Lovely Wild Read online

  In the girl’s hand was an unidentified object. Some sort of toy. Equally as dirty and unkempt as the girl herself, it looked as though it could be some sort of Glow Worm toy—the kids both had them when they were small. Hug the soft worm bodies and the oversize plastic head lit up. This one had material flapping from its sides, something like a cape. Ryan couldn’t quite make out what it was, but another picture in the file, this time a close-up of the toy, showed him it was a butterfly. On the back of the picture was scrawled a single word.

  Mariposa.

  Spanish for butterfly, and the only word the girl would say when they brought her in. It was how they figured out it was her name. Or maybe it was just what they decided to call her and what she answered to. All he knew was that his wife was taken from this house, screaming and clutching a toy butterfly.

  Ryan took another drink of beer that had gone too warm and sat back in his chair. The bright light from the laptop screen made his eyes tired. He should pack it in for the night. Get a fresh start tomorrow, when he could surely sit down and pound out a couple chapters. Instead of going upstairs, though, he turned again to the stack of papers he’d organized according to date and content. Flipping through them, he paused to read again the places he’d highlighted or marked with sticky notes.

  She was something of a miracle, his wife.

  He knew about feral children, of course. You couldn’t make it through psych rotations without hearing about some of the most famous cases. Genie, the girl who’d been tied to a potty chair in a dark back room. Louis the dogboy of France. Kaspar Hauser, the German teenager who’d claimed to have been raised in a tiny cell. The common thread among all of these cases was that most of those children—the neglected, the abused, the outright abandoned or tragically lost—were never able to maintain what might be considered a “normal” life.

  There was the more recent case of the woman born in the Louisiana bayou and raised by a grandmother who’d been too ill to really take care of her. At five years old, she was sent to live in California with her mother, who’d had many other children but was incapable of really taking care of any of them. She’d been bounced from mother to father to foster care until she was finally adopted. She admitted that though she’d married and had a child, she couldn’t really relate to other people. She could live in society, but she’d never really learned to fit in. She preferred to live in isolation, similar to the way she’d been raised.

  She’d been raised not unlike his wife.

  Upstairs, Mari slept naked in a bed that was just enough smaller than their usual one that it still felt awkward to him. Upstairs were their children. Ryan knew without a doubt his wife loved Kendra and Ethan fiercely, without reserve. He’d seen her defend them against bullies on the playground or teachers who were a little too unkind. He had no doubts about his wife’s capabilities for emotion when it came to their kids. And in their marriage, Ryan had always known she was a little more distant from him than the wives of his friends, or the patients who came in complaining about how much they hated their husbands. Ryan had always loved that about Mari, that she stepped back and allowed him to be independent. That she didn’t check up on him.

  And look where it had gotten him.

  Mari had been fifteen when he met her for the first time, though he’d been hearing stories about her for years. The Pine Grove Pixie. His dad’s greatest challenge and best success. The reason Leon Calder spent so many late nights away from home when Ryan was young, and the reason his parents had split. At twenty-three and with years of neglectful fatherhood to numb him, the divorce shouldn’t have bothered Ryan as much as it had, but it had been a long time before he’d gone to see his father in his new house, and the girl he’d adopted.

  The first time he’d seen her, his dad had called out, “Mari! Come meet Ryan!”

  He’d been prepared to hate or at least mildly dislike her, out of loyalty to his mom if nothing else. After all, this girl had pretty much ruined not only his dad’s marriage but his career—even though she’d been the subject that had tipped his dad toward fame, the ethics involved in his adoption of her had basically guaranteed his dad’s forced retirement.

  But Ryan hadn’t hated her. In fact, the opposite. She’d been wearing a simple dark pleated skirt and white blouse. Knee socks. Hair in twin braids. Saddle shoes. Because that was the uniform his dad had insisted on. She’d been a kid and should’ve been way below Ryan’s interest—and she had been. At least in that way. At least for a time. She’d come down the stairs in her schoolgirl outfit and fixed him with a look so unwavering and blunt, like nothing he’d ever had from anyone before, that he’d found himself instantly wanting to...protect her. He’d understood then what had so moved his dad.

  Later, Ryan wouldn’t stop wanting to protect her, but he did start wanting to peel away the layers and get inside her. She wasn’t like other women. She was blunt and honest, as though she were incapable of deception, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t lie. It just meant that she didn’t.

  Annette had come on to him in that same way, her relentlessness erotic and arousing. Who didn’t want to be wanted that way? Like you made all the difference in the world to that one person?

  And so maybe his marriage had become a little stale and strange and he’d let himself be carried away by an opened set of thighs. He loved his wife and the family they’d made together. That didn’t change, not matter what else had.

  Ryan rubbed at his eyes until they blurred and the video he’d been letting run without really watching went to static. It was late. The house was dark. The kids had gone to bed early for once, leaving him undistracted by the creaking of the floors above while they wandered back and forth or did whatever the hell they did when they were up late because it was summer.

  He clicked off the television and sat in the darkness. Listened for the sound of footsteps and heard none. Then he went upstairs and crawled into bed beside his wife, where he pulled her close to him and breathed the scent of her, that warm familiar scent.

  And he wondered if by knowing her better, he was somehow going to lose her.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  “SOME KIND OF, what...sasquatch?” Sammy sounded distracted.

  Kendra imagined her friend hanging upside down, phone at her ear, while she watched TV. “No. I don’t know. I mean...the cop wouldn’t say. But it’s weird, you know? The old lady from down the lane told me to watch out for stuff in the woods, too.”

  “Creepy.” Sammy’s voice crackled and broke up for a few seconds, and Kendra scowled. She held her phone from her ear. Two freaking bars. Now one.

  “The service is better up there,” she said overtop of whatever Sammy was saying.

  “What?”

  “I have crap service here!” Kendra lowered her voice, aware that though her dad was holed up in his office doing whatever it was he’d brought them here to do, her mom could be down the hall. “It was better up on the mountain, that’s what I was saying.”

  “So...take a walk. You’re probably bored as shit there, right?” Sammy sounded bored herself. “You don’t even have internet, right?”

  “No. Just basic cable.”

  “So take a walk.”

  Kendra rolled over on her bed to look out the window. She could only see a bit of sky, some clouds. The tops of the trees. She shivered. “I’m freaked out.”

  “By the sasquatch? Girl, please. That is some tired excuse.” Sammy snorted laughter.

  Not for the first time in their friendship, Kendra wanted to hang up on her friend. Sammy could be such a bitch sometimes. Kendra always thought it was because she was an only child with parents who basically ignored her. She hadn’t ever, like, learned how to treat people. But sometimes Kendra thought it was because there was something wrong with her, that Sammy thought she could treat her like that and Kendra hardly ever did anything about it.

  “Someone took my library book out of the woods by the creek, and I saw footprints there. Big ones. Someone threw rocks a