Buzz Off (5 page)

“How many times are you going to arrange that same shelf?” Stanley Peck asked. I’d been rearranging a honey display back at The Wild Clover while trying to clear the image of my dead mentor from my head. The day was like a bad dream, only I wasn’t going to wake up from this one.

My loyal part-time employees, the twins Trent and Brent Craig, had arrived at the market ahead of me. They were working the counter, checking out customers and bagging.

“Carrie Ann got wasted and went home as soon as we got here,” Trent had said when Hunter dropped me off.

Just great. I’d have to deal with her at some point.

Word spreads fast in a small town, and Moraine is no exception. Customers flowed through the door of the store, hanging around to get more details and to commiserate.

“Manny started me out with my first queen bee,” I said to nearby customers. “When I wanted to have hives in my backyard, he gave me thousands of worker bees. And when he realized I was serious about beekeeping, he included me in his business, teaching me what he knew and giving me a cut on any sales I made.”

I wasn’t telling anybody anything they didn’t already know. Everybody knew how Manny had taken me under his wing, but we were all reminiscing and sharing stories. I wiped away a renegade tear and continued, “Other beekeepers have lots of problems with diseases and mites. Not Manny. He was the best beekeeper and he left some big shoes to fill.” Which was true. Bee management came with all kinds of problems—parasites, pests like ants and mice getting into the hives, predators, and diseases, both old and new. Manny was always on the cutting edge of new technology and preventive care.

“We target practiced together,” Stanley said. “Right out in his backyard with Grace and Carol egging us on and critiquing every shot.”

“Manny was one of a kind,” Milly Hopticourt added. Milly was a seventyish retired schoolteacher built like Julia Child and, like the famous chef, she loved to cook so much that I’d made her the official tester for all of the recipes that appeared in The Wild Clover newsletters.

“He’ll be missed plenty,” other folks agreed.

That was an understatement from my point of view, and not only from a personal perspective. The future of his honey business was in serious jeopardy with his death. I’d secretly counted on a full partnership at some point in the near future, and with him gone, that dream was totally shattered.

Manny, or rather Grace now, owned the honey house, the land, the equipment, and most of the bees. All the bees, actually, except for the two hives in my backyard I kept to pollinate the neighborhood gardens and to provide me with a little honey for my own personal use. Could I carry on without him, keep Queen Bee Honey going? Would Grace even agree to sell the business to me?

Not to mention another pressing business-related problem—my total lack of expertise at managing bees. I’d been in training for a year and a half, but it was only this spring that I started with my own hives. Could I manage eighty hives alone? If Grace would give me the opportunity, I’d make it work. Manny had known what he was talking about when he said that bees would get into my blood. They had.

I gave up on reshuffling the honey products, since it wasn’t helping numb the pain I felt, and went outside where people were loitering in front of the store. The crowd not only filled the assortment of Adirondack chairs lined up on the grass, it spilled out onto the sidewalk. “I heard the sirens early on,” Emily Nolan, the librarian, said. Her presence made me realize how the day had flown. If Emily was here, the library must be closed, meaning that it had to be after five. “Didn’t all of you hear the sirens?” she asked.

I hadn’t, but then I’d been focused on myself, living inside my own head, laughing and celebrating, boozing it up while Manny’s life oozed away.

I must be a slow learner because it took a while after I went back into the shop for the reality of the situation to sink in. I suddenly realized I had bigger worries than an employee drinking on the job and an ex-husband living next door to me. It didn’t take long for the news of Manny’s death to spread, for people to find out that I’d been at the scene and saw some of what happened. My presence in his beeyard and the manner and place where Manny died didn’t help matters one bit.

It only took one excited town gossip named P. P. Patti Dwyre to put what I feared the most into words. P. P. Patti, short for Pity-Party Patti, lived next door to me (on the opposite side of Clay) and spent most of her time trying to convince people to feel sorry for her, making sure everyone knew just how crappy her life was. Her life wasn’t one bit worse than anyone else’s. She just complained more.

“Raccoons got into my attic,” P. P. Patti whined to me, handing over a cloth grocery bag. I rang up her items and began placing them in the bag. “It’s probably going to cost a gazillion dollars to repair the damage, and I just don’t know where the money will come from or where to find anyone to help with the handy work.”

“Put a notice on the board.” I waved to the bulletin board next to the entryway where customers sold their litters of puppies and kittens, or looked for work, or offered to deliver topsoil and mulch in the summer months or plow snow in the winter.

Patti’s head swung in the general direction, but I could tell she had other things on her mind.

“I heard,” she said in front of everyone inside the store, “that Manny was murdered by killer bees.”

That’s all it took.

“Was Manny really stung to death by bees?” Stanley asked the group in general.

“We won’t know anything for sure until the medical examiner finishes up,” I said.

I counted on a favorable verdict, so I kept quiet, mainly because it was easiest. But looking back, I should have made it clear that there was no way honeybees could’ve been involved in Manny’s death. Yellow jackets were the most likely culprits, having the ability to sting multiple times. Yellow jackets were loners, not traveling as a group, but if one got angry and stung, it released a chemical that alerted other yellow jackets. Then they would arrive on the scene and join in the attack.

Whether venom killed Manny or something else caused his death, only Jackson would be able to say conclusively after performing his medical examiner’s miracles.

I felt so bad for Grace that my heart ached.

I heard a truck’s backup alarm and spotted Ray Goodwin’s delivery truck sliding in to park in the back of the store. Trent came out to unload produce. He carried in boxes filled with vegetables while Ray ticked things off on a supply sheet. I joined him.

“I need a signature,” Ray said, handing me the clipboard. “Awful about Manny and those bees.”

“His bees didn’t kill him.” I signed off on the order, thinking I’d be saying that a lot in the upcoming days.

“Sure looked like they did,” he said. “I’m the one who found him right after I stopped at Kenny’s Bees.”

I glanced up from the clipboard. Hunter had already told me that Ray found Manny, but that wasn’t what caught my attention. “Kenny Langley’s?”

Although I knew of the Langley family through my grandmother, I’d officially met Kenny just once, in the spring, when he and Manny sat down to negotiate sales territories. I didn’t like him from the start, because he’d treated me with an exaggerated indifference. Plus, he’d called me “the girl.”

I’d been working in the honey house right next to where he and Manny had had their little chat. So I knew what the old-fashioned handshake entailed. Manny would take Waukesha County, Kenny would stay in Washington County—a logical solution, since they each lived and worked in his own territory. It was a truce that seemed to satisfy both of them. As the two fastest-growing producers in both counties, they didn’t seem at all concerned about the little guys who operated hobby honey farms and dabbled in a sale here and there. Manny had introduced me to Kenny when they first sat down, Kenny more or less ignored me, then before the meeting broke up, Manny asked me to be the official contact person if there were any issues.

That had been a pleasant surprise, in spite of my not liking Kenny. Anything to be involved. Manny wasn’t interested in the sales and negotiation end of his business, which led me to hope that I would be able to take that burden off his shoulders completely in the future. Marketing was second nature to me after owning a small business like The Wild Clover. In any case, there hadn’t been any problems that caused me and Kenny to meet again, which suited me just fine.

“What were you doing at Kenny Langley’s?” I asked.

“Oops.” Ray looked uncomfortable. His eyes flitted away and his coloring deepened like he’d been caught with his hand in the cash register.

“You’re distributing honey from Kenny’s?” I said with narrowing eyes. Kenny’s Bees should definitely have been off-limits to Ray. Every since he took over deliveries two years ago, Manny and Ray had had an exclusive agreement regarding honey. Ray helped Manny get his honey onto other grocers’ shelves, and Ray received a deeper discount. Since I had a small piece of the action based on my own sales’ efforts, Ray’s actions cut into my profits, too. I shoved the clipboard back at him. “You have an agreement with Queen Bee Honey, and you know it. How long has this been going on with Kenny’s Bees?”

“Only once,” Ray said, which is exactly what my ex, Clay, had said the first time I caught
him
. “And I feel real bad about it.”

“I bet you do, and you’re going to feel worse when I take a percentage off this invoice you just handed me to compensate for you reneging on an agreement, which, by the way, is now null and void.”

“Come on, Story. It won’t happen again.”

“Manny’s not even in his grave,” I said, laying on the guilt with a spatula. “Or he’d be turning in it.”

“I promise. I really do. What if I take a few more cases than usual and find new buyers? My route’s expanding. I can sell more.”

“We’ll talk about it later.” I gave him a hard look, but my voice changed to small and pained. “Now tell me about finding Manny.”

“Not much to tell.” Ray tipped his ball cap back and scratched his head. “I was supposed to pick up cases of honey between nine and ten this morning. I got there a little before ten and found him covered in bees. I called nine-one-one.”

“Was he dead?”

“I don’t know—he wasn’t moving, and I wasn’t about to check his vital signs with bees flying everywhere.”

“I didn’t see you there this afternoon.”

“I freaked out after I called for help. That never happened to me before, a crisis like that with me the only one around. I’ve never been too good in emergencies. I should have stayed, I know. The sheriff let me have it good for leaving.”

When he drove off, I went inside through the back door thinking about Ray Goodwin. When our long-time deliveryman retired, Ray managed to land the job. But he’d always been a loser with a capital
L
, moving from one job after another, most of them finishing fast with his termination. I made a mental note to keep a better eye on him in the future.

The store buzzed with activity, giving me another brief moment of guilty pain; I felt bad that my store was benefiting from Manny’s death, but it clearly was—I had the evidence of that right before my eyes. A line at the register kept Brent busy ringing up orders. I took over behind the counter so he could help his brother unpack cases of fresh produce from Ray’s truck—apples, corn on the cob, cabbage, beets, and a variety of late potatoes, including my favorite, fingerlings. Today’s delivery was only a small sampling of the abundant produce Wisconsin had to offer at this time of year.

For the rest of the evening, while the twins and I worked, through the pizza we shared from Stu’s Bar and Grill, until eight o’clock when we closed up, I could hear the growing concern in customers’ voices.

I walked the two short blocks home, knowing it was only a matter of time before the residents of the town would come hunting for killers in my own backyard. I had to think of something to prove that Manny’s bees were innocent.

Lights were off in my ex-husband’s jewelry shop next door, but they were on in Clay’s small living area behind the shop, meaning he was entertaining. Why else would he be home on a Friday night? I wondered if he was still with Faye, or if he’d already moved on to someone new.

Faye Tilley, as the entire town knew thanks to their performance outside my store, was only Clay’s latest in a long line of females extending way back into our history as a couple. While I expected my ex to have the unmitigated gall and extreme bad taste to bring her to the divorce proceeding, I blamed Faye just as much for going along with something like that. To top it off, she’d come wearing dragonfly earrings and a wire butterfly barrette in her hair, original pieces I recognized as Clay’s handmade jewelry.

For some twisted reason, it was comforting to know there were other women in the world with judgment as awful as mine. I felt slightly guilty for being happy that it wasn’t me lying in his bed, but it didn’t last more than a second or two. Let someone else think they could change him. The man was like a shell—beautiful on the outside, hollow on the inside.

I turned away from Clay’s house and considered taking my kayak out. It was a routine of mine almost every night. Late in the evening, right before bed, was the best time to be on the Oconomowoc River. I’d added reflective tape to the sides of my kayak and a few strips of it on my life jacket and, on nights when the moon wasn’t shining to light my way, I wore a waterproof headlamp.

But tonight the river didn’t beckon me. I would probably see death in every shadow. Besides, I was drop-dead tired from the day’s stress.

Those nightmares I’d been worrying about after seeing Manny’s dead body caught up with me. I woke up in the middle of the night, startled, thinking I had heard loud voices followed by a scream. I flipped on the outside lights, but didn’t see anything unusual in the backyard. My bees had bunked down at the first fading light. Nothing moved.