Telling the Bees

by Peggy Hesketh

  But this tragic tale is only half told. Like a separate sentient being, the stinger, once detached from the bee, continues to work its way deeper into its victim’s flesh even as it keeps pumping venom into the wound. Indeed, the pumping action is so strong that it can penetrate a felt hat or a leather belt or shoe, and continue thusly for up to twenty minutes after it has been detached. But to what end?

  I can say this much for certain: The physical wounds we see are often much less virulent than the broken hearts we hide. And the pain we inflict upon others continues to do damage long after we have taken our leave. It matters not whether the hurt is intended or not, the pain is just as sharp, or perhaps even sharper, for all its grave indifference.

  By the time I heard from the good detective by telephone for the last time, I hardly needed him to confirm what I had long since deduced. The final thread of the Straussmans’ tormented family line had died just as the others had before her, alone and unmourned by her own.

  “You were right,” Detective Grayson said. David Gilbert’s daughter, who had been released from prison in 2005, had died of a drug overdose in a liquor store parking lot not more than a mile from where the Straussmans’ home once stood. It had been two months and seventeen days since I’d first seen Christina Perez’s mysterious memorial display on my neighbors’ front lawn.

  “Looks like Christina’s father and that crazy woman from Gain Street’s father served together in the military. First in Texas and then on that helicopter base not far from where you live,” Detective Grayson informed me. “I’m guessing those two girls were pretty tight when they were younger.”

  I said I wasn’t surprised. “Perhaps that’s why she came back here.”

  The paper trail, as the detective called the official records, was there for any to see if only it had occurred to any of us to look. On record was a missing person report that had been filed by Christina’s grandparents with both the local Mexican authorities and several police agencies in Southern California, where they feared the girl may have returned to in order to renew old acquaintances she had made while still living on the Tustin Marine Base with her parents during presumably happier times.

  The detective also informed me that Christina’s father had been unaware of her flight from Mexico, as he had been deployed on a training mission in Saudi Arabia when the girl had disappeared, and friendly contact between him and his deceased wife’s family had long since ceased.

  Of course had he chosen to attend the trial of the two young people accused of robbing and killing Claire and Hilda, I am sure that he would have recognized his own daughter, despite their years of separation, and her double life would have been exposed. Or David Gilbert may have chosen to remain silent. At the heart of this troubled man, I cannot say for certain in which direction the bad blood would have flowed stronger: toward the woman who had first loved and then denied him or toward the daughter who had similarly renounced him.

  It was only in hindsight—and a very long hindsight at that—that there was any real reason to suspect a connection between the preternaturally composed young woman who had sealed the mouths of the Straussman sisters forever with the fatal strips of silver tape and the exuberant little girl who’d been dazzled so many years before by a handful of silver coins.

  Time does not heal all wounds.

  As Castelvetro once noted, there are two dimensions to tragedy: one accessible to the senses and external and measurable by the clock, the other accessible to the intellect and internal and measurable by the mind.

  For all these years, the tragic deaths of the Straussman sisters had been portrayed by everyone involved—from the police investigators to the district attorney’s office, the public defender’s, the newspaper reporters, and the perpetrators of the crime themselves—as an unfortunate accident of fate.

  But then there was the tea set. The company tea set.

  I am sure, even now, that the burglary had been planned much as Christina had testified to at the trial. But I no longer believe she chose the Straussmans’ house by accident.

  A secret cache of coins must have seemed like quite a king’s ransom, and, as all childhood memories do, the size of the treasure would have grown with each passing year. Just as bad blood never fails to poison the vessel.

  It may have been a chance automobile drive past the Straussman house that stirred Christina’s childhood recollection of her one and only visit to her father’s estranged family, or she may have been obsessed for years by her memory of their “honey money,” but what does it matter? Either way, she deliberately set out to rob her own family.

  And that is only the half of the tragedy. I am certain Claire recognized, on some visceral level, this grown-up child and welcomed her into her home, just as I have to believe that Claire had truly come to regret the harsh words she had spoken to drive David Gilbert and his family away from her that awful day. Else why would his picture have been displayed among her family photographs on the mantle? The opportunity to make amends must have dispelled any natural suspicions that Christina’s sudden appearance on her doorstep may have aroused.

  I can only wonder what might have transformed this simple larceny into something far more heinous. Perhaps it was, as Christina testified, merely her young man’s violently impetuous nature that turned the morning’s events so murderously awry. Or perhaps it was something much closer to home. Something Claire might have said over an innocent cup of tea that reminded this dolorous young woman of all she’d lost. Or of all she’d never known. There is no telling how deep her wounds ran or how long they’d festered.

  This much I am sure of: After the secret treasure had been plundered and Claire and Hilda had been bound and gagged, Christina had to have washed and put away the teacup she’d drunk from. And she had to have known precisely what she was doing and what the consequences would be. Once Claire realized who Christina was and what she wanted, it was already too late.

  Indeed, it has been too late for as long as I have held my tongue out of cowardice and spoken half-truths and foolish pride.

  Yesterday morning, I lingered longer than perhaps was necessary in my mother’s herb garden, weeding, watering, and trimming back spindly growths. I suppose it may seem strange to some that I still call it my mother’s garden since she’s been dead for more than sixty years. But it was for her that my father cleared the tiny patch of earth which borders our back porch, and it is in her memory that I have maintained its useful verdure. I don’t cook with herbs. I hardly cook at all these days as I find my appetite waning with the years. I do, however, enjoy watching my bees flit between the tiny buds that sprout on the basil and oregano this time of year, filling their pollen sacs until they seem far too burdened by their rich bounty for their delicate wings to carry them aloft.

  There aren’t as many bees now as there used to be. There will be even fewer next year, I imagine, as there are fewer trees and flowers each year to pollinate.

  I can only wonder what will happen to this garden when I am gone. Left to their own devices, I would like to imagine that my remaining bees will continue to comb these delicate blossoms for the life-sustaining pollen and nectar that these fragrant plants produce. But I know better, as I am sure that once I have departed my sister’s children will have no desire to reclaim the land upon which our dear parents chose to settle and raise a family.

  And so.

  Eventually I am sure our home, our orchards, our garden, and everything else I hold dear will be gone. And so will my bees. Replaced by more houses and people and gas stations and convenience stores. I don’t regret the march of progress, the changing face of the neighborhood—truly I don’t. What I do regret is that after I am gone, there will be no one left to remember how the moonlight used to shimmer like silver gossamer beneath the trees and that here on this sweet patch of land there once lived a woman who died unmourned by all save one.

  I believe Kierkegaard said it best, when speaking of his beloved Regina: “I was too heavy for her and
she was too light for me.”

  Kierkegaard was not speaking of tangible weight, the measurable differentiation between one heart and another. He was a philosopher. I am a simple beekeeper. One who on this day has paused to consider the marvelous banality of a postal scale that is able to calculate the weight and distance of human correspondence and ascribe an absolute, definitive value to it.

  Yesterday afternoon, I received a package in the mail from Detective Grayson. The value of the red-inked postmark, stamped Coeur d’Alene, was five dollars and sixty-eight cents. Inside was a handwritten note that said simply: I thought you should have this. ~Raymond

  The note was rubber-banded around an old diary. It was Claire’s diary. I cannot say for sure how or why the good detective was able to procure this precious artifact from the police department’s evidence storage locker. That is where I was led to believe it would languish forever since there was no next of kin who wished to claim it. When I’d asked what was to become of the diary on the day the Straussman sisters’ murder trial concluded, Detective Grayson had urged me simply to forget about it.

  I have forgotten so many things over the years.

  I don’t cook much these days, I find I’ve lost my appetite. I use my kitchen table as a desk of sorts. It is where I read, when I have the heart to do so, because the light that streams through the window like golden honey over my sink cheers my fading eyes.

  The light was still bright when I sat down at my kitchen table and I opened the diary. Its spine cracked, both audibly and visually, from all its long years of disuse. I turned to the first page:

  March 7, 1928: That silly goose! What does a girl have to do to get noticed anyhow?

  I turned to the next page and the next and the next. I read into the afternoon, and on into the dusk, and on through the night, rising only once to switch on the electric light overhead.

  They were intimate pages, stories of a life, some light and delightful, that reminded me yet again why I had first been drawn to Claire. But there were darker pages, too, dark in a way I had only suspected, and there are details that will haunt me to my own lonely grave.

  Perhaps Harry had died from pneumonia. Claire seemed to have some doubt when she wrote that her mother revealed the doctor’s diagnosis to her shortly after she’d returned from Detroit in one of the few moments of intimacy the two ever shared. Claire had certainly wanted to believe her mother’s account. Before penicillin, such deaths were common. It was a simple explanation, but not a satisfying one to Claire, who had herself been the luckless recipient of physical punishment from her father if I read between the lines correctly. What was beyond dispute was that their grief—her mother’s and father’s—destroyed them all, conflating and diminishing them in all manner of insidious ways.

  The loss of her mother’s leg and the heft she’d acquired in the progression of her diabetic illness had, much like the public account of Harry Junior’s death, explained everything and nothing at all. To Hilda’s way of thinking, according to Claire’s diary entries, it became the underlying reason, or the continuation of the reason, why her father first turned to her. It was much more complex than that, I am sure, but to a girl who had been, if not every bit as vivacious, as desirable even, as her mother once had been, it was how a sad desperate need to please a father whose heart had hardened from lack of use had gone so wrong. And, in time, Hilda’s hope of diminishment became her only hope of salvation. In that incisive, precise way she had of expressing herself from the first day I’d met her, Claire had tried to explain how blowing up and whittling away everything beautiful about herself, and the reflection of what her mother once was, had been the only way Hilda knew how to protect herself.

  Claire had been the only one to fight back. It was why she’d gone away and, tragically, why she’d also come back. Claire had returned from Detroit to protect Hilda. This ultimately selfless act had both drawn her to and cost her everything and everyone she had ever tried to love.

  I had been sorely wrong about the man with the bolo tie. He had been the escape, not the trap. He had died too soon. A soldier on leave, he had been a hero in the war. And Claire had loved him dearly, his strength, his confidence, his laugh. He had died in an automobile accident not more than a mile from the Harmony Ballroom. The tragedy—the deep sorrow—of her life had been that it was her father who had lived on for another twenty years and, in yet another drunken moment, had taken advantage of his daughter, against her will, when she was weakened with grief. As Harry Junior tried to tell me, when a hive goes bad, look within.

  I am certain I must have nodded off a time or two as I read because late-afternoon shadows had already begun to cross the kitchen table when I finally closed the old diary on its last entry, written in Claire’s distinctive bold scrawl, just a week before she died.

  Thursday, April 30, 1992. That silly old fool. Does he really think we don’t know what he’s doing? We need the money, but not that much. I told Mrs. Stevenson to buy the candles if she liked them, but not to do us any favors. I don’t think she’ll be back again. Good riddance, I say.

  I sat for a while, I don’t know for how long, fingering the rough, brittle spine of the diary. I can only assume the diary had never been scrutinized as carefully by the police investigators when it was first found as it perhaps should have been. Or that even if they had read it carefully, the oblique significance of its many telling details had been missed or misinterpreted by all but the one person in the world who could have understood. But I had refused to read more than a page or two of this diary the first time I’d held it in my hands. I thought I had done enough. I had identified the handwriting on its pages.

  The evening shadows had deepened further by the time I rose stiffly to take a clean plate from my cupboard, spoon a few tablespoons of honey onto it, and break apart the heels of a loaf of store-bought bread that had grown stale in a plastic bag sitting atop my old chrome toaster.

  I nudged my back door open with my shoulder, which I suspected ached from more than the simple chill of the evening, and I trudged across my porch, down the stairs, and out to my number one hive, the plate of honey and bread in one hand, which shook ever so slightly, and Claire’s diary tucked under my other arm.

  Most of the field bees had already returned to the hive as I plucked a sticky bit of bread and honey from the plate and set it on the hive’s landing board. I reached into the pocket of my old dungarees with my free hand and withdrew my key ring, which I began to jangle softly in front of the hive.

  Little brownies, little brownies, your mistress is dead.

  I set the plate on top of the hive. I slipped Claire’s diary from beneath my arm and set it next to the plate. I jangled the keys again and then set them on the hive.

  Little brownies, little brownies, your mistress is dead.

  I wiped the honey off my fingers on my trousers, having abandoned my habit of carrying a bandanna in my back pocket some time after Claire and Hilda were buried. I picked up the keys and shook them again. Then I set them down and picked up the diary.

  Little brownies, little brownies, your mistress is dead.

  I opened the diary, its leather spine cracking in yet another crooked line. I turned to the first page, cherishing the sweet fragrance of jasmine that wafted gently upward as I began to read softly aloud.

  A few errant field bees stood at the entrance to my number one hive. Their wings flapped slowly as if they wished to take to the skies again, to search one last time for something sweet to cherish before nightfall.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Elizabeth George: Friend, mentor, inspiration. I only hope I can give back as much to others as you have given to me.

  Deborah Schneider: Your passion has been a beacon.

  Marysue Rucci: I spent a year of revisions railing against you and being in such awe of your editor’s eye at the same time. You told me over and over that I would only have one shot at my first novel and you wanted it to be the best it could be. Thank you for pushing me so
hard. And thank you, Sara, for all you’ve done since.

  Diana Lulek: Thank you for being such a calm, supportive voice when I needed it most.

  Nancy Brown: You may have read just about everything I’ve ever written; thank you, girl.

  Suki Fisher: Your novel is next.

  Barbara Fryer: You’re a wild woman. You are my inspiration.

  April, Tish, Elaine, Chris, Steve, and Reg: You were there just about from the start. Your eyes were key.

  Gloria, Grant, Suzan, Sandy, and Jan: You’ve been in my corner so long, the edges are starting to round.

  And finally, to my glorious family: John, Christen, and Sean. Thank you all for your patience and belief in me. Hope you are ready for more rosemary chicken.