“Okay. Don’t get all huffy,” Mary Beth said as she downshifted and picked up speed. “We’ll look a little longer, but I mean it, Maddie. There’s no way we’re staying out here in UFO utopia after dark.”
“Afraid we might get probed?” Maddie chided.
“No,” Mary Beth said with a laugh. “I’m more afraid you’ll never get probed if this is your idea of how to spend your summer vacation.”
Maddie’s eyes cut to the left. “That wasn’t an invitation for another lecture about my love life.”
“What love life? Or have you finally determined celibacy is too grim a fate even for a workaholic like you?”
Maddie took up her binoculars again and refused to answer.
“I hope you know you’re fooling yourself. You think you’re safely hidden behind those saintly college walls playing professor, but one day some guy is going to come along and knock your feet right out from under you.”
“I’ll be sure to let you know the second anything like that happens.”
“But he won’t be some mental wizard like those stuffy professors you hang around with now,” Mary Beth predicted. “He’ll be all man. Total brawn from head to toe. And you’ll be so hot for this guy, even you would be willing to dance naked on CNN just to get his attention.”
Maddie laughed in spite of herself.
“Besides,” Mary Beth added with a sigh, “we aren’t getting any younger, you know. The big Three-O is just around the corner, and…”
“Age isn’t a subject I care to discuss, either.”
“Nor do I,” Mary Beth agreed. “I just hate seeing you waste your life away like your revered Dr. Fielding has done. And what has being devoted to his career really gotten your boss? When he’s ready to retire I doubt there’ll be any life left in his old caterpillar, if you know what I mean.”
“Mary Beth!” Maddie scolded.
“Well, I’m sorry, but that man gives me the creeps. Any man who would devote his entire life studying the sex life of the tsetse fly has to have a major mental problem. And what scares me most,” Mary Beth added, “is that your only goal in life seems to be to follow in the old coot’s footsteps. Don’t you want a family some day, Maddie? Don’t you want…”
“Stop!” Maddie grabbed Mary Beth’s arm and pointed up ahead. “Ease the Jeep up that hill. Near those thistles. I saw something. Get closer.”
As instructed, Mary Beth eased the Jeep forward and up a small rise that took them even farther away from the main road and deeper into the desert.
“Don’t get too close,” Maddie warned, still using her binoculars to search a patch of brush growing by a chain-link fence that had suddenly appeared out of nowhere.
“Is that a fence?” Mary Beth whispered, reaching for the binoculars when Maddie took the strap from around her neck.
Maddie ignored the question and substituted the strap of her faithful Nikon camera around her neck. Grabbing a small net from the knapsack sitting on the floorboard, she started to ease herself out of the Jeep when Mary Beth grabbed her hand and pointed to a sign fastened to the fence. Forcing Maddie to take back her binoculars, Mary Beth said, “Take another look. I told you we never should have left the main road. This is government property. I think we should get the hell out of here. Fast.”
Maddie looked through the binoculars again at the weather-worn sign that was faded, yet still official looking enough to cause some concern. Government Property—Absolutely No Trespassing—Violators Will Be Prosecuted—didn’t leave much room for any misunderstanding about the warning. However, Maddie made her decision when she checked the bush again and saw another flutter of movement.
“I’m not going over the fence,” she argued, prying Mary Beth’s fingers from around her wrist. “It’ll only take me a minute to get a specimen.”
“A specimen?” Mary Beth cried out. “I thought you said these butterflies were rare? And now you’re going to capture one? Cut its tiny life short? Isn’t that defeating the whole cause?”
Maddie drew her fingers to her lips in a quick sush. “The Deva Skipper only has a life span of a few weeks,” she whispered. “That’s why finding one is almost impossible. I have no intention of harming it, but how can I possibly save other colonies if I can’t prove the Deva was here to begin with?”
Mary Beth frowned. “All of you scientists are alike, aren’t you? Always hell-bent on getting a specimen. I bet that’s the last words those little green men heard, too. ‘Sorry we have to sacrifice your lives, you poor little green bastards, but we have to get that specimen.’”
“Save the drama for the silver screen,” Maddie said as she eased herself out of the Jeep. “I’ll be back in a flash.”
Taking her time, Maddie crept up the hill and along the fence line, butterfly net in hand. She was literally shaking with anticipation as she eased closer, marveling at the sheer beauty of one of nature’s most delicate creatures.
And it was a Deva Skipper, no doubt about it.
The fringe on its forewing was brown, its hind wing a whitish color, and the upper side wing a reddish-brown. And though she couldn’t see the underside of the hind wing from where she was standing, Maddie already knew it would be brown with a gray overscaling and a faint dark bar across its middle. In a single word, the little Deva was breathtaking.
And it was almost within her grasp.
Inching closer, Maddie adjusted the zoom lenses on her camera and snapped a few pictures as she carefully picked her steps over the dusty desert floor. She was trained, ready and skilled to take her captive easily and without doing the tiny creature harm. Holding her breath, she could almost taste the sweetest of success on her tongue. She was only one swoop away from capturing the find of her life when the flirtatious little Deva lifted itself upward and came to a perfect landing on the wrong side of the forbidding chain-link fence that now stood between them.
Without a second thought, Maddie stuck the butterfly net in the back pocket of her khakis and forced the toe of her hiking boot into one of the diamond-shaped holes in the rusted fence. She could hear Mary Beth yelling from behind her, but Maddie scaled the fence like a veteran climber and dropped nimbly to the other side.
“Maddie! Get back here! I mean it, Maddie. Do you hear me?”
“I hear you. You’ve been trying to boss me around our entire lives,” Maddie mumbled under her breath, “but this is one time I’m not leaving until I get what I came for.”
Easing forward, trusty butterfly net again in hand, Maddie was even ready to sprout wings herself if that’s what it took to complete her mission. “Come to me, little Deva,” she cooed, but when Mary Beth’s screaming grew even louder, Maddie glanced back over her shoulder in time to see the panicked look on her sister’s lovely face.
In fact, Mary Beth was literally jumping up and down on the front seat of the Jeep now, waving her arms wildly above her head like a crazy person. Maddie waved back impatiently, motioning for Mary Beth to pipe down, but a large shadow suddenly
