Buzz Off

by Hannah Reed

  Stanley Peck came in at that moment and overheard the last part of the conversation. “Are you talking about how Holly caught DeeDee red-handed with stolen goods and how Story wouldn’t let Johnny Jay book DeeDee for shoplifting?” he said. “Shame on you, Story. Next time, you let that girl have it with both barrels.”

  Lori stomped off down aisle six.

  “Speaking of barrels,” I said to Stanley. “You aren’t carrying a weapon, are you?”

  “Why?”

  “Never mind.”

  “You’re thinking I might be mad about how my chickens showed up way down the road from either my house or yours?”

  “Sorry about that.”

  “And about how you must know my big secret, the same one I’ve been keeping to myself for very personal reasons?”

  “Sorry about that, too.”

  “You know, I felt guilty that I was having so much fun. I felt terrible about it for a long time because of Carol being dead and me carrying on like some kind of love-sick puppy. I didn’t want anybody to know. Still don’t.”

  “I won’t tell a single soul.”

  “If you do, I’ll have to shoot you,” Stanley said straight-faced. Then he laughed. “Just kidding. But you are the snoopiest woman I’ve ever known. You must get that from your mother.”

  “Please don’t tell me I’m just like her,” I begged.

  “You aren’t. Not a bit. Except for the nosy part.”

  “Do you mind answering one more question?”

  Stanley sighed. “Do I have a choice?”

  “Did you borrow Manny’s bee blower?”

  “No, why, is it missing?”

  “Not really.”

  “Story, you sure are acting strange these days.”

  “I know.” I sighed.

  With that, Stanley bought a newspaper and a pound of Wisconsin coffee and walked off down Main Street, whistling like he didn’t have a care in the world, which he probably didn’t.

  “He’s in a good mood,” Carrie Ann said. “That’s what happens when you’re getting lucky.”

  “What makes you think that about Stanley?”

  “I can always tell,” Carrie Ann said, proud of her gift.

  Ray Goodwin came by without his delivery truck, which was a first. I really hoped he wasn’t about to try another tactic to get me to go out with him.

  “My day off,” he said when I asked about the truck. “And not a thing to do tonight.”

  Oh, jeez. “I’m sure something will come up. Otherwise, hang at Stu’s like the rest of us.”

  One place I was sure to avoid with Hunter tonight was Stu’s. The last thing I wanted was to hurt Ray’s feelings by showing up with another man.

  “Did you get the honey from Manny’s honey house?” I asked Ray, changing the subject fast.

  “Sure did.”

  “Grace didn’t give you any trouble?”

  “She wasn’t home when I stopped by and loaded up. I’ll call her today and let her know, so she doesn’t think somebody stole it. Not that she goes out there anyway. She’d never notice.”

  Just then I saw DeeDee Becker walk past the market. I came up with an idea right on the spot, ran out, and called her name, waving her back.

  “What?” she said, shielding her eyes from the sun, which had finally decided to appear through the clouds.

  “I’d like to cut a deal with you.”

  She looked exactly like her sister when she gave me her doubtful look. Except Lori didn’t have pierced nostrils and eyebrows. “What for what? Exactly,” she said in a demanding voice. Again, just like her sister.

  “I’ll lift your ban on the store,” I offered. “All you have to do is tell me if someone really is interested in the Chapman place and if it’s true, who that person is.”

  I noticed Ben, watching me intensely from inside the door, his ears pointed straight at the ceiling.

  “Getting to go back into your establishment isn’t such a big deal,” DeeDee said. “I’m shopping at other places now. Cheaper ones.”

  Great. Just great. I didn’t have anything else to bargain with. “Could you tell me for free?” It was worth a try. The worst she could say would be no.

  “No,” DeeDee said, shaking her head for emphasis. “I’d be taking a chance on getting fired. That’s worth something.”

  “Lori isn’t going to fire you.”

  My fountain of information turned to walk away, acting like she didn’t care one way or another if I didn’t get what I wanted. Without an offer on the table, I’d lose my chance.

  “Wait,” I called, “I’ll throw in a twenty percent discount on everything in the store for one month.”

  My offer to allow a known thief entry to my store, and even throwing in a discount on top of it, might seem overly desperate to a casual observer. But knowing DeeDee, she wouldn’t use the discount anyway, since she usually paid zero dollars for what she wanted. Holly would have her in another hold on the floor in less than a week. And this time, I’d let Johnny Jay do it his way and book her.

  Ray came out of the store, gave a little wave, and drove off in a black Chevy with a crumpled back bumper and an obvious problem with the car’s muffler.

  “So what do you say?” I asked DeeDee.

  She thought it over.

  “Make it twenty-five percent and two months and we have a deal,” the little shoplifter had the nerve to say.

  “Done.”

  “You want to know who’s putting in the offer?”

  “So it’s true?”

  DeeDee nodded. “And you won’t tell anybody who your source is, since it’s what some might say is unprofessional?”

  I nodded again.

  Then she told me. Part of me almost expected DeeDee to say it was Gerald Smith, the phantom who took Manny’s bees.

  She didn’t say Gerald Smith.

  But I knew the name that slid off her studded tongue.

  “Kenny Langley,” she said. “I’m surprised you didn’t think of that on your own. You know him? Right? The owner of Kenny’s Bees?”

  “No way! You mean to tell me,” I said, “that the same Kenny who tried to hustle in on my territory wants to buy Manny’s property?”

  “It was him all right. But he withdrew the offer about an hour ago. I’m actually looking for Lori to tell her the bad news. She isn’t going to like it one bit.”

  “She was just in a little while ago.” The rush of additional information was too much for my overtaxed brain. But I was talking to her back end as DeeDee strolled into The Wild Clover with her big suitcase purse.

  Thirty-nine

  Ben rode shotgun next to me in the truck. Business at The Wild Clover had finally slowed down enough around mid-afternoon for me to take a long break. Carrie Ann said she wanted to stay on, that she needed the money, and the twins were there, too. So everything was covered.

  By now there wasn’t the slightest doubt in my mind that Manny had been murdered. He’d been worried enough about something that he hid his journal under one of my beehives. It was a safe bet that one or more of the pages inside it played a significant role in his concern for its safety, and probably in his death.

  I made a few assumptions:

  • Manny Chapman’s and Faye Tilley’s deaths were both murders.

  • The same person probably killed both of them.

  • Clay had the opportunity and means to kill Faye, but he didn’t have a strong motive to kill either her or Manny, at least none that popped right out at me.

  • Grace had the opportunity and means to kill Manny, but no real motive. Okay, if she thought Manny was cheating on her, maybe she had a motive.

  • Moving on to other possible suspects, Lori Spandle was a nasty person, but that hardly qualified her to be a multiple murderer.

  • Stanley Peck had a beekeeping girlfriend, but so what?

  • Kenny Langley wanted to take over my honey area and that was a fact. He had made an offer on Manny’s property, but then with
drawn it.

  Why? Was Kenny killing off the competition so he could take over more territory? That seemed extreme.

  Who’d ever heard of such a thing in bee circles? If anything, we usually supported each other. Although Kenny had a streak of competition that had put some distance between us, a little too much testosterone to play nice with a “girl,” as he called me.

  I’ve been called worse.

  I drove past Grams’s house, noting that her car was gone from the driveway. Then I turned into the cornfield and bumped along the side of it, parking close to my beehives. Bees flew through the air, coming and going, having forgotten their quarrel with me yesterday. I found their buzz comforting.

  While Ben sniffed along the tree line, leaving his dog scent on pretty much everything that didn’t move, I stayed in the truck with the windows open and began to page through Manny’s journal, starting from the back and working toward the front.

  I skimmed the journal quickly, paging over my own entries, trying to make sense of Manny’s notes. He had practiced selective breeding for years, hoping to extend honey production for greater yields, and he’d seen significant progress as seasons and time went by. He’d also been working on developing strong queens and healthy drones that were resistant to mites without the need for chemical controls.

  The science aspect was way over my head. As a first-year beekeeper, I was more concerned about the basics, like providing food sources for my honeybees and making sure they had enough room inside the hives to keep filling honeycombs.

  “If they run out of space to store their harvests,” Manny had said, “they’ll leave to find a bigger, better home. Keep an eye on them at all times.”

  I had been happy to leave the question of which queens and drones to mix together for more experienced beekeepers to ponder.

  I turned to several pages that laid out all the numbers for our most recent honey harvest, which was up by 20 percent over last year. Every year Manny’s percentages had climbed. He’d also included notes about the queens and royal jelly statistics. Bees needed royal jelly to survive. All I knew about royal jelly at this point in my beekeeping experience could be summed up in a few short bullet points:

  • It’s secreted from glands in the heads of nurse bees.

  • Combined with honey, it is fed to larvae.

  • When a new queen is selected, that special larva is fed only royal jelly and lots of it. That’s what makes her grow into a queen.

  • Royal jelly is supposed to do great things for humans—slow aging, lower cholesterol, strengthen the immune system, and a whole list of other benefits.

  From conversations Manny had with other beekeepers, he didn’t plan to go into full-scale royal jelly production, but the scientist in him couldn’t help but include basic observations.

  It would take several days to go through the journal the way I should, so after a while I closed it, called Ben back to his seat in the truck, and almost sideswiped Johnny Jay as I pulled out on the road.

  He swerved, lost control, and ended up in the ditch across the road, sideways. It was a rather deep ditch with several inches of standing water.

  Nothing good could possibly come out of this encounter.

  Scotty, beam me up.

  When I didn’t evaporate into thin air, I knew I was on my own.

  “Hey, Johnny Jay,” I said through the open window when he got out and stepped down into the water before noticing it. The police chief didn’t look happy about the situation or about seeing me. “Sorry about that,” I added as he sloshed toward me.

  “Missy Fischer, even though our fine country fields don’t have their own special stop signs, it’s implied that those who don’t stay on the roadways will yield to those who do. I’m writing you up for reckless driving.”

  “Whatever gives you a thrill,” I replied, noting his smug, righteous air as he leaned on my truck, an authoritative attitude that always brought out the sass in me. “But I didn’t see you. Perhaps you were speeding.”

  “Isn’t that Hunter’s dog?” he asked.

  I nodded. “He’s trained to attack.”

  “Are you threatening me?”

  “Just telling it like it is.”

  “I’ll need your driver’s license. Then you can sit tight while I run your plates, see if you’re wanted for anything. Let’s see—reckless driving and threatening a police officer.”

  “I’m really sorry about prom,” I said, stooping to an all-time low by apologizing to Johnny Jay. And twice in a row—first for the ditch, then for the dance. “I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings.”

  Johnny Jay stared at me through the window, speechless. Then he said, “What are you talking about?”

  “Prom. When you asked me to go, and I said no.”

  “What’s that got to do with anything?”

  “I thought that’s why you’re so mean to me, and why you aren’t even going to listen to me when I try to tell you that Manny Chapman was murdered.”

  “Don’t you have anything better to do than make up situations in your head?”

  “I’m not making this up.”

  “Come with me.” He opened my door. “We’re going to have a little chat.”

  “What kind of chat?”

  “Just get out.”

  Suddenly I realized that I was alone with a big bully. Holly wasn’t here to act as my bodyguard.

  My reaction was probably silly. Johnny Jay had done some pretty rotten things, but he’d never been accused of physical abuse. At least not since high school, when he had been implicated in several black-eye incidents, which had been his word against theirs and never solidly proven. Although I distinctly remembered a scene with me back in third grade when he’d rubbed my face in the snow. I’d gotten even with him later when I blasted him with mud balloons.

  I didn’t move. Ben was doing his thing, watching and thinking something only he knew about. Suddenly it felt good to have this big scary dog beside me, on my side. What secret words would trigger an active, go-get-him response? Later tonight when I had my hot date with Hunter, I’d have to try to get the magic words out of him just in case I ever needed them.

  And why was I so afraid of Johnny Jay? He and I were supposed to be on the same side, too.

  “I’m not getting out of my truck,” I said, deciding I wouldn’t go, no matter what. “But I’ll follow you to the station, where I’ll be happy to have that little chat with you. So do your business, write me up, read me my rights, whatever you need to do to make yourself feel like you’re the boss. Then we’ll go down to the station. Now close my door and MOVE back.”

  There was a long pause while we stared at each other.

  Then Johnny Jay closed the door. “Okay,” he said. “I’m letting you off with a warning this time.”

  “What?”

  “But only if you swear you’ll shut up and mind your own business. I know you’re upset about the robbery at the store, and that earring showing up, and I’m perfectly aware that someone is toying with you, trying to scare you or worse. But what happened had nothing to do with Manny Chapman and everything to do with your ex-husband and his dead girlfriend. Christ, the guy’s prints are all over the kayak. It’s a given, he’s going to be doing time. So do we have a deal? You let me do police work, and you mind your store?

  “What’s the alternative?”

  “A court hearing and a fine you can’t afford to pay.”

  “This is blackmail.”

  “I call it self-preservation. You’re driving me crazy.”

  “Don’t you want to hear what I have first? We could compare notes.”

  “Hand over your driver’s license.”

  “I’ll take the deal,” I lied.

  Forty

  Just as I’d hoped, Grace wasn’t home. In the past, whenever Manny and I got together on Saturdays to harvest honey, Grace would leave in the afternoon to visit her brother and sister-in-law and do a little shopping. It was one of her routines, and so I was
counting on her being away.

  Ben stayed in the truck. He licked his lips, pressed his nose against the pane of glass, and followed me with his eyes.

  I was starting to kinda, sorta like the big hairy guy.

  But I also wasn’t too happy about continuing my investigation without a human backing me up. Johnny Jay was impossible to deal with, Holly was in Milwaukee for a romantic weekend with Money Machine Max, Hunter was in advanced C.I.T. training, and even Carrie Ann was busy at the market. Plus, I didn’t want to expose my cousin to any more danger, since she’d already had one episode with violence at the store. That left my mother to ask along (no thanks) or Grams, who was so sweet I could count on her to offer the bad guy a brownie.

  I desperately needed a best friend, one who was available when I needed her, one who didn’t judge or criticize or think anything negative about me. A happy, positive, go-getting female, who wasn’t afraid of my honeybees or taking risks. Was I expecting too much?

  Pushing aside my worry about going it alone, I walked into the center of what used to be Manny’s beeyard. Empty now, without the buzzing of activity I remembered so fondly.

  I was back where it had all begun.

  The image of Manny’s body lying there with honey and bees all over him was almost as vivid as the real thing had been. I missed him so much, all his wisdom and passion and patience with my beekeeping inexperience.

  Now that I thought about it, Manny was the closest thing to a best friend that I’d had in years. If I wasn’t on a mission of justice at the moment, I might have sat down and cried over my huge loss. Instead, I headed for the honey house with key in hand, thinking about how Gerald Smith or whoever he was had Manny’s strong, productive hives, which should rightfully belong to me. The best bees in the state, maybe even in the country.

  The only other honeybees around as special as Gerald Smith’s were my own. I had two perfect hives with great bees and queens, thanks to Manny’s selective breeding techniques.