{"id":215,"date":"2026-10-25T00:21:36","date_gmt":"2026-10-25T00:21:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/verobeachfloridahub.com\/mljmysteries\/?page_id=215"},"modified":"2026-10-26T19:08:11","modified_gmt":"2026-10-26T19:08:11","slug":"the-butterfly-clip","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/verobeachfloridahub.com\/mljmysteries\/the-butterfly-clip\/","title":{"rendered":"The Butterfly Clip"},"content":{"rendered":"

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_single_image image=”210″ img_size=”800 \u00d7 1200″ alignment=”center”][vc_row_inner][vc_column_inner][vc_column_text css_animation=”none” css=”.vc_custom_1793041680390{margin-left: 20px !important;}”] <\/p>\n

The Butterfly Clip<\/strong><\/p>\n

A short story by Michele Joslin<\/em><\/p>\n

One<\/strong><\/p>\n

The package arrived at the crime scene before she did. Inside the clear evidence bag was a child\u2019s pink hair clip, the plastic one with the cracked butterfly. Detective Mara Crowe held it up against the fading light and said, \u201cVictim number three. Same as the others.\u201d Dr. Elena Crowe didn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Elena had been in the Keys less than five hours. She\u2019d 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\u2019t want a rental in the way. So the white Nissan stayed in the hotel lot, nose to the mangroves.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cRobin Haskell,\u201d Mara said. \u201cForty-one. Last seen Thursday night. Cars in the drive. Purse on the counter. Phone\u2019s gone.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cFiling date?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThree weeks ago. Petition for dissolution.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cSame as the others.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mara didn\u2019t look up from her notebook. \u201cSame as the others.\u201d<\/p>\n

She had their father\u2019s jaw and had cut her hair short enough that the wind off the canal couldn\u2019t move it. The Monroe County Sheriff\u2019s 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\u2019t spoken then either.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe husbands?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cAlibied, all three, so far. I\u2019m taking another run at Haskell in the morning.\u201d<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Anyone in a boat could have set it there. Anyone at all.<\/p>\n

Mara came up behind her holding the bag by its top seam.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe request came through FDLE,\u201d Elena said. \u201cYour major asked for a behavioral consult. My name was on it.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI didn\u2019t put it there.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cSomebody did.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cSomebody in Tallahassee looked at a list.\u201d Mara lifted the bag. \u201cYou recognized it.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cSo did you.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI recognized a pink butterfly clip. Dollar General by the airport sells them six to a card. I checked.\u201d She tilted it so the light came through the plastic. \u201cIt\u2019s a coincidence, Elena. That\u2019s all it is.\u201d<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

It had stopped a quarter inch short then, too.<\/p>\n

Mara\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cKessler,\u201d she said. \u201cShe took the mailer apart at the substation. There was something else in it. Tucked inside the flap.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cShe won\u2019t say on the phone. She said it has a name on it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Two<\/strong><\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cAll three are new,\u201d Kessler said. \u201cMold flash still on the seams, no wear on the spring. Somebody cracked them on purpose. Slow and controlled. Like you\u2019d do it in a vise.\u201d She pulled the lamp lower. \u201cBut I wanted you to see this.\u201d<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Elena knew the signature before she\u2019d 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.<\/p>\n

Behind her, Mara breathed in and didn\u2019t breathe out.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s our mother\u2019s maiden name,\u201d Elena said, to Kessler, because somebody had to say it out loud. \u201cThat card was in her wallet. Behind her license.\u201d<\/p>\n

Kessler set the forceps down. \u201cYou want me to stop?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cNo. Process it. There\u2019s a chewed spot on the lower right corner. Don\u2019t lose it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Kessler looked at the corner, then at her. \u201cWho chewed it?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cMara did. She was four. We played library on the kitchen floor.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mara walked out.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cSomebody is putting things in front of us,\u201d Elena said. \u201cOnly 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mara rubbed her thumb hard along the edge of the table. \u201cI have the file.\u201d<\/p>\n

Elena waited.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe 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\u2019ve never opened it.\u201d Mara looked up. \u201cI\u2019m not going to open it now.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThere are three women missing.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd I\u2019m working three women missing. I\u2019m not working her.\u201d Mara stood, and the chair scraped. \u201cYou want it. I can see it on your face. Fine.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u2019t take it right away she pushed it against her chest until she did.<\/p>\n

\u201cDon\u2019t open it in my building.\u201d She tossed over a set of keys on a Sheriff\u2019s Office fob. \u201cPool car. Silver Impala, back row. Go to your hotel.\u201d<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

The second strip was initialed too, in a hand made to look like Mara\u2019s.<\/p>\n

M.C. 10\/19\/26.<\/p>\n

Five days ago. Three days before Robin Haskell stood at her stove and heard something at the back of the house.<\/p>\n

The light went green. Behind her somebody leaned on a horn. Elena didn\u2019t move until it went yellow again, and when she did, she drove past the turn for the hotel.<\/p>\n

 <\/strong><\/p>\n

Three<\/strong><\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Monroe County Sheriff\u2019s Office. Missing Person Report. Case 06-41187. Reporting party, Raymond Crowe, husband. Missing, Diane Marie Crowe, n\u00e9e Lasalle, white female, thirty-six. Last seen at residence, 107th Street Gulf, approximately 0640 hours. Hair worn up with a pink plastic clip.<\/p>\n

Elena read that line twice and turned the page.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Walt Pruitt. Elena could see him without trying. Bowlegged, sun-cured, a cap from a bait company pushed back on his head. He\u2019d driven her to school for a month when their father couldn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

Behind the employer page was a single handwritten sheet, blue ink gone purple with age.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s initials were Z.K.<\/p>\n

At the bottom, in the investigator\u2019s blocky print: Witness 81 yrs, cataracts per daughter-in-law. Not pursued.<\/p>\n

A woman who got in without a struggle. Who knew the driver.<\/p>\n

Elena opened the case summary on her phone and scrolled to victim two. Jessie Tran. Employment: front office, Kingfish Marina.<\/p>\n

Same marina. Twenty years apart.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou didn\u2019t turn in at the hotel,\u201d she said. \u201cYou opened it.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cSomebody opened it before me. Look at the flap.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mara looked. Elena watched her find the second strip, watched her read her own initials in someone else\u2019s hand. A muscle moved in her jaw.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat folder has been in my bottom drawer for ten years. It locks.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWho has a key?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cMe. The sergeant. Maintenance has a master.\u201d Mara looked across the highway, as if the answer might be parked over there. \u201cHalf the substation could get in that drawer.\u201d<\/p>\n

Elena held up the witness sheet. \u201cMrs. 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mara didn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ve got Dale Haskell at eight,\u201d Mara said, but it came out without any force.<\/p>\n

Elena\u2019s phone lit on the console. Unknown number. A picture, no text.<\/p>\n

A dashboard, shot through a windshield at night. A white Nissan\u2019s dash, the rental company\u2019s barcode sticker in the corner of the glass. Sitting dead center, set there neatly, as if on display, was a pink butterfly clip.<\/p>\n

Through the windshield behind it, out of focus but readable, a lit sign on a pole. FAIRFIELD INN & SUITES.<\/p>\n

Sent two minutes ago.<\/p>\n

Four<\/strong><\/p>\n

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\u2019t quite reach.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

The dash was empty.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Something white was folded under the driver\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Block capitals in black felt-tip, neat as a draftsman\u2019s.<\/p>\n

SHE KNEW YOU HID THE TORTOISESHELL ONE IN THE FREEZER, ELLIE. SHE WORE MARA\u2019S ANYWAY. SHE WASN\u2019T ANGRY.<\/p>\n

Elena\u2019s knees went loose. She put her hand flat on the Nissan\u2019s hood.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat is this?\u201d Mara said.<\/p>\n

It took Elena a second to find her voice. \u201cThe 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.\u201d The pole light hummed overhead. \u201cIn 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\u2019d be late. That\u2019s all I wanted. For her to be late.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mara stared at her.<\/p>\n

\u201cShe couldn\u2019t find it. She took your clip instead. I never told anybody. That afternoon, when she didn\u2019t come home, I took the barrette out of the freezer and threw it in the canal.\u201d Elena looked at the card. \u201cNobody knew that but me. And her, if she figured it out.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cShe knew,\u201d Mara said.<\/p>\n

It wasn\u2019t addressed to Elena. Something in Mara\u2019s face had come unfastened.<\/p>\n

\u201cI always thought she took mine on purpose,\u201d she said. \u201cThat she was taking me with her. I used to lie awake and think, she has my clip, she\u2019ll have to bring it back.\u201d<\/p>\n

She sealed the card in an evidence envelope, and her hand was shaking enough that she had to write the date twice.<\/p>\n

\u201cShe told somebody,\u201d Elena said. \u201cShe was alive long enough to tell somebody that.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mara didn\u2019t answer.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cMangroves back up to a canal,\u201d Ortiz said when he rolled in. \u201cYou could tie a skiff right there.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u2019s dissolution filings on the console laptop.<\/p>\n

\u201cHere,\u201d Elena said. \u201cLacey Dunmore. Canal rental off Coco Plum.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cShe hasn\u2019t filed yet,\u201d Mara said. \u201cThe twenty-sixth is tomorrow.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThen she\u2019s the fourth.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThen she\u2019s still alive.\u201d<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cAnyone who took her has to use that road,\u201d Elena said. \u201cOr a boat.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cEverybody down here has a boat,\u201d Mara said, and hit the lights.<\/p>\n

Five<\/strong><\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Mara knocked with the side of her fist. \u201cSheriff\u2019s Office. Lacey Dunmore?\u201d<\/p>\n

The door opened four inches on its chain. Mid-thirties, scrubs top, hair wet and combed straight back.<\/p>\n

\u201cYour phone\u2019s been going to voicemail,\u201d Mara said.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was dead. I just got off a twelve.\u201d Her eyes went past Mara to Elena and stopped. \u201cWho are you?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cElena Crowe.\u201d<\/p>\n

Lacey didn\u2019t move for a second. Then she took the chain off and said, very quietly, \u201cCrowe. You\u2019re her. You\u2019re Ellie.\u201d<\/p>\n

Nobody had called her that in twenty years.<\/p>\n

Inside, the place was neat and spare, a woman who\u2019d 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey started coming two weeks ago,\u201d Lacey said. \u201cOn the porch. I thought they were from my husband. But they\u2019re not anything of mine.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u2019s marker: ELLIE\u2019S MIX \u2014 DO NOT TOUCH \u2014 THIS MEANS YOU M.<\/p>\n

The second was a gray gym shirt from Marathon Middle School, CROWE inside the collar in laundry pen in their mother\u2019s hand.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Mara set the strip down very gently.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s how I knew the name,\u201d Lacey said. \u201cThe tape. I looked you up.\u201d She hugged her own elbows. \u201cI 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\u2019d keep an eye on my slip.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat guy?\u201d<\/p>\n

Lacey\u2019s phone lit up on the charger. \u201cThat\u2019s my lawyer. Can I?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cTake it,\u201d Mara said.<\/p>\n

Lacey carried it into the back bedroom and pulled the door mostly shut.<\/p>\n

Mara stood looking at the mailers. \u201cThese were never for her. He sent them here so they\u2019d be here when you walked in.\u201d She turned. \u201cThis is about you. Three women are missing so you\u2019d drive down from Miami.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s not fair.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cYou 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.\u201d Her voice was rising and she didn\u2019t seem to hear it. \u201cEvery Saturday, Elena.\u201d<\/p>\n

Elena had nothing to say to that, and they stood very close in the small kitchen, the way they hadn\u2019t since they shared a bedroom.<\/p>\n

The voice in the back room had stopped.<\/p>\n

Elena didn\u2019t know for how long.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s phone lay face up on the bed. Call ended, 00:47.<\/p>\n

On the tile inside the slider, one wet print. A man\u2019s boat shoe.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Mara keyed her radio. Female abducted by water, Coco Plum canals, small skiff. Notify FWC. Notify Coast Guard Station Marathon. All units.<\/p>\n

Elena\u2019s phone vibrated. The same unknown number.<\/p>\n

She never left. You both just stopped looking.<\/p>\n

Six<\/strong><\/p>\n

The older one who helps out.<\/p>\n

Elena said it out loud on the patio, and Mara turned with the radio still in her hand.<\/p>\n

\u201cA white pickup with a fish on the door,\u201d Elena said. \u201cNot a picture of a fish. A logo. Did Kingfish have a truck in \u201906?\u201d<\/p>\n

Mara called the marina manager back and put him on speaker.<\/p>\n

\u201cFleet truck,\u201d he said. \u201cWhite F-150. Logo on both doors. We sold it for scrap after the \u201908 season.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWho drove it?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cMostly the dockmaster. Walt. Walt Pruitt. He about lived in that truck.\u201d Pages turned. \u201cHere. Policy schedule, 2006. Florida tag Z-K-4, eight-three-N.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mara thanked him in a flat voice and hung up. Out on the canal a mullet jumped and slapped down.<\/p>\n

Every Saturday on the fuel dock, Elena thought. Two years. And he\u2019d have been right there.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe brought groceries every Sunday for a year,\u201d Mara said. \u201cHe came to my academy graduation. He still does the engine work on the marine unit boats.\u201d She looked at the phone in her hand as though it belonged to somebody else. \u201cHe has a maintenance key to the building.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe drawer.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe drawer.\u201d Mara was already moving. \u201cHis mother had a place on a side canal off Thirty-Third Street. Wilma flooded it in \u201905 and the county condemned it. There was a boathouse behind it. He always said he\u2019d fix it up.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWilma was October of \u201905.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd Mom was May of \u201906.\u201d Mara started the engine. \u201cSeven months empty. Nobody going back there.\u201d<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s door pocket.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Against the back wall was a cot. A lantern on an upturned bucket. A plastic tub with a lid.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Beneath the marks, cut shallow into the wood, were letters. D.L.C.<\/p>\n

Elena put her hand out and didn\u2019t touch it. Her flashlight beam had started to shake and she held it with both hands.<\/p>\n

\u201cElena.\u201d<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Mara lifted it by the edge.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

It had been taken from the foot of the bed.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s this afternoon,\u201d Elena said. Her voice sounded far away. \u201cI lay down for 40 minutes.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cHe was in your room.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cHe wanted me to see that he was in my room.\u201d Elena made herself think it through, the way she would for anybody else\u2019s case. \u201cHe\u2019s been watching you for ten years. He knew you\u2019d 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\u2019d know. And he put my name on that consult. He needed both of us back on that road.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWhy?\u201d<\/p>\n

Out on the canal, faint at first, an outboard motor turned over.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Mara killed her light. Elena killed hers.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s voice talking gently to someone, the way you\u2019d talk to a frightened animal.<\/p>\n

\u201cAlmost home,\u201d he said. \u201cAlmost there now.\u201d<\/p>\n

Seven<\/strong><\/p>\n

The skiff\u2019s 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\u2019d left it turned low, and Elena saw him.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Mara\u2019s light came on full in his face. \u201cWalt. Sheriff\u2019s Office. Hands where I can see them.\u201d<\/p>\n

He flinched from the beam as if it had weight and turned his face half away, squinting. He didn\u2019t raise his hands. Then he smiled, and it was the old smile, the one from the fuel dock. \u201cHey, sweetheart.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cHands, Walt.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cEllie\u2019s here too. I can see her back there.\u201d He tipped his head. \u201cYou came home.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cStep out of the boat,\u201d Mara said. \u201cSlow.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI 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.\u201d He shrugged. \u201cThey went for it. People do what a letter tells them.\u201d He looked past Mara, at Elena. \u201cI needed it to be you, Ellie. You\u2019re the one that left. You went off and learned why people do what they do. So you\u2019d see it, and you\u2019d know. Somebody has to say I did right by her.\u201d He nodded to himself. \u201cYou came home.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the bottom of the skiff, Lacey made a small sound behind her teeth.<\/p>\n

\u201cHush, Di,\u201d he said, not looking down. \u201cYour girls are here.\u201d<\/p>\n

Elena watched his hand on the cleat. The tremor in it. He squinted against a light that wasn\u2019t 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\u2019d 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.<\/p>\n

Elena found her voice. \u201cWhere is she, Walt?\u201d<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cShe was going to Miami,\u201d he said. \u201cRay told me at the bar. She was taking you girls to her sister\u2019s and leaving him and leaving here. Leaving all of us.\u201d His thumb found the cord at his throat. \u201cShe had a bag in her trunk again. She always keeps a bag.\u201d His thumb kept moving on the cord. \u201cEleven days. She talked about you two the whole time. The freezer. She laughed about that. She said you were the stubborn one.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWhere is she?\u201d<\/p>\n

Walt looked down at Lacey then, at the dyed hair and the taped wrists, and his whole face went soft.<\/p>\n

\u201cShe\u2019s right here,\u201d he said. \u201cRight here, Ellie. Look at her.\u201d He reached down with the shaking hand and touched the girl\u2019s hair, and Lacey went rigid under it. \u201cI wanted to bring everyone together. That\u2019s all I wanted. Everybody home.\u201d<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

His hand went under the gunwale and came up with a gaff.<\/p>\n

It was a short one, a four-foot fiberglass handle and a stainless hook, and he swung it the way he\u2019d 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Elena didn\u2019t decide anything. She had the Tahoe\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019t waver at all.<\/p>\n

\u201cStay in the water, Walt,\u201d she said. \u201cStay right there.\u201d<\/p>\n

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. \u201cEllie,\u201d he said. \u201cTell them.\u201d<\/p>\n

Then there were headlights through the buttonwood and boots on the slab and Ortiz\u2019s 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\u2019s wrists with a rescue knife, and somebody was pressing a trauma dressing into Mara\u2019s side while she insisted she was fine in a voice that had gone thin.<\/p>\n

Elena opened her hand.<\/p>\n

The cord was frayed nylon. Strung on it was a child\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

She closed her hand again.<\/p>\n

*  *  *<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Down the street, at the end of the canal, a diver had gone into the slip after Mara\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019t seem to see it. His lips were moving, slow and patient, the way you talk to someone in the seat beside you.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

She looked at it until she understood she was going to keep looking at it, and then she made herself stop.<\/p>\n

Something rattled over the crushed shell before she saw him. Ortiz walked up from his Explorer with a rolling suitcase. Elena\u2019s. Navy blue, an airline tag still on the handle.<\/p>\n

\u201cDetective Crowe had me pull your room after you found that picture,\u201d he said. \u201cDidn\u2019t want you going back there tonight. I just swept the drawers into it. Didn\u2019t open any pockets.\u201d<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Her fingers touched plastic.<\/p>\n

She drew it out under the light bar. A child\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

She had not packed it. She had never owned it. She opened her other hand. The clip from Walt\u2019s neck lay in her palm.<\/p>\n

Two of them. The same crack. The same age.<\/p>\n

Walt had been on the water all night. Walt had been in the skiff.<\/p>\n

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\u2019t say anything, and Elena didn\u2019t either.<\/p>\n

The paramedics counted three and lifted. The stretcher\u2019s legs folded and the doors closed, and through the back window Elena could see her sister\u2019s eyes still open, still on her until the ambulance pulled out onto the highway and the siren came on.<\/p>\n

Across the shoulder, Ortiz stood by his Explorer with his hands in his pockets. He was watching her.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Elena stood on the shoulder with a clip in each hand.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

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Detective Mara Crowe held it up against […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-215","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"yoast_head":"\nThe Butterfly Clip - MLJ Mysteries<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/verobeachfloridahub.com\/mljmysteries\/the-butterfly-clip\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Butterfly Clip - MLJ Mysteries\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"[vc_row][vc_column][vc_single_image image=”210″ img_size=”800 \u00d7 1200″ alignment=”center”][vc_row_inner][vc_column_inner][vc_column_text css_animation=”none” css=”.vc_custom_1793041680390{margin-left: 20px !important;}”]  The Butterfly Clip A short story by Michele Joslin One The package arrived at the crime scene before she did. 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