Flight Patterns (38 page)

“Don't you wait where the trees are, / When the lightnings play, / Nor don't you hate / where Bees are, / Or else they'll pine away. / Pine away—dwine away— / Anything to leave you! / But if you never grieve your Bees, / Your Bees'll never grieve you.”

Rudyard Kipling

—NED BLOODWORTH'S BEEKEEPER'S JOURNAL

Georgia

W
e arrived in Apalachicola after a record-breaking four-and-a-half-hour trip that involved only one stop for gas and coffee. James ate something, but I couldn't bear the thought of food. My foot sat heavy on the pedal, my knuckles white as I gripped the steering wheel. All I wanted right now was reassurance, someone who knew how to offer companionship without stealing my solitude. James seemed to recognize this, and several times placed his hand over mine when I rested it on the bench seat beside me to get the blood flowing again. It made me think of Kate, his wife, and all she'd thrown away, wondering as I watched the miles pass whether she'd thought of him in her last moments, grieved what was already lost.

James kept up with Maisy and Lyle on my phone with updates, and shared them with me. Unfortunately there was nothing more to add
than what Maisy had already told me. No witnesses, no notes, no sign of an elderly woman and young girl walking the streets of Apalachicola. No
reason
for them to be gone. At least as far as the rest of us knew.

During the last leg of the drive, as we headed down Highway 98 through Mexico Beach, my phone beeped. “Text?” I asked, feeling excitement, wondering whether it could be Becky since that was her favorite form of communication.

James looked down at the screen and shook his head. “No. E-mail. You get e-mail on this, you know. Someone must have set it up to send you alerts whenever you have a new one.”

I remembered Jeannie the previous week commandeering my phone to set it up so I could use it “like a normal person.”

“It's from Henri Volant.”

In the stress and worry about Becky and Birdie, I'd spared no thought for the elusive china pattern or the beekeeper and his young daughter. I wasn't even sure that I wanted to deal with it now. But a niggling thought kept scratching at my brain. How Birdie and Colette were both the same age. How Colette had been given to another family to live with.

“Henri is the curator for a museum in Limoges,” I explained. “He knows a lot about the area and Limoges china.”

“Do you want me to open it?”

I swallowed hard. I wanted to tell him no, to deny the possibilities. Run away from anything that was unpleasant, because that was what I'd always done. Yet here I was, traveling back down the road I swore I'd never travel again. Maybe this meant I was through with running, was old enough now to face the truth, whatever it might be, and confront Birdie's past that was inexorably tied to mine and Maisy's, no matter how hard it would be to hear. Or forgive.

I turned to James. “Yeah, you probably should.”

After waiting a moment, James read, “‘So good to hear from you. I am very happy to continue to assist you with your research, and am very happy to send you information on Giles Mouton. He is a
local hero, did you know? I must leave now for a conference in Geneva, but will be back in two days' time, when I will send more information. For now, here is a photocopy of a letter from my museum archives that I think you will find most helpful. I apologize that I could not be of more help with your first inquiry, but once you mentioned the name Mouton, I knew exactly where to look.'”

For a moment I almost forgot my worry and the reason for this trip. “Giles Mouton is a hero?”

“Apparently,” James said. He was silent, staring at the screen. “Wow. This is remarkable.”

He continued to read in silence, and I began to get uneasy. “Are you going to share it with me?”

“Yes, sorry. It's in French, so I had to read it a couple of times to make sure I was translating it correctly.”

“And?”

“It's a letter from a Jean Luc de Beaulieu, dated January 1893. It's addressed to Pierre Mouton, thanking Mr. Mouton and his family for one hundred years of service as official beekeepers of the Beaulieu estate, and asking Mr. Mouton to accept a set of china as a token of his gratitude.”

My hands felt slippery on the wheel and I had to grasp it harder. “Does it describe the china?”

“No. There's nothing else.” He paused. “But I think we can make assumptions based on everything else we've learned.”

I thought for a moment. “If that was 1893, then Giles might have been Pierre's grandson, and then the china was passed down until it was inherited by Giles from his father,” I said, trying to focus on the road in front of me.

“And then to Colette, his daughter.”

As if in mutual agreement, we were silent for the rest of the trip, each of us trying to slide the pieces into a puzzle that had lost all size and shape, the unspoken questions drowned out by the sound of the wind in our ears and the steady beat from the radio.

Maisy and Lyle ran out to greet us as soon as I pulled up into the
driveway, Lyle's arm around her shoulders. For a moment I thought Maisy would hug me, or that I would hug her, and I knew she was thinking the same thing, the way we stood on our toes leaning forward.
You called me first,
I wanted to say, but didn't. The circumstances were wrong, and I wanted to think that we were both too old to keep score.

But Lyle hugged me and kissed my cheek before shaking James's hand. “Any news?” James asked.

Maisy shook her head, and I saw her red and swollen eyes, the hollows under her cheekbones. “No. We've set up a command central here, and there are teams working everywhere, but nothing yet. Nobody's seen a trace of them.” She choked on the last word, unable to say it.

“The coast guard is sending a helicopter to search the bay, just in case they took a boat and ran into trouble and can't get back,” Lyle said softly.

We moved up onto the shade of the porch. “How is Grandpa taking it?”

Maisy's brow furrowed. “I don't know—he won't say anything. And he won't leave the apiary.”

I looked at Lyle. “Has he said anything since I left?”

“No. Nothing—although his speech and writing have improved enough that he can communicate if he chooses to.” He glanced up at Maisy. “He's fighting some battle in his head, but he doesn't seem to want to ask for help.”

Maisy's phone rang and she jumped to answer it, hanging up after just a few words. “One of the teachers from Becky's school, Susan Clementson. She's organized the teachers so that they're all driving around and asking people if they've seen Becky or Birdie. There's nothing. We're thinking they left pretty soon after midnight, and that they had a good head start in the dark so nobody would notice them.” Her voice broke and I felt myself leaning toward her, wanting to hug her. But Lyle put his arm around her shoulders and allowed her to press her face into his chest. I felt more sad than relieved.

We moved inside and the house seemed so empty and soulless, the corners darker. It was almost hard to breathe. “Can we go up to
Becky's room?” I asked, not sure what I might be looking for, but knowing I had to start somewhere or go crazy.

I stood in the middle of Becky's bedroom, seeing how childish it was, with the small pink table and chairs, the ruffles on the bedspread, the stuffed honeybee mobile that danced in the corner in a draft from the air-conditioning vent. She'd told me she wanted to keep bees, too, that Florence had said she and Grandpa would help get her started as soon as Grandpa was feeling better. I stood under the mobile in the middle of all that pink and knew that I would have kept the room the same, would have wanted to keep Becky a little girl as long as possible. Maisy and I both understood that childhood was just a tiny blip in a person's lifetime, and that the rest of Becky's life she'd be forced to spend as an adult.

“Did she say anything to you? Give you any reason to think she would run away?” I asked.

“She did say something, but not for a moment did I think she'd run away,” Maisy answered, looking at Lyle as if she needed corroboration. “Last night when she was packing for camp, she told me she didn't want to go. That she needed to keep an eye on Birdie. I told her that's what I was here for, that I would take care of Birdie. And Becky seemed to accept it, and was even excited about camp.” She threw up her hands, as if she'd already gone over and over it all in her head and still couldn't find a plausible answer. But her eyes looked directly into mine and we were little girls again, and she was looking at me as if I held all the answers.

I turned away, then walked across the hall to Birdie's room. Her bed was unmade, all the drawers in her chest and dresser neatly closed, her nightgown carefully folded at the bottom of the bed.

“She changed into a dress, which would make her less obvious if she was walking around at night than if she were still wearing her nightgown,” Lyle said.

Like she knew. Like she planned it.
I wondered whether anybody else had thought the same thing. I walked to the closet and opened it, moving to the back as if my younger self were pushing me forward. The suitcase was still there, where Maisy said she'd returned it after
finding the teapot lid. I pulled it out of the closet, then opened it on top of the bed.

“I looked through all the pockets,” Lyle said. “I only found the lid.”

“I know,” I said. “But I always like to see for myself.”

“You sound like Caroline,” James said, and I had the impression that he'd meant it as a compliment.

Maisy left and came back with the lid. “I hid this in my drawer, just in case Birdie went looking for it again.”

She gave it to me, allowed me to hold it in my palm and feel the heft of it, to see the pattern of the bees. “I'm pretty sure now that the entire set of china was made for the Mouton family—the beekeepers on the Beaulieu estate. It was a thank-you gift for one hundred years of service.”

Maisy's eyes met mine. “And yet it ended up in James's grandmother's home, and two pieces ended up here.”

“Actually, just one and a half,” Lyle corrected. “We found the teapot lid, but not the teapot.”

“Could that have been what she was looking for in the attic?” I asked Maisy. “Because you said she had the lid in her hand when you found her.”

Maisy shrugged, her shoulders shaking, and I could tell she was trying very hard to keep it together. “Who knows what's in Birdie's head? Have we ever known?”

“Maybe she's gone looking for the teapot,” James suggested. “That's just a guess, but it follows her discovery in the attic with the lid, and the empty cedar chest. Maybe she's on a quest to find it, and Becky decided to go with her to keep her safe.”

“That makes no sense,” Maisy said. “I can't believe Becky would just leave without telling me.” Lyle put his arm around her, and Maisy let her head rest against him.

I continued to hold the lid, thinking. Remembering. I looked up at Maisy. “That summer I left—the summer when Birdie stopped talking. Grandpa found her in the attic—remember? She'd collapsed and was lying on the floor. Maybe she found something she didn't expect and it made her—I don't know—lose touch with reality.”

Maisy's gaze met mine. “Or it made her remember something.” She thought for a moment. “I'm wondering. . . . I found something that may or may not have anything to do with this. There's a possibility that Grandpa was sterile. He had mumps as a child—it's in his medical records. It could have made him unable to have children—like James's uncle. What if Birdie isn't his?”

Our thoughts ran in tandem, a blur of unexpected discoveries over the last few weeks: of the beekeepers on an estate in France, our grandfather's possible sterility, and of a little girl named Colette Mouton who came to America in 1947 and then disappeared.

I looked away, breaking the connection.

“Your grandpa found Birdie in the attic that first time?” James asked.

Maisy nodded. “Yes. He brought her down the steps and called the doctor.”

“Did anybody else go up into the attic?”

I shook my head. “No. Grandpa said he didn't want anybody else up there. He said there were a lot of spiders.”

Lyle and James shared a look. “So nobody went up there after Birdie collapsed, so nobody knows if something might have been taken out of the attic and put somewhere else?” Lyle asked.

“No. I left shortly after that and . . .” I stopped, realizing what I was about to say.

“And I was pregnant,” Maisy said. “I didn't want to risk a fall, so I didn't go up. I don't think I've been up there since.”

I stood. “None of this is helping. We've got to figure something out or I'm going to get in my car and start driving. Are we sure they didn't take a car or bikes or any form of transportation?”