Buzz Off (25 page)

“Looks to me more like we’re following Stanley Peck.”

My grandmother was one sharp cookie. So I told her about the bees and how I couldn’t find them, and how Stanley had checked out a beekeeping book, and was acting sneaky.

“He’s not heading for his farm,” Grams observed.

“No. I followed him yesterday and lost him on the rustic road.”

“Seems to me, you’d want to check out his farm rather than chase him around the countryside.”

I glanced over at my petite, gray, sweet grandmother. We did a U-turn. “You’re right, as usual. This is the perfect opportunity to find out if the bees are at his farm. You’re a genius.”

Grams grinned as if I’d made her day. But then she lived with my mother. You learned to appreciate any kindness that came your way when you spent too much time defending yourself against Mom’s constant criticism.

Stanley Peck’s farm was called, unoriginally, Peck Farms. Once upon a time, the Peck family worked the land themselves, growing acres and acres of corn and soy beans and raising dairy cattle. Stanley had opted for the same course as Grams, preferring not to sell out to big developers when they’d come calling. Instead, he rented most of his land for others to do the work and kept whatever part he felt he could manage for himself, such as the house, a few outbuildings, and enough space for a vegetable garden. When his wife, Carol, was still alive, the place was spruced up, but now a certain scruffiness had settled in. The grass was a little long, the garden a little weedy, and the house could use a paint job.

After parking, we walked around, hunting for beehives.

There weren’t any. Not a single one anyplace. Believe me, I’d know if there were hives close by. I have built-in bee radar, aka bee-dar, and it doesn’t miss.

Nada. Disappointing to say the least.

“I’m going to do some breaking-and-entering, if you don’t mind waiting in the truck,” I said to Grams, who was right on my heels the whole time. I wanted to do a quick peek in case Manny’s bee journal was sitting out in the open on Stanley’s kitchen table.

“You know, it’s not breaking-and-entering if the door’s open,” Grams commented. “It’s not illegal to check up on a good friend if we’re worried that something might have happened to him.”

“Oh, look,” I said, testing Grams’s open-door theory. “It’s unlocked.”

“There you go.” Grams passed me up. “Now, if you’ll give me a hint so I know what we’re looking for? I assume we’ve exhausted our search for beehives and are now onto the subject of . . . what again?”

“Manny’s missing bee journal.” We walked in and I lowered my voice, not sure why. “He kept all his bee notes in it. It’s black, spiral-bound, about the size of a hardcover book, and as thick. Scraps of paper are stuck in the back of it with odds and ends. Newspaper clippings and so forth.”

While I described the notebook, I opened kitchen drawers searching for the junk drawer. Every house has one, right? I quickly found it, which was in fact totally filled with junk. It had everything imaginable inside it except the kitchen sink. Or Manny’s journal.

Damn.

“Stanley needs someone to help him out with his home,” Grams noted. “He isn’t much of a housekeeper.”

“Why don’t you check his bedroom dressers while I search the rest of the kitchen,” I suggested.

“Let’s trade. I’ll take the kitchen. You can do bedroom drawers. I’m too old for surprises.”

We rooted around like two snoops, which was exactly what we were. If Stanley had secrets, we hadn’t found them yet. The man seemed to be an open book, which made me even more suspicious.

“Ah-ha!” Grams said, picking up a kitchen utensil and brandishing it. “He borrowed my apple corer last month and refused to admit he still had it. ‘I gave it back,’ he said, letting me think I was losing it. Here’s the proof.”

At least something came of our efforts. Grams got her apple corer back.

“This is why you wanted to come here, rather than following him?” I said. “For your apple corer?”

“I needed it,” Grams said after we left the house and I had boosted her back up into the passenger’s seat of my truck. “I’m making apple crisp today with a ginger-snap crust.”

Grams was the official baker in our family, and this dish sounded like a real winner, but that wasn’t the point.

“You couldn’t have mentioned the apple corer earlier?” I said with a tiny whine. “We couldn’t have stopped to get it
after
we found out where Stanley was going?”

“We wouldn’t have had the opportunity to shake down his house. Where’s the fun in that?”

Driving back, I made a mental list of suspicious characters, or as Johnny Jay liked to phrase it in cop talk, “persons of interest.” Suddenly, everyone in town seemed to be acting strangely, like they had hidden agendas. Except my family, who always acted a little strange and really did have hidden agendas.

I distrusted Clay Lane on principal, Stanley Peck because he was sneaking around reading bee books, and Lori Spandle for being anti-bee, and trying to get Grace to sell Manny’s house.

Then there was gossipy reputation-ruining Patti Dwyre. If I tried, I could work all of these people into a powerful theory of murderous intent.

But it was Grace Chapman who had my full attention. “I’m taking you home,” I said to Grams.

“My car’s at the store,” she reminded me. We drove in silence for a few minutes, then she said, “Want me to check up on your bees when I get back?”

“You know about them?”

Grams nodded. “But my lips are sealed.”

Why minding my own business (or as Holly would say, MYOB) was the best advice Mom ever gave me (even if she never took it herself):

“I’m sorry,” I said to P. P. Patti when she walked through the store and we met up in front of the wine rack where I was restocking Wisconsin wines. “I apologize deeply and sincerely for anything and everything I ever did to you or said or implied about you.”

“Okay,” she said, though hesitantly, like she was waiting for the punch line.

“I mean it. I’m sorry—past, present, and future.”

“You’re saying you’re sorry for something you haven’t done yet?”

“If that’s what it takes.”

“Am I missing something here?”

“I’m with you,” Carrie Ann said to Patti, running her fingers through her choppy yellow hair, a sure tipoff that her nerves were frayed from all her recent lifestyle changes. “Totally confused.” Then she looked at me, not too kindly. Or was I being overly paranoid? “You could apologize to me, too, while you’re at it,” she said.

“For what?”

“You don’t pay me enough, for starters.”

“Nobody else complains about the wages I pay. I never did a thing to you worth apologizing for, Carrie Ann, and you know it.” That was a big lie. I’d propositioned her boyfriend after a funeral, of all things. Had he told her about that? “And besides, shouldn’t you be watching the cash register?”

“I can see it just fine from over here.” She swiveled her head to check out the counter.

“Can we find someplace to talk?” I said to Patti. “Do you have time?”

“You could buy me an Italian ice at the custard shop. I’m allergic to dairy, I get a horrible stomach ache, but the ices are pretty good.”

“Fine. Perfect.”

On the sidewalk, walking to Koon’s Custard Shop, Patti brought me up-to-speed on her most recent problems, of which she had plenty.

“The raccoons are trapped and gone, but now squirrels are chewing through all my power lines. My cable’s out. So is my landline. You haven’t been trying to call me, have you? I better give you my cell number. The doctors are still looking into my shaking problem.” She paused to prove her point. I detected a slight twitch in her hand, but nothing a little anxiety medication wouldn’t fix.

She went on and on, working hard to uphold her Pity-Party Patti title. By the time she ordered her Italian ice and I ordered a dish of vanilla custard, and we parked ourselves at an outside table, I was ready to commit suicide. Or murder.

“Patti, we need to have a serious discussion,” I said around spoonfuls of custard. My stomach was doing flips; I hated confrontations and conflicts and I was about to launch into exactly those things with Patti. “Someone,” I began, “has been spreading rumors, lies that are hurting people, things that are mean and vicious and I’d like to know how to put an end to them.”

“Me, too,” Patti said. “One thing I hate is that kind of mean-spirited behavior.”

I almost swallowed my spoon. “But,” I managed to say, “the person I just described, the one spreading nasty lies is . . .”

I couldn’t say it. Patti was watching me with intense concentration, expecting to get the goods on some mean old gossip. She had no idea I meant her!

“I have to go to the bathroom,” I said.

“But you were going to tell me something really juicy!”

“Be right back.”

In the restroom, I washed my hands and stared at myself in the mirror. I’d never been good at this sort of thing, calling someone out when they did me wrong. Sure, I could stand up to my family in a passive-aggressive sort of way and I could go to bat for another person if I felt they were treated unfairly, like when Johnny Jay used to bully other kids or even now when he pushed around adults. But when it came to face-to-face confrontation, I wasn’t nearly as confident.

In one enlightened moment while I stared into the mirror, I realized exactly why Patti was the way she was. I understood her perfectly, scary as that was.

Patti knew people didn’t really like her too well. They didn’t want her around, but she wanted desperately to be noticed and accepted. Gossiping got attention. Whether good attention or bad attention, she didn’t really think it through that much, so long as she had her tiny little share of limelight.

She just wanted to be part of the community but she was going about it all wrong, driving people away instead of to her.

Or at least that’s what I came up with.

When I sat back down at the table, she said, “It was nice of you to apologize to me, before, at the store. And I accept your apology. You weren’t very friendly in high school. In fact, really rude and insensitive, is more like it. Hanging out with that clique of yours. Maybe now that you’ve grown up we can be real friends.”

“Sure,” I said, not sure at all, wondering what I was getting myself into, sensing a new direction I didn’t want to explore. “But I’m pretty busy with the store and my bees. I don’t have much time for girlfriends.”

Which I realized was absolutely true. I didn’t have any close female friends unless you wanted to count my younger sister or my cousin. How pathetic was that? I hadn’t had time for a personal life while I’d been living in a bubble while struggling to save the store from ruin during my marital split.

Even so, Patti wasn’t exactly my first choice for a new best friend.

“Now that we’re buddies,” Patti said, seeming to have forgotten the thread of our earlier conversation, thank God, “I didn’t get a chance to finish telling you what I know about Grace and your ex-husband.”

“Something important?”

Patti nodded. “I saw them through my telescope.”

“Your . . . telescope?”
Jeez!

“I have it set up in the window facing the river so I can watch birds and water fowl and, you know, whatever.”

“Right.” I tried to picture which window she might be referring to. And whether that same one looked out over my yard and into my windows. My compassion for her socially inept manipulations was fading fast.

Patti leaned forward, conspiratorially. “Anyway, I saw them together last Thursday night right before dark. You were at the store, I think, because I couldn’t see you moving around inside your, uh, I mean your lights weren’t on and I know you work late some nights.”

P. P. Patti had been watching me through a frickin’ telescope? Oops, there went my sympathy, completely gone.

“Grace had parked in the library parking lot so no one would see where she was going.” Patti was in her element, her eyes shiny. “I know because I followed her afterward to see where she went. That’s how I found out where she’d parked. Anyway, she knocked on Clay’s door, looked around to see if anyone was watching, and when he opened the door, she slipped right in. And this was the very night before her husband was killed by bees! Of course, she didn’t know he was going to die. Later on, she must have felt pretty bad about her timing.”