Buzz Off (23 page)

“Ouch!” I quickly scraped off a stinger embedded in my thumb, closed up the top of the hive, and moved on to the next one, repeating the process over again.

“Ouch, jeez, that one really hurt.” This time the target was my neck.

Did I mention that bee stings emit an odor that riles up the other bees? Once stung, my only recourse was to cover up any exposed body parts. That is, if I had anything to cover up with. Otherwise, they’ll keep it up.

In my semi-panic, I stepped sideways, forgetting about the nails. Flip flops are
not
the proper foot gear for walking on nails.

By the time I returned to The Wild Clover, my neck was red and throbbing, I had a pronounced limp, and I’d ruined one of my favorite pairs of flip flops.

“What happened to you?” Carrie Ann asked.

“Nothing. Never mind.”

Before I could gimp to my storage room office, Holly came into the market.

“Your sister is up to something,” Carrie Ann said to Holly, talking over my head as though I didn’t exist. “She’s been overly nice to me since I arrived this morning, then she informed me of errands but wouldn’t share what they were, and finally she came back a few minutes ago all banged up.”

“I wouldn’t ask any questions if I were you,” Holly replied. “You’re better off not knowing.”

“Isn’t that the truth,” Carrie Ann said.

“Story has a problem with physical coordination,” Holly continued.

“Two left feet?” Carrie Ann chuckled. “Now that you mention it, I’ve noticed that, too.”

“Since as far back as I can remember,” Holly added.

“How’s business been?” I asked, diverting them before they could start in on examples of my klutziness. I also was wondering if I should go to the emergency room with my bloody feet. When did I get my last tetanus shot?

“Still slow,” Carrie Ann said. “A few tourists came through town, antiquing in the area. Lori Spandle stopped by and pumped me for information about your bees. I didn’t tell her a thing, not that I actually know anything to tell her. Stu came for his paper. You know, the usual.”

“Holly,” I said, “can you handle the store while I have a word with Carrie Ann?”

“Sure.”

“You’re firing me, aren’t you? I can hear it in your voice.” My cousin stuck her fingers in her ears and started making some
la-la-la
noise with her tongue.

I grabbed her arm and pulled her into the back, trying to walk gently. I shut the door.

“Am I at least getting severance pay?” Carrie Ann leaned against a shelf, looking defeated. “Unemployment would be good, if a severance package is too much to ask.”

What nerve. The woman, until recently, had been so part-time I wasn’t positive she actually worked for me. Now she wanted a going-away package?

“I’m not firing you,” I said.

“You aren’t?”

“Nope.”

“Then why all the drama about talking to me in private? Oh, I get it, you don’t want your sister to hear what we are talking about. Is it about her?”

I plopped into my office chair and gestured for my cousin to take a seat in a metal chair next to me. I wondered how to begin.

The direct route seemed best. “I need the truth from you and nothing but the truth.”

“I can do that.”

“Good. So . . . I’ve been getting weird vibes.”

“You and me both. That’s what comes from talking to the universe.”

“Huh?”

“Every day I talk to the universe. It’s easy. You go outside, face up to the sky, and tell God or the universe or whatever energy source you believe in what you need or want. It really works, but sometimes you get weird vibes. Is that what you mean?”

I had to admit that Carrie Ann was much more interesting sober than she was in a drunken state. Glimmers of the young woman I’d chummed with in high school were starting to peek through from the depths of a hazy sobriety.

“That’s not exactly what I meant,” I said. “I get the feeling that people around here have been talking about me behind my back. It sounds paranoid, but I’m pretty positive I’m right. Especially at the funeral yesterday.” I didn’t break eye contact with her. “Now I’m sure they’re wondering about how Clay and Faye and I fit together, since the divorce happened one day, then right away Faye was killed. Is that it? Are they curious and want to ask me questions but they don’t know how so they come up with their own theories?”

Carrie Ann looked off, but not before her eyes gave her away.

“You
do
know something.” I shook her arm to get her to look back at me while putting on my best pleading expression. “You have to tell me. We’re bound by blood.”

I don’t know where that came from. It just popped out. However, my Mom-like comment, laying on the guilty family responsibilities thing, worked.

“You won’t like it,” my cousin said. “You’ll wish you hadn’t asked.”

“Try me.”

“Please don’t make me be the one to tell you,” she whined. “I hate this.”

Right when I was considering intimidation tactics and torture techniques, Carrie Ann caved. “It’s about the affair you were having with Manny Chapman,” she said.

My mouth dropped open. Of all the different ideas that had gone through my head, that wasn’t one of them.

“That’s exactly how I must have looked when I first heard the rumor,” Carrie Ann said. “You were a little wild in school . . . okay, a lot wild, but I thought you had settled down. Imagine my surprise to find out something like this. At least you kept your personal business quiet, not like that slinky husband of yours who sat at Stu’s bar with one woman after another bragging about his sex drive. Sorry. That just slipped out. And I don’t blame you one bit for spending intimate time with Manny. I’m the last one to cast stones, let me tell you. I have my own secrets.”

Carrie Ann would have kept up with the nervous chatter if I hadn’t raised my right hand and held it out like a stop sign.

“That,” I said, clearing my throat, “is the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard.”

“So you’re denying it? Good idea. We can pass that around and maybe it will stop all the talk. Or else it might fuel the fire. What should we do?”

“No wonder Grace and her sister-in-law treated me so cold,” I said to myself, but out loud. “They heard what was going around and believed it.”

“Should we confront the issue head on or hope it dies out? Or we could spread something new to distract them.”

“Who started such a nasty lie?” I wanted to know.

“P. P. Patti,” she said. “But don’t tell her I told. And you better get some ice on your neck. It’s swelling up like a balloon.”

When I was in high school, I wasn’t the nicest person on the planet. Looking back, I realize that now and I’m not proud of everything I did. I was popular enough to be nominated for prom queen, but I didn’t have enough real compassion for those less fortunate on the popularity scale. And I suppose I deserved to suffer for past actions, for every time I hurt someone else. What goes around, comes around, as the saying goes. And I should feel some of the same pain I’d dished out.

But why on earth would Patti Dwyre have said such a thing? Had she found out that I referred to her as Pity-Party Patti? Was this retaliation? I certainly wasn’t the only one who called her that. She’d earned it all on her own. I couldn’t even remember who’d started it.

Had it been me?

What if my mother and Grams had heard about this so-called affair? While I had given up on a meaningful relationship with my mother, deep down I didn’t want her to think worse of me than she already did.

So I asked Holly if she knew about the latest gossip while we freshened up the vegetable bins. “There’s a rumor flying around,” I said, restacking vine-ripened tomatoes so they looked their very plumpest, “that I had an, ah, er . . . intimate relationship with Manny Chapman.”

“I heard that,” Holly said, not looking up from the garlic bulbs.

“From P. P. Patti?”

“From Mom. That’s one of the reasons she wanted me to stick around here. Grams agreed.”

“Oh, gawd. Mom knows?”

“Yup.”

“So you’re here to comfort me in my grief at the loss of my lover?”

Holly started cleaning up husks and silk lying around the corn bin from customers shucking their own corncobs. Something about peeling the husks away and exposing all those juicy yellow kernels appealed to our shoppers. Corn on the cob was one of our top sellers this time of year.

“Mom wants me to protect you from yourself, and Grams wants me to protect you from Grace.”

“Grace wouldn’t even have a right to be mad. She was sneaking around with Clay.”

I told my sister about confronting Clay and how weakly he’d defended himself and Grace against my claim.

Holly shook her head. “Is it something in Moraine’s drinking water that’s making everybody so horny?”

“This is turning into a soap opera. You have to believe me. I was
not
having an affair with Manny,” I said.

“Right,” said my sister.

If your own family doesn’t believe you, who will?

 

 

“Grace, open up,” I called, peering through the screen door. I could see a pot boiling on the stove, steam rising from it. “I know you’re in there.”

I tried the door. It was unlocked. I opened it and called again. “I’m coming in.”

“Stay right where you are on the porch,” Grace said from someplace in the back. “I’ll be right there.”

Grace left me outside for a while before she appeared. She looked tired. It was only the first day after Manny’s funeral. Life in Moraine had become complicated for both of us.

“I need to talk to you, Grace. About several things.”

She didn’t invite me in, just leaned against the porch and folded her arms. I started with the easy stuff first, since I’m a confrontational wimp.

“I tried to look up Gerald Smith so I could talk to him about the bees. He isn’t a member of the beekeepers association and I can’t find him in the phone book. Do you have his number?”

“No,” Grace said, her lips in a thin line.

“Do you have any kind of contact information at all?”

“No.”

“Did you see him when he picked up the bees? What does he look like? Did you see his truck?”

“No. Don’t know. No.”

Jeez. She was making this hard for me.

“Come on, Grace. You must know something.”

“The bees are gone. That’s all I care about.”

“So this guy came after dark, loaded them up, and drove off? And you didn’t see a thing?”

“That’s right. Are we done?”

“Does Stanley have them?”

“Stanley Peck? Why would you think that?”

I sighed, disappointed. This was going worse than I expected.

“I heard about the robbery. Did they catch whoever did it?”

“No. The camera was old anyway. And they didn’t get much money.”

I wanted to ask her about the dead yellow jackets in the honey house and the pieces of nest and the bee blower out of place like someone had borrowed it and didn’t put it away properly, but even if she’d known anything about those things, she obviously wasn’t in a chatty mood.

“Will you consider selling the honey house to me?” I asked instead. “I’d like to keep raising bees, keep the honey business going.”

“No,” she said, and all hope of salvaging some of what was left of Manny and my honey-producing business faded.

Maybe I should have started with the hard stuff first. By now my palms were sweating. “The things they are saying about Manny and me? They aren’t true. We were friends and that was the extent of it. I’m sorry you had to hear such awful lies.”

I couldn’t help thinking that Grace owed me something, too. An apology back would be nice, since she’d been with Clay and that fact was real, not just made-up gossip like the story about me. My ex had even confirmed it in his pathetic way.

“I didn’t hear any lies,” she said.

We did one of those stare-downs that I usually reserve for the police chief.

“You know what I’m talking about,” I said.

“No. I don’t.”

“I said what I came to say.” I backed off the porch, forgetting about my sore feet until I felt the pain, but didn’t take my eyes off of her because the hairs on the back of my arms were standing up and I was getting a weird impulse to get the hell out of there. I’ve always been slow to think the worst of people, mainly because I want to believe that people are basically good. But recent events should have turned on my caution lights.

If Grace had killer instincts, what would stop her from attacking me? I had arrived without a protection plan in mind. “My sister knows I came out to talk to you,” I stammered. “Carrie Ann knows, too. That I’m here. I better get back to The Wild Clover.”

Grace didn’t move. She watched me walk back to my truck, scoot in, and leave for what I assumed would be the last time.