She opened the jar and gently shook the butterfly onto her hand. It fell into her palm and lay on its side.
“Did I kill it?” I asked in dismay.
“I doubt it. Sometimes these things only live for a day or two. Now this is interesting—”
She prodded it with a pencil, examining its wing markings.
“I thought it looked like some kind of swallowtail.”
She shook her head. “It’s not—wrong kind of tail hairs. Now this will sound kind of strange, but I don’t think this is a native species at all.”
“You mean not native to D.C.?”
“I mean not native to this continent. Unless I’m mistaken, this is some sort of festoon—”
She put the jar and the butterfly on her desk, crossed to a bookshelf, and pulled out an oversize volume. “Okay, let’s see—”
She rifled the pages and stopped, pointed triumphantly. “Yup, here it is! Zerynthia cerisyi keftiu. Zerynthia cerisyi, that’s the eastern festoon, and keftiu—that would be the subspecies from Crete.”
“Crete?”
She looked puzzled. “That’s in Greece, isn’t it? Can that be right? Here, look at this and tell me what you think—”
She put the book down beside the butterfly and pointed to a colored plate, and yes, there it was: the same insect, the same pied wings and extravagantly feathered antennae.
“It—it sure looks the same,” I said slowly.
“I wonder how it got here?” she mused. “Did someone just send you this lamp as a present?”
“No—I got it ages ago. I mean really long ago, almost twenty years.”
“I was thinking maybe it had pupated inside—”
“Could it have been doing that for all this time?”
Maggie shook her head. “Beats me. I guess it could have, but I’ve sure never heard of anything like it before.”
I looked back down at the illustration. On the facing page, there were plates showing several Greek amphorae, a small round seal like an irregularly shaped coin. I drew closer to the page and read.
In Mycenae and ancient Crete, butterflies often represented rebirth and the souls of the dead…
Maggie’s voice made me jump. “Do you mind if I keep this? I’d like to study it—”
I pushed away from her desk, my heart pounding. “S—Sure,” I stammered. “Listen, thanks, Maggie, but I’ve got to get to my office.”
“Anytime! Hey, better stop and get a soda—I hear the air-conditioning’s down in the west wing.”
“Oh, great.”
“Let me know if you change your mind about the cockroach.”
I fled upstairs. Maggie was right: the a/c was down. When I reached the third floor the heat was like a solid red wall. I stumbled past the security guard at the west desk and continued on down the corridor with my head bowed, so that I almost bumped into Laurie Driscoll.
“Katherine! Your intern’s here—”
I groaned and slapped my forehead. “Oh, god, I completely forgot! Has she been here long?”
“Not really. Twenty minutes, maybe, they all had breakfast at the Commons but—”
“Okay, well thanks, I’ll take care of her—”
I swept into my office, tossing my briefcase onto the desk and pausing to run my hand across my forehead. Then I put on my best formal expression and took a step toward the figure gazing out the window. She was tall for a woman, leaning on the sill to stare out at the Aditi already in full swing even in the sweltering heat.
“I am so sorry,” I began, holding out my hand. “I had to drop something off on my way in here and I just—”
Slowly the figure turned to me. A lock of dark hair slipped across his forehead, his mouth curled into a crooked smile as he gazed at me and I stopped, paralyzed with the purest coldest terror I have ever known.
“Hi,” he said softly, and brushed the hair from his eyes. “I hope you got my message.”
“I—ah—ah—” I staggered back until I bumped my chair. “No!—”
It was Oliver.
He stared at me with wide blue eyes, holding his hand out in greeting. When I didn’t move he frowned, glanced down at his extended hand, and then at me again.
“I’m sorry?” he said anxiously. “Is this—I mean, I called your voice mail and Dr. Dvorkin said this was—”
I slumped into my chair, clenching my hands to keep them from shaking. “Who are you?” I hissed.
“I’m Dylan Furiano. My mom says she knows you—Angelica Furiano, she says you’d remember her maiden name, Angelica di Rienzi—”
“Angelica?”
“Uh, yeah. I’m your intern—I wasn’t on the original list because I was doing a semester abroad, in London. I’m at UCLA, studying film ethnography. My mom says to tell you hi.”
“Angelica.” There was a roaring in my ears. “Angelica is your mother.”
He nodded. “See, originally I thought I had this summer fellowship at Sundance, but when that fell through my mom pulled some strings—my grandfather was good friends with Dr. Dvorkin, so Mom called him and they set this up—”
“Your grandfather.” I seized on the notion like it was all that stood between myself and the abyss. I took a deep breath and nodded, my words spilling out breathlessly. “Your grandfather, I knew your grandfather—”
Dylan looked at the floor. “Yeah. He died a few years ago—”
So the Benandanti could die. “I’m sorry,” I said softly, and meant it. “He was—I only met him once, but he was very kind to me.”
“He and my father—they were out sailing together, there was this freak storm and the boat went down. They never recovered the bodies.”
“God, how awful. I—your father?”
“Rinaldo Furiano. He was sort of this entrepreneur—well, it’s kind of hard to explain what he did. We lived in Italy until he died. After that my mother and I moved here, to California. I guess probably you didn’t know him.”
“No,” I whispered. “I—I don’t think so.”
But of course his father wasn’t Rinaldo Furiano! I thought of that night at the Orphic Lodge, of Oliver and Angelica coupling in the shadow of the dead bull. No wonder she disappeared, ran off to Florence or Rome or god knows where, to hide from us all and have her baby and…
And here he was.
“Dylan,” I murmured.
“Yes?”
I shook my head. “I’m sorry, I was just saying your name.” I laughed, a little shakily. “So, are you named for Bob or Thomas?”
He looked at me blankly.
“Bob Dylan or Dylan Thomas.”
“Oh! Neither, actually—it’s Welsh, it means ‘Son of the Wave.’ I was born on this island and my mom was reading about some myth or something and there was this guy named Dylan, and so—”
He waved his hands: pouff!
“—here I am. She’s into all this sort of weird stuff, my mom is.” He smiled wryly, tilting his head to gaze at me. “But I guess probably you know that already.”
Yeah, no shit, I thought. Now that I’d had a few minutes to calm down and look at him more closely, I could see how different he was from Oliver. His voice, for one thing—like Angelica’s, it was musical and slightly accented, though the accent was more British than Italian, no doubt smoothed out by a few years in California. And he was much more handsome than Pretty Boy Oliver, with an underlying shyness that contributed to his almost feral beauty, like someone unaccustomed to wearing clothes or shoes.