Mind Your Own Beeswax

by Hannah Reed

  I loved my honey house, which I had moved from my beekeeping mentor’s apiary after he died. I painted it yellow with white trim to match my house. The honey house was the size and shape of an oversized garden shed and contained all the gear and equipment I needed to harvest and process honey from my hives. I could smell its sweetness floating on the damp air.

  Holly reappeared on the other side and we fell in step, turning to the right at the Oconomowoc River’s bank. Fog rolled thicker now, lying in the low areas, but we would head uphill in a few minutes and visibility would improve.

  With a good hour before dark, we had plenty of time to find my bees. They might be able to outrun me on a short sprint, but that heavy blob wouldn’t have made any real mileage before settling in a tree for the night.

  As we turned onto the same deer trail my bees had followed earlier, I heard crashing behind us. A beam of light swung wildly from side to side. Not a sharp, crisp funnel of light, more blurred and diffused by the haze.

  “Lantern Man!” Holly practically screamed, which wasn’t a brilliant move if we’d really stumbled across some kind of ghost or creepy creature from another dimension. Not that I believed in those things, but still . . .

  “The Lost Mile is still ahead of us,” I said. “It’s on the other side of the river, which is the only place he’s ever been seen.” I really, really hoped that were true.

  “Quick! Hide!” Holly ignored me and vanished into the thicket alongside the deer path, leaving me to face whatever was charging our way. I considered jumping on Holly’s hysteria train and scampering for cover.

  Southern Wisconsin doesn’t have wolves or bears or moose, so I wasn’t worried about an attack from a wild, woman-eating, four-legged creature. Coyotes and foxes were plentiful in our area, but they didn’t attack humans. Did they?

  Besides, I reasoned, suddenly feeling foolish for my irrational thoughts, animals didn’t carry light sources.

  Still, I felt my heart rate pick up speed at the thought that I might actually meet up with the infamous Lantern Man.

  The light beam was close enough now I could tell it was a flashlight, not a lantern.

  And P. P. Patti was right behind it, binoculars and all.

  “I thought you didn’t want to be in the woods after dark,” I said.

  “I don’t,” Patti said, sounding out of breath. She looked around. “So we have to hurry. Something important came up. Where’s Holly?”

  “In the bushes. You can come out now, Fearless Wonder.”

  Holly had the decency to look embarrassed, but I wasn’t sure if it was because she had left me to fend for myself or because she had revealed a cowardly part of herself residing under all that casual bravado. I’d already known about her cowardliness, exposed the first time we’d worked together with minuscule honeybees, so she wasn’t sharing any new flaws.

  Holly had burrs stuck in her hair but that was her problem, and I wasn’t about to tell her they were there. That’s the least I could do to thank her for her teamwork.

  “I just got a bulletin over my scanner.” I realized Patti’s heavy breathing wasn’t because she had been traveling fast. It was pure excitement that had her panting.

  “You have a scanner? Like a police scanner?” Holly asked. “WTG (Way To Go)! Awesome.”

  Patti nodded, speechless, while she caught her breath.

  That little gem—the scanner—explained why Patti always had breaking news before the rest of us did. She had a full arsenal of spying equipment, including a telescope, which seemed to be pointed in every direction at once, including at my windows.

  Patti took a deep breath before starting in. “It came through on one of the auxiliary channels. One of the Kerrigans is missing,” she said. “The police chief won’t do anything about it because it hasn’t been twenty-four hours, so the Kerrigans put out their own news bulletin and are organizing a search party as we speak.”

  “Which one is missing?” I asked, thinking the situation must be serious to get that kind of reaction. I really hoped it wasn’t one of the younger ones.

  “And missing for how long?” Holly butted in. “It couldn’t have been more than a few hours since we had Kerrigans at the store making candles and they didn’t seem worried about a missing family member. V (Very) weird.”

  “She went missing right after she left your class, Story.”

  My heart sank into my stomach. “Not one of the kids.” I thought of the little troublemakers, how overly exuberant they’d been. Alive and not missing at all. Then.

  “No,” Patti shook her head. “Not a kid. So, do you want to keep guessing or should I tell you who?”

  “Who?” Holly and I said in unison.

  “Lauren Kerrigan,” Patti announced.

  Holly gave me a sharp glance.

  After a brief pause while I took in the name Patti had flung out so casually, I said, “That is the most outrageous thing I’ve heard in a long time. Is this some kind of joke? Did someone put you up to this?”

  “Why? No! Why? Tell me.” Patti was what Moraine’s locals called an outsider, and despite all her gossiping, she always would be. She hadn’t been born and raised in our community, so even though she had latched on to all the town’s current drama, tapping into Moraine’s main artery with a permanently placed IV, she wasn’t part of our past and wasn’t privy to old secrets we kept.

  And Lauren Kerrigan’s name had been tucked away in Moraine’s most secret jar where it resided in a dusty corner of our topmost pantry shelf. Out of reach, out of sight, out of mind.

  I hadn’t heard her name spoken in years.

  “It’s true,” Patti said. “I wouldn’t make it up. Can one of you tell me why the big reaction? Who is she?”

  “Are you sure she was in my candle-making class?” I asked, ignoring Patti’s demand for more info.

  She shrugged. “Apparently. At least that’s what I heard.” I thought back to the strange woman in my class, the one who’d looked vaguely familiar. But Lauren Kerrigan had been my age; the woman in the basement of The Wild Clover looked much older than her mid-thirties. Was it possible?

  A little inner voice whispered an affirmative.

  Then Holly said, “Why all the uproar? She’s been gone only a few hours. Seems like a knee-jerk reaction to me. Way OTT (Over The Top).”

  “I’m with you,” I said to Holly. And for the first time in memory, I thought Johnny Jay, our police chief, had made a good call. He’d made the right decision to give it twenty-four hours before alerting the troops. Though I’d rather eat road kill than admit Johnny Jay and I agreed on anything.

  But Patti wasn’t done dispersing information. “She came into town and was staying with her mother on the Q.T.,” she said.

  I shook my head in bewilderment. Rita Kerrigan was Lauren’s mother. Rita had kept her distance from her daughter during the candle-making class. Although now that I thought back, Rita had stayed close by.

  “Why didn’t Rita say anything?” I wondered aloud.

  “Lauren asked her to keep it quiet?” Holly guessed.

  “Then why come at all?”

  “I have more,” Patti said. “When Rita Kerrigan went home from The Wild Clover after the class, she found her nightstand drawer wide open. A gun was missing from inside it and nobody can find Lauren. Something awful might have happened to her.”

  “Or to someone else,” Holly suggested.

  Instantly, I thought of the gunshots we’d heard. Just as quickly, I rejected the next thought that popped out of nowhere. That they were connected. A missing gun and a gunshot didn’t necessarily have to add up. Did they?

  But why had Lauren come back to Moraine?

  And where was she right now?

  “What if she killed somebody again?” Holly said.

  “Killed? Again?” Patti said, practically shouting in excitement.

  “Some people,” I said, sending Holly a shut-up look, “have overactive imaginations.”

  Four


  “Lauren Kerrigan,” Patti said, slowly rolling the name on her tongue and crinkling her forehead. Finally, she said, “There’s a big story here. I can feel it in my bones. Spill the beans.”

  Holly and I glanced at each other. My sister’s eyes told me she’d defer to me. There was a story, but Patti wasn’t going to get much of it from me. The whole thing was too long and complicated, not something that could be explained in a two-sentence blurb. “Another time,” I said.

  “Oh, come on,” Patti said. “I’m trying to get a reporting job with the local newspaper and this could be my ticket.”

  “The Distorter?” I said. “You want to work for The Distorter?”

  “The Reporter,” Patti corrected me, sounding offended at my own “distortion” of our tiny news rag’s name. “I need a big story to get in the door. Joel Riggins works at the paper and he promised to collaborate with me on a big, juicy piece once I find it.”

  “That kid reporter?” Holly asked. “Isn’t he about twelve?”

  “He’s going off to college. I want the position when it opens. So spill.”

  “Is that reporter talk?” I asked. “Spill?”

  “Come on, you guys!”

  “It’s nothing. No big deal,” Holly said. “She’s just one more from the Kerrigan clan.”

  “I heard you say ‘kill again.’ You can’t fool me.”

  Just what we needed, Patti broadcasting Holly’s careless comment to the entire community.

  “EOD,” Holly said.

  Which meant, End Of Discussion.

  “EOD?” Patti said. “Can you talk normal English for once? All this EOD, POD, COD stuff. I mean, who understands what you’re talking about? Half the time, I’m clueless.”

  “I don’t like to waste breath,” Holly retorted.

  While Patti and Holly continued to discuss the pros and cons of acronyms, all kinds of memories surfaced in my head.

  As if I’d ever forgotten in the first place. The past was hard to get away from. It might disappear for a while but it always comes back in some form. The best a person could do was have a perfectly clean slate all along. But who manages that?

  Certainly not me. Or Lauren Kerrigan.

  Back in high school, Lauren had been a beautiful teenage girl with a gift for getting any guy she wanted. She knew how to dress to attract attention, had long blond hair and a to-die-for complexion. She was the kind of female that guys loved and girls absolutely didn’t.

  Lauren became the newest addition to my close group of friends senior year when she started dating T. J. Schmidt only a few weeks before the bottom dropped out of our party barrel. Our future dentist and his longtime girlfriend, Ali, were in the midst of another of their relationship crises, only one of multiple routine breakups, when Lauren seized the opportunity to insert herself into the action. She moved in fast. T. J. hadn’t stood a chance.

  We were all tight back then, and having Lauren around complicated things. Suddenly our friend Ali was replaced, and the dynamics of the group changed in some inexplicable and very uncomfortable way. I felt the change in us that very first day when she came around on his arm.

  Now here we were in the woods looking for my runaway honeybees and all of a sudden we were talking about Lauren Kerrigan.

  “What a blast from the past,” I muttered to Patti and Holly. Shadows moved and swayed around us, became longer and more sinister. Overhead, the trees seemed to grow taller and denser. Kind of creepy, considering the topic under discussion at the moment.

  “Blasts. We all heard gunshots,” Patti pointed out, using blast in an entirely different context than I had. None of us had moved from our spots on the deer trail. “This is too spooky for me. What if what we heard were shots from Rita’s missing gun?”

  “Would a handgun have sounded that loud?” Holly asked, looking at me.

  “That’s a really good question,” I said, again thinking back to the shots we heard earlier.

  “You knew all about the differences between rifles and shotguns a little while ago,” my sister pressed. “GA (Go Ahead). Enlighten us. What kind of gun was it?”

  “Uh, uh . . . How should I know?” I said, realizing I’d used the extent of my limited weapons knowledge on the town’s no-rifle policy.

  “Wouldn’t a handgun make more of a firecracker sound?” Patti asked.

  Holly piped in. “Or a noise like those snap-n-pops we used to throw on the ground when we were kids? Remember? They sounded like caps?”

  “We don’t know if the shots were fired from close by,” I said, “or from far away, so all we’re doing is wildly guessing.”

  Too bad Hunter hadn’t been with us when we heard them. He would have known.

  I looked down the trail and noticed Holly and Patti doing the same. Up ahead, the path we were following would come out into a clearing, marking the southern end of The Lost Mile. Somewhere north of there it had all started for us back then. Or ended for us, if I wanted to go and be all dramatic.

  “Tell me what’s going on,” Patti demanded. “I’ll find out from somebody else, and what if they tell me wrong? Don’t you want me to get the story straight?”

  My nosy neighbor had a very good point.

  “Besides,” Patti added, “if you can’t trust your best friend, who can you trust?”

  Oh jeez, not that again! My next-door neighbor was NOT my best friend. At least not from my point of view.

  Holly gave me an amused smirk.

  I decided to give Patti the bare bones facts since she wasn’t going to quit bugging me until I did. “In high school a bunch of us went into The Lost Mile from the other end. Some of us had been drinking.”

  Holly snorted.

  “Okay, all of us were, but some more than others. And bad things happened.” That was an understatement. Too much booze and even more bad judgment had ridden shotgun with Lauren Kerrigan when she pealed away from the northern entrance to The Lost Mile. “Lauren took off on her own,” I continued, “drove into town, and ran over somebody.”

  Holly stepped in. “Not just anybody, either. Johnny Jay’s dad. Wayne Jay.”

  “Our Johnny Jay’s father?” Patti said. “She killed the police chief’s dad? That’s horrible. How come this is the first I’m hearing about it?” Patti’s eyes actually gleamed with glee, and I had to think the world was filled with gossiping people who thrived on the bad fortunes of others. Please, don’t let me ever be one of them!

  I vowed to watch myself carefully.

  “What happened to Lauren?” Patti wanted to know.

  “She went to prison,” I said. “And no one saw her again.”

  There was so much more to the story and it all came rushing back. Lauren had turned eighteen the week before and so had been tried as an adult. Her defense team pushed hard for vehicular manslaughter while driving under the influence, which sounded terrible enough, but Murder One was much worse. They appealed to the jury, imploring them to consider her state of mind, which at the time had been swimming in straight vodka.

  Lauren’s life was in the hands of twelve jurors. If they came back with a charge of criminal negligence, her sentence would be light. None of us thought that would happen. And we were right.

  The jury couldn’t do that.

  Lauren had three strikes against her from the very beginning.

  Bullet point one: She couldn’t remember a thing, which wasn’t so surprising considering her condition. After striking Wayne Jay, her car skidded into a tree. She got off easier than her dead victim, only suffering a mild concussion and a bad hangover. Maybe if she had been able to recall the night, she might have been able to defend her actions. Or at least offer an explanation.

  Two: Another big factor that hadn’t helped her case was Wayne Jay’s position in the community. At the time of his death, Wayne Jay had been in the same shoes his son went on to fill after his death. Lauren’s victim had been the local police chief.

  Three, and most important: After hitting Johnny Jay’s dad, La
uren had backed up, then ran over him a second time. This was the totally incriminating evidence her attorneys couldn’t rationally explain away.

  P. P. Patti nudged me. “Wake up.” She waved a hand in front of my face. “Calling Story Fischer.”

  I blinked. “Sorry, I was lost in the past.”

  “Is there more to tell?” Patti asked.

  “That’s pretty much it.”

  “But Holly said she might be back to kill again.”

  “Ignore me,” Holly said. “I say weird things sometimes.”

  “No kidding,” Patti said, shifting her eyes to me. “Can’t you give me something I can use that’s special? Something to tie things together? I have a hunch this is the breaking story I need to get into the newspaper job as a full-time investigative reporter.” Patti grinned. “I like the sound of that—investigative reporter.”

  “I’ll have to think a little,” I said to get her off my back. P. P. Patti might get the entire historical scoop from another resident as soon as we retraced our steps and cleared the woods, but she wouldn’t get the finer details from me. I didn’t want to go there.

  “Should we go home and call for help, report what we heard?” Patti asked. “Or should we keep going on this path, in the dark, with Lantern Man running loose and who knows what else?”

  “You can go back and report the shot if you want to,” I said, fumbling with the flashlight I’d brought along until its beam lit up the ground at my feet, knowing what Chief Johnny Jay would say if I were the one doing the calling. It wouldn’t be pleasant. Or printable. “While you’re doing that, we’ll keep going.”

  “We?” Holly said.

  “You and me. In case you forgot, our original mission was to find and retrieve a swarm of honeybees. Somehow we got sidetracked.”

  I cut my eyes to Patti.

  She was hesitating, trying to make up her mind which way to go, caught between two potentially exciting possibilities: Running home to be the first to report shots fired, which could possibly have been from Rita’s missing gun. Or staying with us in case we found something more tangible, equally newsworthy, or even better. I was pretty sure this was a no-brainer for Patti. And I was right. She decided in a flash.