Джеймс Грейди - The Best American Mystery Stories 2002

Skeet’s apartment was no apartment at all, but one of those same storefronts in our old neighborhood, at the corner of Grand and Clay. I sat in the car for a moment and reread the address Janie had given me, convinced it was wrong. The store was too familiar to me, just two blocks from the house we grew up in. When Janie and I were kids it had been Murphy’s Candy Store, then Bunny’s Corner Market, and long after that a package store and bar — as though the building itself had seen fit to fulfill our every evolving need.

It was vacant now, though the front window was still intact, which surprised me. But the plate glass was painted pitch black, and plastered thickly with nightclub posters and concert flyers. I turned off the air conditioning in the car, rolled down the window, and waited.

The air outside was hot and still. The hollow summer sunlight, the shadows and the silence, the spare barren sidewalks all stole my momentum and I just sat there, feeling something of summers past. Further down the street two children were beating at each other with sticks. A screen door slammed somewhere behind me, and a little girl sped by on her bike, a doll tied cruelly to the rear fender. Suddenly and loudly a big yellow Cadillac ran the stop sign in front of me, its windows down and its stereo thumping, then was gone.

When I looked back at the storefront, Janie was leaning out of the store’s dark doorway. She was watching me expectantly, staving off the heavy steel door with one of her strong, sinewy hands and motioning me inside with the other. I locked up the car and stepped up to meet her.

Janie retreated in front of me like a tour guide, walking backward deeper and deeper into the room. “Look at these,” she said. But I couldn’t see anything. The room, though cool and damp, was too dark to see. Janie had propped open the front door, and the weak light from it lit up the shallows. A dirty skylight in back illuminated the rear. Stopping, I let her go ahead, waiting for my eyes to adjust. And when they did the room seemed simple and empty. Old tongue-and-groove wood flooring, smoothed like stone by the treading of years, ran the whole length of the room. A broad double desk sat off to one side. A heavy oak swivel chair was pulled up to it. At the end of the room a mattress and box spring were stacked on the floor.

I stepped forward to follow, but something — a piece of string — fell against my face, startling me with its softness. A light cord. I reached up and pulled it.

“Busted,” Janie said. “Come look at these.”

At the desk Janie stepped around to the other side and faced me. She looked down at the surface, and I followed her eyes. Some boxes sat there. We looked up at each other, then back at the boxes.

“What are they?” I asked.

“You tell me,” she said.

I stepped around and leaned in closer. They were display cases — plain rectangular wooden boxes with hinged lids and glass tops — two of them, lying face up. They were recognizable immediately, the kind of boxes over which you might linger at a flea market, inspecting the pocket watches, pen knifes, old fountain pens, and election buttons they contain — all the ephemera and mantelpiece trinkets that people hoard and collect and imbue with some secret significance. I peered into one of them and then looked back at Janie.

“Moths?” I asked, for I was no lepidopterist.

“Butterflies,” Janie crooned. “They’re all butterflies.”

She lifted the other box toward the weak light from the front door. Suddenly their colors — caramel, black, yellow, and blue — began to glow as though lit up from within, translucent and alive. In that box as in the other, butterflies of all kinds sat in neat spacious rows, orderly and at attention. Their wings were spread open in perfect equipoise, as though they’d just finished a long flight, or a ballet movement, by gently landing and taking a bow. But small black pins pierced the narrow abdomens of each one, holding them to the corkboard surface, making them seem less graceful, more dead, engaged in no dance at all.

A paper nametag was glued below each butterfly, its proper name spelled out in Skeet’s erratic, struggling scrawl: Papilio Glaucus, Lycaena Phlaeas, Spicebush Swallowtail, Silver-spotted Skipper, Stage Monarch, Red Admiral, Peking Cabbage, Blue Ipso-Columbus, Northern Cloudywing. After reading them, I couldn’t imagine which was more unlikely — Skeet attempting to pronounce the names, or actually taking the time to pen them.

“Look at the others,” Janie said. She wagged a finger and guided me away. We walked down the length of the room until we came to three more identical boxes, standing upright in a row along the rear wall, like museum displays about to be hung. They too were filled with butterflies.

“Where did they come from?” I asked.

Janie moved a few paces away and turned, folding her arms. “I don’t know,” she said. “I honestly don’t.”

I bent down and inspected a few of them. “Maybe he picked them up somewhere.”

“Picked them up? Picked them up where?” she asked.

“I don’t know. Maybe he bought them.”

“Come on,” she said. I looked up at her. Her arms were folded. She was rocking on the balls of her feet. Her forehead was furrowed and she was picking at her fingers mercilessly.

“Or found them,” I stabbed on, “in an alley. Or outside a lab. Or the museum. Or a garage sale. Who knows.”

“Picked those up in an alley?”

“Maybe he bought them, Janie. I really don’t know.”

“Look in the drawer,” she said.

“Why? What’s in there?” I asked.

“Just look.”

“There’s something dead in there. Isn’t there?”

“Look in the drawer.”

I looked in the drawer. Scattered around inside were all of the implements Skeet had used to make his displays — tiny plastic boxes filled with colored pins, glue, tape, corkboard, rulers, X-acto knives.

“Look in the other,” Janie said.

In the next drawer down, a deep drawer, were pieces of muslin and cheesecloth, two of them fashioned around coathangers to form crude butterfly nets. There was an old coffee can too. I lifted it out and the pungent odor that wafted from it — ethyl acetate, I know now — made me return it quickly. It was a killing jar, primitive and also of Skeet’s own fashioning. Strewn along the bottom of the drawer was butterfly carnage, their bodies dry and dusty and disintegrating, brittle like fall leaves.

After I’d closed the drawers I turned the desk chair around and sat down. “I don’t understand,” I said.

“Neither do I.” Janie, still standing, pulled out a cigarette and lit up. I started to cough conspicuously.

“Not a word,” she warned. “I’m the nurse around here.”

“You couldn’t tell by looking at you,” I said.

She inhaled and looked down at herself.

“I’ve got to get back to work,” I finally said.

“What am I supposed to do with them?”

“I don’t know. We’ll talk about it later.”

“I can’t just leave them.”

“You can for now,” I said. “I’ve got to get back to work.”

She started throwing her weight from leg to leg. She let her cigarette fall to the floor and crushed it with a pivot of her foot. “It doesn’t make any sense.”

“I know it doesn’t,” I said. I stood up to go.

“What was he doing?”

I stood looking at her, watching her wonder and wondering myself if she would hit upon it, remember it, allow herself to understand how the most vicious person we had ever known had come to take an obsessive interest in butterflies.

“I don’t know, Janie. I’ve really got to go.”

But I did know. The lies we tell when we’re children might be called innocent lies, not because we’re innocent, but because as children we know we’re lying, and to what purpose or end. The lies we tell when we’re older, though, are the frightening lies, because now we lie mostly to ourselves, and it’s ourselves alone that we wish to delude.