a young woman with noble ideas and ideals. People like you are the glue to save the planet. That quality is what makes you do what you do, and what you do with the butterflies is very special. Before you put a pistol in your purse, answer this question: if you had to shoot a man in the heart…to shoot to kill…could you do it?”

  Luke Palmer warmed up a can of beans over an open fire. It had been more than a week since the drums stopped. He stared at the yellow flames and thought about the first night he heard the drums. It was his first night in the forest. He wondered if the girl and her commune had moved on to some other desolate place. He thought about her smile, brighter than the moon that dark night.

  HE DUCKED UNDER A low-hanging limb, pushed through Spanish moss, and walked toward the drumbeats in the distance. Mosquitoes followed him, buzzing in his ears, biting at his exposed forearms and neck.

  Within fifteen minutes, he’d reach the site. A few dozen old cars and vans were parked in a small field off one of the dirt roads. Palmer hid in the shadow of trees under a bold moon and watched as people moved in and around the parked cars. The scent of burning marijuana caught his nostrils. He saw the tiny moving orange dots as the pot was passed among two women and one man.

  He crept closer to the sounds of the drums and chanting. Moving behind the underbrush, Palmer pulled back branches and looked out onto a small meadow area. At least fifty people sat around a bonfire. Some chanted. Some danced. One man in a white robe played a guitar. They all looked like they needed a good meal, he thought. Skinny hippie kids out here in no man’s land.

  Palmer was intrigued with the costumes some of them wore. Girls dressed in wings, like little angels. The guys wearing masks, black and white, green faces, some wore horns, like the pictures of warlocks he’d seen.

  A tall, lean man in a black robe climbed on a wooden box and began speaking, the chants ended and the drumbeats slowed to a steady pulse.

  “Brothers and sisters,” said the man, eyes scanning the crowd. Even from the distance of at least one hundred feet, Palmer could see the firelight reflecting in the man’s wide eyes. “My angels of Eden,” began the man again, pointing to a half dozen women who moved to the beat of the drum. “From ancient Nordic times, this night is sacred. It’s the zenith in the crossroads of time and space…a night special beyond all the rest. Why? Because this is the night of the mystic movement of the heavens—the trek of planet earth on a southern journey. It’s the long day when we earthly creatures must move in sync with the pendulum that swings to its fullest arc this night.”

  Someone standing to the far right of the crowd caught Palmer’s eye. A man, someone who seemed to be older than the majority of these kids, dressed in a long-sleeve shirt and jeans. He stood alone. Watching. Palmer had seen the stance, the look of the assassin many times in the prison yard. This man moved no different. He seemed to survey the crowd, and then work his way toward a table where food and drink was laid out. Palmer watched the man approach one of the girls dressed like an angel.

  Palmer wanted to walk up to them and ask where a fella could get a thick steak on a night like tonight. We’re all fuckin’ carnivores, some have sharper and more deadly teeth, he thought. And Luke Palmer knew that the man talking with the girls was a lone wolf among sheep.

  He watched the celebrations for another minute, said to hell with it. He could tell everyone was smokin’ and tokin,’ some drinking something from the bowl in the center of the table. God knows what’s mixed in that shit. People chanting. Dancing. Crying.

  He turned and walked back toward his camp, walked through the clearing near the cars when a woman came out from behind a tree. “I saw you go in there,” she said, her voice soft as the moonlight falling around her shoulders.

  Palmer looked at her, more curious than anything. She wore the angel wings, too. Her blond hair braided and up, her long dress was the color of vanilla, and she had a yellow wildflower behind one ear.

  “Well, now you see me leaving,” Palmer said.

  “You think we’re odd. Maybe some kind of freaks.”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “You just didn’t speak it.” She smiled, dimples showing. “It’s okay. This is the celebration of St. Johns. A midsummer’s night dance with the little people.”

  Palmer said nothing. He hadn’t had a lot of practice talking with women in the last forty years, and tonight he was totally speechless.

  “I’m calling you Night Raven,” the girl smiled. “Because I think you have the wisdom of the raven. You feel comfortable at night. You’re free to live your dreams here, away from a spirit that’s been cooped up with things that you didn’t ask for.”

  “I’ve had more than my spirit cooped up. What’s your name?”

  “Evening Star, can’t you tell?” The smile was brighter than the moon over her right shoulder.

  “Yeah, I guess I can, now that you mentioned it.”

  She licked her thumb, knelt down, and placed her thumb in the dirt. Then she stood and reached up to Palmer’s forehead. He didn’t resist as she pressed her thumb on the center of his forehead. “There, Night Raven, you are of this earth…forever.”

  Palmer shook his head. “Look, you’re a sweet kid. I’ve kinda missed a few generations in my life. Or maybe nothing’s changed since I was locked up way before you were born. A thing that hasn’t changed
is bad in some people. Be careful out here.”

  “That can’t touch us on this night.” She smiled and looked at the moon.

  “That can always touch you, even when you don’t know it. Just be aware.”

  “When was the last time you were hugged?”

  “Huh?”

  “Hugged.”

  “Hugged?”

  “That’s what I thought.” She leaned in and put her arms around him. “You can hug me, too.”

  Palmer slowly placed his arms on her back, finding a spot between the wings.

  “There,” she said, ending the embrace. “You are loved, Night Raven.” She turned to leave, walking toward the crowd in the meadow, the singing, the drums, the glow of the bonfire, almost floating like a winged moth to a flame where evil circled just outside the firelight.

  I awoke before sunrise, slipped on shorts, T-shirt and running shoes. Max kept under the blanket on her side of the bed. She’d stayed up too late last night pacing the screened-in porch while gators rumbled and roared mating calls on the riverbank. Fog stood motionless above the water as if layered clouds had descended from the heavens overnight. The rising sun was a burnt orange planet trying to penetrate the mist. The sunlight was a shattered radiance bent through steam and moving water, creating color wheels of dappled rainbows. The river itself was drenched in morning light.

  My three-mile jog took me north, most of the running on a path near the river. As the sun eased over the tree line, I thought about Elizabeth and Molly Monroe. I’d left my card with them and instructions to call if they needed me. I remembered my cell phone sitting back on the porch next to a framed picture of my wife, Sherri. And I remembered the promise I’d made to Sherri to do something else with my life. “I’m trying,” I said, the sound of my own voice out of character in the surrounding primal land of birdsong, water and light, a place where Florida existed like it had before the Spanish arrived 450 years ago.

  I pictured Frank Soto and the hate on his face as he kicked me. What had Molly done or seen…or what had he thought she’d done or seen? Maybe Elizabeth was right. Maybe Soto was your basic serial rapist who got his erections by stalking women, using hate and violence as self-satisfying, sadistic foreplay. Then why did he try to take them both, mother and daughter? Could it have been because he assumed the daughter had told the mother something, and both needed to be silenced?

  I climbed the steps to my back porch, and there was Max waiting. She was pacing to a different stimulus, this one bladder-induced. I let her out, and she scampered to her favorite spot in the wide yard. She watched a small Johnboat motor down the center of the river, a fisherman sipping coffee from a thermos, a V rippling the still water.

  My cell phone didn’t indicate any missed calls or text messages. I glanced down at Sherri’s beautiful eyes and said, “I’m trying. No calls. That’s a good thing.”

  Max looked up at me. “Yep, I know, most of the time I talk to you. I was just…” Her head cocked, eyes curious. “Oh, never mind, Max. Let’s head to the marina.” I had checked on the web and knew we had a few days of hot sun. Now was the time to begin repairs to my boat. It, like my home, creaked with old age.

  I locked the river house, put Max in the front seat of the Jeep, headed for the grocery store and then went to Ponce Marina. What I needed was a few days of sanding, painting, lots of sweating, saltwater, and some fresh seafood to keep my head in the direction I told myself it needed to be. Then I thought about the heart-felt embrace Elizabeth Monroe had given me in the parking lot, the scent of her perfume, the slight trembling in her body, the way she held me. But it was at the restaurant when I felt something unfasten inside me. It was when we were saying goodbye. She had faked a boldness that I knew was thin, a shield she held to protect her daughter, like she’d probably done so many times before. And now a psycho had pointed a gun in her face, left her with emotional scars and the threat of his return.

  I found the card Detective John Lewis had given me. I called his number, reintroduced myself and asked, “Did you come up with anything more on Soto?”

  He cleared his throat. “Right now, Mr. O’Brien, the suspect is still on the run.”

  “Where’s his family?”

  “We don’t have a last known address. The DL lists an address of a PO Box in Miami. Soto’s done a good job of not leaving a plastic trail. Must use cash for everything. I heard you worked homicide in Miami, is that so?”

  “It’s been a while. You think Soto will return?”

  “Hard to say what a criminal mind will or will not do. We have a visible presence at the restaurant, officers stopping in for coffee. We’re not so visible to the untrained eye at Miss Monroe’s home, but we’re there.”

  “How about when Molly Monroe returns to her apartment in Gainesville?”

  “Florida Department of Law Enforcement is working with Gainesville PD.”

  “So you believe it wasn’t a random attack, right?”

  He didn’t answer immediately. I could hear a croaky sound deep within his lungs. He said, “Correct. We have reason to believe Soto knew or knew of Molly Monroe.”

  “Is that because of the tat she saw at the butterfly research center in Gainesville?”

  “Yes.”

  “She tell you it looked like a woman wearing butterfly wings?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Detective, it was a hybrid tat.”

  “Hybrid? What the hell does that mean?’

  “The face was like a young fairy with the body of a grown woman superimposed with the wings and lower extremities of a butterfly.”

  He snorted when he laughed. “A damn fairy, like a cartoon, on the body of a nude woman. Now, what does that tell you about the mind of Frank Soto?”

  A handful of thoughts raced through my head—not one of them good. I knew the place and direction I needed to be—at the marina, chartering the boat, making a life. I pointed my Jeep that way. But inside, deep inside, my internal compass was beginning to spin toward Elizabeth and Molly Monroe.

  We rolled into the dusty parking lot and Max stood on her hind legs, popped her head out the open window, and filled her nose to sensory capacity. A half-dozen sunburned tourists, back from a morning of charter boat fishing, loaded their iced-down catch of red snappers into the trunk of a rental car. Two bearded bikers cut their Harley engines, parked under a live oak and strode into the Tiki Bar Restaurant adjacent to the main pier.

  Getting out of the Jeep, I was greeted with the scent of blackened grouper and garlic drifting across the oyster shell lot. A flock of brown pelicans sailed effortlessly above us, banking over the long line of boats moored to L dock, and then vanishing into the mangroves and estuaries of the Halifax River. In the distance, I could see the top of the Ponce Lighthouse poking its glass eye above the tree line.

  I liked this place. Liked the people, the smells, even liked the “dock cat,” Ol Joe, a calico knock-off who outweighed Max by ten pounds. Joe had no fear of Max, and had, on one occasion, raked his claws across Max’s nose.

  “Hey, Sean, ‘bout time you showed up here again. One day your bilge pump is gonna go kaput, and your boat will be on the bottom of the bay.” The greeting came from Nick Cronus, a commercial fisherman with an ancient Greek sailor’s heritage in his blood and a wide smile on his tan face. In his mid-forties, he had powerful forearms, hands and muscular shoulders, skin dark as creosote, a head of curly black hair, untrimmed mustache and a perpetual smile working in one corner of his mouth.

  Nick had been the first person I’d met at the marina, and I met him under some dire circumstances. It was late at night, after the Tiki Bar closed. Nick had argued with two drunken bikers who wanted to feed him to the crabs. They’d come close. I’d fallen asleep lying on my deck under the stars when I heard the punches and swearing.

  With the threat of using my Glock, I pulled two bikers off Nick the first month I docked Jupiter here. After the bikers cursed me, mounted their Harleys and rode north toward Daytona, Nick, part
ially drunk and completely serious, said he was in my debt forever. “Brothers for life,” he whispered through loose teeth, split lips and bloodied gums. I’d cleaned him up and helped him back to his Old World-style boat. He was loyal as a big-hearted St. Bernard, something that I was grateful for because Nick kept an eye on my boat when I was away. There is no better neighborhood watch than a marina community.

  “Hey there hotdog!” Nick said, kneeling in the parking lot and scooping up Max with his big hand and holding her belly up. Max didn’t protest, licking Nick’s whiskered face as he cradled her in his arms like a baby and said, “I got a starfish for a chew bone. Maxie, you need to hang out with Uncle Nicky, I cook better than Sean. Yeah, man.”

  I smiled. “You’re spoiling her.”

  “All sexy ladies, like Max, need to be spoiled. She’s a princess and knows it.”

  “She’s a handful.” I started to unload ice and groceries.

  Nick grinned, set Max down and said, “Lemme help you. Did you bring some beer or am I gonna have to drink the two-dollar drafts in the bar?”

  “Case of Corona.”

  “Sean O’Brien, you have not learned to fish yet, but when you get customers, you’ll know how to make ‘em happy fishermen.”

  “It’d be nice to find a few paying clients. My resources are running low. I might take a job teaching college if I don’t learn the trade and get my boat ready to go.”

  “What you gonna teach?”

  “Things I’d like to forget, things like criminal profiling, forensics.” I handed Nick two bags of groceries. I carried the ice, and Max followed us through the alcove between the marina office and the Tiki Bar, toward L dock.

  A singer, dressed in a colorful island print shirt, white shorts and white fedora hat, nodded to us as we worked our way through customers extended a ways out from around the bar. All the seats were taken. I could smell sun block, sweat and chlorine. The talk was loud. Debate topics included fishing, sports and NASCAR. Bottles of beer dripped with condensation in the humidity as two paddle fans spun overhead.