Buzz Off (3 page)

The church that housed my store had been constructed with Cream City brick, which was made from a special clay found only along the banks of the western shore of Lake Michigan, mostly in the Milwaukee area. When it was fired, the clay turned a creamy light yellow color. The church’s steeple and bell tower were whitewashed and wood-framed, and the church bells were still intact.

Milwaukee was forty minutes away, close enough to Moraine to visit whenever we needed culture and fine dining. I’d spent enough years living in the city to appreciate what it had to offer. All the same, when I first left home to move to Milwaukee, I couldn’t wait to get away; but by the time we decided to relocate, I couldn’t wait to come back. It’s weird how your priorities change over time.

While I sat admiring my store, Holly came out, waved good-bye, and roared away in her Jag. A few minutes later my grandmother’s Cadillac Fleetwood pulled over, its tires kissing the curb. Mom was on the passenger’s side as usual, since Grams, at eighty years old, refused to give up the driver’s seat.

The Caddy’s window slid down, and Mom poked her head out.

“What’s going on inside the store?” Mom asked, even though she knew perfectly well.

“September is National Honey Month,” I said. “The store is celebrating.”

“Looks to me like you’ve been drinking.”

Now how could she tell from where she was? Then I noticed that I had an empty flute in my hand. “Only a little,” I said, walking over to the car.

My mother had done me a huge favor when Clay and I decided to move to Moraine, by selling us the family home for a very low price—making it affordable enough for us to also buy the house next door as well as the market. My dad had died several years ago, dropping at the age of fifty-nine from a massive heart attack, and Mom never got used to living alone. After the house closing, Mom moved in with her mother, my sweet-apple-pie Grams, who was presently looking happy and pretty with a daisy from her garden tucked into her little gray bun.

Unfortunately, all my mother’s genes came from my ornery grandfather’s side, not from my grandmother’s. Mom had a negative outlook on life. Worse, since the house sale, she thought she owned me.

“Are you coming in?” I asked, noticing that they weren’t getting out of the car.

Grams leaned over Mom to join the conversation. “We’re going to the beauty shop over in Stone Bank,” she said. “We only stopped because we saw you outside and wanted to say hi.”

“You shouldn’t be drinking on the job,” Mom said, puckering her lips in disapproval. “You aren’t serving alcohol inside the store, are you?”

“When’s your appointment?” I said to Grams, who caught my hint.

“We have to go, Helen,” she said to my mom. “Or we’ll be late.”

My mother hated being late for anything. “Fine,” Mom said.

Grams pulled out at a snail’s pace and disappeared from sight.

I stood on the curb, considering the virtues of a hot cup of coffee.

While I went over my limited beverage options—coffee from Koon’s Custard Shop or more champagne, which would have been the absolute wrong decision—Hunter Wallace, my first high school flame, pulled up at the curb in a Waukesha sheriff’s SUV and decided for me.

I’d get neither.

As Hunter rounded the SUV, his body language screamed official business. He’s a member of the Critical Incident Team, aka C.I.T., which comprises law enforcement officials from the surrounding towns and villages. They respond to anything considered high risk. The C.I.T. would swing into action, for example, if we had a hostage situation or a gunman entrenched on a rooftop. Not that we get much of that kind of crime. C.I.T. also handles potentially risky situations like search warrants and arrests, but again, not much of that action around here.

Although last year, when Stanley Peck had summer workers staying at his farmhouse, C.I.T. had to break up a drunken shooting incident that left poor Stanley with a hole in his foot.

Stanley, all sixty-plus years of him, still owned one of Wisconsin’s disappearing farms, although he leased out most of his acreage to other farmers. His wife, Carol, had died that year. I thought about how lonely he must’ve been without her, and how that emptiness might have been the reason he invited temporary summer workers to stay with him in the first place. Rumor has it Stanley did the shooting himself and blamed it on his houseguests, but since he has deep-rooted family ties and is as local as you can get, the town sided with him and sent the so-called rabble-rousers packing.

Stanley still had a slight limp.

Because Hunter looked so businesslike, my eyes swept up to The Wild Clover’s bell tower. I didn’t see any gun-men up there. Stanley Peck was inside the store, but last I looked, he hadn’t been toting any dangerous weapons—visible ones, at least.

“Hey, Hunter,” I greeted him, taking in his tight jeans and untucked, button-down blue shirt with rolled sleeves. The shirt matched the blue of his eyes.

Hunter lived about ten miles north of Moraine and worked in the City of Waukesha, which was twenty-five miles southeast of my town. Our paths hadn’t crossed on a daily or even weekly basis in the two years I’d been back in Moraine. We didn’t see much of each other in the fourteen years that I had lived in Milwaukee, either (between the time I went to college there and when I came back, with a lot of baggage in the form of Clay Lane). Still, Hunter was usually happy to see me when we came face-to-face here and there. But today he wasn’t in a joking, flirtatious mood.

“Story, I need your help,” he said. “Right now.”

“Sure.”

“I see Grace Chapman’s car. Is she inside?” He motioned to the market.

I nodded, sensing this wasn’t the best time to invite him in to toast my newly single status. “What’s up?”

“I have bad news. Stay put. I’ll be right back.”

With that he yanked open the door and disappeared inside.

What could Hunter possibly need me for? What bad news was he about to deliver? Was it bad news for me? Or for Grace?

Before I could ponder the cryptic message further, Hunter came out, leading Grace by her elbow and carrying a small bag of groceries tucked under his arm.

“What’s going on?” Grace asked him.

“Just get in, please.” He held open the front passenger’s side door. “You, too, Story. Please. Hurry. I’ll tell you on the way.” Grace slipped in first, and I got into the backseat. Hunter handed me Grace’s bag of groceries, slammed the door, and trotted around to the driver’s side.

I heard heavy breathing behind me, glanced back, and saw a crate in the cargo area. Dark canine eyes peered back at me. Large or small, dogs get the hairs on my arms standing at rigid attention. The big ones have big teeth and most of them think they are the leaders of the pack, which includes any humans around. The little ones are even worse, all hyper and ready to latch on to sensitive body parts.

Getting bitten by a dog as a kid has made me leery of all canines.

This one was big. I scooted closer to the door.

As we pulled out to make the short run to the north side of town where Manny and Grace lived, Hunter was more serious than I’d ever seen him. “Have you been home in the last few hours?” he asked Grace.

“Not since earlier this morning. I’ve been visiting my brother and sister-in-law. Why? Did something happen to Manny? Is my husband okay?”

“I’m sorry to have to tell you this, Grace,” Hunter said. “But Manny’s unconscious out by the beehives, and it doesn’t look good.”

“Oh, no!” Grace said.

“Who called you?” I asked.

“Ray Goodwin stopped by to pick up a honey delivery and found him.”

Hunter glanced back at me. Grace looked over at him, and I could see the shock on her face and how pale she was, before I met Hunter’s blue eyes. The message they conveyed wasn’t good. He was preparing her for even worse news.

“Hunter, you have to be wrong!” I said, a little too quickly, a little too loudly in such a confined space, but I’d been caught off guard. “Manny was perfectly fine yesterday morning when I saw him.”

“I came from their place just now,” he said, looking at me in the rearview mirror, “and saw it with my own eyes. That’s why I need your help, Story. Manny’s covered with bees and we can’t get near him.” Then to Grace, “I can’t tell you how bad I feel. You’d better brace yourself for the worst possible case.”

When we arrived at the Chapman property, an ambulance, three fire trucks, and several police vehicles were parked off to the side of the house. Paramedics and firefighters huddled together, studying the beeyard out in the back field. Both the Waukesha Sheriff’s Department and the Moraine Police Department were there. I saw Johnny Jay, the Moraine police chief, off by himself, talking on his phone.

I’d never seen a dead person outside of a coffin, and seeing Manny lying there almost brought me to my knees. If I’d still had a champagne buzz after riding over in Hunter Wallace’s SUV, I instantly sobered up when I walked into the aviary and saw Manny Chapman’s body.

Emotionally, I wanted to be alone someplace, crying my eyes out. I couldn’t stop thinking that if I had been here, none of this would have happened. Logically, however, I knew that I couldn’t fall apart. I was the only living and breathing person available at the moment who knew anything about bees. I had to help.

Manny was lying in the center of the beeyard, sprawled squarely between the hive boxes. He was dressed in a loose long-sleeved shirt rumpled up around his armpits, and sweat pants tucked into a pair of high boots, the same kind I wore to keep bees from crawling inside my clothes.

And, as Hunter had said, Manny was covered with honeybees.

When Manny fell, he must have overturned a plastic five-gallon bucket filled with honey. Some of it had landed on his body, and bees were crawling around, feasting on the thick sweet line that had run out onto his chest from the bucket. My beekeeping friend’s staring eyes were all the indication I needed that he was gone.

This was September. Bees were starting to get extra hungry. Their pollen sources were drying up, and they were busy trying to store enough food for the winter. Contrary to what some people believe, bees don’t hibernate. They tough it out the best they can by huddling together inside their dark homes, protecting their queen from the cold while surviving on honey reserves.

“I’ve always hated those bees,” Grace sobbed, from a distance. She had a knot on her forehead that had swelled like a bag of Jiffy Pop popcorn. When we’d arrived, she’d climbed out of the SUV and had taken one look at her husband’s body lying in the beeyard, then pitched forward in a faint. I’d tried to catch her, but she had forty pounds on me, and we’d both gone down. I’d been lucky, I’d only scraped my right elbow and banged my knee. Even though I’d cushioned her fall, Grace had bounced backward and clunked her head on the side of the SUV.

Grace had never liked Manny’s bees, but whether it was the bees themselves or her husband’s obsession with them, I wasn’t sure. Either way, she refused to have anything to do with them.

“He’s dead,” she said. “I can tell. And the damn bees did it.”

“You’re not really blaming his bees?” I said, astonished that anyone—least of all Grace, who lived among them—would think that honeybees were dangerous, let alone deadly.

“Well, it sure looks like they killed him,” one of the officers said from behind me. “Was he allergic?”

“No,” Grace said.

“Absolutely not,” I agreed. Some beekeepers would start out without problems, but then developed allergic reactions to stings over time. Manny wasn’t one of them.

Police Chief Johnny Jay stood by himself, still talking on his cell phone, but he had one eye on me and it was clear he didn’t like what he saw.

Johnny Jay didn’t fit any of the physical or mental stereotypes associated with small-town cops. He wasn’t overweight and didn’t eat donuts. He didn’t wear mirrored sunglasses or talk around a toothpick. Johnny looked like a choirboy or a boy scout—clean-cut, good teeth, and even though he was approaching thirty-four, he looked much younger. He was smart, calculating, and serious about his position. This wasn’t your typical Mayberry cop.

But Johnny had enough buffed-up muscle to let you know that he had a major vain streak, and when he opened his mouth and you heard the garbage come out, you knew something was seriously wrong with the boy. That is, if you were listening hard.

Way back when, if I had known that the biggest bully in school would grow up to be the chief lawman in the same town I lived in, I wouldn’t have gone up against him so many times. Okay, maybe that’s not true. I would have anyway. Johnny Jay didn’t fool me then, and he didn’t fool me now. He was still a bully, but he’d become sneakier at it.

“A man can only stand so many stings before the venom will poison him to death,” one of the uniformed county sheriff deputies said.