The Butterfly Garden by Dot Hutchison Page A

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.