Death of a Butterfly (Sigrid Harald) Read online

  “You have saved my life!” he informed her in his solemn blend of cinema English and educated Midwest. “Your kindness is a sun to my dark despair! I shall bring supper.”

  Sigrid wasn’t eager for him to bring back the remains of the broccoli casserole, which she had insisted he take home with him Saturday evening. She tried to express it diplomatically, but Tramegra brushed her words aside.

  “There’s none left,” he said darkly. “I shall have to stop for something of a takeout nature. Mexican or Italian?”

  “What about Chinese?” she countered.

  “I shall never eat oriental food again,” he snarled. “Kipling was right.”

  “Kipling?” asked Sigrid, wondering how Kipling had gotten into a fast food discussion.

  “East is East and West is West and never the twain should meet.”

  CHAPTER 20

  “Comforting the afflicted is all very well,” said Roman Tramegra as he divided their anchovy and ripe olive pizza with magisterial exactitude, “but if you’re already sheltering the homeless, you should not allow your good Samaritan impulses to run away with you.”

  “First come, first served?” asked Sigrid, surreptitiously removing the ripe olives, something she’d never acquired a taste for.

  Roman looked at her suspiciously, ready to take offense with the first hint of amusement.

  “Your mother is a dear generous woman,” he said, “but she disregards the limits of what is feasible.”

  In short, thought Sigrid, her mother should not have thrown her apartment open to a large family of boat people while Roman was still in residence.

  “I just don’t understand where she met them,” said Sigrid. In her last letter, Anne Harald had written that she expected to move on to Ireland in the next week or so.

  “How could she run across boat people in Ireland?”

  “She didn’t,” Roman said gloomily. “That Stewart woman had them and she bullied Anne into housing them until she comes back. It’s only supposed to be until they’re assimilated. Oil and water, if you ask me. They’ll never assimilate.”

  “Cameron Stewart?” asked Sigrid, beginning to see the light.

  Anne Harald’s circle of acquaintances was almost as varied as Oscar Nauman’s, for she greeted life with wide-open arms and only the most miserable misanthrope failed to respond to her sunny nature; but Cameron Stewart was not one of her usual lame ducks.

  Through hard work and a thick skin, the woman had risen high in the city’s social services bureaucracy, and she was so relentlessly optimistic that she made even Anne tired. She periodically blasted the city budget’s penny-pinching attitude toward its poor and needy and, when told that the city simply couldn’t afford all that she asked, told them that the word can’t ought to be banished from the city council’s vocabulary. She would probably win a major humanitarian award one day if someone didn’t strangle her first.

  No, Cammie Stewart would see nothing awkward about sticking an anglophile with a houseful of Orientals.

  “There’s nine of them,” said Roman. “Husband, wife, two grandmothers, an uncle, a sister, and three incredibly tiny children—I say, don’t you want your olives?”

  He took the neat pile Sigrid had collected on the edge of her plate and sprinkled them over his half of the pizza.

  “They’ve spread sleeping mats all over the living room and down the hall. The uncle is camped in the vestibule, the grandmothers in the kitchen. They refuse to use Anne’s room because she’s their hostess. They say it isn’t seemly! I ask you—is it seemly to sleep under the kitchen table?”

  “But, Roman, these people are homeless. They’ve lost everything.”

  “I know, I know!” he sighed. “It sounds so petty and self-centered to carp. I know that, my dear. And it isn’t that I mind sharing. Do you know, I offered them some of my broccoli casserole and they flushed it down the toilet, so it isn’t as if they were actually starving or anything. And then they did something perfectly revolting with raw fish heads!”

  Sigrid sipped her wine and tried to choke back the laughter that came bubbling up at the vision Roman had conjured of West clashing head on with East.

  Prettyman Day School was a modern three-story educational laboratory; but like grade schools everywhere, it smelled of chalk dust, crayons, and fresh pencil shavings, with an occasional whiff of formaldehyde and Popsicles.

  Despite Dr. Gill’s prediction, the auditorium was nearly full. Murmuring apologies, Sigrid and Roman slipped past parents and bright-eyed children to a pair of seats halfway down a middle row.

  Gill herself was being instructed in the intricacies of the school’s new slide projector when they arrived, and she did not see them at first. While the principal called the meeting to order, she scanned the audience and flashed Sigrid a grin.

  Her soft yellow caftan was the same shade as her Dutch bob, and her rhinestone-studded harlequin glasses glittered in the overhead lights as she responded to the principal’s introduction and set the mood with some preliminary remarks. At her signal, the lights were doused and an exquisite zebra swallowtail floated onto the screen, its black and white stripes a nice contrast to the vivid red patches on its hindwings. In rapid succession, Dr. Gill snapped through a quick overview of brightly colored North American species.

  “Oooh!” breathed a little boy in the seat next to Sigrid as a cloud of dainty blues hovered over a rain puddle, forever fixed in time and space.

  “Now how do butterflies begin?” Jill Gill asked rhetorically.

  She was an excellent showman, but, along with a nonstop humorous commentary, she managed to slip in quite a lot of technical, scientific information as the slides followed a monarch butterfly from egg to chrysalis, from adult emergence back to the laying of another egg.

  Roman was entranced. If he could duplicate the crispness of these slides with the caterpillars on Sigrid’s kitchen counter, surely Today’s Kid would buy a full-length article on raising butterflies in the city. And they paid a full eight cents a word, too.

  The lights came up and eager hands signaled questions.

  “Perhaps she’ll come and have a drink with us?” said Roman, who had questions of his own but didn’t want to compete with nine-year-olds.

  As the meeting broke up, Sigrid and Roman walked down to the projector where Jill Gill was packing up her slides, accepting compliments from pleased parents, autographing her book on moths and butterflies, and occasionally identifying various larva or abandoned cocoons that the children thrust upon her.

  “I think that’s an Io caterpillar,” she told a pony tailed youngster clutching a mayonnaise jar stuffed with rose leaves and a munching green worm that had spiny tufts along its back.

  “Does it sting?” asked the little girl.

  “It certainly does,” said Dr. Gill, her eyes serious behind those preposterous turquoise glasses. “Most don’t, you know, but Ios burn like nettle rash. Keep it—just don’t pet it. It’ll spin a cocoon soon and the moth that comes out will be a gorgeous golden brown with a large black eyespot on each hindwing.”

  “Will it still sting!”

  “Nope.”

  Despite the assurance, the child looked dubiously at her catch. “Maybe I’ll put it back on Daddy’s rosebush,” she said.

  “You certainly will not!” said her mother. “Remember what Daddy told you? When you’re tired of it, you must let us dispose of it.”

  “Young lady,” said Tramegra casually, “if you don’t want that caterpillar, may I have it?”

  Cunning entered the girl’s eyes. “Fifty cents,” she said.

  “Agatha!” exclaimed her mother.

  “Twenty-five,” Tramegra countered.

  “A dollar,” grinned the child.

  “On second thought, fifty cents seems a reasonable price,” Tramegra said. He gave her two quarters and beamed as she handed over the mayonnaise jar.

  “Have you been a collector long?” asked Dr. Gill.

  They had gone to
a cocktail lounge near the Prettyman Day School that leaned toward Polynesian decor. Dr. Gill was sipping something tall and green with rather a large amount of fruit in it.

  Tramegra fished pineapple spears from a coconut shell of piña colada. “Only started this weekend,” he admitted. “Sigrid’s letting me help with the caterpillars you gave her Saturday morning.”

  “I can’t always be there to feed them,” Sigrid said lamely. Her complement of fruit was limited to the single slice of lime floating in her gin and tonic.

  “You needn’t make excuses,” smiled Jill Gill. “It isn’t easy to sidetrack Oscar when he gets a notion in his head, is it?”

  She cocked her round blond head and her rhinestone glasses twinkled mischievously.

  Sigrid ignored the innuendo.

  “If Sigrid doesn’t want the books you brought, may I borrow them?” asked Roman. “I promise you, dear lady, that I will take excellent care of them.”

  He had found an illustration of his new moth and wanted her opinion of when it would spin a cocoon.

  “It’s in its final molt—no more than two or three days.”

  “That long?” he asked, disappointed. “These leaves won’t last past tomorrow. Now where can I borrow more, I wonder? Isn’t there a rose garden in Central Park?”

  “There is,” said Sigrid. “Want to know what the fine for vandalism is? The park gardeners are touchy about having their bushes mauled.”

  “I shall be very discreet,” said Roman. “They won’t notice a thing.”

  He turned to Dr. Gill and began asking questions about children’s books, publishers in general, and royalties in specific.

  Embarrassed, Sigrid started to remonstrate, but Jill Gill was so used to asking personal questions herself that she didn’t seem to mind answering his.

  Sigrid shrugged and signaled for another round of drinks. As she felt in her purse for her wallet, her fingers touched the letters she had scooped from her mailbox when she and Roman passed through the lobby earlier in the evening. Among the bills and circulars was another communiqué from Mrs. Jacob L. Wolfermann.

  Mrs. Wolfermann was co-president of the tenants’ association in Sigrid’s apartment building. A tireless activist for tenants’ rights, she had a vigilante’s suspicious nature and spun a nebulous web of spies around the company that managed their building.

  Mrs. Wolfermann had documented horror stories of landlord neglect and harassment in other buildings. Compared to them, their landlord was a model of humanity. Minor repairs might take an exasperatingly long time, but at least heat rose all winter, air was properly conditioned in the summer, and hot water flowed year-round.

  Still management could change hands; humanity could evaporate. Sigrid was no joiner. She waved no banners, marched in no parades; nevertheless, she was quite willing to pay yearly dues if it encouraged people like Mrs. Wolfermann to watchdog her rights. She just wished Mrs. Wolfermann didn’t feel obligated to issue status reports every few weeks. In Sigrid’s opinion, no news was still the best.

  With her two companions deep in conversation about press runs and copies shipped, Sigrid quietly opened the legal size envelope and read the short letter it contained. She read it again.

  “Something wrong, my dear?” asked Roman.

  She looked at him blankly. “My building’s being converted to a co-op. The landlord is going to file a plan next week.”

  She handed over Mrs. Wolfermann’s letter and Tramegra read it with mounting indignation. “They can’t do this to you!” he said stoutly.

  “Sure they can,” said Jill. “It may take awhile but sooner or later you’ll have to buy or get out.”

  Sigrid shuddered, remembering the periodic upheavals of her childhood. Other mothers bought new furniture or rearranged the old; Anne Harald kept the same furniture in the same arrangement and changed apartments instead. She moved at least once a year, sometimes more often.

  As a child, Sigrid never knew when she would come home from school to find a rental truck parked in front of their building and some of Anne’s photography students carting her bedroom furniture down the steps.

  Even after all these years of living in the same apartment, seeing one of those orange and black trucks could still give her a split second of apprehension.

  “I don’t want to move,” she said.

  “Well, you certainly don’t want to buy it,” said Roman, who occasionally kept his eye on the important points. “My dear Sigrid, I don’t wish to hurt your feelings, but if this Mrs. Wolfermann’s information is correct, you’ll pay an exorbitant sum for what is—forgive me, my dear—rather a mediocre apartment.”

  “Perhaps you won’t have to do either,” Jill comforted. “Your tenants’ association can fight the conversion. You can appeal to the State Division of Housing and Community Renewal, take it through the appellate courts, and if that fails, letters to newspapers, picket lines, injunctions.” She sounded gleeful at the prospects. “You could delay it for years!”

  It sounded worse than moving, thought Sigrid.

  CHAPTER 21

  Sigrid’s first unguarded reaction when her telephone began ringing at five Tuesday morning was that Oscar Nauman must have returned unexpectedly. No one else ever called at such an ungodly hour.

  Her next reaction was to wonder briefly if something had happened to Anne. It was already midmorning in Belfast. Or did she mean midnight last night? She rather thought there was a five hours’ difference, but whether New York time was earlier or later she could never remember. Neither could Anne, for that matter.

  Tillie’s anxious voice put an end to her speculation.

  “Sorry to wake you, Lieutenant, but Peters just called me.”

  “It’s okay, Tillie,” she answered, stifling a yawn. “What did he have?”

  “Suffolk County reports that George Franklin’s car is parked behind a cottage in Port Jefferson.”

  Sigrid threw back the blanket, swung her long legs over the edge of the bed, and reached for a brush to begin untangling her mass of dark hair. “Any sign of Franklin himself?”

  “Someone similar to his description was seen entering the cottage last night. They think it’s still occupied.”

  Sigrid was silent, considering the probabilities. It was five o’clock now, and Port Jefferson was what? Sixty miles out on Long Island?

  “Lieutenant?”

  “If we left now, Tillie, do you think we could be there by seven?”

  “This time of day? Sure.”

  Emerging from her apartment—her soon-to-be-a-co-op, Sigrid remembered unhappily—she found a gray morning. New Jersey’s industrial fumes had drifted across the Hudson and a thin drizzle held in all the city’s muggy odors without washing them away. Street traffic was light, however, and within half an hour she had checked out a car and was heading across the East River to Brooklyn.

  To most native Manhattanites, the other four boroughs of the city might as well lie in the ancient mapmaker’s terra incognita; and Sigrid held onto Tillie’s instructions as to a lifeline: down Flatbush Avenue, left onto Atlantic, then straight on to the playground between Elton and Linwood, where Tillie waited for her in the family sedan.

  A sleepy-eyed redhead sat behind the wheel, and she gave Sigrid a friendly smile of recognition through the rain-glazed windshield when Sigrid pulled alongside. Marian Tildon was thin and birdlike with an equable disposition and a chest even flatter than Sigrid’s.

  As Sigrid rolled down the window on that side, Marian called, “Lovely morning for a drive, Lieutenant.”

  Sigrid spared a glance at the heavy gray skies. “Lovely isn’t the word I’d have chosen.”

  The woman’s mischievous face split in a mischievous grin. “Me neither, actually. I, for one, am going back to bed.”

  From the brilliant red suffusing Tillie’s round face, Sigrid suspected that Marian Tildon had been told how much she disliked early morning risings. She also disliked being an object of third-party conversation, but the
remark had been too good natured to resent.

  “You mind driving?” she asked Tillie, sliding into the passenger seat. After all, Brooklyn was his territory, not hers.

  Tillie circled the car. “Make him stop for coffee,” Marian suggested, watching Sigrid stifle another yawn.

  She gave a cheery wave as they pulled away from her.

  Sigrid was not a talkative person, especially not in the early morning, and Tillie was tactful enough to respect her silence.

  They drove through Brooklyn and Queens with only the steady swooshing of the windshield wipers to counterpoint the background murmur of their radio tuned to the police band. As they passed into Nassau County, Tillie pulled off the Expressway and found a coffee shop. He splashed back to the car with foam cups of hot black coffee and a couple of sugared doughnuts.

  By then, Sigrid was ready for both and they munched and sipped companionably while the uninspiring housing developments slid past. Although traffic was still light in their direction, the inbound lanes were beginning to clog up. The rain slacked off as they left the eastbound Long Island Expressway and picked up the Northern State Parkway into Suffolk County.

  “My father had a cousin who lived out here when he was a kid,” Tillie said. “Near Huntington. He said it was all farms right up through the Second World War. Potatoes and truck farms and ducks.”

  The open fields had given way to bedroom communities so long ago that every lawn was overgrown with tall trees and well-established bushes; but there were still occasional stretches of woodlands and scrub tracts.