Stolen Honey (3 page)

“I said I would, didn’t I?” said Leroy. “I said I’d take care of him. And I will.”

Chapter Two

Gwen was loading the pickup, ready to make the rounds of the Branbury farms where she kept hives, when the police car pulled up behind, blocking her exit. She knew who it was and she didn’t want to see him right now. She loaded in her record book, the smoker, gloves and bee veil, the sugar syrup, a few extra boards to put under hives that might need them, and then climbed into the driver’s seat. “Olen,” she shouted at the lanky, gray-haired man in the white car, “I can’t talk now, I’ve work to do. Mert will give you a cup of coffee. He likes company while he works.”

She was usually glad to see Olen Ashley, but now she was busy. He was a local cop, a friend of her father’s. As a child she’d called him Uncle Olen, but when she grew older he became more of a big brother. In her last year of high school she grew aware that he had more interest in her than a brother might have, and for a few years she was rather pleased with his attentions, the presents he’d bring her. But six months into the state university she’d met Russell while she was doing a history paper on the Abenaki, and Olen took second place in her affections.

Shortly after that she and Russell married, and so did Olen. But two years later he was childless and divorced; he needed Gwen’s ear, her advice. At least he kept his feelings in check, and for her sake he more or less tolerated Russell’s activism. Although he’d told Russell point-blank that if he caught him doing something illegal he’d have to bring him in. They both understood that. It was getting to be sort of a cat-and-mouse game.

“It’s not coffee I’m looking for,” Olen said, sounding gruff, more like the police lieutenant he was and less the family friend, “it’s a missing person.” He leaned his arms on the cab of her pickup. His face looked huge and flushed in the window.

For a moment Gwen was worried. She counted mentally:

Donna was home and in bed after a late night. Brownie, too, was in bed; it was Sunday, his sleep-in day. Russell’s dad was in his workroom, surrounded by tangles and twists of split wood. Leroy was beside her in the pickup, staring straight ahead as though he didn’t realize a policeman was present. His left leg, though, was jiggling a little from nerves.

“A missing college boy,” Olen went on. “He was last seen driving off with your Donna on a motorcycle.”

Now Gwen’s stomach was doing twists and turns. A motorcycle? But it was Emily Willmarth who’d driven Donna home, wasn’t it?

“I’d like to speak to the girl, Gwen. Not that she’s under any kind of suspicion.” He waved his arms, smiled a little. “But she was the last person to see the boy. He hasn’t been back to his bed in the fraternity.”

“Well, he’s not here. Donna came in at ten of one from a dance. I know, I called out to her, I looked at the clock. Leroy knows. He was still up, weren’t you, Leroy?”

Leroy jerked his head about, his mouth slightly open, as though suddenly aware that there was a police officer nearby. “Yeah. She went in the house then.”

“You see,” Olen said, still leaning his elbows on the open truck window, “his parents were coming up today to take him out to brunch at the Branbury Inn. He’d planned to meet them at ten-thirty. And he wasn’t there.”

“A college boy,” Gwen said. “You were in college once, Olen. Did you ever take off on a Saturday night?”

“Sure, but I wouldn’t leave my motorcycle out on a mountain road. We found it half a mile below here. Look, I’ve got two men searching the general area now. When I heard about the kid’s bringing Donna home, I thought I’d come on up and ask.” He looked sympathetic, his eyes on Gwen’s face. “I’d like to talk to Donna, please, Gwen. These are New York parents. They’re all in a twit.”

Brownie appeared in the kitchen doorway. “Mom! There’s no Froot Loops in the pantry. What’m I supposed to eat for breakfast?”

She saw her son the way Olen would see him, a slight, poor-complexioned boy with bowed legs like he didn’t get enough calcium in his bones. Though she did try. Brownie had always been a fussy eater.

“Have the Raisin Bran,” she called. “I’ll buy some more Froot Loops. And go wake Donna, will you? Tell her Uncle Olen wants to see her.”

She’d had the children call Olen “uncle” when they were small, and they still called him that. The word “uncle” made the mission seem more innocent. And it was innocent, wasn’t it? What college boy wanted to have brunch with his parents when something more exciting might come along?

Another concern sprang up. Had he really brought Donna home last night—and on a motorcycle? She and Russell had had a few drinks, made love, and slept like babies—at least
he
had— until Donna came home. With Donna safe in bed, she’d slept soundly. Russell was out of the house by five-forty-five. Had he seen a motorcycle? She hoped not. It would blow his mind! She was suddenly upset with that college boy, upset with Donna. With Olen, too. It was a gorgeous April day. The pussy willows were out, the bees were overjoyed. Why was Olen pulling a shadow over her world?

And here was a second police car, pulling up behind Olen’s. Would she never get away this morning? A short, robust-looking woman shouted, “The cycle’d been here, I could see the tracks. Shall we search the woods?”

Olen glanced at Gwen. “With your permission? He might have just gone in the woods to, um, sleep it off. They’d been at a party, right?” His tone was more conciliatory, his voice sorter, throatier. “He could have got lost, trying to get back to his bike. He’s had a couple warnings for that thing—shouldn’ta been driving it. I suppose Donna didn’t know.”

“But why was the bike a half mile down the road if he was in our woods? Does that make sense?”

“Gwen,” said Olen, poking his big gray head close to her face, “nothing makes sense when you’re twenty years old. Right, Leroy?” For the first time he addressed the hired boy. Leroy nodded and pulled the bill of his feed cap down over his bushy red eyebrows.

“So we’ll have a look,” Olen said to the officer, a sergeant, who was out of her car now. “Tell Donna not to go anywhere,” he warned Gwen. “We’ll want to talk to her. The boy might’ve said something about where he was headed, you know.”

“It’s damp in there,” Gwen said, resigned to losing half a morning’s work. “You’d better let me come with you. You don’t want to get those nice black shoes muddy.” She wasn’t going to worry. What would a college boy be doing in her woods? This “missing person” label was definitely premature. “So let’s get going,” she told Olen, who was lifting an anxious eyebrow.

“Stay here and explain to Donna what we’re doing,” she told Leroy. “Don’t alarm her, though.” She strode on ahead of the two officers. For one thing, she wanted to steer them away from the barrel she illegally burned her trash in.

They were partway into the swamp, picking their way slowly through the frosty grasses, when the sergeant, who had gone on ahead, gave a yell. “Stay back,” Olen warned, and lurched forward. For a moment the woods were silent except for twittering birds and snapping twigs where some small animal had squeezed through.

But she wasn’t going to stay back. If they’d found something—someone—in her woods, she wanted to see. This was a controversial area they were in now. A variety of unusual plants grew here: oleander, nightshade, pokeweed. Marijuana. She didn’t want them to recognize that!

“Be careful, I told you,” she called out. “Watch for any plants you’re not familiar with.”

“Too late for this kid,” the sergeant shouted back, and when Gwen caught up, she heard Olen say, “Oh, Jesus Christ.”

A dark-haired boy lay there, face down, the skin horribly red and swollen on the back of his neck and hands as though he’d been rolling in the leaves. When the sergeant turned him over— though Olen swore at her for doing that—she saw the hot red dry puffy skin of his face, the purple black bruises on the neck, something that looked like an unhealed cut on his cheek. Flies were buzzing about his head; she heard the hum of wild bees in the white Adder’s Mouth that grew nearby. She saw the discolored place in the grass where the boy had been vomiting. He appeared to be sleeping—if that’s what he had been doing—in a patch of deadly nightshade.

Gwen had a headache when she woke up the next morning; it was drumming and drumming in her temples. She had just had a call from Olen. The news was bad. She had asked Olen to give her time, to let her talk to the young people alone. She had had to turn aside his insistent questions yesterday. “You can see Donna later, not now,” she’d told him, feeling disoriented, swept away. “She’s upset enough without you hurling questions at her.” Now she, Donna, and Leroy were walking the woods together. She wanted Donna to retrace her steps, Leroy to tell his part of the story. She needed the facts herself before Olen tried to elicit them in his plowmanlike fashion.

“I want the whole story. The whole truth,” she insisted, “out of both of you.”

“It was here,” Donna said when they’d gone twenty yards into the woods. “I mean around here I left him—I can’t remember exactly. He tried to—well, he tried to do stuff, I didn’t like it. I fell—”

“She was pushed,” Leroy said, his hands hanging like rakes at his sides. “She was on the ground.”

Donna glared at him. “I fell. That’s when he—Anyway, then you came, Leroy. You had no business following us in like that! You should leave me alone. Stick to what you’re paid for. The bees. My personal life doesn’t concern
you.”

“Donna,” Gwen murmured, seeing Leroy’s stricken expression. “Enough.”

“If I hadn’t come by just then—” Leroy went on, and was shushed by Gwen. She didn’t want to hear this part. She just wanted facts. Where and when, not what.

“It wasn’t here,” Leroy said. “It was over by that sugar maple. I remember, it’s the tree with the red slash. I made it myself when Brownie wanted a path he could ski.”

Gwen looked at the tree, at the ground beneath it. The snow had already melted in the April sun that snaked down through the budding leaves; there was no sign of a struggle, of a body lying there.

“He was there when I left,” Leroy said. “He was out of it. He was drunk. I tried to wake him up, get him to go home. It didn’t work. So I left him there. I figured he’d wake up sooner or later, get on his big motorcycle, and go home to his safe little bed.”

“You said you’d take care of him. You did!” Donna cried, grabbing his arm.

“Well, I tried, didn’t I?” He shook his arm free. “I told you I tried. It’d stopped snowing. The moon was back out. It wasn’t that cold, he wasn’t gonna freeze. He had a big fancy coat on. I noticed he didn’t give
you
that coat to wear. You were the one would of froze if I hadn’t—”

“Stop it, both of you!” Gwen shouted. She took a breath to steady herself. “But if you left him here, Leroy, then how did he get into the swamp? Tell me that.”

Leroy was silent. Donna looked at him and he shook his shaggy head. “Not me. I just left him here, like I said. He must’ve got in there himself. Went the wrong way.”

“They found the motorcycle down the road,” Gwen said. “Is that where he left it?” She looked at Donna. The girl was clutching her hands together, as though trying to squeeze something out of them.

“Shep left it by the fence. At the foot of the driveway!” She sounded totally distraught now. One hand flew up to her forehead as though she, too, had a headache. A hangover, Gwen supposed, feeling her own head pounding. The girl wasn’t used to drinking. Gwen had to understand. How could you go to a fraternity dance without drinking? How could a young girl say no?

“I didn’t move it. It wasn’t me,” said Leroy, gazing off at something Gwen couldn’t see. “I don’t know how it got down there. Somebody else must’ve moved it.”

“Somebody else,” Gwen repeated numbly. “Then somebody else could have pulled the boy into the swamp. The police found him with his face in the nightshade—at least fifty feet from here.” She added, “Atropine and belladonna come from that plant, you know. If it gets into the bloodstream it can paralyze the nervous system, it can kill.”

How ironic, that word “belladonna,” she thought. It meant “beautiful woman.” It was said that, during the Renaissance, women applied an extract of the plant to their eyes to dilate their pupils, enhance their appearance. But the boy had been far from beautiful when they found him. His dilated eyes looked ghastly, shocked, as though he’d seen a horrible sight. It wouldn’t—couldn’t—have been her lovely Donna.

“You said he wasn’t dead. You said there was a pulse.” Donna yanked at her mother’s sleeve, her hand shaking. “Please, Mom, you said he was still alive.”

“Then, yes,” Gwen said. “But Olen called. He’s gone, Donna, the boy is dead.”

Donna cried out; she turned away, her shoulders quaking.

“I’m so sorry.” Gwen put an arm around her daughter, who seemed to need holding up. “Sorry for you. For the parents. But we have to face this. The police will be back here with questions. You’ll have to remember everything. The time, the place, any other sounds you heard—the most minute details. And I’m not just talking to
you.
Donna. You, too, Leroy. You’re a witness as well. Probably a suspect.” She put her free hand on his arm. “I don’t mean to scare you. I just want you to be prepared.”

She saw Leroy give her a sidelong glance. She wondered if he knew what she was thinking about. Russell was there, too, that night, although he didn’t know where his daughter had gone—Gwen hadn’t dared tell him. But why would Russell go out in the woods? Unless he’d heard the motorcycle, suspected it was Donna—he’d have gone off soon enough then. He’d have been angry—she didn’t want to think how angry.

She remembered now the dirty boots she’d found the next morning in the kitchen—she’d cleaned off the dried mud, put them back in Russell’s closet. But of course it was mud from the Revolutionary War reenactments, not swamp mud. There was no need for Olen to know about Russell’s presence at home, was there? No, definitely not. She held tight to Donna as they made their way slowly back to the house.

* * * *

Donna slipped in through the side door of Emily’s dormitory. There was no one in sight, thank heavens. Everyone would know by now about Shep Noble’s death, about where he’d been found. She still couldn’t believe it; it was like a nightmare she was breathing heavily through. She couldn’t grieve—she’d hardly known Shep, she hated what he’d tried to do to her. But she never wanted him dead!