Tom Lowe
The Butterfly Forest
The butterfly counts not months but moments, and has time enough.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
As an author, one of the questions I get the most is this: where do you get your ideas? Most of the time, the answer is I really don’t know. Stories seem to sprout from scattered seeds buried somewhere in my subconscious when a current event helps spawn some sort of germination.
Not with The Butterfly Forest.
This novel got its start from a walk in the park with my youngest daughter, Ashley. She and I were in San Diego’s Balboa Park and entered a sunken stone grotto built in 1915. It is now a butterfly garden, a place filled with dappled sunlight and shadows, cool stones, milkweed, sunflower, passion vine and other flowers that attract the attention of butterflies. The butterflies attracted our attention. Some of the butterflies alighted near or on us. Ashley was fascinated by the intimacy, reaching out to give a butterfly a rest on her hand. I imagined a young, college-aged woman doing something to help protect rare and endangered butterflies. Where would a trail in the woods lead her? What if that trail led her to a place where the innocence and nobility of the journey and mission intersected with a horrifying destination? The literary result of time slowed and spent with my daughter and the butterflies that surrounded us is The Butterfly Forest.
A special thanks to Jacqueline Y. Miller, Ph.D, Curator of Lepidoptera, University of Florida — Florida Museum of Natural History; and Danielle Bennett, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Tampa, Florida. My thanks also to the following: Richard and Matil Smith, Vicki Lieske, Michael Prescott, Ben Stoner, Kate DeGraaf, Lorna Powell and John Buonpane. Thumbs up to Tom Greenberg and Greg Houtteman of EO MediaWorks for the design of my website, www.tomlowebooks.com
I want to thank my family for their strong and continued support for each novel that I write. This includes Natalie, Cassie, Christopher, and Ashley. The video book trailer for The Butterfly Forest was produced by Christopher’s company, Suite 7 Productions in Los Angeles. Most of all, I want to recognize and give deep thanks to my wife, Keri, for her unmatched passion and support for my work. I’m grateful for her guidance, suggestions and patience. She is a gifted editor with a keen eye and ear for story and dialogue. Her editing skills are insightful, intuitive and spot on. Keri, you have my heartfelt appreciation.
And now to you, the reader. I want to thank you for your partnership. If this is your first Sean O’Brien novel, I hope you enjoy the story. If you are part of the gang, let’s saddle up and ride into the wind together.
DEDICATION
For Jim and Carole Kelel,
my mother- and father-in-law
ONE
Molly Monroe began to get the feeling she was lost. The ranger had told them the elusive coontie plants were in the Ocala National Forest, a mile north of Alexander Springs. “Lots of them,” he’d said.
That was three hours ago.
Molly and her boyfriend, Mark Stewart, walked beneath towering bald cypress trees, Spanish moss sagging from the limbs like wet beards in the humid Florida morning. Air plants resembling sea urchins clinging to branches, and bromeliads the tint of cherries, hung from trees as if the forest had been decorated with holiday ornaments.
“Wait a sec,” Molly said, ducking to avoid a spider’s web. She was tall, dark hair pulled back in a ponytail, vivid golden-brown eyes that trapped the sunlight streaming through the cypress boughs.
“What?” Mark asked.
“Shhh… did you hear that?”
“What?”
“A sound that stopped when we stopped.”
Mark grinned, a feigned chuckle coming from his throat. “I didn’t hear anything.” He was an inch taller than Molly, blonde hair, slim build, wide smile — a graduate student in botany. It was his smile that had first attracted Molly to him. Three months ago, she’d accepted a part-time job working at the University of Florida’s butterfly rainforest exhibit, meeting when he had brought in some clover, the perfect flower for yellow swallowtails.
But this morning they were far from campus, deep within the oldest national forest in the East, Ocala National Forest. It was here where Molly hoped to find the only plants that could support the lifecycle of the atala butterfly. The butterflies were beautiful and very rare, one of the most endangered in America.
She forced a smile. “I don’t hear it anymore.”
“Probably a squirrel.”
“Long as it’s not some bear that missed a few dinners.”
“Lions, tigers and bears — oh my,” Mark grinned, the dimples in his cheeks deep, his eyes teasing.
“I’m studying entomology, not lions, tigers and bears. Come on.”
They threaded their way through the underbrush, deerflies orbiting their heads. Mark said, “Coontie — that sounds like some poor animal caught in ropes.”
“It’s like a fern, a very old plant. Dates back to dinosaurs. If you think about it, this forest would be the perfect place for the atala to make a return. No people and no development. If we find the coontie, we can come back, release some butterflies, and hope they lay eggs on the plants. They might hatch into fat and oh-so-lovely caterpillars, and grow up to be beautiful atalas.”
A limb fell from a dead tree that had been splintered long ago by lightning, startling them.
Mark said, “Just a rotten limb. If a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it… does in make a noise?”
Molly grinned and started to say something when a woodpecker drilled into the dead tree—tat tat tat. It was a hollow echo, like a wooden mallet knocking on the door of an ancient tree with sawdust for its organs. Its rings of life long since killed and devoured by insects and time. As they walked, a long hoot from a great horned owl traveled through the boughs. Molly’s eyes widened. “I thought owls slept in the day.”
“Not always. Some hunt for prey in the morning and late afternoon.”
They followed the clear waters of a spring as it led them deeper into the forest.
Molly looked at the time on her cell phone: 4:45 p.m. She also looked at the signal. No bars. No way to call. Her chest tightened. Before Dad’s death, he had taught her to be strong. “Don’t let fear make your mind freeze,” he often said. She would find the coontie plants and help reintroduce a nearly extinct butterfly back into the world. Molly set her jaw line and took longer strides.
A crow flew overhead, its call a mocking cry. A long black snake slithered from a pine that had fallen and rotted across a path almost concealed by tall ferns. Mark stopped. He said, “That was awesome! Probably the biggest black racer I’ve ever seen.” He opened a plastic bottle and drank. “Thirsty?”
“I just want to find the plants. They should be here, according to the ranger.”
Mark laughed. “Next time we’ll bring a GPS tracker, or at least a compass.”
“Let’s keep moving.”
As they got farther away from the spring, a fighter jet roared overhead, its sound and presence like an alien ship in a land of dragonflies and ghosts of pterodactyls. Molly recalled how an archeology class found remains of a woolly mammoth in the muck, a bog near the St. Johns River.
Molly pointed west and said, “The ground is drier in that direction.”
“That’s the opposite way from where the ranger said we might find them.”
“I know, they grow in drier soils. Come on, it’s a big forest.”