Telling the Bees

by Peggy Hesketh

  “The dying are held back from their repose by the love that will not give them up,” Harry Junior whispered in a voice like the rustle of eucalyptus leaves in a hot September wind. And yet, the air was still, and I noticed that even the bees in my number fourteen grew quiet when Harry Junior spoke.

  “It’s out of my hands now,” I said.

  “You know better,” he said, smiling that faint wisp of a smile of his again.

  “What would you have me do?” I said.

  “You know what the old beekeepers say?” he inquired.

  “They say many things,” I replied as Harry Junior emerged from the shadows to stand with me beside the hive.

  “You know what they say,” he repeated, placing his hands lightly on my shoulders. So lightly, in fact, that I felt their heat more than their pressure and I could not be sure whether they rested on or hovered slightly above the threads of my worn cotton jacket. “When the bees look out, you look in. To do so too late is to observe the protracted death rattle of a hive so bereft of order and purpose that even the dead are left unattended. And those forlorn few who remain are hardly enough to form a warming cluster.”

  And as he spoke, as if beguiled by the melancholy rhythm of his words, the bees in my number fourteen began to issue slowly from the hive in a great consuming wave that gradually surrounded and obscured Harry Junior from my sight.

  “It’s too late,” I said.

  “You look in,” Harry Junior repeated, his voice both swallowed and amplified by the roar of the swarm.

  “But I can’t bring her back,” I said.

  “You can let her go.”

  Thirty-four

  COLONY COLLAPSE DISORDER: There has not been a satisfactory explanation for the profound loss of beehives that has taken place since 2006. Some apiarists are beginning to believe there is no single cause but rather a perfect storm of pathogens, parasites, pesticides, poor beekeeping practices, and even electromagnetic emanations from cell towers that are to blame.

  From my singular perspective, it is perhaps forgivable that I had for so many years viewed the tragedy of Claire’s murder as a one-dimensional event: a tragic point in time that began and ended with the horrific image of her lifeless body that, once beheld, instantly and irreparably transformed all my most cherished memories into the seed of my most bitter regrets.

  Even after I read in the newspaper about the poor misguided young woman who had been found dead of a drug overdose in a liquor store parking lot not more than a mile and a half from where the Straussmans’ old house once stood, I failed to draw the connective tissue between the individual points.

  Instead, I regret to say that I may have smiled slightly to myself, drawing even a modicum of satisfaction from my belief that this unfortunate woman had received her just desserts after all. It seemed to me a sad but fitting end to a senseless tragedy all around.

  And even when her name appeared on my neighbors’ cross several days later, I was not surprised by their misguided need to place the blame of her death on the malevolence of science.

  As a man of both faith and reason, I blamed the end of this young woman’s sordid life on her very human inability to control her wanton desires. And to be quite candid, I took great comfort in my mother’s oft-stated belief that God works in mysterious ways.

  But of course as my dear mother also used to say, “There are none so blind as those who will not see.”

  I suppose that it took me so long to see what had been right in front of my nose because I did not want to admit my own complicity in the progression of acts that had unfolded over the years as inexorably as distaff Greek tragedy.

  Blind to the convergence of causal events and relationships, I had for so many years missed the most basic yet telling signs that Claire’s and Hilda’s murders had been anything but a random act even though this had always been the most troubling aspect of their deaths from my point of view.

  I recall how at the very beginning of his involvement in the case Detective Grayson had been likewise disturbed by the apparent motivelessness of the Straussman sisters’ murder. This of course was before we learned for certain that robbery had been the indirect cause of their deaths.

  And so at the beginning of the investigation, which was well before the bungled burglary had been discovered, the good detective had asked repeatedly whether I had noticed anything missing from the house when I found the Bee Ladies’ bodies. And over and over again I told him that in all my recollection of the house there had been little of value to recommend it to strangers and, from my limited observation of the Straussman sisters’ affairs since our friendly discourse had ceased, a sudden appetite for material possessions would have been a most unlikely change of disposition for either of them. Which is to say that like their parents before them, the Straussman sisters had led an austere life.

  In the early days of the investigation I had told the detective more than once, in response to his unremitting inquiries, that the only household treasure to speak of that I could recall in all the years I’d known them had been the golden tea set of which Mrs. Straussman had been so inordinately proud. And that was the very item that had been left in plain view on the kitchen table when I’d discovered Claire’s and Hilda’s bodies.

  “If robbery had been the motive, that tea set should have been taken,” I reasoned. “It’s rimmed in twenty-two carat gold, after all.”

  The detective, however, had just as vehemently disagreed, explaining to me in that gruff, impatient manner I eventually grew to find almost endearing that porcelain pieces such as these were far too fragile to easily transport and so would likely have held little appeal to any robber, despite its relative twenty-two carat gold value.

  Odd, then, that it was its relative value which finally persuaded me of the true significance of the tea set having been left out on the table that fateful day.

  “You must look in,” Harry Junior had told me in no uncertain terms the last time I saw him. And as I sat long into the night pondering his words, I found my attention drawn without conscious thought to the incessant humming of the high-tension wires that run past my bedroom window. And as I wondered at my neighbors’ folly, God’s will, and my own incertitude, I attended more closely to the magnetic dissonance of the power lines. And it was then that the continuous flow of electrical current slowed—almost imperceptibly at first, but after a time I began to perceive a series of rapid, interlocking oscillations from which I could differentiate the algorithmic whir and snap and sputter and buzz of each connection from within the aggregate swarm of electrons pulsing through the lines—and as I listened long and hard to the indistinguishable hum, individual notes became distinguishable, and the single point upon which I had for so many years been so exclusively focused suddenly, without warning, became two, then three, four, a half dozen, a dozen, and infinitely more. The laying worker. The cross-tempered hive. My neighbors’ crosses. The crosses in the grove. The china dolls. The golden china. The silver coins. The silver duct tape. And with each new note, the line took on yet another dimension of painful memory, connected by time and space, that became a symphony of notes weighted by the composite sights and sounds of each tragic movement. Of course Harry Junior had been right all along. I cannot say for certain why or even how I knew it then, but there it was: There had been no marauding strangers. No robber bees. When a hive goes bad, it nearly always does so from within.

  I dug the first letter Detective Grayson had written to me out of the drawer of my telephone stand, where I’d kept it along with other important correspondences. We had exchanged three or four more letters in the interim, mostly about beekeeping. It was in that first letter, however, that he had included his telephone number, along with a polite admonition that I “stay in touch.”

  Nevertheless, I am sure Detective Grayson was surprised to hear my voice when I reached him by phone at his home in Idaho as he had always been the one to initiate all verbal contact between us prior to this point.

  �
�Someone came to visit them that day,” I told Detective Grayson straight off after identifying myself and exchanging perfunctory pleasantries as I assumed distant acquaintances such as we were did. “Someone they were happy to see.”

  “See who, Mr. Honig?” he responded, clearly taken aback by my unexpected call, and with good reason: It had been nearly two decades since we’d last spoken directly. “What are you talking about?”

  “I’m sorry, Detective,” I replied, “I’m referring to Claire and Hilda Straussman’s murderers of course. Those two young robbers weren’t telling the whole truth about what happened that morning.”

  There were more questions and answers and more words, some of them more profane than I care to relate, before Detective Grayson deigned to pay attention to what I should have told him years ago if only I’d realized it then.

  “They were invited in.”

  “Who?”

  “Miss Perez and Mr. Garcia.”

  “That already came out at the trial,” he said.

  “No, only that they were invited into the kitchen to look at the candles and such.”

  It was a small distinction but an important one, one that I should have realized at the time.

  “The gold tea set was left out on the table,” I said. “The Straussmans brought that set out only for company. They never drank from it when they were alone.”

  “But what difference does that make?” the detective said. “Those two punks admitted they killed the Straussmans. They were tried, convicted, and sentenced to prison. The case is closed, Mr. Honig. Done. Fini. Over and out.”

  “But don’t you see?” I said. “They said that Claire and Hilda were outside working with their bees when they first attempted to break into their house. They said it was only by happenstance that they were discovered.”

  “I still don’t get where you’re going with this,” the detective said. I’d almost forgotten how impatient he could be. I reminded him once again that Miss Perez had testified at the trial that Claire invited her and Mr. Garcia into the kitchen to view the honey and candle samples and that it was at this point, before they’d brought their wares out, that Mr. Garcia grew impatient and demanded they show him where they kept their valuables.

  “So?”

  “But if Claire and Hilda had gotten up early to work in their apiary only to be interrupted by our young criminals, why were there no candles and honey left on the table? Why was their table set for company?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe the Perez woman forgot to mention their little tea party. Or maybe they were expecting someone later,” the detective speculated.

  “I don’t believe so. There was tea already poured in the cups and milk was in the pitcher,” I reminded him.

  “Okay. But the only prints we lifted off the cups were Claire’s and Hilda’s.”

  I could tell by the slight shift in the tone of his voice that I had finally piqued his interest.

  “What if the tea set was left out from the night before?” Detective Grayson queried.

  I firmly dismissed this possibility, reminding him of the family’s obsessive tendency toward cleanliness.

  “I’m sure someone came to visit them that morning. Someone special enough to bring out the company tea set.”

  “Well, that puts us back at square one,” the detective said. “You yourself said they were practically recluses. So who would’ve come to see them?”

  “Detective,” I said, “do you have any idea what happened to David Gilbert’s daughter? Tina or Tini, I believe her name was.”

  “I really don’t know. The grandparents were from somewhere in Mexico—Sonora, I think. I assume she’s still there.”

  There had of course been no real reason to assume otherwise. Once David Gilbert had been dismissed as a suspect, there had been no need for further inquiry into his family. And so the detective, for all of his investigative diligence, had missed the obvious. As had I.

  In the cycle of the hive, no single action of any one of the thousands of honeybees who reside within it occurs in isolation, but, cloistered in the solitude of my own grief, I had failed to consider all—or, in truth, even any—of the other people and circumstances leading up to and away from the one overriding moment in which I had remained frozen for so many years like an insentient insect in amber.

  “Could you perhaps use whatever investigative connections you have to look into what happened to David Gilbert’s daughter?” I asked. “I know you’re retired, but you must have some friends on the police force.”

  “I suppose I do,” he said after a moment’s pause. “But really, Mr. Honig, what difference would it make? We already know who killed the Straussman sisters.”

  “But we don’t know why,” I said.

  “Sure we do. It was a stupid mistake by a couple of stupid punks. That’s all there is to it.”

  “Did you know that the Perez girl died last month?” I said.

  The detective admitted that he hadn’t been aware of it.

  “I don’t exactly keep tabs on my old cases anymore. Especially ones like this, Mr. Honig. You know, the ones that are closed,” he emphasized.

  “I understand that, Detective, but . . .”

  “But what? Look, I wouldn’t lose any sleep over her.”

  “It’s not my sleep I’m concerned about,” I said. “Or hers.”

  I told him about the crosses in my neighbors’ yard. About the name on the twenty-first cross—Christina Perez—and how I didn’t recognize her name at first, but, when I did, it made me think about Claire and Hilda all over again.

  “What neighbors? What crosses?”

  I patiently described my neighbors’ gaudy mock cemetery, their tasteless holiday displays, and their silly signs detailing their strange electromagnetic theories.

  “Oh, jeez louise,” he exclaimed, more or less. “Not those crazy meth heads on Gain Street? Mr. Honig, those guys are tweekers.”

  I wasn’t familiar with the term. Detective Grayson explained to me as best he could what it meant to be a methamphetamine addict.

  “They’re full of conspiracy theories and all the chemically induced energy in the world to go hog wild on them,” he said. “We busted those Gain Street crackpots on possession once. Not enough to nail them for a felony, but . . .”

  “Be that as it may,” I interrupted, “Christina Perez was the name on the cross.”

  “Well, hell’s bells, Mr. Honig. They were druggies. She was a druggie. Not to sound too callous, but I’m not exactly surprised she OD’d. She admitted she was an addict at her trial. Jesus F-ing Christ. That was their whole defense: ‘Boohoo. The drugs made me do it.’ Look, Mr. Honig, cats like that don’t usually change their spots.”

  “I’m sure you are correct. Believe me when I say that the cause of her death isn’t particularly important to me at this point. That she was mourned by my neighbors, crazy as they may be, is what matters. I am sure Christina Perez was profoundly connected to this place.”

  There was an audible sigh, followed by a long pause. In my mind’s eye, I imagined him swiping his mouth with his hand and tucking his shirttail into his trousers. “So what is it again you want me to do, Mr. Honig?”

  “I would like you to investigate the present whereabouts of David Gilbert’s daughter,” I said. “I suspect that Tini is short for Christina.”

  Thirty-five

  BEE VENOM: The poisonous matter secreted by special glands attached to the stinger of the honeybee, it is used primarily in defense. Derived from the Latin venenum, meaning drug, poison, magic potion, or charm, it is related to the Latin venus, for love or sexual desire.

  Hydraulically speaking, a bee’s stinger is a marvelous example of divine engineering, but as an offensive instrument it is curiously ill designed. Delicately tapered and polished, it is, under close examination, actually two separate daggers forming a V shape, with tiny barblike serrations running along each dagger. And at the top of the V rests a small poison sac that supplies the ve
nom released through tubes running through the daggers. When driven into the flesh of its victim, the barbs catch like tiny fishhooks and spurt venom into the wound. But as any experienced beekeeper knows, one never removes a stinger by grasping it directly between thumb and forefinger. To do so merely squeezes the sac and releases more venom into the wound, which makes the sting even more painful but seldom deadly, as, in most cases, the venom is more irritating than lethal to any foe but her own sister.

  And in those rare cases where death does result, it is more often an accident of nature—a reaction to other, unforeseen factors rather than by design or with intent. But the worker bee who does unleash her stinger upon a perceived enemy renders herself an irrevocable death sentence—and a needless one at that—because, given enough time and calm surroundings, the stinging bee theoretically should be able to work her stinger free from the wound without damage to herself. But that is seldom, if ever, the outcome. This is because once aroused, even the most placid and intelligent bee abandons all reason, invariably ripping the stinger from her body, rupturing her abdomen, and in the end dying in much the same manner as the hapless drone who mates on the fly.

  Contrary to common wisdom, the stingerless worker bee’s death is not necessarily instantaneous. In an effort to determine how long a honeybee could live without her stinger, scientists discovered that within a protected environment—and by that I mean one in which she is separated from her hive mates—a worker could lose her stinger and yet go on about her business for up to five more days, flying about, eating honey, and grooming herself, even with her tattered intestines trailing behind her all the while.

  Of course it should be noted that in the relatively short life span of a worker bee, those five days are roughly equivalent to an additional ten years of human life. But if, on the other hand, the stingerless bee is forced to remain with her sisters, she is always attacked and unmercifully driven from the hive, where she soon succumbs to the chilling consequences of isolation. It is this psychic ostracism from her own kind that kills her long before the physical consequences of the wound can run its course.