The Butterfly Garden

by Dot Hutchison

  “There are hot dogs, hamburgers, and fries,” Yvonne announces. “I wasn’t sure what your tastes are, so I had them put some condiments in on the side.”

  It takes the girl a moment to realize that she’s the one being addressed, and then all she says is thank you.

  “Anything new from Ramirez?” Eddison asks.

  She shrugs. “Nothing big. They’ve got another girl identified, and a couple of them have given their names and addresses, or partial addresses. One girl’s family relocated to Paris, poor thing.”

  As he portions out food, Victor watches Inara study the tech. There are questions in her expression, but he can’t make them out. After a moment, she shakes her head and reaches for a packet of ketchup.

  “The senator?” asks Eddison.

  “Still in the air; they had to detour around a storm front.”

  Well, Victor almost got his wish. “Thanks, Yvonne.”

  The analyst taps her ear. “Anything interesting, I’ll keep you updated.” She nods to Inara and leaves the room. A few seconds later, the mirror rattles slightly as the door to the observation room closes.

  Victor eyes Inara as he squeezes mustard and relish onto his hot dog. He isn’t sure if he should ask the question. He’s never felt uncertain about the power dynamic in a room, not with a victim, but then, she’s not exactly a typical victim, is she? That’s at least half the problem. He frowns at his meal, unwilling to let the girl think the scowl is aimed at her.

  Eddison has that covered.

  He has to know, though. “You weren’t surprised to hear about Senator Kingsley.”

  “Should I have been?”

  “So you all know each other’s real names.”

  “No.” She squeezes ketchup over the patty and fries, then pops a fry in her mouth.

  “Then how—”

  “Some can’t stop talking about their families. Afraid they’ll forget, I guess. No names, though. Ravenna said her mother was a senator. That was all we knew.”

  “Her real name is Patrice,” Eddison says.

  Inara just shrugs. “What do you call a Butterfly halfway between the Garden and Outside?”

  “Well? What do you call them?”

  “I suppose it depends on whether or not her mother is a senator. How much damage will it cause if she’s forced to become Patrice before she’s ready to let go of Ravenna?” She takes a large bite of hamburger and chews slowly, closing her eyes. A soft sound like a groan escapes and her face softens with pleasure.

  “Been a while since you had junk food?” Eddison asks with an unwilling smile.

  She nods. “Lorraine had strict instructions to make healthy food.”

  “Lorraine?” Eddison grabs for his notebook and flips through several pages. “The paramedics took in a woman named Lorraine. She said she was an employee. You mean she knew about the Garden?”

  “She lives there.”

  Victor stares at her, vaguely aware of the relish dripping off his hot dog onto the foil. Inara takes her time with the food and doesn’t continue until the last fry is gone.

  “I believe I mentioned that some girls tried to suck up?”

  Lorraine was one of those once upon a time, someone so desperate to please the Gardener that she was perfectly willing to help him do whatever he wanted to other people if he would just love her. She may have been broken before he took her. Normally the girls like her were given another mark, another set of wings but this time on their faces, to show everyone that they loved being one of his Butterflies. But the Gardener came up with another plan for Lorraine and actually let her out of the Garden.

  He sent her to nursing school and to cooking classes on the side, and she was so broken by submission to his interests, so absolutely in love with him, that she never tried to run away, never tried to tell anyone about the Garden or the dead Butterflies or the living ones who still could have had some hope. She went to her classes, and when she came back into the Garden she studied and practiced, and on her twenty-first birthday, he took away all those backless, pretty black dresses and gave her a plain grey uniform that covered her entirely, and she became the cook and nurse for the Garden.

  He never touched her again, never spoke to her except about her duties, and that’s when she finally started to hate him.

  Not enough, I guess, because she still didn’t tell.

  On kinder days—of which there weren’t many—I could almost feel sorry for her. She’s what, forty-something now? She was one of the first Butterflies; she’s known the Garden twice as long as she’s known anything else. At some point, maybe you have to break. Her way kept her out of the glass, at least, however much she came to regret that.

  Our cook-nurse, and we loathed her. Even the suck-ups despised her, because even the suck-ups would have escaped if they could, would have tried to call the police for the sake of the rest of us. Or at least that’s what they told themselves. If the opportunity had presented itself, though . . . I don’t know. There were stories about a girl who escaped.

  “Someone escaped?” demands Eddison.

  She smiles crookedly. “There were rumors, but no one knew for sure. Not in our generation, or in Lyonette’s. It seemed more apocryphal than anything, something most of us believed simply because we needed to believe escape was possible, not because we thought it was real. It was hard to believe in escape when you had Lorraine choosing to stay, despite everything.”

  “Would you have tried?” asks Victor. “To escape?”

  She gives him a thoughtful look.

  Maybe we were a different breed of girl than thirty years ago. Bliss especially enjoyed tormenting Lorraine, mainly because she couldn’t do anything in return. The Gardener got pissed if she screwed with our food or medical needs. She was incapable of insulting us, because the words have to have meaning to hurt.

  We didn’t think the maintenance guys knew about the Butterflies. We were always hidden when they were in the greenhouse, never allowed to be out where we could be seen or heard. The walls came down, opaque and soundproof. We couldn’t hear them, just as they couldn’t hear us. Lorraine was the only one we knew who knew about us, but it was useless trying to ask her to do anything or send a message to anyone. Not only would she not do it, but she’d take it straight to the Gardener.

  And then another girl would end up in glass and resin in the hallway.

  Sometimes Lorraine looked at those girls on display with such naked envy it was painful to see. Pathetic, of course, and infuriating, because for fuck’s sake, she’s jealous of murdered girls, but the Gardener loved those girls in glass. He greeted them when he passed, he visited just to look at them, he remembered their names, he called them his. Sometimes I think Lorraine looked forward to joining them someday. She missed when the Gardener loved her the way he did the rest of us.

  I don’t think she realized it would never happen. The girls in the glass were all preserved at the peak of their beauty, the wings on their backs brilliant and bright against young, flawless skin. The Gardener would never bother preserving a woman in her forties—or however old she would be when she died—whose beauty faded decades ago.

  Beautiful things are short-lived, he told me the first time we met.

  He made sure of that, and then he strove to give his Butterflies a strange breed of immortality.

  Neither Victor nor Eddison has a response.

  No one asks to be assigned to crimes against children because they’re bored. There’s always a reason. Victor has always made sure to know the reasons of those who work for him. Eddison stares at his clenched fists on the table, and Victor knows he’s thinking of the little sister that went missing when she was eight years old and was never found. Cold cases always hit him hard, anything where families have to wait for answers that may never come.

  Victor thinks of his girls. Not because anything’s ever happened, but because he knows he’d lose it if anything ever did.

  But because it’s personal, because they’re passionate,
agents in crimes against children are often the first to break and burn out. After three decades with the bureau, Victor’s seen it happen to a lot of agents, good and bad alike. It nearly happened to him after a particularly bad case, after one too many funerals with too-small caskets for the children they’d been unable to save. His daughters convinced him to stay. They called him their superhero.

  This girl has never had a superhero. He wonders if she ever even wanted one.

  She watches them both, her face revealing nothing of her thoughts, and he has the uneasy feeling she understands them a lot better than they understand her.

  “When the Gardener came to you, did he ever bring his son?” he asks, trying to regain some control of the room.

  “Bring his son? No. But Avery came and went mostly as he wanted to.”

  “Did he ever . . . with you?”

  “I recited Poe a few times under his attentions,” she answers with a shrug. “Avery didn’t like me, though. I couldn’t give him what he wanted.”

  “Which was?”

  “Fear.”

  The Gardener only ever killed girls for three reasons.

  First, they were too old. The shelf date counted down to twenty-one, and after that, well, beauty is ephemeral and fleeting, and he had to capture it while he could.

  Second reason was connected to health. If they were too sick, or too injured, or too pregnant. Well, pregnant, I guess. Being too pregnant is a bit like being too dead; it’s not really a flexible state. He was always a little disgruntled about the pregnancies; Lorraine gave us shots four times a year that were supposed to prevent that sort of inconvenience, but no birth control is completely foolproof.

  Third reason was if a girl was completely incapable of settling into the Garden. If after the first few weeks she couldn’t stop crying, if she tried to starve herself or kill herself past a certain “allowable” number of times. The girls who fought too hard, the girls who broke.

  Avery killed girls for fun, and sometimes by accident. Whenever that happened, his father would ban him from the Garden for a time, but then he’d be back.

  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.”