The Beekeeper's Secret

by Josephine Moon

  Thank you for bringing Maria back into our lives. I’m so sad that we’ve only just found her now when we’ll likely lose her again any day. I’m sorry that I was angry with you. Can you forgive me, Tansy dear? Florrie x

  He’s still eating! He feels twice as heavy as yesterday. B xx

  Hi family, this is just to let you know that Sam moved out today. He’ll be staying with his mother for a while. The kids are very upset, of course. I’m sorry I’ve brought this on our family through all my own doing. I hope you can forgive me. I know you’ll continue to support my children, even if you can’t support me. Rose xxx

  I can’t tell you how happy I am that you’ll be here in a week. I can’t wait to leave this hotel and for us to find a place together. I can’t wait to hold my wife in my arms again. I love you.

  Sister Veronica was first on George’s list for Monday morning, and he drove to her nursing home on the south side of the city. It was a dated Catholic-run home, only minutes from the city centre, red brick, three storeys, on land that must have been outrageously valuable these days to the developers who were always looking to demolish whatever they could to build high-rise unit complexes. He was directed to her room on the second floor, at the west end of the building. His leather shoes squawked on the linoleum flooring, and voices bounced off the walls, with no carpets or soft furnishings to absorb the noise. The hallways were hung with paintings and artefacts from decades ago. The tea trolley wheels yelped as the blue-capped volunteer pushed it along.

  He’d been told that Veronica had dementia, but he needed to see for himself. Sometimes the past was still within reach for those with dementia, though it was always difficult to get a testimony admitted to court under those circumstances.

  Her room smelled as they always did, of chemicals and ageing plastics, a hint of urine and lost hope. George shuddered as he entered, both at the stuffy oppressiveness and with the desire to never end up in a place like this.

  Veronica was in the far corner, and two other women lay in beds nearby. One of them had a tiny television next to her bed, the volume up as far as such a small item would go. The other woman was asleep. Veronica was half sitting, propped up with pillows. She was tiny, with none of the robustness of Maria or Sarah (but of course she was much older than them, he reminded himself), just bones and flapping skin and veins, her short hair looking as though someone had taken to it carelessly with scissors, exposing parts of her scalp. She was knitting—something blue that might eventually be a blanket.

  ‘Sister Veronica?’ George said. She looked up and smiled, with no trace of hesitation or suspicion. ‘I’m George.’

  ‘Hello,’ she said, an Irish accent little worn from the decades of being in Australia. ‘Do I know you?’ She stopped knitting, seemingly pleased to have a visitor.

  He smiled, and pulled over a plastic chair. ‘No, we’ve never met.’

  ‘Are you a nice man?’

  ‘I think I am. My wife and children think so too.’

  ‘Catholic?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘We need more parishioners. Dropping like flies, they are,’ she said, sucking in her cheeks distastefully.

  ‘I wanted to ask you some questions about your time as a nun at St Lucy’s Convent.’

  ‘Do you?’ She narrowed her eyes. ‘Why?’

  Still shrewd.

  ‘I’m a police officer, Sister.’ He felt her withdraw the moment he said that, but it would be unethical to ask her questions without disclosing who he was and why he was there.

  ‘Mother,’ she corrected him.

  ‘My apologies, Mother. I’ve been investigating Father Peter Cunningham in his time at your convent.’

  Veronica lifted her chin and looked directly at him. ‘I don’t know who you’re talking about.’

  He nodded, defeated. ‘I thought you might say that.’

  George didn’t believe Veronica, but there was nothing he could do. If she’d been able or willing to talk, she might have been able to point him in the right direction to look for more information and evidence. But even if she’d delivered him the out-and-out truth, it was unlikely to ever be admissible. The testimony of a ninety-three-year-old woman with dementia was hardly legally convincing.

  So it was with some anxiety that he drove back through the city to the north side of Brisbane, to the outer suburbs, and to St Lucy’s itself. He parked out on the road, listening to the sounds of teachers lecturing in classrooms up on the second storey of the long college building, and the students talking and laughing. A group of girls in sports gear were out on the oval to the right, playing hockey. The teacher blew a whistle and they cheered.

  He walked along the pathway to an annexe with Office printed over the door, where he spoke to the enthusiastic receptionist, who gave him a visitor badge and phoned the principal to let her know he was on the grounds, and then pointed him in the direction of the convent proper.

  Here in the kitchen he found Sister Celine, a woman of approximately his own age, peeling potatoes. She was thick around the middle, with patches of angry-looking eczema up her arms. Her hair was cut short, like that of all the other sisters he’d met. To get her attention, he knocked on the architrave of the doorway he’d just entered.

  She looked up, wary. ‘Can I help you?’ She glanced around the room, even though they were alone.

  ‘Sister Celine, my name is George Harvey.’ He extended a card to her.

  ‘Police?’ she squeaked, dropping the potato and wiping her hands on a pink tea towel. Weakening sunlight filtered through the tall windows that overlooked the oval. It must be nearly the end of the school day.

  ‘Yes. I wanted to have a chat with you, if that’s okay.’ He was treading gently, knowing that Celine was considered delicate. ‘May I sit down?’

  Sister Celine pulled on an earlobe, a nervous gesture. It was one of those large, meaty, pendulous lobes, and he wondered if a lifetime of pulling at them had contributed. ‘I suppose.’

  He sat down at the wooden kitchen table and indicated for her to do the same. ‘I want to assure you that the principal—Mrs Thatcher—knows I’m here, and why I’m here. I checked into the office.’ He showed her his visitor badge. ‘So you should feel free to talk to me.’

  ‘Okay,’ she said slowly.

  ‘You’ve been here a long time,’ he said, smiling. ‘Almost forty years.’ She studied his face, his hair, his clothes. But said nothing. ‘Can you tell me about your work here, in the kitchen, in the convent?’ He gestured around the room.

  She spoke with her eyes directed to the ceiling. ‘Food prep, mostly. Odd jobs. I do bits and pieces in the school office now too, typing and filing. And I look after one organ in the chapel, and two now retired inside the convent. They’re my babies.’

  George nodded, remembering Maria saying the same thing. He took notes as she talked, his silver pen rolling quickly over the lined pages. He’d decided against an audio recording today due to Celine’s evident wariness of strangers.

  ‘And back in the seventies, when Father Peter Cunningham was around, what did you do then?’

  Celine’s knee instantly began to jiggle, her fingers worrying at buttons and eczema. ‘Same,’ she said flatly, her eyes roaming the kitchen, looking anywhere but at him.

  His stomach lurched. He’d seen these sorts of behaviours so many times before in the people whose testimonies he’d taken. They wore a haunted look around the eyes; they were reluctant to engage, and when they did they looked at a spot somewhere over his shoulder, back into the past. Maria had mentioned the commonly held beliefs about Celine’s background, what little the other nuns knew, and the nervous way Celine had acted around Cunningham.

  Had Cunningham hurt Celine too? Had he seen her fragile mind, her damaged psyche, her inability to defend herself? Of course he had. She was exactly the sort he’d prey on. Her mental illness would have been all the better for him—people back then knew so much less about these kinds of conditions and would be quick to dismiss
her erratic behaviour.

  George swore under his breath: another victim for his file.

  The school bell rang, loud and long, like a fire station alarm. Instantly, the air filled with shrieks and chatter as the girls spilled out onto verandahs and ran down stairs. Balls bounced on the footpath and mobile phones trilled. (How times had changed.) Celine’s eyes turned towards the window, seeking distraction.

  Not wanting to lose her, he changed the subject. ‘Tell me about the other sisters and what they did,’ he said, adopting a relaxed and open posture, smiling and nodding. To calm her down and salvage this conversation, he needed to pull her mind away from Cunningham, away from the dark place, back to the safety of the sisters. And it was working, her compulsive picking at her eczema notably easing.

  ‘Everyone had their roles. Sister Kathryn, she looked after the plumbing. Her father was a plumber and she was one of five daughters—no sons. He had to teach someone.’

  She then seemed to lose her concentration and fall into random nonsense and fragments of nursery rhymes before regaining her clarity.

  ‘Then there was Sister Fiona; she was our spider catcher. Most of the sisters killed normal spiders easy enough, but the big hairy huntsmen . . .’ Here, she held up her hands like menacing crawling spiders and walked them up her arm. ‘They would make them scream.’ She was gleeful about that, and held her hands up by her mouth as if to scream. But then her face fell. ‘And we weren’t allowed to scream. No screaming. No.’

  George swallowed. ‘And Mother Veronica? What was her specialty?’

  ‘She was the Mother. What Mother says goes. What Mother hears she pretends not to.’ Celine began to chew a nail, or rather a nail bed, her nails so badly gnawed down.

  ‘Tell me more about that,’ he said quietly, sitting very still.

  ‘She could see, you know.’

  ‘See what?’

  ‘See, see, see. Everything.’ She lowered her voice to a whisper. ‘See, see nothing.’

  George waited. But she was muttering now, half singing, her eyes unfocused, her mind elsewhere. The hair stood up on the back of his neck. It was just as Maria had said: Veronica knew. She’d always known. And she’d done nothing. And now, because of her dementia, she would never be held to account and might not even by troubled by the knowledge of her culpable failure to protect her students.

  ‘What about Maria?’ he ventured.

  ‘Maria, Maria, Maria,’ she sang, drumming her short fingers over her lips.

  ‘Sister Maria. She was here when you arrived at the convent. She was the head beekeeper.’

  Celine stopped all movement. ‘The bees.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘She was the only one, you know.’

  ‘The only one?’

  ‘Father Peter. The bees. Maria.’ Celine burst into cackles that racked her body and sent tears streaming down her cheeks. She doubled over with uncontrollable laughter. ‘Died, died, died, he did,’ she wheezed, as the convulsions began to ease. Then she took a deep breath and composed herself, her face stolid once more. ‘Died like the rat he was.’

  At home that night, George replayed his audio recording of Maria, skipping forwards and backwards to find the parts he wanted. He played these sections again and again, unsure whether or not he was just hearing what he wanted to hear. He returned to the places where she talked of convent life, of the various residents and what they did each day, just as he’d asked Celine to do. And over and over, he listened to her describe the events of that afternoon that led up to her attack on Peter Cunningham.

  Then he pulled out the recent test report and read it again.

  Lastly, he phoned Blaine Campbell. ‘We need to talk.’

  35

  Belle’s name flashed up on Tansy’s mobile.

  ‘Hi, I meant to call you yesterday,’ Tansy said. It turned out that once she’d booked a flight to Toronto, her to-do list suddenly quadrupled.

  ‘It’s fine, totally fine. You’ve got a life too,’ Belle said.

  ‘What’s the latest with Hamish?’

  ‘We went back to the doctor yesterday and Hamish has put on a week’s worth of weight in just two days.’

  ‘Wow.’

  ‘He’s chowing down like there’s no tomorrow.’ Belle laughed. ‘So the doctor thought this was pretty remarkable and hooked us up with a remote Skype appointment with the gastric surgeon to talk about it. And the surgeon says the only difference between this new formula and the one he was on is corn. So he says Hamish might have a corn intolerance. All of that because of bloody—I mean, flaming corn syrup.’

  ‘So will he stay on the new formula now?’

  ‘Yep. The surgeon has given authorisation to the doctor to prescribe it. He has to ring some authority centre to clear it each time he writes a script, but hopefully that’s it now for quite a while . . . until we hit the minefield of eating solids.’

  ‘What a drama.’

  ‘I know.’ Belle took a deep breath and let it out slowly. ‘So, enough of me. What’s going on with you? Where are you right now?’

  ‘On my way to see Maria. I have some news I need to tell her, and you.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’ve booked my ticket for Canada. I leave Sunday.’

  Belle sucked in her breath sharply. ‘Sunday?’

  ‘Yep. I just realised I have to get to Dougal as soon as possible. We can’t move forward together if we’re on opposite sides of the world. This is something . . . a test, a roadblock, a phase . . . I don’t know. I hear all marriages go through them,’ Tansy said lightly, trying to lift her own mood. ‘I have to go.’

  ‘I don’t know what to say,’ Belle said. ‘I know you don’t want to go.’

  ‘No, I don’t. But, you know, as far as problems in the world go it’s a good one to have, hey.’

  ‘You’re doing the right thing.’

  ‘You sure?’

  ‘Definitely. Send me the details of when your flight’s leaving and I’ll come to the airport.’

  ‘No, you don’t have to do that. It’s a huge drive and effort for you with Hamish and all.’

  ‘Stop it. You’re not getting on that plane without a hug from me. I’ll leave you to your party on Saturday at Noosa. You’re still doing that, aren’t you?’

  ‘Yes. It will be my going-away gig now.’

  ‘I won’t get enough time with you there, because everyone will want to be spending their last minutes with you.’

  ‘You’re probably right. There’s been so much family stuff going on I don’t even know where to start. I’ll give you the Cliff ’s Notes at the airport.’

  ‘Sounds like a plan. I can’t wait to hear all about it and have you all to myself.’

  Maria waited. George Harvey was on his way.

  A sick bee will abandon a hive, hoping to stop the rot from spreading. A bee has only one aim and that is to build a strong hive. A sick bee could endanger the rest of the hive. So they will leave to die.

  Maria wondered if her act of violence made her a sick bee, one who had poisoned the hive she lived in.

  She hoped not. She liked to think instead that she was a guard bee. Guard bees ruthlessly killed predators to protect their family. And that was what she’d done.

  But for that, now she was to learn her fate.

  She heard an engine groaning up the hill and she stepped out into the cold. It was late morning but it still hadn’t warmed up here on the mountain, the temperature only twelve degrees. It was quiet, too. No new guests had arrived since the drumming camp had left, and Petrice wasn’t due to come in today.

  Rubbing her hands together against the chill, she walked to the upper car park just in time to see the nose of George’s car peek up over the hill. He swung into an empty space. Seconds later, Tansy’s white Barina appeared unexpectedly behind him. Maria shuffled her feet, both against the cold and with anxiety. She didn’t want Tansy here when George delivered his news.

  They both got out, Tansy lithely, Geo
rge awkwardly, and made each other’s acquaintance as they came towards her. Tansy’s brows knitted together and she folded her arms across her body, as though bracing herself.

  ‘Maria, I need to call Zoe now,’ she urged.

  ‘Who’s Zoe?’ George asked. ‘Hello again, Maria,’ he said, leaning forward to shake her hand.

  ‘Zoe is Maria’s lawyer,’ Tansy said. ‘She needs to be present for this interview and Maria must not say a word until she arrives.’ She was very firm.

  ‘Nonsense,’ Maria said. ‘It makes no difference, Tansy. It’s all over.’

  George rubbed his chin, considering. ‘Of course you’re entitled to have legal representation present,’ he said. ‘And I don’t want to appear flippant about it, but I think you’ll be okay for what I have to say today. I’ll need to get you down to the station later to make statements and so on, but if you like, to save time and your lawyer making a trip up the mountain, I can simply talk today, and you can listen. How does that sound?’

  Maria nodded at Tansy. ‘Okay?’

  ‘I don’t like it,’ Tansy said, still frowning. ‘We’ve no idea what he’s going to say.’

  ‘But if I don’t say anything at all, will that make you happy?’ Maria asked.

  Tansy looked unconvinced, but also resigned, perhaps realising that it didn’t matter what she tried to do to help her, Maria would do whatever she wanted anyway. ‘Lead the way.’

  Back in Maria’s small house, they all perched uneasily on the sagging couches. It was cold in here too, barely warmer than outside, the tall gum trees casting shade over the cabin and preventing the weak sun from heating it.

  ‘Shall I make tea?’ Maria asked.

  ‘Shh!’ Tansy practically jumped out of her seat.

  ‘Oh, for goodness’ sake, I only asked if the man wanted tea,’ Maria said.

  ‘I’m fine, thank you, Maria,’ said George.

  Tansy looked to the heavens and groaned.