Death By A HoneyBee (A Josiah Reynolds Mystery)

by Abigail Keam

  Death By A HoneyBee

  A Josiah Reynolds Mystery

  Abigail Keam

  Worker Bee Press

  www.abigailkeam.com

  Death By A HoneyBee

  Copyright © Abigail Keam 2010

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in

  any form without written permission of the author.

  Many sites in the book such as the Butterfly, Lady Elsmere’s farm,

  Bledsoe Bloodstock Inc., The Racetrack strip joint and the LETC plus

  characters such as the victim, victim’s family, FBI agent, Racetrack

  employees, farmers, police, lawyers, mysterious daughter, beekeepers,

  cheating husband, neighbors, exotic dancers, nurses & etc. are fictional

  and any similarity to any living person or physical place is just coincidence

  unless stated otherwise.

  It’s not you. So don’t go around town and brag about it.

  Josiah Reynolds does not exist except in the author’s mind.

  ISBN 978-0-61534734-9

  Published in the USA by

  Worker Bee Press

  P.O. Box 485

  Nicholasville, KY 40340

  Printed in the USA by Morris Publishing

  3212 East Highway 30

  Kearney, NE 68847

  1 800 650 7888

  For Peter,

  who makes my life possible

  The author wishes to thank

  Deborah Struve and Phil Criswell

  Who took the time to read the

  unrevised ms and offered comments.

  Thanks to Rebecca Webster and Diana Keam

  for their encouragement.

  Thanks to William O’Connor MD, Professor of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, UK College of Medicine, for letting me pick his brain at a dinner party.

  Thanks to Gerald Marvel, General Manager of Spindletop Hall Inc., who gave me detailed information

  and even made corrections on the Spindletop chapter for me.

  www.spindletophall.org.

  Thanks to glass artist Stephen Powell who consented to be a character. www.powellglass.com,

  and Al’s Bar which consented to be used as a drinking hole

  for my poetry-writing cop, Kelly.

  And thanks to the Lexington Farmers’ Market,

  which has given me a home for many years.

  www.lexingtonfarmersmarket.com

  Very special thanks to my mother, Mabel Louise,

  for passing on her love of movies and reading to me.

  Special thanks to Neil Chethik, best selling author, and

  Author in Residence at the Carnegie Center for Literacy,

  who kept pushing me forward. www.neilchethik.com

  And to my editor, Brian Throckmorton,

  for his corrections and insight into the characters.

  1

  I knew something was wrong as I turned the corner around the copse of black walnut trees where mourning doves roosted. The stillness of the gray-breasted birds perched in a dull slash on a tree limb contrasted with the clamorous buzzing of thousands of bees. As though readying for battle, their thundering racket was an alarm that meant danger to anyone or anything that chanced upon them in their harried state.

  As a mother knows the meaning of her baby’s whimpering, so a beekeeper understands the droning of her bees. I thought an animal might have disturbed them – a raccoon, or maybe a deer, had kicked over a hive. That alone would cause them to be anxious and making it difficult for me to work with them. I hurried past the vigilant doves, their heads swiveling in my direction. Coming around a hedge of honeysuckle, I encountered a six-foot-high wall of enraged bees hovering between their white hives and me, a glittering wave of golden insects ready to inflict painful stings on anything deemed hostile. Thank goodness I had worn my thick white cotton beesuit as honeybees hurled themselves at my veil in a panic. To be accosted this aggressively is unnerving even for the most experienced beekeeper. I felt my stomach muscles tighten. Talk about a gut feeling.

  “Babies, babies,” I cooed. “Settle down. Settle down.”

  Then I saw the source of their fear and revulsion. The metal cover from the most populous beehive had been heedlessly thrown on the ground, and wooden rectangle frames full of baby brood lay abandoned next to it. Thousands of young nurse bees frantically tried to protect this nursery full of eggs and wax-capped unborn bees by covering the frames with their bodies. This violation alone would make honeybees angry, but I saw that someone was bent over and plunged face down into the open hive, which made them even wilder. The person’s arms hung down outside the hive. I noticed the fists were clenched.

  “What are you doing?” I yelled, startled at the sight of a strange person with his head and shoulders inside one of my hives. “Who are you? Get away from there!” I stepped back waiting for a response.

  My chest tightened. Hoping to stave off an asthma attack, I reached in my pocket for my abuterol spray, but realized my veil would stop me from getting the medicine to my mouth. I breathed more slowly. I inhaled the musky odor of the bees along with the heavy, cloying scent of honeysuckle hedges behind their hives. Somewhere in the distance I heard the growl of a tractor cutting sweet hay. I flinched at the sudden piercing call of a redwing blackbird.

  I scanned the field for further danger. Other than a person sticking his naked head into one of my hives with eighty thousand bees dive-bombing him and me, nothing appeared different. The rest of the hives waited in line like

  sailors standing at attention in their white uniforms. Bullets of reflected light darted back and forth from openings in the bottom hive boxes so quickly the human eye could barely register the tiny insects. Freshly mowed grass manicured the ground around the hives. Their water tank, full of hyacinths and duckweed, stood unmolested.

  The intruder did not stir. Grasping a fallen branch from the ground along with my belching hive smoker thrust before me, I moved closer. “Mister,” I cried, “MISTER!” I assumed it was a he – a heavy-set man with pale skin – in beige corduroy pants and laced-up boots. I called again. Still, he did not budge.

  My initial shock overcome, I realized he didn’t seem to be breathing. Not a good sign. The bees covered him, pulling and biting at his neck, stinging his scalp and his back, furiously trying to evict him from their home. I inched closer. He looked stiff. I poked him with my branch. He didn’t shift. I jabbed him again with the tree branch. Nothing.

  Leaning over the body, I carefully swatted away the bees. “Girls, girls, don’t sting him. It’s over. Don’t waste yourselves,” I whispered. Still the bees stung him and, by doing so, condemned themselves to death too. The man’s neck swelled against his checkered shirt. I took off my glove to feel for a pulse but the bees swamped my hand, stinging furiously. I pulled away quickly. “Merde!” I exclaimed. I cradled my badly stung hand.

  I walked away from the hives, yanking off my beekeeper’s hat and veil. I fumbled in my suit for my cell phone. My hands were shaking as I dialed 911. “Police? You better come. I have a dead man in my beehive. Yes, that is correct.

  He is lying face down in a beehive.” I gave the police my name and address, clicked the phone shut and sat on the meadow grass waiting for the wail of the police siren. It seemed like a long time before they came.

  2

  My name is Josiah Reynolds. My maternal grandmother, who felt compelled to give biblical masculine names to the girls in her family, gave name to me. She said it was to make us strong. My mother’s name was Micah. People always mistook her name for mica, a silicate minera
l. However, I love my moniker, being named after a king.

  For the past three years, I have made my living from working the land – mainly beekeeping. My home is built on a cliff overlooking the forest-green, fast-flowing Kentucky River. Following the river east of my farm, Daniel Boone built Fort Boonesborough. North is Ashland, former estate of Henry Clay, the Great Compromiser and statesman who owned slaves; south lies White Hall, the haunted home to Cassius Clay, a distant cousin of Henry’s who was a firebrand emancipationist. Legend has it that the moment Cassius Clay breathed his last, lightning struck Henry Clay’s towering memorial statue in the Lexington Cemetery, decapitating it.

  The blue and grey once skirmished on my property. I still find Civil War uniform buttons, as well as arrowheads from

  the Shawnees who used to hunt here. I suspect that a small hill on my land might be a Native American Adena burial mound. I stay away from it out of respect, and I will not let the Anthropology Department at the University of Kentucky excavate it.

  I think it was Faulkner who said, “The past is never dead. It is not even past.” My neighbors would concur, and so do I. Like a blue morning mist hovering over the Kentucky River, the history of this land hangs tight. The past is always tapping on my shoulder. It never strays far from anyone who lives in Caintuck, the dark and bloody ground, as I would find out later. It was going to bite me but good, but I didn’t realize this when I found the body. Looking back, I was naive, plain and simple. Like most women, I didn’t sense the danger coming my way.

  I am a beekeeper, and a good one at that. Since most of my current income derives from selling honey at the local Farmers’ Market, I am always concerned about my bees. As a rule, they receive better medical attention and general care than I do. So I was pretty agitated when I saw police officers poking around my hives even to the point of banging on their sides. Of course, the guard bees of these hives responded by swarming the offenders. A cop angrily pulled a fire extinguisher out of his cruiser trunk after being stung several times.

  “Don’t you dare use that on my bees!” I yelled. I glared at the coroner struggling into his hazmat suit.

  “Yes, put that away or you’ll contaminate the scene,” the coroner said, putting on his headgear after crushing a cigarette in the grass. He and two other officers looked like Michelin Men as they waddled through quick darts of bees. Most of the field bees had already headed out to harvest nectar from wildflowers in the surrounding pastures. Their daily routine was not going to be hampered by a dead body in their neighbors’ hive. Field bees, already returning from pastures laden with flower juice, expertly swerved around men standing in their pathways. Both smell and sight guided them home among a row of twenty painted white hives. Honeybees can fly forward, backwards or sideways at fifteen miles per hour, so they are able to swerve around strange obstacles in their way.

  “Quit swatting at those bees,” I cried. “It only makes them mad.”

  “This is rich,” said a voice at my elbow. I looked up to see my helper, Matt, standing beside me suited up, but with his veil off.

  I smiled inside. Matt was six feet two with dark curly hair and blue eyes. He looked like Victor Mature, the matinee idol of the 40’s and 50’s. I thought Victor Mature was the most delicious male I had ever beheld after seeing him in The Robe. And he even had a sense of humor. When an exclusive country club refused Mature membership because he was an actor, the Louisville homeboy protested, “I am not an actor. Haven’t you seen my movies?” Good looking and funny. What woman could resist that combination?

  Many thought Matt and I were lovers, which was ridiculous. Why would this Adonis be bedding a frumpy middle-aged woman? But the rumors did give me a source of pride. So I never told my straight friends that he was gay. And neither did he. He was that good of a friend to support my vanity.

  “Who is it?” Matt asked, seemingly unperturbed at the commotion in the beeyard. He acted more intrigued than worried, but then it wasn’t really his problem.

  “No idea,” I shrugged.

  The state's bee inspector, Caleb Noble, pulled up in his jeep, flashed the cops his badge and began recording the proceedings.

  “Hell’s bells,” I murmured to Matt. "Somebody called Caleb. Like I don’t have enough trouble.”

  The coroner and two assistants measured and probed the body with forbidding-looking instruments. They filled evidence bags, sealed them and made notes on a log. The police photographer took pictures. Satisfied, the coroner gave the word for his guys to yank the body out of the hive. Honeybees fell lifelessly from the victim’s hair. One coroner’s assistant put some dead bees in a jar for testing. The victim’s face was gooey with streaks of honey and mashed bee pollen. Great clumps of beeswax fell from his swollen jowls to the ground. An acrid smell drifted from the disturbed hive.

  Matt groaned, “Oh man. That is nasty looking.” I was glad to see Matt finally unnerved.

  The victim’s face was not recognizable due to the lumpy swelling from hundreds of bee stings. It looked like a huge red beet, the kind that wins prizes at fairs.

  “I don’t know how this could have happened,” I said. “What was he doing here?”

  “Are you sure it is a he? Who could tell from that thing?” Matt looked away from the awful sight.

  I concurred that it was a hard spectacle to behold.

  “You know that they will probably take that hive as evidence, or at least some of the frames,” said Matt.

  I sighed. “You’d better put another hive box together.

  Take some frames with honey from the other hives. Some brood, too, if they can spare it. Just save what you can. I hope they don’t kill the Queen with their meddlin’.”

  Matt pulled out his cell phone and started taking pictures.

  I stared at him in silent annoyance.

  “If Caleb is video-recording, then I should take pictures,” he argued, scanning the scene with his phone. “Here he comes.”

  I looked over. He was also carrying samples of dead bees.

  “Yes, we better take pictures. Just in case,” repeated Matt.

  “In case of what?”

  “You know – in case you get sued.”

  “Sued for what? I should sue that person’s family for destruction of my property.”

  Matt assumed his superior lawyer’s look. “It has been my limited experience that usually it is the property owner that gets the crap stomped out of him, in this case her, both in and out of court.”

  “As if you have even tried your first case,” I snorted. I looked at the body now being zipped into a black bag with plastic handles. “I think that poor schmuck is the one who got stomped on.”

  “Morning, Miss Josiah. Got quite a mess here,” said Caleb, making notes as he approached me. He was dressed in white coveralls and had his bee hat tied around his waist. “Know what happened?”

  I took my time replying. Whatever I said was going into an official report to Frankfort, and Caleb had the power to make my life miserable. “That guy was probably drunk or high and got the bright idea of stealing some hives.”

  “Any possibility that these bees are Africanized and attacked without provocation?”

  “You can test them if you like but . . .” I held out my hand where several bees settled. I poked them. The bees merely scraped pollen into the pollen basket on their hind legs and flew off. “They don’t seem too aggressive to me. I think

  these are all European bees.” It was every beekeeper’s nightmare that their pure European stock would become compromised with African DNA, making the bees a hundred times more aggressive. Instead of being stung ten times by honeybees, a person would be stung a hundred times and be chased for one thousand feet or more. The problem was that Africanized bees looked just like European bees. To protect myself against possible aggression, I always wore my suit into the beeyard until I could establish that the bees were friendly. If they were, I usually stripped down to a pair of pants, long sleeved shirt and a veil. Other times they
were cranky and I kept the suit on.

  Caleb wiped the sweat from his forehead. “They look pretty gentle to me too, but I am going to check their DNA anyway.”

  “Fine with me,” I said. “I’ll let you go about your business then.”

  “Will call you if I find anything odd.”

  “Sounds good, Caleb.” I watched the inspector move towards my hives.

  “Where is his car, Rennie?” Matt used his pet name for me because I could recite Michael Rennie’s lines to the robot in The Day the Earth Stood Still. We share a love of old movies. It was how we met.

  Three years ago, I was a guest at a Kentucky Derby party when I heard Matt arguing with another man about the commands to the robot. Apparently they had a bet on it.

  “Klaatu barada nikto,” I whispered into Matt’s ear. “The robot’s name was Gort and the actress was Patricia Neal.”

  Matt turned around with surprised eyes and said, “Well hello, Gorgeous!”

  “Barbra Streisand as Fannie Brice in Funny Girl,” I replied.

  “Marry me,” Matt quipped as he collected his money. After talking into the wee hours of the night, it seemed that we both were batty about movies. In fact, he came with me to watch Double Indemnity that night only to fall asleep in my car on the way home. I awoke the next morning to find Matt leaning on my car drinking coffee while watching a flock of wild turkeys skirt around the house. He really hadn’t left my side since then. I believed his devotion has been due to my collection of four hundred and seventy-two videos and DVDs. We watched a movie every week. It was a standing date.

  Pushing those fond memories away, I responded to Matt’s assessment of the current situation. “Oh,” I said, scanning the fields. Great response, huh.

  “Something for you to study on,” Matt said, firmly snapping away. “The question of this poor slob’s transportation.”