Chapter 1
The Butterfly Killer
A Novel
She died unseen. She came back to be heard.
Briarcliff, Connecticut · Spring 2004
• • •
The first thing Marnie Hale figured out about being dead was that she could still smell things, which felt like a cosmic joke.
Specifically, she could still smell the cheap vanilla air freshener her mom had plugged into the hallway outlet—the one shaped like a sunflower that had been there since fifth grade, yellowing at the petals. She could smell the dryer sheets her dad shoved into every load because he refused to believe one was enough. She could smell the coffee burning on the kitchen counter, the pot left on by someone who’d forgotten, again, that nobody in this house drank coffee anymore.
What she couldn’t do was turn the pot off.
She’d tried. Twice. Her hand went straight through the handle like it wasn’t there, and the second time she’d gotten mad enough to slam her fist down on the counter, which did absolutely nothing except make her feel stupid. Ghosts couldn’t slam fists. Ghosts couldn’t do much of anything, as far as she could tell, except stand in their own childhood kitchens at 6:47 in the morning and watch their mothers cry into a bowl of cereal.
Her mom was sitting at the table. The cereal was Cheerios, honey nut, the box with the bee on it that Marnie had loved when she was little because the bee looked like it was winking. Her mom wasn’t eating. She was just staring at the bowl, her spoon balanced on the rim, and her shoulders were doing that small shaking thing they’d been doing for—what, a week now? Marnie had lost count. Time moved weird when you were dead. Some days felt like hours. Some hours felt like years.
“Dad’s gonna be late again,” Marnie said, even though she knew her mom couldn’t hear her. “The Sunday mail run got backed up. Post office stuff, you know how he gets.”
Her mom didn’t look up.
“He’s fine, Mom. He’s just—busy.”
The Cheerios went soggy.
Marnie pulled out the chair across from her mom and sat down—or did the ghost equivalent of sitting, which was more like hovering at chair height and pretending. She rested her chin on her hand. She’d gotten really good at pretending, in life. Pretending she didn’t care that the girls in her homeroom whispered when she walked past. Pretending she wasn’t the one who’d drawn the little pencil sketches in the margins of Liam Thorne’s history notebook, the ones he’d never mentioned, the ones she’d slipped in during lunch when he was at basketball practice and his bag was just sitting there on the bleachers, unzipped, like an invitation.
Three years. She’d liked him for three years, and he’d never once looked at her the way he looked at Wynne Prescott.
That was the worst part of being dead, actually. Not the cold. Not the way her hand went through door handles. The worst part was that she still wanted him to look at her, and now he never would, and she couldn’t even be mad at him about it because he didn’t know she’d existed in the first place.
The phone rang.
Her mom didn’t move. The machine picked up—yeah, they still had a machine, her dad was old-school like that—and a man’s voice came through, clipped and tired-sounding.
“Mrs. Hale, this is Detective Thorne with the Connecticut State Police, Major Crimes Unit. I’m calling to—”
Her mom lunged for the phone so fast the chair scraped back and knocked over the Cheerios. Milk pooled across the table.
“Detective—yes. Yes, I’m here. Did you—is there anything—”
Her voice cracked on the last word, and Marnie felt something inside her chest—or where her chest used to be—fold in half.
She couldn’t listen. She drifted through the kitchen wall, out into the side yard where the forsythia bushes were starting to bloom even though it was only mid-March, and the air in the Hollow neighborhood smelled like wet leaves and somebody’s wood-burning stove. The Hale house was a small Cape Cod on Maple Lane, blue shutters, a porch that sagged on the left side, a mailbox her dad had painted himself that said HALE in crooked black letters. Across the street, old Mrs. Kowalski was already out walking her fat dachshund, and two houses down, the Petersons’ sprinkler was running even though it had rained last night.
Everything looked the same. That was the awful thing. The world had not stopped because Marnie Hale had died in it.
She drifted higher than the roof, until she could see the whole town of Briarcliff laid out below her—the white spire of St. Mary’s, the new ShopRite plaza on Route 7, the Mobil station with the broken sign, the high school. St. Cecilia High. Red brick, three stories, the parking lot shaped like a wedge of pie because the town had run out of money halfway through paving it. The basketball court out back, where Liam spent every free period.
She shouldn’t go there. She knew she shouldn’t.
She went anyway.
It was Saturday, so the building was mostly empty, but the gym was open for Saturday morning open court and she could hear the squeak of sneakers through the wall before she even got close. She slipped in through the side door—the one that didn’t latch right, the one everyone used to sneak out for lunch—and drifted up near the rafters where the championship banners hung. 1998 State Champions. 2001 Conference Runners-Up. A new one, from this fall, that said Regional Semifinals in fading gold.
Liam was on the far court, doing layups by himself. He wasn’t supposed to be here alone—Coach Bianchi had a rule about it—but Liam did what he wanted, always had, and nobody ever told him no because he was Liam Thorne and he could sink a three from the logo like it was nothing.
He looked different than she remembered. Or maybe she just hadn’t let herself look closely, when she was alive. She’d always watched him from the corners of her eyes, from behind her locker door, from the second-floor landing where the art room windows faced the gym. She’d never let herself really look.
He looked tired. There were shadows under his eyes that hadn’t been there in September. His hair was longer than he usually kept it, curling at the back of his neck, and he’d missed a spot shaving, just under his jaw. His practice jersey was the old gray one, the one with THORNE on the back in peeling white letters, and he was wearing two mismatched socks—one black, one navy—because he’d probably grabbed them in the dark.
He took a shot. It went in clean.
He didn’t celebrate. He just went and got the ball and did it again.
Marnie watched him for a long time. She watched the way his shoulders moved, the way his jaw set when he missed, the way he swore under his breath—a soft “shit” that he wouldn’t have said if he’d known anyone was around to hear. She watched him push his hair back with his wrist, and she thought, very clearly: I’m such an idiot. I should’ve just said something. Even once. Even just hi.
But she hadn’t. She’d been too scared. Scared he’d laugh. Scared he’d tell Tristan. Scared it would get back to Kelsey Marcum and her friends, and they’d have something new to whisper about in the second-floor bathroom, the one that smelled like strawberry body spray and cigarette smoke. So she’d just kept drawing the little sketches and slipping them into his bag, and she’d told herself that someday—someday she’d be brave.
Someday had come and gone, and she was a ghost in a high school gym, and Liam Thorne didn’t know her name.
He stopped mid-dribble. Turned his head, slow, like he’d heard something.
Marnie went very still.
He was looking right at her. Not through her—at her. His brow furrowed, just a little, and he took a step toward the bleachers, and for one insane second she thought, he sees me, he actually sees me—
And then the side door banged open and Tristan Wells walked in, holding a Slurpee and a bag of Cool Ranch Doritos, and said, “Yo, Thorne, you gonna shoot hoops all day or you coming to the mall with me? Skylar’s working the food court and she said she’d give us free samples if I showed up before noon.”
Liam blinked. Looked away. Whatever had been in his face slid off it, replaced by the careful blank expression he wore around everyone who wasn’t his brother.
“I’m coming,” he said. He tossed the ball into the equipment cart. “Give me five.”
Marnie stayed in the rafters for a long time after they left. The gym was quiet. The heater hummed. Somewhere in the distance, the bells at St. Mary’s started to ring—ten o’clock Mass, the early one her grandma used to drag her to when she was little, the one where she’d sneak peppermints from her pocket and try not to fall asleep during the homily.
She thought about Detective Thorne’s voice on the answering machine. She thought about her mother’s face. She thought about the last thing she remembered before she died, which was walking home from the Briarcliff Free Library on a Tuesday night, the streetlight out by the creek, and the man who had stepped out of the trees.
He’d been holding a long black umbrella, even though it wasn’t raining.
There was a butterfly on it. Black, with the wings spread wide.
She hadn’t even had time to scream.
Marnie closed her eyes—or did whatever ghosts did instead of closing their eyes—and when she opened them again, the gym was empty, the bells had stopped, and somewhere across town, in a small blue Cape Cod on Maple Lane, her mother was pouring soggy Cheerios down the drain.
