Mind Your Own Beeswax (6 page)

We were all tight back then, and having Lauren around complicated things. Suddenly our friend Ali was replaced, and the dynamics of the group changed in some inexplicable and very uncomfortable way. I felt the change in us that very first day when she came around on his arm.

Now here we were in the woods looking for my runaway honeybees and all of a sudden we were talking about Lauren Kerrigan.

“What a blast from the past,” I muttered to Patti and Holly. Shadows moved and swayed around us, became longer and more sinister. Overhead, the trees seemed to grow taller and denser. Kind of creepy, considering the topic under discussion at the moment.

“Blasts. We all heard gunshots,” Patti pointed out, using
blast
in an entirely different context than I had. None of us had moved from our spots on the deer trail. “This is too spooky for me. What if what we heard were shots from Rita’s missing gun?”

“Would a handgun have sounded that loud?” Holly asked, looking at me.

“That’s a really good question,” I said, again thinking back to the shots we heard earlier.

“You knew all about the differences between rifles and shotguns a little while ago,” my sister pressed. “GA (
Go Ahead
). Enlighten us. What kind of gun was it?”

“Uh, uh . . . How should I know?” I said, realizing I’d used the extent of my limited weapons knowledge on the town’s no-rifle policy.

“Wouldn’t a handgun make more of a firecracker sound?” Patti asked.

Holly piped in. “Or a noise like those snap-n-pops we used to throw on the ground when we were kids? Remember? They sounded like caps?”

“We don’t know if the shots were fired from close by,” I said, “or from far away, so all we’re doing is wildly guessing.”

Too bad Hunter hadn’t been with us when we heard them. He would have known.

I looked down the trail and noticed Holly and Patti doing the same. Up ahead, the path we were following would come out into a clearing, marking the southern end of The Lost Mile. Somewhere north of there it had all started for us back then. Or ended for us, if I wanted to go and be all dramatic.

“Tell me what’s going on,” Patti demanded. “I’ll find out from somebody else, and what if they tell me wrong? Don’t you want me to get the story straight?”

My nosy neighbor had a very good point.

“Besides,” Patti added, “if you can’t trust your best friend, who can you trust?”

Oh jeez, not that again! My next-door neighbor was NOT my best friend. At least not from my point of view.

Holly gave me an amused smirk.

I decided to give Patti the bare bones facts since she wasn’t going to quit bugging me until I did. “In high school a bunch of us went into The Lost Mile from the other end. Some of us had been drinking.”

Holly snorted.

“Okay, all of us were, but some more than others. And bad things happened.” That was an understatement. Too much booze and even more bad judgment had ridden shotgun with Lauren Kerrigan when she pealed away from the northern entrance to The Lost Mile. “Lauren took off on her own,” I continued, “drove into town, and ran over somebody.”

Holly stepped in. “Not just anybody, either. Johnny Jay’s dad. Wayne Jay.”

“Our Johnny Jay’s father?” Patti said. “She killed the police chief’s dad? That’s horrible. How come this is the first I’m hearing about it?” Patti’s eyes actually gleamed with glee, and I had to think the world was filled with gossiping people who thrived on the bad fortunes of others. Please, don’t let me ever be one of them!

I vowed to watch myself carefully.

“What happened to Lauren?” Patti wanted to know.

“She went to prison,” I said. “And no one saw her again.”

There was so much more to the story and it all came rushing back. Lauren had turned eighteen the week before and so had been tried as an adult. Her defense team pushed hard for vehicular manslaughter while driving under the influence, which sounded terrible enough, but Murder One was much worse. They appealed to the jury, imploring them to consider her state of mind, which at the time had been swimming in straight vodka.

Lauren’s life was in the hands of twelve jurors. If they came back with a charge of criminal negligence, her sentence would be light. None of us thought that would happen. And we were right.

The jury couldn’t do that.

Lauren had three strikes against her from the very beginning.

Bullet point one: She couldn’t remember a thing, which wasn’t so surprising considering her condition. After striking Wayne Jay, her car skidded into a tree. She got off easier than her dead victim, only suffering a mild concussion and a bad hangover. Maybe if she had been able to recall the night, she might have been able to defend her actions. Or at least offer an explanation.

Two: Another big factor that hadn’t helped her case was Wayne Jay’s position in the community. At the time of his death, Wayne Jay had been in the same shoes his son went on to fill after his death. Lauren’s victim had been the local police chief.

Three, and most important: After hitting Johnny Jay’s dad, Lauren had backed up, then ran over him a second time. This was the totally incriminating evidence her attorneys couldn’t rationally explain away.

P. P. Patti nudged me. “Wake up.” She waved a hand in front of my face. “Calling Story Fischer.”

I blinked. “Sorry, I was lost in the past.”

“Is there more to tell?” Patti asked.

“That’s pretty much it.”

“But Holly said she might be back to kill again.”

“Ignore me,” Holly said. “I say weird things sometimes.”

“No kidding,” Patti said, shifting her eyes to me. “Can’t you give me something I can use that’s special? Something to tie things together? I have a hunch this is the breaking story I need to get into the newspaper job as a full-time investigative reporter.” Patti grinned. “I like the sound of that—investigative reporter.”

“I’ll have to think a little,” I said to get her off my back. P. P. Patti might get the entire historical scoop from another resident as soon as we retraced our steps and cleared the woods, but she wouldn’t get the finer details from me. I didn’t want to go there.

“Should we go home and call for help, report what we heard?” Patti asked. “Or should we keep going on this path, in the dark, with Lantern Man running loose and who knows what else?”

“You can go back and report the shot if you want to,” I said, fumbling with the flashlight I’d brought along until its beam lit up the ground at my feet, knowing what Chief Johnny Jay would say if I were the one doing the calling. It wouldn’t be pleasant. Or printable. “While you’re doing that, we’ll keep going.”

“We?” Holly said.

“You and me. In case you forgot, our original mission was to find and retrieve a swarm of honeybees. Somehow we got sidetracked.”

I cut my eyes to Patti.

She was hesitating, trying to make up her mind which way to go, caught between two potentially exciting possibilities: Running home to be the first to report shots fired, which could possibly have been from Rita’s missing gun. Or staying with us in case we found something more tangible, equally newsworthy, or even better. I was pretty sure this was a no-brainer for Patti. And I was right. She decided in a flash.

“I’m staying with you two,” she said, taking up a position behind Holly as I claimed the lead. Patti had said the same thing in my backyard about coming along, right before she reversed directions and backed out, but this time she seemed to mean it. No way was Patti going to miss an opportunity like this, whatever “this” turned out to be.

Even though we still had time before dark, I was relieved when we crossed the wooden bridge to the other side of the river and into the clearing where The Lost Mile began, leaving the semi-darkness of the trees’ canopy behind us for a few final rays of sunshine. We were on higher ground with the fog behind us, but I knew we’d have to deal with it again on the way back.

Not an encouraging prospect. We had to get going.

“What are you doing?” Holly asked when I stopped to scan the tree line.

“Looking for my swarm. They have to be close by.”

Holly groaned.

Patti added her two cents. “Who cares about a stupid bunch of bees when we should be investigating a possible shooting incident?”

“Exactly,” Holly agreed, just to agree with anything nonbee related.

Patti marched past us without a backward glance, proving that curiosity can outweigh caution under the right conditions.

“Wait for us,” Holly called. “We should stick together.”

We caught up and followed close behind Patti. She stopped every few minutes to scan the woods through her binoculars. Then she began moving ahead fast, on a mission to infiltrate the lowly
Distorter
rag sheet, ready to face anything to get her story.

I grabbed my sister’s arm.

“What?” Holly said, trying to shake free from my grip.

“You’re on your own, Patti,” I said, holding my sister back.

“My allergies are starting to kick up,” Patti called back. “That happens every time I go into the woods. I’ll only go a little farther. If anything happens, I’ll yell for you.” With that, she disappeared down the path like a bolt of lightening.

Holly wiggled into a contorted position, spun around, and broke my grip. “We have to stay together. What’s wrong with you?”

“There they are.” I pointed out the clump of bees in a dead white birch about halfway up its bare branches. My original idea had been to locate them, snip off the branch where they clung, and carry them home. I’d have to revise the plan.

They were too far up off the ground to reach.

Holly spotted them and gurgled like a drowning woman.

I tipped my head back and eyed up the situation. The white birch was totally dead with large holes drilled into it that could only have been made by a pileated woodpecker. But the trunk seemed solid enough in spite of all the holes. “We’ll have to come back tomorrow morning,” I said. “With a ladder.”

“We?” Holly whimpered.

“You and me.”

“Quit including me in your bee problems. IOH (
I’m Outta Here
).”

I grabbed her again and refused to let go, even when she pulled the same move she’d used on me in the past and wrestled me into a headlock.

“You’re the one who wanted a partnership,” I croaked through the clench, working to break it, “when all I wanted was a loan and monthly installments.”

“I wanted a partnership in the grocery store, not in the bee stuff.”

“You don’t get to choose. You’re either in all the way or you aren’t in at all. Let me go!”

Holly released me so abruptly, I lurched forward.

“I hate when you do that,” I said. “I’m telling Mom.”

“Oh right, Squealy. Like she’d care.”

“What are you? Twelve?”

“NC (
No Comment
),” my sister said, starting to laugh. Pretty soon we were both grinning, on good terms again.

“Let’s go back to your house,” Holly said. “I’m getting cold.”

“We better wait for Patti. She won’t go far.”

“Of course. You can’t abandon your
best
friend. But I can.”

“I have the flashlight and you aren’t getting it.” I waved it in front of her, snatching it back when she made a grab for it.

“Should we follow her?” Holly said. “Hasn’t she been gone awhile now?”

I slid down the trunk of the tree my bees had chosen, tucking my knees against my chest. “I’m waiting here.”

“What about the bees?” Holly looked up.

“What about them?”

“What if they attack?”

“It’s not sunny and warm anymore. They’re sleeping.” Which wasn’t exactly true. Most beekeepers, myself included, believed bees didn’t sleep at all. But Stanley Peck insisted he could hear his bees snoring. Whatever the case, Holly bought my reassurance and slid down next to me.

“I can’t believe Lauren Kerrigan came back to Moraine,” I said.

“I never really knew her,” Holly said. “I was a freshman that year.”

I nodded in understanding.

The three years between Holly and me had seemed like an enormously wide age gap during our teens. We hadn’t really gotten to know each other until recently, and now the difference in ages didn’t matter one tiny bit. What’s three years in the scheme of things? But back then it was huge.

“I remember how long you were grounded,” Holly said. “And how the lawyers said you weren’t supposed to talk about what happened, even with your friends. And how you had to go to court and testify. What a bummer. Did anybody ever figure out why she ran over Wayne Jay two times?”

I shook my head. “No. She was so drunk when it happened, she was lucky she didn’t die from alcohol poisoning.”

“What a horrible thing to go through.”

“I can’t believe that emaciated woman in my candle-making class was Lauren Kerrigan. I wouldn’t have recognized her in a million years. Why didn’t she identify herself to me?”