The Butterfly Forest (Mystery/Thriller) (13 page)

“Two boats down from mine.  Nick will be back in by then.  I’m betting he’ll have some snapper.  I’ll select two prime pieces, make it an old Greek way, toss a salad, and serve it with some chilled chardonnay.  How’s that sound?”

“I’m almost a loss for words.  Do I come to your boat for dinner?”

“That would work fine, but I’ll be packing Max up Saturday morning and heading back to my shack on the river.  I’ll give you the address.  Be there at six, and I’ll show you a sunset that will put you at an even greater loss for words.”

“Just having a man cook for me leaves me speechless.”              

TWENTY-NINE

 He thought of Jurassic Park.  It was the first movie Luke Palmer had seen in prison.  And now he was walking through ferns that grew up to his shoulders.   Bromeliads hung from live oak branches by the dozens.  And then he saw something that took his breath away.  An oval-shaped spring, at least a hundred feet in width, bubbled up from the earth.  The water was a blue diamond shimmering beneath the cloudless indigo sky.  Wild red roses grew along the opposite side of the spring.

Palmer simply stood there for a minute absorbing the beauty.  Never had he seen anything like this.  So untouched.  God’s garden.  Maybe the last piece of pie left from the Garden of Eden.  Some of the things ripped away from a man in prison could be restored here.  This was a waterhole for the soul.  He stepped to the edge of the spring and filled his jug. 

Then he heard voices.

Palmer capped the jug, stood and slipped back into the foliage, his ears tracking the talking.  Sounded like a man and a woman.  Palmer picked up his gear and followed.  He walked next to the spring as it flowed from its azure bowl into a creek bed that snaked its way through the forest.  It seemed as if the people talking and laughing were following the stream, too.  Another hundred feet and Palmer spotted them.  He recognized the girl and the man.  Both young.  Maybe out of college, maybe not.  They carried a cardboard box with dime-sized holes poked into the sides.  What was in the box?  Could be an animal.  Might be something that was injured and these young people were returning it to the woods.  Squirrel?  Rabbit?

The woman seemed to lead.  She pointed toward some plants that looked a little like the ferns he’d walked through earlier.  The girl set the box down next to the plants.  Her friend took pictures with a small camera as she smiled and opened the box.

Palmer had to grin.  Butterflies seemed to float out of the box.  A dozen or so.  Dark color.  They flew around the couple then darted off into the woods.

Butterflies.

Why the hell not?  The girl reached one hand into the box.  She slowly lifted her hand with a butterfly riding on the tip of an extended finger.  The girl raised her arm to the sky, the butterfly opening and closing its wings, testing the air.  Palmer watched as the girl smiled and said something to the butterfly.  Maybe she was coaxing it to fly.  And then it seemed to jump from her finger, flew around the couple and ascended high into the blue sky.  The man laughed and tried to snap pictures.  The butterfly flew about fifty feet away and alighted on one of the fern plants.  The woman hugged the man, said something to him, and pointed inside the box.  Maybe there was one more. 

Palmer smiled again.  He could walk up and introduce himself.  See if he might buy some food from them, if they’d brought some.  As he started to step out from the undergrowth, he saw three men approach the couple.  The men had their backs to him.  Although he couldn’t see their faces, he could read their body language.  He’d seen it a hundred times in the prison yard.  Gangs approaching prey with one man picked as the killer, the rest acting detached as they closed the human noose, each man’s eyes tracking the victim. 

These men in the forest didn’t encircle the couple.  Didn’t have to.  They didn’t think anyone was watching.  No guard towers.  No rival gangs.  No one.  Palmer wanted to do something.  Say something.  If only he had a gun.  The man in the middle carried a lever-action rifle.  The girl held her hands up, like her palms could deflect death.  The young man started to say something when a bullet hit him between the eyes.  The girl screamed.  It was the most horrific scream Palmer had ever heard.  The man in the middle shot her in the chest.  She fell to her knees, one hand clutching her wound.

As the man stepped closer, the girl reached for the box next to her, a trembling bloody hand on one of the cardboard flaps.  Then the man stood over her and fired a shot into the back of her head the moment a lone butterfly flew from the box.

Palmer felt bile erupt in the back of his throat.  He coughed.

One man looked his way.  Palmer ducked farther back, dropping his water jug and running.  Had he been seen?  Heard?  Or was it a coincidence that the man looked his way.  Regardless, Palmer wouldn’t forget the man’s face.  He’d seen it earlier.  He ran as fast as he could.  Ran toward the spring.  He’d hide deep in the jungles.  He tripped, falling on his outstretched palms.  Was it a root that tripped him?  He sat up and looked at the dark hose.  It was partially buried beneath leaves as it made its way toward the spring.

Run!
  He could hear the men in the distance.  A second shot rang out.

Run!
  The echo from the shot reverberated through Palmer’s soul as he ran deeper into the forest.  He ran through growth so dense he couldn’t see the sun.  Sweat rained from his face.  Plants ripped and bloodied his arms and chest.  He’d gone at least a mile when his lungs felt like acid was bubbling up, legs rubbery.  Too weak to go. 
Run!
 He stumbled and fell.  He lay there.  Breathing.  Listening.  Palmer watched a tick crawl onto his arm.  He didn’t have the strength to knock it off his skin.  For a full two minutes, he lay on his stomach as the tick began to feed.

Sunlight warmed the back of his neck when he looked up at the largest oak tree he’d seen.  Some twenty feet away, he could barely make out on old carving etched into the tree.

He managed to get to his knees as he pulled the tick from his skin and studied the carving in the tree.  Through the years, the two hearts had changed as the tree grew, the trunk expanding, the carving changing.

The two hearts looked like a pair of butterfly wings.

For the first time in forty years, Luke Palmer allowed himself to cry.  

THIRTY

When Sherri was alive she loved my “gourmet cooking,” hated my cleaning.  She called the cooking real but the cleaning superficial.  She treasured my attention to detail with food and with her but didn’t like the way I introduced dishes to soap and water.  Since it’s been Max and me, I’ve made an effort to keep the dishes, and the house, cleaner than my genetic handicap would permit.

I thought about that as I was dusting the old house before Elizabeth Monroe’s arrival later this afternoon.  Would her female radar pick up on unidentified dirt?  Times like this I wished Max could mimic a bird dog.  She could scout behind the furniture, stop, freeze and point to a hiding dust bunny poised to leap when a breeze came across the screened porch and blew through the house.

Maybe we’d eat on the dock. 

I was listening to a bluesy tune by Kelly Joe Phelps as I made the salad and marinated the two pieces of red snapper.  I stored them in the refrigerator and waited for Elizabeth to arrive.  I hadn’t met many women since Sherri’s death.  Dating seemed odd.  For that matter, life seemed abnormal after I released her ashes at sea.  But, for sanity, you move on best you can or calcify.  Some of the women I’d met had their lives somehow knocked out of trajectory, which was too much for me to handle after losing the woman I had adored.  Nick told stories of birds, even sparrows, caught in air currents and blown out to sea.  They’d land on his boat, feathers frayed, wet with perspiration, tattered from exhaustion.  He’d nurse them back to health.  He said one sparrow liked to sit on his head, resting at times in his hair like it was a nest.  After icing down the day’s catch, Nick would drink ouzo, play his guitar and sing in Greek to the bird.  He swore one night the little sparrow started singing to him, long chirping calls. 

When Nick’s boat got within sight of land, his company would take flight, the bird’s world brought back into perspective with a new horizon.  That had been my story with some of the women I’d met in the last couple of years.  Leslie Moore had not been one of them.  She was a gifted detective who was murdered by her boss, a former police lieutenant on the take.  Now he’s doing a life stretch in Raiford.  

Max barked.  She jumped off her chair and trotted to the front door.  “That’s Elizabeth.  Greet her warmly, okay?”  Max looked at me over her shoulder as she approached the door.  For a moment I thought she nodded.

When I opened the door, I wish I’d spent more time cleaning.  Elizabeth was beyond stunning.  “Come in,” I said.  She brought a physical presence into the room so total I felt the old house itself took notice.  She wore her hair back, face radiant, small pearl earrings with a matching necklace.  Her white blouse was feminine without frills.  The curvature of her legs and hips made her black pants come alive.

“Well, hello Max,” she said entering and holding a pie.  “Since you seemed to like the pie at my restaurant, I baked a whole one.  Sean, where can I put this?”

“Thank you.  Kitchen’s right past the living room.”

“I love the feel of your home, the fireplace, the wood.  This place has character.”

“It’s got a wow factor for me, but there's still a lot of work left to be done to bring the character back of yesterday while adding the conveniences of today.  The plumbing works.  That was my first job.”

She smiled and followed me to the kitchen.  I set her pie down and said, “Make yourself at home.  What would you like to drink?”

“You mentioned chardonnay when you were going over the menu on the phone.” 

“Chardonnay it is.”  I got a chilled bottle out of the refrigerator, popped the cork and filled two glasses.  “I also promised you a sunset.  Let’s walk down to the dock.”

“Oh, what a wonderful porch.  And the view of the river… this is breathtaking.  How’d you find this old house?”

“I grew up in DeLand.  I remembered the place all these years.  As a kid, I fished and played on this river.  Its waters are a kind of catharsis for me.  When I decided to come back, I wanted to see if the old Parker place was for sale.  It was in foreclosure.”

“Well, it’s a great place.  To the dock and a sunset?  I’ll follow your lead.”

I smiled.  “We’ll both follow Max’s lead.”

My cell phone rang.  It sat on the table next to the picture of Sherri.  “She’s beautiful,” Elizabeth said, picking up the framed photo.

“That was my wife, Sherri.  She died from ovarian cancer.”

“I’m so sorry.  How long has it been?”

“Two years.”

“They say time heals most things.  Sometimes.”

“The cut still bleeds.”

“I understand.”

Elizabeth set the picture down, and I glanced at my cell.  The caller ID wasn’t a call I anticipated or wanted.

I wondered if Detective Lewis had left a message.      

THIRTY-ONE

An amber sunset filtered through the tall trees in the forest as Luke Palmer looked for a place to stretch his plastic tarp between two trees.  He’d hunker down in the thicket away from the killers.  Were they still tracking him?  Didn’t think so, but they might be back in the morning.  He’d find the big ol’ oak again, dig for the dough and get out of the woods.  This world, a world with no bars, was too fuckin’ crazy.

There was a rifle shot.  He listened to the unmistakable echo of gunfire through the woods.  Palmer rolled up his tarp and waited.  Listening.  Don’t move.  Just wait.  After a few minutes, a pine needle fell from a branch and landed between his neck and collar.  Then he heard a noise.  Thrashing.  Something running.  Something crashing though the forest.  Palmer hid behind a mesh of honeysuckles.

A deer.  Running.  Stumbling.  A young buck.  He’d been shot in the shoulders and was bleeding profusely.  The animal fell to its front knees, struggled and rose up.  It walked a little farther and fell again.  Got to put it out of its misery, Palmer thought.  He held his knife and followed the deer.  It tried to run, falling again. 

“Hold on, boy.  I know you’re hurting… hurting real bad.”  The deer lay on its side, chest panting, and one large brown eye watching Palmer approach.  He crouched down beside the dying animal.  “I’ll help you go to sleep.  You were in the wrong place, the friggin’ forest, at the wrong time, old friend.  Some stupid half-ass, wannabe hunter couldn’t even do a clean shot.  And here you are.”  The deer’s breathing came in quick shallow bursts.  Palmer held his left hand over the animal’s eye closest to him.  Then he shoved the long blade in the center of the deer’s chest.  Its body shuddered once and was still.

He hated the thought of gutting the deer.  But to survive, he’d need the meat to eat.  He traced the entrance of the bullet in the right shoulder.  There was no exit wound.  He cut into the animal’s stomach, within seconds he saw it—a brass bullet.  He reached in the open cavity and extracted the bloody bullet, holding it in the palm of his hand.  He knew the caliber of the bullet.  A .30-.30.