Mind Your Own Beeswax

by Hannah Reed

  I took a step back and saw Rita Kerrigan glance over, as though she was assessing the woman. When they had come downstairs, I thought they were together; but neither had spoken to the other, so I figured my first impression had been wrong.

  Then I got busy with others in the class, enjoying the excitement on my students’ faces as the candles they were dipping began to form. Afterward, we strung our creations to dry from a long dowel I’d hung especially for this event.

  The emaciated stranger disappeared at some point, leaving behind the candle she’d made.

  Something about her seemed vaguely familiar, so when the others left with their candles, I checked the class sign-up sheet lying near the checkout counter. The last two places were still blank. Rita Kerrigan and the unidentified woman hadn’t registered.

  “Why should they have registered, coming in at the last minute?” Holly said a little snappily when I questioned her. “I was checking out Ali Schmidt’s cart full of items; she came back because she ran out of sugar, and they whizzed right by us. GMAB (Give Me A Break), will you!”

  “Well, did they pay?”

  “Um, no. I forgot.” Holly didn’t have enough respect for the good old dollar bill most of us worked hard for. But knowing Rita, she’d remember later and pay up. The other student . . . well . . . that one was lost.

  “Did they arrive together?” I pressed on.

  “How should I know?”

  “What’s going on with you?” I said. “First you show up hours late for work, then you’re crabby and defensive. What happened to my perky, positive sister?”

  Holly leaned against the counter. “Max and I had a fight on the phone last night. I’m staying with Mom and Grams.”

  That explained her bad mood. She had two perfect excuses for being cranky. She’d actually argued with her husband, as amazing as that was since those two always acted like honeymooners. Worse, she’d been overexposed to Mom. Our mother was a lot like the sun—fine in small doses, but stick around too long and you’ll get a bad burn.

  Mom and Grams live together. Mom moved in with my grandmother when my ex-husband and I agreed to purchase our old family home after my dad died. My ex wasn’t my ex then, of course, but the yellow warning light in my brain began flashing at me shortly after we made the move from Milwaukee and he started flirting (and more) with every female in town.

  I stopped to think about Holly and Max. Had they ever had an argument before? Not that I was aware of, which always made me wonder about them. Who doesn’t argue once in a while?

  “What was the fight about?”

  “Lots of things.”

  I studied my sister, noting that she had gained a few pounds. We both had the same build—voluptuous according to Holly, bordering on chunky in my opinion. Holly and I watched every little thing we ate or our hips expanded exponentially. “What’s the biggest issue?”

  “He’s out of town again.” Holly did a dramatic eye roll. “What else is new? That’s the whole point, he’s always gone.”

  “But if he isn’t even home, why are you staying with Mom? Personally, I’d rather walk in front of a speeding train or throw myself into shark-infested water.”

  Our mother was a demanding control freak who didn’t particularly approve of or like me and showed it in not-so-subtle zingers, shots across my bow, which I tried to deflect without firing back. Most of the time, my subterfuge worked.

  “IDK (I Don’t Know),” Holly said to my incredulous question about why she would voluntarily stay with Mom. “I’m sick and tired of being all alone in that great big house, I guess.” Holly rubbed her temple. “I still have a few things to do in back.”

  “I’ll close up.”

  As soon as Holly disappeared, right when I was flipping the closed sign, I saw Grams’s Cadillac Fleetwood edge over to the side of the street. The front tire jumped the curb before bouncing back down and settling.

  “Speak of the devil,” I muttered before opening the door.

  Mom got out of the passenger seat and was already griping. “For cripes’ sake,” she said to Grams. “If you’d let me drive, we wouldn’t be running up on sidewalks. You’re going to kill somebody one of these days. Wait until your next driver’s license renewal. You’re never going to pass.”

  “Hi, sweetie,” Grams called when she crawled out of the driver’s seat and saw me. “Closing up for the night?” My eighty-year-old grandmother looked dainty, with her trademark daisy in her tight gray bun and a pocket-size camera hanging from her wrist.

  “That’s the plan,” I said. Mom marched past me into the store. I thought about running away, but decided against it. Even when she looked me up and down with her standard sour expression, and I knew what was coming next, I still didn’t flinch—at least not outwardly—or change my mind about bolting.

  “That’s your business attire?” Mom asked. We’d been down this road before, but apparently she liked the view because we went in that direction often.

  “I like how she looks,” Grams said. “Snappy.”

  With that, she took my picture.

  “Tomboy jeans, thongs on her feet . . .” Mom couldn’t get used to the idea that the definition of thong had changed over the years and no longer meant flip-flops. “Disgracefully casual.”

  I rolled my eyes. I’m pretty sure my grandmother captured it on film.

  “Business is going to suffer because of it. Mark my words,” Mom crabbed. Like it was any skin off her nose. “And you shouldn’t close at five o’clock. That’s much too early.”

  Another road well traveled. I pointed out the same old landmarks again. “We’ll stay open longer hours after Memorial Day. Like we always do. Customers know our hours. They don’t mind. And business doesn’t warrant staying open late on Saturday nights. Case closed.”

  Like that was going to happen.

  “We’re going to Larry’s Custard Shop for frozen custard,” Grams said.

  Mom frowned. “Your grandmother intends to eat her dessert before her meal.”

  Grams grinned. “When you get to my age, you can eat in any order you feel like. Want to come?”

  “Thanks, but no. I have a few things to do here yet.” Which wasn’t true. “You two have fun.”

  Grams smiled like she really would have fun. How she could stay positive inside Mom’s major bubble of pessimism was beyond me.

  After they left, Holly came out of the back room.

  “We need to work on your outlook,” I said. “You better come to my house. Stay with me for a few days.”

  “Really? Really?” Holly squealed and actually jumped up and down. “GTG (Got To Go) get my stuff.”

  “You need to get over to my place as soon as possible. Hurry.” That just slipped out as she ran out the door. Good thing she hadn’t been really listening or I would have had to explain the remark and she might have made a U-turn and run for the hills instead.

  Because whether she liked it or not, we had a swarm of bees to recover.

  Three

  “Absolutely no way,” Holly said when I told her the plan of attack regarding the capture of my swarming bees. “Buzz off.”

  We were near the back entrance to my house. I blocked the door so she couldn’t get inside and plant herself where I couldn’t get her moving again. She’d have to wrestle me to the ground to get in, though she would beat me for sure in hand-to-hand combat. I’d seen her perform some kind of impressive drop-and-hold maneuver on a shoplifter not too long ago. Holly knew the moves, but I counted on my sister to show a little restraint when it came to family members, especially her one and only sibling.

  I held a flashlight in case she made any aggressive moves. Not that I planned to actually hit her with it. Just threaten to if she came at me. The flashlight wasn’t purely a prop though, more a necessity for beaming in on renegade bees than a defensive weapon.

  My backyard, where we were at a standoff, was much longer than it was wide, with a neighbor on one side and an empty house waiting for a
buyer on the other. My ex had lived there until last fall when he finally moved away. Thank God for small miracles. According to Mom, the only upside to our marriage-gone-bad was that we hadn’t had children together. I agreed. Because that meant I never, ever (did I say never?) had to see his cheating face again or live through any more humiliating incidents in which he tried to sweet-talk someone from my hometown into bed. How humiliating was that?

  I’d been trying to counter residual bitterness with a new positive attitude about life. At the moment, my sister wasn’t helping me get to that happy place.

  “I can’t believe my eyes,” Holly said when her gaze fell on the neatly stacked yellow hive boxes out back. “How many beehives do you have now, anyway?”

  “Ten or twelve,” I lied.

  Actually, forty beehives stood between the house and access to the Oconomowoc River, which wound along the back of my property. The rest of my hives numbered another forty or so and were scattered along open farm fields and fruit orchards where local farmers rented hives filled with honeybees from me to pollinate their crops.

  Holly was backing away with a wild look in her eyes, not a good sign.

  “You don’t have to do much at all,” I reasoned with her. “Just hold this flashlight when we find them, so I can see what I’m doing if it gets too dark. Which I could remind you wouldn’t have been a problem if you hadn’t taken so long getting here.”

  I didn’t want to mention that fog was rolling in from the west, creeping up from the low-lying river in swirls like it had become a living and breathing thing. Light wind lifted a few strands of my hair. I pulled my hoodie tighter, noting that the temperature had begun to drop quickly as the sun headed west.

  “I’ll come with,” said a familiar voice out of the cedars separating my property from my neighbor, P. P. Patti Dwyre.

  P. P. stood for “Pity-Party,” since Patti whined about her life nonstop, weaving her personal misery through the rumors and innuendos she spread like peanut butter about town. I’m sure she knew what we called her behind her back, but that didn’t encourage Patti to change her ways.

  “I’ll come with you,” P. P. Patti said again, plowing through the privacy hedge, proving the term privacy held little weight in her small world of gossip gathering. “Even though you never help me with anything.”

  Patti wore binoculars around her neck, a ball cap on her head, and a canvas vest with multiple pockets. She was all ready to start out, which made me suspicious that she’d been listening in to the entire conversation.

  “That isn’t true,” I said. “I helped you set a raccoon trap just last week, didn’t I?”

  “All I got in it was a skunk and I didn’t see you rushing over to help with that! Nobody does, and I’m the most volunteering person in the whole community.”

  Mainly to feed your gossip addiction, I could have said. “I appreciate your offer to help find my bees,” I said instead, throwing a hard look at my sister, who thought she would escape her bee-catching destiny because Patti had stepped up and volunteered. Ha! “And three of us will make it even easier,” I continued. “Getting the swarm back to the beeyard isn’t going to be the hard part. They’ll come along as docile as a flock of newborn ducklings following mommy duck.”

  My sister snorted.

  “It’s true,” I said. “They don’t have a hive to defend, which is the only reason they would attack in the first place, and they won’t leave their queen, who has to be protected in the middle of the entire clump, so we’re safe. The hardest part will be finding them.”

  “Did you see which way they went?” Patti asked.

  I pointed northwest.

  “Oh no,” Patti said. “Not there.”

  Just then, we heard a gunshot coming from the general vicinity where I had, only seconds ago, pointed. We had a moment of silence.

  Holly was the first to speak. “Is it turkey-hunting season?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “How does anybody figure it out? Keeping up with all the different hunting seasons is impossible. There’s some kind of lottery system involved and different hunting dates depending on the draws. That’s all I know.”

  “It sounded really close,” Holly said.

  “Turkey season is over,” Patti said. “And sound travels. It could have been miles away.”

  None of us felt too worried.

  Hunting was a way of life for many of the residents of Moraine. People didn’t hunt within the business and residential districts, but with all the forests and fields surrounding town, hearing a gun go off wasn’t any big deal. If we had been in Milwaukee, which was less than forty miles away (and where I had gone to college and started up in my bad marriage), we’d have already been on the ground, crawling for cover. Here, it was part of the daily routine of small-town life.

  “We’ll be perfectly fine going into the woods,” I said. “Rifles aren’t allowed around here, only shotguns and they don’t have the power and range that rifles do. It isn’t like bullets are going to come zinging at us just because we heard a shot.”

  “Listen to you,” Holly said. “Suddenly a weapons expert.”

  That little tidbit on firearms came courtesy of Hunter Wallace, my maybe boyfriend, who happened to be a cop and therefore up to speed on all that shooting stuff. Some of it, a tiny amount, had rubbed off on me. He’d even taken me target practicing at the police range and said I wasn’t too bad, at least when I remembered not to accidentally point my weapon at other people.

  Another shot resounded.

  I checked the time on my cell phone. Seven. We had at least an hour before dark.

  “Did you know sound doesn’t travel in outer space?” Patti said.

  Holly and I looked at Patti, not sure whether to believe her or not. Like it mattered at the moment.

  “We’ll need protection if we’re going in where I think we are,” my neighbor stated. “Flashlights, pepper spray, anybody have a weapon?”

  Patti wasn’t concerned about the blasts we’d heard, but about something much creepier and more otherworldly than a shot in the distance.

  “SC (Stay Cool),” Holly said to Patti, moving closer. Holly always was a sucker for drama. She knew exactly where Patti’s concern came from, and I could tell she was very close to getting totally involved in our caper. “He never hurt anybody.”

  “That we know of,” Patti said ominously, before throwing in a whine. “I have enough problems with my health conditions and trying to make ends meet in this economy. I can feel my blood pressure going up right this minute and that isn’t good—not good at all.”

  “You’re both overreacting,” I said. “Lantern Man, if he really exists, is totally harmless.” But I felt the hairs on my arms stand at attention. “And to make something perfectly clear,” I continued for Patti’s benefit, “I didn’t start that particular story.”

  I sounded defensive even to myself, but I’d been accused more than once of being the Lantern Man fiction author, and so I set the record straight every chance I got.

  The three of us were talking about strange sightings along a secret tract of land. Nobody other than locals knew the land existed. It consisted of a mix of woods and fields and ran between a state trail on one side and private landowners on the other. We called it The Lost Mile because it had been overlooked when a survey was prepared to divide up surrounding land, an oversight that wasn’t that unusual when working with large parcels of farmland. The mistake happened so many years ago nobody could remember when it was finally discovered and nothing had been done to remedy the situation.

  The Lost Mile was the equivalent of a city block—a little under a full-mile long—and had been logged at one time. An overgrown road cut right down the middle of it and a young forest of pines and maples flourished on its sides. The Lost Mile also had a history. It had generated some wild stories, mostly because of the teenage parties held along its paths. Hippies squatted there in the sixties and some of the old-timers claim someone had been killed in there w
hen a motorcycle gang discovered it. Although none of them could recall the circumstances or who the victim had been.

  Then, sometime during my senior year in high school, Lantern Man arrived. He’d been seen or, rather, his lantern light had been seen, by enough witnesses to make the rest of us sit up and pay attention.

  And scary, weird stuff began to happen.

  Nobody would think of going in there after dark.

  “I’ve changed my mind about helping you,” Patti said abruptly. “I have better things to do than get caught in dark and fog in The Lost Mile. I’m staying home where it’s warm and dry.”

  With that, she disappeared through the cedar hedge.

  “Okay then,” I said, turning to my sister. “You’re the only one still standing.”

  “I’m not afraid of The Lost Mile, if that’s what you think.”

  We both knew what terrified Holly more than anything: bees. “I can’t do this alone,” I said. “You have to help.”

  Which was totally true. If I had even the slimmest chance of getting them back tonight, I needed a partner. And Holly was it.

  “Look at the fog,” she pointed out. “Patti’s right.”

  “We’ll only look for a little while. Besides, I’ve been thinking about them and I’m pretty sure I know where they went and it isn’t anywhere near The Lost Mile. This will be a piece of cake.”

  Which was a total lie on more than one count, but I needed her help, and she wasn’t enlisting on her own.

  Holly didn’t say yes, but she didn’t say no either, and she wasn’t backing up to make a run for it. Her lip popped out in the pout she gave when she was about to go along with something she really didn’t want to. I could read my sister like the back cover of a children’s storybook.

  We slipped past the beeyard, walking lightly over the field mix of dandelions and grass that carpeted my backyard. I kept it natural and chemical-free to benefit the honeybees, another sore topic between Mom and me. Holly hugged the hedge line as far from the hives as possible and disappeared behind my honey house, still heading in the right direction.