Mind Your Own Beeswax (25 page)

“Want to ride over with me?”

Holly rolled her eyes, as if that was the silliest question of the day. “NFW (
No Freaking Way
). I hate bees.”

“Oh, come on. You have from now until tomorrow morning totally free. Ali and the twins don’t need your help and your man’s still out of town. Have you two made up yet?”

“Sorta. We’re talking. He’ll be home AND (
Any Day Now
). Thanks for letting me stay with you. It’s helping to have family around.”

“Hop in.”

Holly still stood by the window, not moving. “I can’t go along with you. The store might get busy. One of us should stay close by in case.”

“Since when did you become Ms. Responsible Store Partner?”

“Since two seconds ago when my only other choice involves bees.”

“You’re my bodyguard.”

“AIR (
As I Remember
) you promised not to make me help with your bees if I got rid of Mom the other day. Which I did.”

“These aren’t my bees.”

“Same difference.”

“Well, you promised to protect me after I made my promise, so your promise to stick close to me overrides mine. Besides, we’re family. I need you.”

Those were the magic words, because Holly made a face and that familiar lip pout while she went around the front of the truck, opened the passenger door, and got in. “I’m only doing this,” she said, “because you played the family card. Cheap shot.”

On the way over to Stanley’s, I told her about Norm’s alleged Lantern Man lie, which I planned to prove soon, and how the real culprit wasn’t a man, it was a woman. Lantern Woman (aka Hetty Cross). And how I couldn’t understand why Hunter was wasting time interrogating Gunnar when he could be taking care of the real killer and keeping our streets safe.

When we pulled into Stanley’s driveway, my cell phone rang. The number on the display wasn’t familiar. I shouldn’t have answered, but I did.

“We need to talk, Missy Fischer,” Johnny Jay said without identifying himself. I’d know that voice anywhere.

“Johnny, you need to stay away from me. Or I’m getting a restraining order.” Yes, I needed a restraining order pronto. Even if it involved face-to-face confrontation in a court of law.

Holly, on the other side of Ben, sat up straight when she heard me say Johnny’s name. She stared at me.

“I’m hanging up,” I said, but that wasn’t true. I needed to find out just how angry he really was and to what lengths he’d go to get his revenge.

“I think you want to hear what I have to say,” he said next.

“Uh, no, not really, but if you insist, say it.”

“Not this way. In person.”

Oh, right, like that was going to happen in this lifetime. The next thing I said just popped out. “Is that how you got Lauren to meet you in the woods? Pretending you had something important to tell her?”

That was really the wrong thing to blurt, because I should have kept him off guard until I had more information. I hated when I blurted.

The pause was pronounced, as in uncomfortable and awkward.

Then he said, “So you’ve been sitting down at that store of yours, pointing your finger at me, telling all your customers I killed Lauren Kerrigan.”

And Hetty
, I could have pointed out, but what was left of my common sense took over. “Townspeople are smart. They don’t need me telling them what’s as obvious as the noses on their faces.”

“You’re making a big mistake, a very big mistake.”

“I’ll take that as a threat then,” I said and hung up.

“I need a really long vacation,” I said to my sister. “Peru or Brazil. Columbia. Someplace safe.”

Holly snorted. “Those places aren’t safe. They have terrorists and drug dealers.”

“They’d be minor problems compared to this.”

“Relax. You’ll be fine. Don’t overreact.”

Easy for her to say. She didn’t have a care in the world other than deciding what color Jag to buy next time and whether or not to be mad at Max the Money Machine for working hard and keeping her in the style that she’d become accustomed to.

With a sigh, I stepped out of the truck and greeted Stanley, who had waved to us from an outbuilding next to his house. “Come on, bodyguard,” I said to Holly.

“I’ll wait here.”

“No you won’t. You’re the one with the wrestling degree. Stay close. Johnny Jay could be around any corner.”

“Yeah, right.” But she followed me.

Ben moved over behind the steering wheel and watched out the open window, his tongue hanging out about two feet.

“I have two problems,” Stanley said, standing next to one of his hives.

I could tell what one of those problems was by the fact that the hive had been disassembled in a crude and rough way. Holly, I noticed, was as far away from the flying honeybees as possible, which sort of countered my plan to get her more involved with bees. She wanted a partnership and she was going to get it full blast.

“Come take a look, Holly,” I said. “You should learn this, too.”

“No,” she answered.

I bent down and spotted raccoon tracks. Stanley was a total rookie, even worse than I’d been as a first year beekeeper. “Raccoons. They lifted the top right off the hive to get at the honey, then just kept taking it apart, one level at a time.”

“You’d think all those bee stings would have chased them away.”

“Raccoons have thick fur, dense enough to make it hard for bees to penetrate. Not much stops them. And they are as smart as some humans I know.” Smarter than a whole lot of people I knew, actually, but I kept that to myself.

“What should I do?” Stanley said, worried. “They’ll be back tonight and do the same thing to the rest of my hives.”

“Bricks on top,” I answered.

“Ahhh.” Light bulbs went on in the dimness of Stanley’s mind. “I thought you put bricks on top of your hives so the tops wouldn’t blow off, which didn’t make much sense since the tops are pretty heavy. I should have figured that out.”

Holly had edged an inch or two closer due to my constant gestures to join the conversation.

“That one was an easy fix,” I said. “What’s your next problem?”

“Mites,” Stanley said. “I found mites on my bees. Come look.”

“I’m out of here,” my sister said.

“Ben has more loyalty,” I called after her retreating back.

Sure enough, Stanley’s bees had what all beekeepers had to deal with sooner or later. Varroa mites. Parasites almost invisible to the human eye. They attached to bees’ bodies like bloodsuckers or wood ticks, but instead of sucking blood, they sucked hemolymph. Varroa mites could weaken a colony so much that if the bad news bugs weren’t discovered and treated quickly, they could wipe out an entire hive.

Stanley didn’t like my diagnosis, although he suspected it. “If it’s not one thing, it’s another,” he said.

Which was true.

Here’s a list of only a few predators that prey on honeybees:

I told Stanley what to do for starters—sprinkle the honeybees with powdered sugar. The sugar made it harder for the mites to stay attached and it gave the bees a reason to do some extra grooming, which also caused them to fall off. “Let me know if that doesn’t work,” I said, walking with Stanley out to the truck where my sister sat inside, talking on her cell phone while studying her fingernails to make sure they were picture perfect.

“I heard Carrie Ann might be drinking again,” Stanley said.

If Stanley knew, then everybody knew. “She’ll be fine,” I said, hoping that was true. “Lauren Kerrigan’s murder really stressed her out.”

“We’re all a little edgy with a killer running loose.”

“This can’t be over quick enough for me.”

“That reminds me of something,” Stanley said. “Way back when Lauren ran over Wayne and plowed into that tree, I was the one who towed her car off to scrap it.”

Thinking back, I remembered that, at the time, Stanley still ran his farm instead of renting it out to other farmers like he did now, and he had his hands into everything where money was to be had, including the towing business.

I nodded. “I remember.”

“Usually when a car is totaled like that, the family comes by and strips out personal belongings, but none of the Kerrigans ever showed up even though I let them know I had her stuff. I guess they had other things on their minds. So I went through the car and boxed up whatever was loose, which wasn’t much. Rita said she didn’t want the junk back and it’s been here every since.”

I looked at the outbuilding. “You’ve held on to things from Lauren’s car for sixteen years?”

“Yup. And now that she’s gone for good, I asked Rita again and she said to throw whatever I had away. Guess I’ll do that.”

“Don’t,” Holly piped up. “Rita might change her mind someday.”

Stanley shook his head. “It’s nothing but junk. I’m cleaning out that building, making room for other stuff, and it’s going.”

“Throw the box in the back of Story’s truck. She’ll hang on to it for a while.”

Gee, thanks, sis. I wondered why she couldn’t store it herself.

But in the scheme of things, it wasn’t a big deal.

Stanley limped away to get it, came back with a cobwebbed cardboard box that had seen better days, and added it to the junk in the back of my truck.

One of these days, I’d have to clean out the back end and get organized.

It had been one of those days when I started out with good intentions and ended up with very little accomplished. I had a list a mile long and hadn’t made a dent in my chores. I’d wanted to start checking my outlying beehives, but that would have to wait until tomorrow. And I didn’t want to even think about all the paperwork piling up at The Wild Clover.

At the rate I was going, I had just enough time to take Ben home and return Dinky’s belongings before getting ready for Chopper Murphy’s wake at Stu’s. First stop was Norm’s house while Ben waited on the porch, pressing his nose against the screen, inhaling the odor of freshly fried meat.

“Here you go,” I said, handing over the scraggly mutt’s food, pink blanket, and accessories, looking around Norm’s kitchen floor for the tiny terror. “Where’s Dinky?”

Almost before the words were out of my mouth, Dinky barreled at me like I was her long lost mother, squealing and panting. I scooped her up.

“She really likes you,” Norm said, watching her wash my face while I tried to dodge her pink tongue.

“As long as she doesn’t pee on my feet, we get along just fine.”

Norm put her things on the floor and she wiggled to get down and take possession. I obliged. She ran off with her rawhide chew toy.

“We’re having a wake for Chopper tonight at Stu’s,” I said to Norm. “Are you coming?”

“No, I’m not in the mood to party. Those Irish . . .” Norm shook his head like I should automatically know how to finish the rest of the sentence.

I hadn’t intended to bring up the subject of Hetty’s reign of terror or Norm’s dishonest cover-up, wanting to give him some grieving time before making accusations, but the words came flying out before I could stop them. “I know you aren’t Lantern Man,” I blurted.

Norm’s eyes narrowed and his face reddened almost immediately. “I admitted it in public and those reporters even put it on television. What more do you want from me? I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You have good intentions, but Hetty was the one who destroyed those scouts’ camping equipment. Not you.”

“That’s a lie!”

“You were on a camping trip at the same time as those campers who had their supplies destroyed by the so-called Lantern
Man
.” I put special emphasis on the last word. “You weren’t even in the area.”

I’d guessed at that last part, but my remark struck true as an arrow. Part of me wondered why I was giving the man more grief to pile on what he already had. “I know you did it to preserve your wife’s good name. I won’t tell anybody else.”

I was so intent on watching Norm’s reaction I didn’t notice his dog approaching until I felt warm liquid on my flip-flopped foot. She hadn’t peed on me once while she stayed with me. On everything else, yes, but not directly on me. I had to remember to wear more protective footwear on her home turf.