The Butterfly Clip

A short story by Michele Joslin

One

The package arrived at the crime scene before she did. Inside the clear evidence bag was a child’s pink hair clip, the plastic one with the cracked butterfly. Detective Mara Crowe held it up against the fading light and said, “Victim number three. Same as the others.” Dr. Elena Crowe didn’t answer. She was staring at the clip and counting the years. Twenty. Exactly twenty years since their mother had worn that same clip the morning she walked out and never came back.

It had come at ten after four, Mara said. A padded yellow mailer set on the cap of the seawall behind the house, no postage, no name. Deputy Ortiz found it walking the property line and had the sense to leave it where it sat until the crime scene tech photographed it in place.

Elena had been in the Keys less than five hours. She’d driven down from Miami that morning, checked into the Fairfield Inn on the north end of Marathon, and lain down on top of the spread in her clothes, meaning to rest ten minutes. She woke forty minutes later with the air conditioner rattling and the room gone dim behind the blackout curtains. Ortiz was waiting in the lobby with a marked Explorer. Mara had sent him. The street was clogged with county vehicles, and she didn’t want a rental in the way. So the white Nissan stayed in the hotel lot, nose to the mangroves.

The house was a two-story stilt home painted the green of key lime pie, on a canal off the Overseas Highway near mile marker 50. The boat lift at the seawall was empty. Its cables groaned whenever a wake reached them.

“Robin Haskell,” Mara said. “Forty-one. Last seen Thursday night. Cars in the drive. Purse on the counter. Phone’s gone.”

“Filing date?”

“Three weeks ago. Petition for dissolution.”

“Same as the others.”

Mara didn’t look up from her notebook. “Same as the others.”

She had their father’s jaw and had cut her hair short enough that the wind off the canal couldn’t move it. The Monroe County Sheriff’s Office star rode on her belt beside the holster. Twenty-nine. The last time Elena had stood this close to her was at a funeral home in Homestead eleven years ago, and they hadn’t spoken then either.

The back slider stood open a foot, the vertical blinds stirring against the frame. On the stove, a pot of black beans had gone sour, a gray skin across the top. Elena stood over it longer than she needed to. Somebody had been making dinner. Somebody had heard something at the back of the house and gone to look.

Carla Benoit, Key Colony Beach, had filed on the twenty-ninth of August and was gone two weeks later. Jessie Tran, Little Venice, worked the front office at Kingfish Marina in Boot Key Harbor until the night of October third. Robin Haskell, Thursday. Three women in six weeks. Each had filed to leave a marriage. Each lived on the water or worked beside it. No bodies. No calls. Nothing on their cards or phones since. At every scene, a clip.

“The husbands?”

“Alibied, all three, so far. I’m taking another run at Haskell in the morning.”

Elena went back out to the seawall. The sun had dropped behind the houses across the canal, and the water had gone the color of weak tea. She looked at the spot where the mailer had been, then down the canal at the dock lines and the row of stilt houses with their backs to the water.

Anyone in a boat could have set it there. Anyone at all.

Mara came up behind her holding the bag by its top seam.

“The request came through FDLE,” Elena said. “Your major asked for a behavioral consult. My name was on it.”

“I didn’t put it there.”

“Somebody did.”

“Somebody in Tallahassee looked at a list.” Mara lifted the bag. “You recognized it.”

“So did you.”

“I recognized a pink butterfly clip. Dollar General by the airport sells them six to a card. I checked.” She tilted it so the light came through the plastic. “It’s a coincidence, Elena. That’s all it is.”

There was still a little sun coming between two of the houses across the canal, and Mara held the bag up into it. The crack was easy to see. Left wing, on a diagonal, from the body of the butterfly out toward the scalloped edge. It stopped a quarter inch short.

Elena had watched that crack happen. Mara, nine years old and barefoot in the kitchen of the house on 107th Street, had stepped on the clip in the dark before school and cried. Their mother wiped her face and pinned it in her own hair and said look, it still holds.

It had stopped a quarter inch short then, too.

Mara’s phone buzzed. She read the screen, and her face did nothing at all, which Elena had learned as a child was its own kind of answer.

“Kessler,” she said. “She took the mailer apart at the substation. There was something else in it. Tucked inside the flap.”

“What?”

“She won’t say on the phone. She said it has a name on it.”

Two

The substation was one story of stucco set back off the highway, the hurricane shutters still bolted open from some storm season nobody had bothered to close out. At the end of a narrow hallway Mara punched a code into a steel door, and Elena signed the log under her name.

Kessler had the mailer laid out on butcher paper under a magnifier lamp. Beside it, in their own bags, sat the clips from Key Colony Beach and Little Venice. Elena bent over them one at a time. Pink plastic. A hinge spring of bright steel. Each one cracked across the left wing on the same diagonal, stopping short of the edge.

“All three are new,” Kessler said. “Mold flash still on the seams, no wear on the spring. Somebody cracked them on purpose. Slow and controlled. Like you’d do it in a vise.” She pulled the lamp lower. “But I wanted you to see this.”

She folded back the adhesive flap with the tip of a probe. Inside the fold, where the bubble lining met the paper, someone had slid a thin rectangle of laminated card stock. She lifted it out with plastic forceps and set it face up.

MONROE COUNTY PUBLIC LIBRARY. MARATHON BRANCH. Under the blue stripe somebody at the branch had typed DIANE M. LASALLE, and the A in Diane sat a hair higher than the other letters. The lamination had gone the color of old Scotch tape.

Elena knew the signature before she’d finished reading it. That D, with the loop at the top she always went back over twice. It had been on every field trip slip Elena ever brought home.

Behind her, Mara breathed in and didn’t breathe out.

“That’s our mother’s maiden name,” Elena said, to Kessler, because somebody had to say it out loud. “That card was in her wallet. Behind her license.”

Kessler set the forceps down. “You want me to stop?”

“No. Process it. There’s a chewed spot on the lower right corner. Don’t lose it.”

Kessler looked at the corner, then at her. “Who chewed it?”

“Mara did. She was four. We played library on the kitchen floor.”

Mara walked out.

Elena found her in an interview room down the hall with the overhead light off, sitting on the suspect side of a metal table. The clock over the mirror was four minutes fast.

“Somebody is putting things in front of us,” Elena said. “Only us. Nobody else alive would know that clip was cracked. Nobody else would know that card meant anything. Her wallet was never found. Whoever has that card has had her wallet for twenty years.”

Mara rubbed her thumb hard along the edge of the table. “I have the file.”

Elena waited.

“The original missing persons file. Oh-six. When I got hired I signed it out of records in Key West and never signed it back in. I sealed it the day I got it. Evidence tape, my initials. I’ve never opened it.” Mara looked up. “I’m not going to open it now.”

“There are three women missing.”

“And I’m working three women missing. I’m not working her.” Mara stood, and the chair scraped. “You want it. I can see it on your face. Fine.”

She came back from the squad room with a manila folder thick as a paperback, tied with cotton string, red evidence tape across the flap. When Elena didn’t take it right away she pushed it against her chest until she did.

“Don’t open it in my building.” She tossed over a set of keys on a Sheriff’s Office fob. “Pool car. Silver Impala, back row. Go to your hotel.”

Somebody had been smoking in the Impala for years and trying to hide it with the cardboard tree on the mirror. Elena laid the folder on the passenger seat and pulled out onto US-1, north toward the Fairfield Inn.

At the light by the airport she glanced over at it. The sodium lamps over the intersection were bright enough to read by. The red tape across the flap carried a black marker line of initials and a date: M.C. 03/02/16.

Just below it was a second strip of the same tape, laid so carefully along the first that you had to be looking for it. The old seal had been slit underneath and closed again.

The second strip was initialed too, in a hand made to look like Mara’s.

M.C. 10/19/26.

Five days ago. Three days before Robin Haskell stood at her stove and heard something at the back of the house.

The light went green. Behind her somebody leaned on a horn. Elena didn’t move until it went yellow again, and when she did, she drove past the turn for the hotel.

 

Three

Half a mile on she pulled into the lot of a marine supply store closed for the night and parked under the one working pole light. Across the road the sign for a fish house was dying from the left. The F kept cutting out, so half the time it just said ISH HOUSE.

She worked on a pair of gloves before she touched the folder, because someone had been inside it five days ago and might have left some of themselves on the paper. She slit both seals with her car key, photographed the flap, and opened it on her knees.

Monroe County Sheriff’s Office. Missing Person Report. Case 06-41187. Reporting party, Raymond Crowe, husband. Missing, Diane Marie Crowe, née Lasalle, white female, thirty-six. Last seen at residence, 107th Street Gulf, approximately 0640 hours. Hair worn up with a pink plastic clip.

Elena read that line twice and turned the page.

Employer. Kingfish Marina, Boot Key Harbor. Subject cleaned and detailed private vessels, paid cash. Dockmaster W. Pruitt advised subject was scheduled at 0700 and did not arrive. Pruitt advised subject was reliable and well liked. Pruitt offered to assist with the search.

Walt Pruitt. Elena could see him without trying. Bowlegged, sun-cured, a cap from a bait company pushed back on his head. He’d driven her to school for a month when their father couldn’t get out of bed. He had taught Mara a bowline on the end of the fuel dock, the rabbit out of the hole and around the tree. Mara had tied it on everything for a year.

Behind the employer page was a single handwritten sheet, blue ink gone purple with age.

Statement of Inez Varela, 107th Street Gulf. Witness states that at approx. 0650 she observed the neighbor lady, Diane, get into the passenger side of a white pickup truck stopped in the road. Truck had a picture of a fish on the door. Diane did not appear to be in distress. Witness recalls partial tag, ZK4, because her late husband’s initials were Z.K.

At the bottom, in the investigator’s blocky print: Witness 81 yrs, cataracts per daughter-in-law. Not pursued.

A woman who got in without a struggle. Who knew the driver.

Elena opened the case summary on her phone and scrolled to victim two. Jessie Tran. Employment: front office, Kingfish Marina.

Same marina. Twenty years apart.

Headlights swung across the windshield. A dark Tahoe rolled in nose to nose with the Impala. Mara got out and left her door open, the chime going, and came around to the passenger window and looked in at the folder, the cut tape, the gloves.

“You didn’t turn in at the hotel,” she said. “You opened it.”

“Somebody opened it before me. Look at the flap.”

Mara looked. Elena watched her find the second strip, watched her read her own initials in someone else’s hand. A muscle moved in her jaw.

“That folder has been in my bottom drawer for ten years. It locks.”

“Who has a key?”

“Me. The sergeant. Maintenance has a master.” Mara looked across the highway, as if the answer might be parked over there. “Half the substation could get in that drawer.”

Elena held up the witness sheet. “Mrs. Varela saw Mom get into a white pickup with a fish on the door. Partial tag. Nobody ran it. And Jessie Tran worked the front office at Kingfish.”

Mara didn’t take the pages. She stood with her hand on the roof of the Impala, and Elena could see her deciding whether she should know this.

“I’ve got Dale Haskell at eight,” Mara said, but it came out without any force.

Elena’s phone lit on the console. Unknown number. A picture, no text.

A dashboard, shot through a windshield at night. A white Nissan’s dash, the rental company’s barcode sticker in the corner of the glass. Sitting dead center, set there neatly, as if on display, was a pink butterfly clip.

Through the windshield behind it, out of focus but readable, a lit sign on a pole. FAIRFIELD INN & SUITES.

Sent two minutes ago.

Four

Mara drove with the grille lights going and no siren, and the half mile took under a minute. The white Nissan was where Elena had left it, backed in against the mangrove line at the far end of the lot, where the pole light didn’t quite reach.

Mara stopped the Tahoe across its nose and got out with her flashlight up. She swept it under the car, along the mangroves, across the rear glass. A pair of tree frogs went quiet. Nothing else moved.

The dash was empty.

Elena pressed the fob. The car chirped and the dome light came on over gray upholstery and an empty coffee cup. No clip. No mark where one had been.

Something white was folded under the driver’s side wiper blade. An index card, bent once down the middle. Mara gloved up and drew it out by its edge and opened it under the flashlight.

Block capitals in black felt-tip, neat as a draftsman’s.

SHE KNEW YOU HID THE TORTOISESHELL ONE IN THE FREEZER, ELLIE. SHE WORE MARA’S ANYWAY. SHE WASN’T ANGRY.

Elena’s knees went loose. She put her hand flat on the Nissan’s hood.

“What is this?” Mara said.

It took Elena a second to find her voice. “The night before she left, we had a fight. About me wanting to go live with Aunt Ruth in Miami. She said no. I said things.” The pole light hummed overhead. “In the morning I took her barrette off the bathroom counter, the tortoiseshell one, and hid it in the freezer behind the ice trays. So she’d be late. That’s all I wanted. For her to be late.”

Mara stared at her.

“She couldn’t find it. She took your clip instead. I never told anybody. That afternoon, when she didn’t come home, I took the barrette out of the freezer and threw it in the canal.” Elena looked at the card. “Nobody knew that but me. And her, if she figured it out.”

“She knew,” Mara said.

It wasn’t addressed to Elena. Something in Mara’s face had come unfastened.

“I always thought she took mine on purpose,” she said. “That she was taking me with her. I used to lie awake and think, she has my clip, she’ll have to bring it back.”

She sealed the card in an evidence envelope, and her hand was shaking enough that she had to write the date twice.

“She told somebody,” Elena said. “She was alive long enough to tell somebody that.”

Mara didn’t answer.

The hotel camera caught a figure in a long hooded rain jacket crossing the top edge of the frame at 9:51, coming from the mangroves, and going back the same way fifty seconds later. No face.

“Mangroves back up to a canal,” Ortiz said when he rolled in. “You could tie a skiff right there.”

Mara was already on the phone to the manager at Kingfish. Thirty minutes later he emailed the slip roster, and they read it in the Tahoe with the dome light on, against the clerk’s dissolution filings on the console laptop.

“Here,” Elena said. “Lacey Dunmore. Canal rental off Coco Plum.”

“She hasn’t filed yet,” Mara said. “The twenty-sixth is tomorrow.”

“Then she’s the fourth.”

“Then she’s still alive.”

The cell number on the roster rang five times and went to a voicemail box that had never been set up. The address was a rental on a canal off Coco Plum Drive. Six minutes, maybe seven.

On the console screen the county map showed Marathon as a thin, crooked string of islands with one road down its spine. One way in from the north. One way out to the south, over the Seven Mile. Everything else was water.

“Anyone who took her has to use that road,” Elena said. “Or a boat.”

“Everybody down here has a boat,” Mara said, and hit the lights.

Five

Lacey Dunmore rented the bottom half of a cinderblock duplex where the canal street ran out. Somebody had nailed a sign to the gate that said BEWARE OF NOTHING. A light was on behind the jalousie windows.

Mara knocked with the side of her fist. “Sheriff’s Office. Lacey Dunmore?”

The door opened four inches on its chain. Mid-thirties, scrubs top, hair wet and combed straight back.

“Your phone’s been going to voicemail,” Mara said.

“It was dead. I just got off a twelve.” Her eyes went past Mara to Elena and stopped. “Who are you?”

“Elena Crowe.”

Lacey didn’t move for a second. Then she took the chain off and said, very quietly, “Crowe. You’re her. You’re Ellie.”

Nobody had called her that in twenty years.

Inside, the place was neat and spare, a woman who’d moved out of a marriage with two suitcases. On the kitchen counter, lined up as if someone had been studying them, three padded yellow mailers, slit open.

“They started coming two weeks ago,” Lacey said. “On the porch. I thought they were from my husband. But they’re not anything of mine.”

Mara gloved up and tipped the first one out. A cassette tape, the case cracked, masking tape across the label in a twelve-year-old’s marker: ELLIE’S MIX — DO NOT TOUCH — THIS MEANS YOU M.

The second was a gray gym shirt from Marathon Middle School, CROWE inside the collar in laundry pen in their mother’s hand.

The third was a strip of four photo booth pictures. Two girls cheek to cheek. Elena with braces. Mara with no front teeth, laughing so hard her eyes were shut.

Mara set the strip down very gently.

“That’s how I knew the name,” Lacey said. “The tape. I looked you up.” She hugged her own elbows. “I told my lawyer. And the guy at the marina, the older one who helps out, because I thought my husband was leaving them. He said he’d keep an eye on my slip.”

“What guy?”

Lacey’s phone lit up on the charger. “That’s my lawyer. Can I?”

“Take it,” Mara said.

Lacey carried it into the back bedroom and pulled the door mostly shut.

Mara stood looking at the mailers. “These were never for her. He sent them here so they’d be here when you walked in.” She turned. “This is about you. Three women are missing so you’d drive down from Miami.”

“That’s not fair.”

“You know what I did after you left? I went to the marina every Saturday for two years and sat on the end of the fuel dock and waited for her to come back.” Her voice was rising and she didn’t seem to hear it. “Every Saturday, Elena.”

Elena had nothing to say to that, and they stood very close in the small kitchen, the way they hadn’t since they shared a bedroom.

The voice in the back room had stopped.

Elena didn’t know for how long.

Mara heard it at the same time. She crossed the room in three steps and put the door open with her shoulder, gun out and down along her leg.

The bedroom was empty. A rolling suitcase standing open. The sliding door to the patio pushed all the way back, the blinds rattling against the frame. Lacey’s phone lay face up on the bed. Call ended, 00:47.

On the tile inside the slider, one wet print. A man’s boat shoe.

Out toward the mouth of the canal, already distant, a small two-stroke outboard was winding up. Then it was around a bend and gone.

Mara keyed her radio. Female abducted by water, Coco Plum canals, small skiff. Notify FWC. Notify Coast Guard Station Marathon. All units.

Elena’s phone vibrated. The same unknown number.

She never left. You both just stopped looking.

Six

The older one who helps out.

Elena said it out loud on the patio, and Mara turned with the radio still in her hand.

“A white pickup with a fish on the door,” Elena said. “Not a picture of a fish. A logo. Did Kingfish have a truck in ’06?”

Mara called the marina manager back and put him on speaker.

“Fleet truck,” he said. “White F-150. Logo on both doors. We sold it for scrap after the ’08 season.”

“Who drove it?”

“Mostly the dockmaster. Walt. Walt Pruitt. He about lived in that truck.” Pages turned. “Here. Policy schedule, 2006. Florida tag Z-K-4, eight-three-N.”

Mara thanked him in a flat voice and hung up. Out on the canal a mullet jumped and slapped down.

Every Saturday on the fuel dock, Elena thought. Two years. And he’d have been right there.

“He brought groceries every Sunday for a year,” Mara said. “He came to my academy graduation. He still does the engine work on the marine unit boats.” She looked at the phone in her hand as though it belonged to somebody else. “He has a maintenance key to the building.”

“The drawer.”

“The drawer.” Mara was already moving. “His mother had a place on a side canal off Thirty-Third Street. Wilma flooded it in ’05 and the county condemned it. There was a boathouse behind it. He always said he’d fix it up.”

“Wilma was October of ’05.”

“And Mom was May of ’06.” Mara started the engine. “Seven months empty. Nobody going back there.”

The side canal was the kind tourists never saw, a narrow cut behind a row of shuttered businesses, lined with buttonwood and the gray ribs of collapsed docks. The house was gone. Only the slab was left, cracked through with weeds. Out over the water on pilings stood the boathouse, tin roof rusted to lace, a single slip inside open to the canal.

Mara called for units to stage on US-1 with no lights. Then she went in first, flashlight and gun together, and Elena followed with the second light from the Tahoe’s door pocket.

The walkway around the slip was new plywood, the screws still bright. The air smelled of low tide and engine oil and, under that, kerosene.

Against the back wall was a cot. A lantern on an upturned bucket. A plastic tub with a lid.

Above the cot, an eyebolt had been screwed into one of the pilings. Old. Rust stains ran down the wood beneath it in long brown streaks. On the board beside it, at the height of someone sitting on the floor, were rows of short scratched lines, grouped in fives. Elena counted without wanting to. Eleven.

Beneath the marks, cut shallow into the wood, were letters. D.L.C.

Elena put her hand out and didn’t touch it. Her flashlight beam had started to shake and she held it with both hands.

“Elena.”

Mara had the lid off the tub. A gold hoop earring in a sandwich bag. A Kingfish Marina staff lanyard: JESSIE. A phone in a cracked purple case. On top, a glossy four-by-six from a drugstore kiosk.

Mara lifted it by the edge.

A hotel room in afternoon light leaking around blackout curtains. A woman asleep on her back on top of the spread, fully dressed, one arm over her eyes. On the nightstand, a notepad that said FAIRFIELD INN & SUITES.

It had been taken from the foot of the bed.

“That’s this afternoon,” Elena said. Her voice sounded far away. “I lay down for 40 minutes.”

“He was in your room.”

“He wanted me to see that he was in my room.” Elena made herself think it through, the way she would for anybody else’s case. “He’s been watching you for ten years. He knew you’d never open the file, so he opened it for you. He took women who were walking out of their marriages, the way she was, and left the clip so you’d know. And he put my name on that consult. He needed both of us back on that road.”

“Why?”

Out on the canal, faint at first, an outboard motor turned over.

Down past the leaning pilings of the next lot, a single white running light came around the bend, low on the water. A small skiff, moving slow, the two-stroke throttled down to a mutter.

Mara killed her light. Elena killed hers.

The motor cut out. They could hear the hull hiss through the water, drifting in on its own momentum, straight for the slip. And over it, very low, a man’s voice talking gently to someone, the way you’d talk to a frightened animal.

“Almost home,” he said. “Almost there now.”

Seven

The skiff’s bow nosed into the slip and bumped the pilings, and the man in the stern reached up without looking and caught a cleat, the way he had caught ten thousand cleats. In the dark he was only a shape. Then the lantern on the bucket flared, because he’d left it turned low, and Elena saw him.

Walt Pruitt was seventy-one now. Thinner, his neck gone stringy, a white beard cut close. The same bait company cap. His hand on the cleat had a tremor in it that stopped when he gripped and started again when he let go. A cord hung around his neck and disappeared into the open collar of his fishing shirt. In the bottom of the skiff Lacey Dunmore sat with her back against the console, her wrists wrapped in silver rigging tape, her eyes huge. Her hair was dark and cut to the jaw, the way their mother had worn it. It was dyed. The roots were coming in light.

Mara’s light came on full in his face. “Walt. Sheriff’s Office. Hands where I can see them.”

He flinched from the beam as if it had weight and turned his face half away, squinting. He didn’t raise his hands. Then he smiled, and it was the old smile, the one from the fuel dock. “Hey, sweetheart.”

“Hands, Walt.”

“Ellie’s here too. I can see her back there.” He tipped his head. “You came home.”

“Step out of the boat,” Mara said. “Slow.”

“I wrote your major a letter on substation paper. Said the family would want the older girl to consult. Said it would mean something to the department.” He shrugged. “They went for it. People do what a letter tells them.” He looked past Mara, at Elena. “I needed it to be you, Ellie. You’re the one that left. You went off and learned why people do what they do. So you’d see it, and you’d know. Somebody has to say I did right by her.” He nodded to himself. “You came home.”

In the bottom of the skiff, Lacey made a small sound behind her teeth.

“Hush, Di,” he said, not looking down. “Your girls are here.”

Elena watched his hand on the cleat. The tremor in it. He squinted against a light that wasn’t that bright. The weight had come off him all at once, not over years. He said the same three words twice and gave no sign he’d heard himself. The girl in the boat was only close. She had sat across a table from this shape before, in rooms with no windows, and she knew where it went. She put it away.

Elena found her voice. “Where is she, Walt?”

He looked at her for a long moment with something like tenderness. Then his eyes drifted off her, out toward the dark water, as if someone had said his name out there. It took them a second to find her again.

“She was going to Miami,” he said. “Ray told me at the bar. She was taking you girls to her sister’s and leaving him and leaving here. Leaving all of us.” His thumb found the cord at his throat. “She had a bag in her trunk again. She always keeps a bag.” His thumb kept moving on the cord. “Eleven days. She talked about you two the whole time. The freezer. She laughed about that. She said you were the stubborn one.”

“Where is she?”

Walt looked down at Lacey then, at the dyed hair and the taped wrists, and his whole face went soft.

“She’s right here,” he said. “Right here, Ellie. Look at her.” He reached down with the shaking hand and touched the girl’s hair, and Lacey went rigid under it. “I wanted to bring everyone together. That’s all I wanted. Everybody home.”

Mara made a sound Elena had never heard from her. Then she holstered and stepped down off the plywood toward the skiff to reach for Lacey because Lacey was the one who was still alive.

Walt watched her come. Something cold and sudden crossed his face. The light still in his eyes. The gun on her hip. Her hands reaching past him for the girl. Nobody was staying. Nobody had come home. For one second, he was only an old man in a stolen skiff at the end of a canal with the law on the dock, and he knew it.

His hand went under the gunwale and came up with a gaff.

It was a short one, a four-foot fiberglass handle and a stainless hook, and he swung it the way he’d swung it at a thousand fish, low and across. The hook took Mara in the side just above her belt. She grunted and folded and went down on one knee on the walkway, and the gun she was drawing back out skidded off the plywood and into the slip with a small, final splash.

Walt looked at the hook, and then at Mara on her knee, and the hard thing went out of his face as fast as it had come. What was left was puzzled and gentle, the old face, a man who had walked into a room and forgotten why.

Elena didn’t decide anything. She had the Tahoe’s heavy flashlight in her right hand and she brought it down on his wrist with everything she had. Something gave. The gaff dropped and clattered against the hull. Walt lunged after it, and the skiff rolled under him, and for a second, he hung there with one foot on the gunwale and one on nothing. Elena grabbed for him. Her fingers closed on the cord around his neck. She leaned out over the slip. When it broke, water surged up and caught her sleeve and the front of her blazer.

He came up gasping in black water between the hull and the pilings, his cap gone, his wrist held against his chest. Mara had dragged herself to the edge of the walkway. She had her backup out of the ankle holster, a little five-shot revolver, and it didn’t waver at all.

“Stay in the water, Walt,” she said. “Stay right there.”

He looked up at the three of them on the walkway, the two sisters and the girl in the boat, and for a moment he seemed not to know which one he was looking for. “Ellie,” he said. “Tell them.”

Then there were headlights through the buttonwood and boots on the slab and Ortiz’s voice and two other deputies, and somebody was hauling Walt Pruitt up the ladder by his collar, and somebody was cutting the tape off Lacey’s wrists with a rescue knife, and somebody was pressing a trauma dressing into Mara’s side while she insisted she was fine in a voice that had gone thin.

Elena opened her hand.

The cord was frayed nylon. Strung on it was a child’s pink butterfly clip. Not new. Its plastic had faded almost to white along the top where sun had found it, and the spring had a fine bloom of rust. The crack ran through the left wing on a diagonal and stopped a quarter inch short of the edge. The broken surfaces had yellowed with twenty years of age.

She closed her hand again.

*  *  *

The ambulance was parked on the shoulder of US-1 at the mouth of Thirty-Third Street, light bar flashing, washing the mangroves red and white, red and white. Traffic crawled past in both lanes, faces in the windows. A Fish and Wildlife truck towed a dive trailer in behind the last patrol car. Out past the end of the canal, the dark water ran flat to the horizon.

They had Mara on the stretcher with an IV running and an oxygen cannula under her nose, and they were about to lift. The dressing at her side had already gone dark through.

Down the street, at the end of the canal, a diver had gone into the slip after Mara’s service weapon. His lamp moved under the black water, stopped, moved again, and stayed in one place a long time. Then he came up and said something to the deputy on the walkway, and the deputy kneeled and keyed his radio, and nobody on the shoulder heard what he said.

It took two of them on the ladder and the diver below. What came up was long and sagging and wrapped in a rug, the pattern gone to the color of silt; the ends bound with wire. They laid it on the plywood under the lantern, where Walt had tied up. Water ran out of it through the gaps in the boards.

No one on the shoulder said anything. One of the paramedics stopped with his hand on the stretcher rail. A car in the southbound lane slowed almost to a stop and then went on.

Walt sat in the back of the nearest unit with the dome light off. He kept his face turned from the light bar, and that turned it toward the canal, toward the lantern and the thing on the boards beneath it. He didn’t seem to see it. His lips were moving, slow and patient, the way you talk to someone in the seat beside you.

Elena looked back at the rug. The water had almost stopped running out of it. The deputy who had keyed the radio stood over it with his cap in his hand and did not move, and the lantern on the bucket burned low beside him, the way Walt had left it.

She looked at it until she understood she was going to keep looking at it, and then she made herself stop.

Something rattled over the crushed shell before she saw him. Ortiz walked up from his Explorer with a rolling suitcase. Elena’s. Navy blue, an airline tag still on the handle.

“Detective Crowe had me pull your room after you found that picture,” he said. “Didn’t want you going back there tonight. I just swept the drawers into it. Didn’t open any pockets.”

Elena thanked him. She was cold in the wet blazer, shaking with it, and she laid the suitcase flat on the hood of the Tahoe and unzipped it to find a sweater. She reached into the mesh pocket inside the lid for her phone charger.

Her fingers touched plastic.

She drew it out under the light bar. A child’s pink hair clip. A butterfly. Faded along the top. A fine bloom of rust on the spring. A crack through the left wing on a diagonal, its edges yellowed, stopping a quarter inch short.

She had not packed it. She had never owned it. She opened her other hand. The clip from Walt’s neck lay in her palm.

Two of them. The same crack. The same age.

Walt had been on the water all night. Walt had been in the skiff.

Mara had turned her head on the stretcher. She was looking at the clips. Her face was gray under the flashing light, and she lifted two fingers off the rail, toward the suitcase or toward something past it, and let them fall. She didn’t say anything, and Elena didn’t either.

The paramedics counted three and lifted. The stretcher’s legs folded and the doors closed, and through the back window Elena could see her sister’s eyes still open, still on her until the ambulance pulled out onto the highway and the siren came on.

Across the shoulder, Ortiz stood by his Explorer with his hands in his pockets. He was watching her.

Behind her, the road ran north toward the bridges and the mainland and Miami. Ahead of her, it ran south over the Seven Mile into the dark. On both sides, the water lay black and still, and down at the end of the canal the lantern burned low over the boards.

Elena stood on the shoulder with a clip in each hand.