Those who knew Eulalia Quirke thought her surname suited her: of the two thousand residents of Red Crescent, she was by far the quirkiest. She probably thought that old Jenny Joseph poem was an instruction manual—you know the one about wearing purple and going out in the rain in slippers and learning to spit? You’d be hard-pressed to find anyone who disagreed.
Although, to me, that was all second-hand scuttlebutt. She and I had never crossed paths in the three years I’d been in the dinky North Carolina town. There was one morning I could swear I saw her on the side of the Main Street bridge, colorful as a butterfly, chucking peanuts at some crows. But when I looked back in my rearview mirror, she was gone. A technicolor mirage.
It wasn’t until the big railroad derailment on the ridge that our parallel lines of destiny happened to converge. The NTSB stormed in one day at dawn and cleared out the whole town because noxious gas threatened to smother us or give us cancer or whatnot. We all holed up in Asheville a few days before they finally figured it dissipated enough to let us go back home. And why would they lie?
I met Eulalia Quirke the very next day.
In my stint as the resident psychologist up at the regional hospital, I’d dealt with my fair share of … let’s say, unique personalities. I was ill-prepared for the likes of Eulalia when I arrived that rainy morning.
Sheriff Rakes loomed in front of my office door with his hairy arms crossed over his badge, which was never a good sign. His face was redder than the splotches of blood on the gauze wrapped around his left wrist.
“Mornin’, Flip.” I craned my neck to see past him, catching a splash of canary yellow between the slats of my blinds.
“Joella.” He nodded at my travel mug. “Hope you drank some of that coffee already. You’re gonna need it.”
“It’s Earl Grey, actually. Who’s my patient?”
“Got called up to Eulalia Quirke’s place at sunup. She was already half a bubble off plumb when I got there. Ranting about how, during the evacuation, someone stole her prized collection of swallowtail butterflies. She didn’t take too kindly that I wouldn’t do a door-to-door sweep looking for it.” He submitted his bandaged arm as evidence, wincing as he wiggled his fingers. “Still, I didn’t have the heart to lock up the old dingbat. Figured maybe you could talk some sense into her.”
I shouldn’t have been surprised. In my line of work, belligerent patients come with the territory. Usually, listening is all it takes to cool someone down, as nothing gets a person more fired up than feeling like they ain’t being heard. Then again, someone who assaults a peace officer is another ball of wax entirely.
“Should I be worried?”
“Well, I’m coming in with you.”
From within the office, an angry voice called out, “Like hell, you are!”
Sheriff Rakes rolled his eyes and shook his head. “Okay, then, looks like you’re on your own. But I’ll be right out here. Anyway, I reckon she’s settled down a bit since hauling her in.”
Setting my lips into a thin line, I threw the sheriff a doubtful glance and pushed open the door.
Eulalia’s violet eyes trailed me between squinting lids as I hung up my umbrella and purse and dropped into the chair across from her. The lines on her ruddy cheeks were drawn in toward her puckered lips. A fire engine red blouse peeked out from the quilted yellow housecoat she held closed with clenched fists. Calloused heels jutted from the back of fuzzy pink slippers.
“That’s a pretty color on you,” I said, in an attempt to break the ice.
“Color is an illusion, Miss …”
“Riley. But you can call me Joella, or Jo.”
“Well, Miss Riley, color all depends on what light gets reflected or absorbed. Things themselves ain’t got no color. Plus, who’s to say what’s yellow to you ain’t green to me? Quite frankly, people get too caught up in color these days.”
That explains the strange ensemble, I thought. “So, Eulalia, I hear you’re a butterfly collector. Swallowtails, was it?”
“I’ve collected papilionidae for fifty years.” Eulalia drew a deep breath and let it whistle out her nose. “I had every North American swallowtail butterfly species except for one. Battus philenor, the blue swallowtail. You collect anything, Miss Riley?”
I chuckled inwardly. Did ex-boyfriends count as a collection? “Can’t say as I do.”
“Sheriff Rakes don’t collect nothing, neither. I guess y’all can’t appreciate what my swallowtails mean to me. Every single one of them is unique and precious as a child. Betcha if someone’s baby went missing, they’d be out knocking on doors across the whole county. Well, someone just walked away with my entire family, and all that tar heel would do is file some damned report!” She stabbed her middle finger toward the shadow of the sheriff outside for emphasis.
“Tell me more about your collection, Eulalia. What got you started as a butterfly collector?”
Eulalia brushed peppered curls from her face with a spotted hand, composing herself. A broken fingernail had a fleck of red at its tip, which I didn’t suspect was nail polish.
“My momma’s name was Aurelia, which is an old word for chrysalis. Out in the woods one day, we watched a butterfly emerge from one, and I been hooked ever since. Didn’t start my collection ‘til I was twenty-two, though.”
Her eyes went chasing after something in her past, and I let the pregnant pause linger. People abhor silence when they ain’t distracted by something. Keeping quiet is a sure-fire way to get people talking, which lets me go on listening.
“The first one was parides erithalion, the variable cattleheart. I trailed that girl through the dappled shade of a meadow for an hour before she finally lighted to rest. Her long legs … so graceful.” Eulalia placed a hand over her breast and looked up at the ceiling, her lips moving in what might have been a silent prayer.
“Your mother must have been delighted with your choice of collection.”
The creases on her brow deepened as she returned my gaze. “Momma was killed on my tenth birthday.”
“That’s awful! What happened?”
“Oh, they made it out like she OD’d, just another junkie who pushed things too far. Nobody ever bothered to ask what drove her to the brink, but I knew. Child Protective Services”—she punctuated each word like they were four letters apiece—“took me from her when I was eight. Unfit, they said. As if they knew better than my own momma what best fit me. It was losing me that done her in. Killed her. Tell you what, if any of them had an inkling of how my foster father defined parenting, they woulda realized I was better off with Momma, faults and all.”
I reckon all of Eulalia’s quirkiness made a lot more sense at that point. She’d been thumbing her nose at a society that had done little more than flip her from a frying pan into a fire. It was easy to see why someone would turn their back on what’s conventional and polite, given her circumstances. This woman didn’t need to be incarcerated, she needed to be understood.
“Eulalia, if I can get the sheriff to back off on any charges, are you gonna be alright going back home and not making any more trouble about how the law handles their investigation?”
“I’m just supposed to let it go, is what you’re saying.”
“Well, not in so many words. But maybe you can start over. You’re awfully fit for someone in her seventies.”
“I see.” Eulalia’s irises went a shade darker as the corners of her mouth drew down. “Start over.”
“Why not? It’s adventurous. Admirable, even. To have a passion like yours is … well, it’s a rare thing.”
She twitched one bushy eyebrow. “I suppose it is something of a … passion of mine.”
The following Saturday, I drove up to Asheville for a bit of a shopping spree. Between the Hobby Lobby and the REI, I picked up everything on my list, before zipping back to Red Crescent and parking on the street outside Eulalia Quirke’s house.
With an armload of shopping bags, I headed up the cobblestone walk to the salmon-pink dwelling, its paint faded and chipped. Foil pinwheels spun alongside the path, glinting in the summer midmorning, while a menagerie of wind chimes tinkled across the width of her covered porch. The entire front yard was a living thing, a veritable blanket of wildflowers and perennials undulating with bees and butterflies.
The door opened before my finger touched the bell.
“Miss Riley.” Eulalia’s light summer blouse was lime green, hanging over a pair of tangerine orange basketball shorts. The citrusy old woman moved aside and waved me in. “Forgive the mess. I wasn’t expecting guests.”
The butterfly motif was everywhere, in every manner of decor, from the rug to the curtains to the countless tchotchkes covering every flat surface. Prisms dangling before the windows threw wobbling rainbows around the room. The kaleidoscopic clutter assaulted my eyes.
“I have something for you,” I said, blinking to acclimate my vision to the spectacle. Handing over the shopping bags, I narrated each item she pulled out. “It’s a new specimen case—that’s mahogany, by the way—and a butterfly net. Oh, and the clerk at REI assured me that’s the best book on amateur lepidopterology.”
“You shouldn’t have,” she whispered.
“It was my pleasure.” She flinched as I touched her arm. “After our meeting the other day, I was almost obsessed with doing something kind for you. Seemed like you could use a bit of kindness.”
Eulalia’s face was inscrutable as she snared my eyes in hers. The ensuing pause in conversation was predictably uncomfortable as I found myself on the receiving end of the silence. But, try as I might to come up with words, they refused to line up on my tongue.
Her words were a sweet mercy. “Care for a glass of lemonade, Miss Riley?”
I accepted, and Eulalia tottered into the kitchen while I wandered the room, lifting random pieces from her assortment. A prominent rectangle of lighter wallpaper above the sofa marked the space where her prized butterfly collection must have been.
“Here we are,” she said, thrusting a tall glass of ice-cold lemonade toward me. “Cheers.”
I tapped my glass against hers and enjoyed a long, soothing drink before smiling gratefully.
She motioned for me to sit beneath the missing display case and lowered herself into an armchair across from me. “I’ve been giving a lot of thought to your suggestion. You know, starting over.”
The vision of Eulalia before me doubled briefly before I shook my head and brought her back into focus.
“I think you’re right,” she continued. “It’s important to have a passion. Perhaps I’m not as lithe as I was fifty years ago, but I still get around. Why, just this morning I nabbed what would have been the last specimen in my collection. Battus philenor. Remember? The blue swallowtail?”
She lifted a small wooden box from her coffee table and raised the hinged lid. Inside it was a triangular envelope surrounded by moth balls. The envelope blurred as she removed it from the box. I rubbed my eyelids and refocused as she spread open the envelope to reveal a large butterfly with black forewings and hind wings of a dull, iridescent blue.
“Lovely, ain’t she? ‘Course the males are a lot prettier, but I rather like her subtlety. It’s like she’s telling the world, ‘I don’t need your approval.’” She chuckled. “Kinda reminds of you, actually.”
“Eulalia.” My voice echoed inside my head. “I don’t feel so good.”
“That’d be the toxins, dear. I wouldn’t worry too much. It’ll be over before you know it.”
“W-what have you done?”
“This here swallowtail may be pretty, but her simulacrum represents everything I’ve come to despise about today’s patriarchy.”
“S-simulacrum?”
“You, Miss Riley. Every one of my specimens is a trophy, representing a simulacrum: a woman who failed me in some way.”
“I … I failed you? How? I’m only trying to—”
“By doing Sheriff Rakes’ bidding, of course! I thought you’d understand how important it was that I get my collection back. But no. When all was said and done, you were nothing but the blunt instrument he used to beat me into accepting his solution to my problem. You’re just like the caseworker who fed me the it’s our policy line. She was my first.”
Closing my eyes did nothing to stop the vertigo. Attempting to command my body to stand left me sprawled out over her coffee table, staring into the bulbous eyes of the female battus philenor.
“Perhaps lilies?” Eulalia gazed out at her back yard. “Yes, I think I’ll grow lilies over your grave.”