by Abigail Keam
“No, no. We were just gonna scare you.”
I shook my head in disgust. “You didn’t bring any way to hide your identity which indicates you were planning not to leave any witnesses. Taffy, you’re in serious trouble, don’t you realize this? I haven’t talked with the DA yet, but there is a strong chance that you might be charged with attempted murder. Aren’t you worried that Nancy might roll over on you in order to make a deal?”
“Huh?” Taffy’s eyes grew large with tears. “I just wanted to scare you. That’s what Nancy said we was gonna do. Just a prank. I swear to you, Miss Josiah. Oh, I wish I had listened to Mommy.”
“For goodness sakes, Taffy, that Nancy woman is a psycho. You do well to do what your mother tells you. Did you have anything to do with your father’s death?”
Taffy blanched and swallowed hard. “No, how can you ask such a thing? I know my father had some serious problems, but I loved him.” She looked at me sheepishly.
“Hated him too, but I could never hurt him. I just wanted to get as far away from him as possible.”
“How do you think your father died?”
“Heart attack. I just thought maybe you upset him when he came out to your place and caused his heart to fail like Nancy said you did to your husband.”
“Is that what your mother thinks?”
“That’s what Mommy told me.”
“Do you know where your mother was the morning of your father’s death?”
“She was at work like always and then home at her regular time. Why do you ask?”
“Nothing. I will speak to your mother, but I don’t know that I will ask the charges to be dropped. Some restitution will have to be made. You have cost me a lot of money, not to mention sleepless nights.”
“I’m sorry,” said Taffy, wiping her nose with her sleeve.
“Sorry doesn’t cut it.” I stood up. “We’ll see what happens, Taffy, but your mother is right. You need to be on a short leash.” I left without saying goodbye or looking back. I just wanted to go home. I knew Taffy believed me. The problem was that if another person came along after I left and told her that I had killed her father, she would believe that person too. Taffy believed anyone who had just last talked to her. No wonder Nancy could persuade her to do anything. Stupidly, I felt sorry for Daffy Taffy.
23
It is a hard thing to witness frantic drones struggling to get back in the hive as they are being stung to death by worker bees that once fed and groomed them. But if the hive wants to survive, the females of the hive need to live through the winter, so the male drones are expendable and gotten rid of in the most brutal of ways, killed by their loved ones. Love stinks.
For a crime that had not been committed as declared by the Kentucky medical examiner, I surely had suffered as though I had been guilty. I had had my house ransacked by the police, a thirty-thousand-dollar piece of art glass broken, spent forty thousand on security doodads, paid penalties and taxes to break my IRA, been run off the road by a crazy nurse, had threatening letters sent to me, been groped by a cop who hated me, spent several thousand dollars for fingerprint/DNA tests on letters accusing me of murder, had one car towed, another one totaled, gave my criminal lawyer an expensive painting to cover my fees, spent a three-thousand-dollar night in the hospital, and was now selling ten acres of my land to get me out of the financial mess that had been dumped on me through no fault of my own. This did not include my purchase of a puppy that would grow to two hundred pounds and was showing signs of being extremely willful. In addition, my helper had taken up permanent residence, rent-free, in my caretaker’s bungalow.
As I worked my honeybees, I wondered what Richard’s death would have cost me had I really been guilty of murdering him. It probably would have been cheaper just to confess and go to trial. I finished feeding two weak hives with bee pollen goo. It was a warm October day with the trees just at their riotous height of color. Finished with my tasks, I walked back to the Butterfly and, once inside, pulled off my thick gloves and grabbed the iced tea from the fridge. Ahh – sweet iced tea, the wine of the south.
Some people would argue that Kentucky is not the South, that it is a border state with its own unique culture. I guess they don’t understand the Mason-Dixon line. They had never come to Lexington at Derby time and stayed in fine old mansions that African slaves and poor Irish had built – many of which my husband had restored to their former glory and then some.
Lexington has always been very southern in its manners but split in its politics. When I first moved to Lexington from northern Kentucky, Lexingtonians still revered the Confederate John Hunt Morgan and had preserved the house in which he rode his horse into the parlor to kiss his mother goodbye before going out on a raid. Every day, people passed by the site where Cassius Clay wrote his abolitionist paper several streets over from where his distant cousin Henry Clay, the Great Compromiser, shot craps on the side of his law office while slaves ran his estate. Though the Visitor’s Center downplays Cheapside Park, everyone knows it was the location of one of the busiest slave markets in the South. Many old families still have ambroytypes of Cheapside in its heyday with white men bidding on a multitude of darker-skinned people. And sometimes, free people of color also bid on those who came to the auction block or an occasional white person who had sold themselves into servitude.
Take the story of a white man, William “King” Solomon, who was purchased by a freed slave by the name of Aunt Charlotte for the price of eighteen cents. She was a respectable baker who specialized in cakes and pies. Solomon was the town drunk. Somehow, they struck a chord with one another. Solomon dutifully carried out his duties of fetching wood and maintaining her stoves so Miss Charlotte could bake, and she provided a decent place for Solomon to sleep. She even cared enough about him that when a cholera epidemic broke out in 1833, she begged him to escape with her before the illness struck them both down. He refused, sending Miss Charlotte to safety, while he stayed to bury the bodies of the deceased. Steadfast through the cholera epidemic, he buried the dead for the town of Lexington. The town drunk is today considered a hero of Lexington.
Like “King” Solomon, Lexington has two personalities – that of the conservative suburban element that votes staunchly Democrat for governor and Republican for president, and the downtown liberal bohemian art scene of writers, artists and actors. They never seem to bump into each other except on Gallery Hop night. It is perhaps good manners that each group just looks the other way. Our unofficial motto was live-and-let-live, that is until Lexington began to grow from sixty thousand to three hundred thousand people.
It was during the late seventies and early eighties, the influx of Yankees and Eastern Kentucky immigrants caused the Bluegrass to overrun itself with a glut of ticky-tacky housing developments. Like the newcomers, I also was an immigrant to the Bluegrass and as guilty as the carpetbaggers devouring the South after the Civil War. Cashing in on the real estate boom ourselves, Brannon and I were flush with money from his restoring ante-bellum houses and designing new ones for the out-of-town nouveau riche investing in race horses. Brannon was becoming nationally known, and I was on my way to tenure at UK. We thought the building boom would go on forever and bust was a four-letter word. I didn’t care that I was harming a sensitive environment. I was too ambitious.
In our early days together, we had an apartment in town. These were the times when the rich and famous flitted in and out of Lexington like gilded butterflies. Henry Faulkner was still alive, driving around with his goat and happened to live on our street. He liked us, so we would be invited to his informal parties where Tennessee Williams sat drunk, mumbling in a corner or Bette Davis argued with Henry about his chili recipe. One could walk down the street and pass Rock Hudson or Sweet Evening Breeze on the same evening – or so it was rumored around town.
There seemed to be a riotous party all the time. People knew how to have fun. Even during the weekday, people socialized at cocktail or dinner parties. Rich horse people gav
e famous Derby parties. Britain’s Princess Margaret stayed with the Whitneys. IBM was the major employer in the city besides the University of Kentucky. And everyone knew everyone else.
Not anymore. IBM left town. Some of the rich gave up their parties and became real estate moguls. Princess Margaret died. I hardly know anybody when I go to a function now. Everyone is younger than I. But I had saved 139 acres of prime Bluegrass that included a pristine palisades eco-system. That was my atonement.
Sipping on my sweet tea, I put on a Big Maybelle CD and opened the back terrace doors to air out the house. This would be one of the last warm days of the season before winter sneaked her silvery head in. Dimly, I heard the beeping of my answering machine and went see who had called. Shaneika left a message that the complaint about the damaged Stephen Powell work had been reviewed. The city would pay for repair work if Stephen Powell could fix it. If that didn’t pan out, I would have to sue the city for full damages and take my chances within the system.
I pushed the recorder button again. The second message was from Mr. Haggard, left only an hour ago. “Mrs. Reynolds, this is Joe Haggard. I have your casserole dish ready for you. It was good eatin’. Thanks. You might want to know that your friend, Miss Tellie, seems to be leaving on a trip. She’s loading up her car. Thought you might want to say goodbye in person, you being such a close friend and all.”
I grabbed my car keys, not even taking off my beesuit, and jumped into my van. Praying all the way that I might not be too late, I screeched into the Pidgeons’ driveway just as Tellie was closing the back door of her Suburban. She looked up in surprise, her face clouding with anger.
“You gave me a start, Josiah,” she said, trying to hide her dismay at seeing me.
I got out of my van and looked into hers. “Going somewhere?”
“Just a small trip over to Gatlinburg to calm my nerves.”
“All this luggage just to go to Gatlinburg? It looks to me like you are going to be away for a long time.”
“Would you please move your van? I need to get going.”
“Looks like you’ve been in an accident,” I said rubbing a dent in her fender. “Why, it seems that this car has hit a black car, maybe a black Mercedes.”
“I am telling you one last time to move your piece of junk out of my way.” Tellie started towards me.
I drew my taser out of my pocket. “You are not going anywhere, Tellie. We need to get some things settled.”
“This is kidnapping. Aren’t you in enough trouble with the police without adding this?”
“Tellie, I will not hesitate to use this on you,” I warned.
In a flash, Tellie propelled herself into her car, locking the door. She then turned on the Suburban. I pulled a hive knife out of my pocket and sliced off her tire’s air valve.
“You bitch!” she mouthed. I was getting really tired of people calling me that. She flew out of the car towards me with her hands extended as though she was going to rip off my face. I zapped her with my taser.
She fell to the ground crying and writhing.
“Tellie, that was just a little sting, but if you come at me again, I’m gonna give it to you full blast.” I pulled out my cell phone from another pocket, punched in 911 and held it up for her to see; then I secretly turned on the phone’s video just as Franklin had taught me.
She kept rolling and moaning on the ground as though really injured. I was not going to fall for that trick.
“Tellie, if you don’t simmer down, I am going to call the police and let them talk to you. I know you killed Richard and tried to blame it on me.”
She turned to look at me and my spine tingled. I had never seen such a look of pure fury. Her face was twisted with it. Tellie rolled over and weakly stood up using the car for support.
I jabbed the taser in her direction. “Don’t come any closer,” I cautioned. I felt the sweat drip down my back. I was scared of her. Tellie was younger and stronger. She had to have a lot of hate in her to kill her husband. I did not want to get into a tussle with someone like that.
“You have nothing, Josiah. Let me be.”
“Then let’s call the cops. As you say, this is technically a kidnapping. I am sure they would like to know my theory that you jabbed Richard with adrenaline inducing his heart attack, and used the bee stings to disguise the holes in his neck.”
Tellie’s face slumped with the crooked look of defeat.
“What do you know?” she whispered.
“I know how and why you killed Richard. I just don’t know why you picked me as the fall guy. What had I ever done to you?”
Looking defeated, Tellie leaned against her car. “It wasn’t personal. It was . . . just opportunity. Richard didn’t like your competition at the Farmers’ Market. Said over and over again you had no business being there when he had to make a living and you being rich and all. Over time, he became more and more obsessed with you. Told people that you cut your honey with corn syrup. One day, it came to me that I could use his obsession of you to get rid of him. I never thought you would ever get convicted, even if you went to trial. Rich people never go to jail.”
“Do you have any idea of what you have put me through? How much money you have cost me?”
“Josiah, it was easy to set you up. If another beekeeper had been having trouble with Richard, then I would have used him. Like I said, you were convenient.”
“Meaning the argument at the State Fair.”
“Yes. You and Richard were so busy eyeballin’ each other that it was easy for me to switch the tags on the jars. Nobody paid any attention to me, no one ever does. And you just left the claim tickets out in the open where anyone could get at them. It didn’t occur to me that he would actually push you, but when he did – so much the better for me. Then you pushed him back. He wasn’t expecting that.”
“Well, that certainly makes me feel better that it wasn’t personal,” I growled. “How did you make a call on my cell phone?”
“That was easy too. Don’t you remember you sat near me at the Beekeepers’ Meeting in August? When everyone was loading up their plates during the potluck, including you, I simply hung back. Your back was turned; your purse was open and the cell phone on the top. Richard had our phone turned off at the time, besides he never would have thought to check the time or date that the call was made. I told him I took the call. We had just one phone between the two of us and shared it.”
“What was the purpose?”
“I had to have a record that you contacted him. Just more smoke and mirrors. I told Richard that you had called and wanted to see him. You were thinking of selling out and wanted to give him first crack at buying your bees.”
“So you lured him to my house and stabbed him with adrenaline pens.”
“He was overweight. Had high blood pressure. The doctor had him on medication. I didn’t know if it would really work, but it was my only chance to be free. I tased him first and just pushed him in where he had pulled some frames
out. The hive was already open where he was checking it. Then I stuck him in the neck with the pens in the taser burn area and started banging on the side of the hive. It didn’t take much to get those bees stirred up. It was a hard thing to do, but I was desperate to get away from him. To get Taffy away from him.”
“Oh come on. I think the $750,000 life insurance policy may have been the main incentive.”
“An incentive – not the motive. The life insurance policy was just the icing on the cake. I had thought of a way to get rid of that wretched man for once and for all.” Tellie exhaled. “You have no idea what freedom tastes like until you have been kept in a cage. I waited years for an opportunity to kill him.”
“What did you have to do with the letters and the attempts on my life?”
“That was all Nancy’s doing. One of the reasons I am leaving this town is to get Taffy away from that lunatic. As soon as I bail Taffy out, we’re leaving Lexington forever.”
“Skipping out on her c
ourt date?”
“Skip out, drop out. I don’t care what you call it. I am taking my daughter and shaking the dust of this snobby town off my shoes. We are going to start fresh and clean where no one knows us.”
“Taffy will be a fugitive for the rest of her life. Think about what you’re doing,” I said.
“My daughter will have the special tutoring and education she needs. For the first time, she will have a chance at a good life, and not just the crumbs. I’m not going to waste the insurance money on a trial lawyer when I can use it for her college education. I made a choice of what to do with the money that is left. I am going to give my daughter every advantage in the world. All my married life, I took the brunt of Richard’s anger trying to protect Taffy. And I will go on protecting her until the day I die. Taffy is going to have the life I didn’t.”
“You’re defaulting on your house?”
Tellie smirked. “The house was paid in full this morning and will go on the market in two weeks. My lawyer is handling all the details. And once the house is sold, I will have a hundred thousand plus. Meanwhile, Taffy and I will be far, far away.”
“Speaking of money, how are you going to be free of Joyce?”
Tellie looked confused. “Don’t know what you mean.”
“Come on, isn’t she blackmailing you because she covered the last half hour of your shift and lied for you so you could have an alibi?”
“Don’t you dare drag Joyce into this! She’s my friend. You have no idea what you are talking about.”
“I know that she stupidly deposited twenty thousand dollars in her bank account, her payoff to lie for you.”
“Joyce knew nothing, asked for nothing. I asked her to cover for me that day, lied to her saying that I was meeting a man. She knew about my marital problems, so she was happy for me when I told her that I had met someone special. When I got the insurance check, I gave her that money.”
“As a payoff.”
“No! As a gift to a friend. She wants to take her dying child to Disneyland. I gave her the twenty thousand so that she and her son could have everything their hearts desired on this trip. She knew nothing about my plans. She thinks I am leaving to meet this made-up man just for the weekend.”