Stolen Honey

by Nancy Means Wright

  “I want the whole story. The whole truth,” she insisted, “out of both of you.”

  “It was here,” Donna said when they’d gone twenty yards into the woods. “I mean around here I left him—I can’t remember exactly. He tried to—well, he tried to do stuff, I didn’t like it. I fell—”

  “She was pushed,” Leroy said, his hands hanging like rakes at his sides. “She was on the ground.”

  Donna glared at him. “I fell. That’s when he—Anyway, then you came, Leroy. You had no business following us in like that! You should leave me alone. Stick to what you’re paid for. The bees. My personal life doesn’t concern you.”

  “Donna,” Gwen murmured, seeing Leroy’s stricken expression. “Enough.”

  “If I hadn’t come by just then—” Leroy went on, and was shushed by Gwen. She didn’t want to hear this part. She just wanted facts. Where and when, not what.

  “It wasn’t here,” Leroy said. “It was over by that sugar maple. I remember, it’s the tree with the red slash. I made it myself when Brownie wanted a path he could ski.”

  Gwen looked at the tree, at the ground beneath it. The snow had already melted in the April sun that snaked down through the budding leaves; there was no sign of a struggle, of a body lying there.

  “He was there when I left,” Leroy said. “He was out of it. He was drunk. I tried to wake him up, get him to go home. It didn’t work. So I left him there. I figured he’d wake up sooner or later, get on his big motorcycle, and go home to his safe little bed.”

  “You said you’d take care of him. You did!” Donna cried, grabbing his arm.

  “Well, I tried, didn’t I?” He shook his arm free. “I told you I tried. It’d stopped snowing. The moon was back out. It wasn’t that cold, he wasn’t gonna freeze. He had a big fancy coat on. I noticed he didn’t give you that coat to wear. You were the one would of froze if I hadn’t—”

  “Stop it, both of you!” Gwen shouted. She took a breath to steady herself. “But if you left him here, Leroy, then how did he get into the swamp? Tell me that.”

  Leroy was silent. Donna looked at him and he shook his shaggy head. “Not me. I just left him here, like I said. He must’ve got in there himself. Went the wrong way.”

  “They found the motorcycle down the road,” Gwen said. “Is that where he left it?” She looked at Donna. The girl was clutching her hands together, as though trying to squeeze something out of them.

  “Shep left it by the fence. At the foot of the driveway!” She sounded totally distraught now. One hand flew up to her forehead as though she, too, had a headache. A hangover, Gwen supposed, feeling her own head pounding. The girl wasn’t used to drinking. Gwen had to understand. How could you go to a fraternity dance without drinking? How could a young girl say no?

  “I didn’t move it. It wasn’t me,” said Leroy, gazing off at something Gwen couldn’t see. “I don’t know how it got down there. Somebody else must’ve moved it.”

  “Somebody else,” Gwen repeated numbly. “Then somebody else could have pulled the boy into the swamp. The police found him with his face in the nightshade—at least fifty feet from here.” She added, “Atropine and belladonna come from that plant, you know. If it gets into the bloodstream it can paralyze the nervous system, it can kill.”

  How ironic, that word “belladonna,” she thought. It meant “beautiful woman.” It was said that, during the Renaissance, women applied an extract of the plant to their eyes to dilate their pupils, enhance their appearance. But the boy had been far from beautiful when they found him. His dilated eyes looked ghastly, shocked, as though he’d seen a horrible sight. It wouldn’t—couldn’t—have been her lovely Donna.

  “You said he wasn’t dead. You said there was a pulse.” Donna yanked at her mother’s sleeve, her hand shaking. “Please, Mom, you said he was still alive.”

  “Then, yes,” Gwen said. “But Olen called. He’s gone, Donna, the boy is dead.”

  Donna cried out; she turned away, her shoulders quaking.

  “I’m so sorry.” Gwen put an arm around her daughter, who seemed to need holding up. “Sorry for you. For the parents. But we have to face this. The police will be back here with questions. You’ll have to remember everything. The time, the place, any other sounds you heard—the most minute details. And I’m not just talking to you. Donna. You, too, Leroy. You’re a witness as well. Probably a suspect.” She put her free hand on his arm. “I don’t mean to scare you. I just want you to be prepared.”

  She saw Leroy give her a sidelong glance. She wondered if he knew what she was thinking about. Russell was there, too, that night, although he didn’t know where his daughter had gone—Gwen hadn’t dared tell him. But why would Russell go out in the woods? Unless he’d heard the motorcycle, suspected it was Donna—he’d have gone off soon enough then. He’d have been angry—she didn’t want to think how angry.

  She remembered now the dirty boots she’d found the next morning in the kitchen—she’d cleaned off the dried mud, put them back in Russell’s closet. But of course it was mud from the Revolutionary War reenactments, not swamp mud. There was no need for Olen to know about Russell’s presence at home, was there? No, definitely not. She held tight to Donna as they made their way slowly back to the house.

  * * * *

  Donna slipped in through the side door of Emily’s dormitory. There was no one in sight, thank heavens. Everyone would know by now about Shep Noble’s death, about where he’d been found. She still couldn’t believe it; it was like a nightmare she was breathing heavily through. She couldn’t grieve—she’d hardly known Shep, she hated what he’d tried to do to her. But she never wanted him dead!

  She reached Emily’s room without running into another student and knocked, praying it wouldn’t be Alyce who answered. But Alyce stood there, a small smile on her face. “Emily’s inside,” she said, motioning with a pale, ringed hand. “I expect you’re here to tell her your troubles. I was just leaving.” She swept past Donna like she owned the whole doorway, like Donna wasn’t there at all.

  A moment later she wheeled about. “We’re all mourning Shep. All of us. The whole college. Shep was my special friend,” she added, her face all puckery. Then she turned and ran down the hall.

  When Donna entered, Emily looked up from her sociology book—they were in the same class—and said, “Hi, don’t mind her,” as though nothing had happened, although they both knew the sky had fallen.

  Donna slumped back on Emily’s bed and stared at the ceiling. Someone had stuck silver stars on it—last year’s residents, Emily said. Emily liked to lie there and gaze at them. They made the future appear hopeful, she said.

  But Donna’s future didn’t look hopeful at all—just the opposite. “You heard what happened.”

  Emily shut her book. She nodded, looking sad, sympathetic. “But I don’t know all the facts. I mean, I only heard the rumors, you know. That Shep is dead, that he was found in your woods.”

  “And you’re wondering where I was.”

  “Well, I’ve heard about Shep. A nice guy, an athlete, very popular. But a big appetite, too. For women. For drugs—he got in some trouble with that. They’re oversexed, those athletes. He tried to come on to me once, did I tell you? We were coming out of soc class, he put his hand on my butt—and I pinched him, hard. God, I never should have let you come with me, Donna. Nothing would have happened if I hadn’t made you.” Emily’s lip was quivery. She was pulling at her short brown hair.

  Donna waved her hands. “You didn’t make me. I went of my own accord. I should have gone home with you. It was my fault I stayed. And Shep, well, I asked him to take me home. I left my coat at the frat house. I was hoping you could get it for me. I can’t go back in there!”

  Emily sat on the edge of the bed, put her hand on Donna’s arm. “I’ll get it for you. Now quit blaming yourself. You didn’t know he was going to come on to you.”

  “How’d you know he did? Is that what they’re saying?”

 
; “Well, it’s not hard to figure. Kids know Shep. So you got him off, went back in the house, expecting he’d leave, right?”

  “Sort of.” Donna told the story: about Leroy’s intervention, about Shep’s passing out. “But somehow he got moved. Or moved himself. We just know he was in my mother’s nightshade. It looks bad for my mother. Uncle Olen is working on the case. He’s a local cop—not my real uncle, just a family friend.”

  “My mother’s boyfriend, Colm Hanna, is a cop, too. He works there part-time You should talk to him. Talk to my mother. She gets into these things. She—well, she helped me when things got bad a while back. Say, what are you doing tomorrow afternoon?”

  “I don’t know. I can’t think straight. I guess I’m through after my one o’clock.”

  “Then we’ll drive over, talk to Mom. It could help just to talk, right?”

  “Well . . .” Donna didn’t know why Emily’s mother would want to help her. Ms. Willmarth was a dairy farmer, she had cows to take care of. However, Donna’s mother kept bees on the Willmarth farm. There was some connection there. “All right,” she said. “But I don’t know what anyone can do. There weren’t any witnesses.”

  “What about that guy Leroy? You said he was the last to see Shep alive, right?”

  Donna held her breath a moment. Was it really Leroy? He had gone back after she went to bed. He was jealous. It drove Donna crazy; frankly, she couldn’t move a step around the place without his watching her. She’d have to get a straight story out of him.

  One thing she knew: She would ask her mother to get rid of those poisonous plants. Her mother even talked to them, apologized when she picked one or crushed it for some salve she was making. She would give a gift of tobacco to the plant in exchange for “taking its life.” It was “Indian” to do that, her mother said. And all her mother had in her was one long-ago drop of Indian blood through some ancestor who’d been taken prisoner, marched up to Canada, and then married an Abenaki brave.

  Well, Donna didn’t need the traditions. She didn’t need another identity. She was having enough trouble just figuring out who she was.

  “Want some Sprite?” Emily asked. She went over to the small refrigerator she kept in a corner of the room.

  “No, thanks. We’ve got that paper to write for soc class. I have to go see Professor Wimmet about what to write. I have to get my head together. I have to get my mind off what happened.” But what happened was a shadow that would follow her even to bed.

  “Sure, I understand. We’ll talk about it tomorrow. Be here at two, okay?”

  Donna nodded. When she went to the door, she saw that a sheet of paper had been shoved under it. She picked it up to give to Emily.

  But it was for her, not Emily. In red ink were the words: BELLA DONNA.

  She crumpled it in her fist so Emily wouldn’t see, let the door bang behind her, and stumbled, on rubber}’ legs, down the hall.

  Chapter Three

  “She’s in her room, she isn’t feeling well,” Gwen told Olen Ashley when he appeared in the doorway, looking contrite, the cheeks of his big plain face working in and out, one hand fiddling with a jacket button as though he were uncomfortable with what he had to say.

  “I can come back tomorrow,” he said, his hand on the doorknob.

  “No, wait.” She needed to hear more—if he had anything new to tell her, that is. She wanted the facts; it was the unknown that was tormenting her. “Try some of my dandelion wine? We’ve had a great crop of dandelions this spring. The bees love them, too.” Dandelions were the bees’ first taste of nectar after a long cold winter. “Come on. Just a small glass? It’s pretty mild.”

  Olen smiled. She knew he liked dandelion wine, even if he was on duty. They’d made it together once when her father was soil alive, when they were both younger—before he’d gotten so law-and-order-fixated.

  “Hi, there, son,” Olen said, as Brownie came running in, straight for the refrigerator.

  “Say hello to Uncle Olen,” she said.

  Brownie mumbled something and proceeded to spread a piece of bread with peanut butter and honey. Gwen didn’t want to talk in front of the boy, so she poured the wine, and she and Olen sat in silence until Brownie started upstairs with a can of Pepsi and the sandwich.

  “Lights out by nine,” she reminded him, but there was no response. Brownie wanted more than anything in the world, it seemed, to be an ordinary kid. And so far he was achieving his goal. He was neither popular nor unpopular in school—he just went along, without trouble. She wanted life to remain that way for him.

  “I suppose this will have to be in the local papers,” she said to Olen.

  “Afraid so, Gwen.” He looked apologetic. “We have to report it, you know. A death that, well, could be homicide?”

  “Homicide? It was the nightshade! And I didn’t even plant it, it had been growing there for years. It likes a damp stony spot, a wasteland. I merely cultivated it, that’s all. I mean, I sell it for the atropine. They put it in eyedrops, to dilate the pupils. Hundreds of ophthalmologists—”

  “I know, I know,” he said. “That’s not the problem.”

  “What is the problem?”

  “Cause of death. That’s what they’re asking down at the station.” He licked his lips. He was nervous; she knew the dry lip syndrome.

  “The nightshade!” she half shouted. “The boy had a cut on his face, you saw that. His nose was down in the roots. He must have dragged himself over there, dead drunk.”

  “That’s what happened, I suppose—it was all an accident. But the coroner says—”

  “Says what? What?”

  “Gwen, if you keep interrupting, I’ll never get to the point.” He swallowed the wine, let her wait. There was always a flare of the dramatic in Olen, wanting to surprise, shock with his words. He’d protect her, though, that’s what he liked to do. After a few sighs, he went on. “There were bruises on the forehead. Like he’d been hit, the coroner says. With a rock or something, I don’t know. And where did that cut come from?” Olen looked upset. She could see he didn’t want to make things hard for her. He wanted to get this over with as much as she did.

  “Who would have done that? Dragged him and then hit him? Not Donna! You can’t think that Donna—”

  “No, no. I’ve known Donna all my life. She’s like a daughter to me.” He looked nostalgic; he rubbed his chest. Donna was still fond of Uncle Olen. It was Brownie who could take or leave him. Brownie wanted—needed—his father.

  She sighed, finished her glass of wine. “So what happens next?”

  “We wait. Until the coroner is finished with the body. Until the autopsy is done.”

  “Those bruises,” she said thoughtfully, “were probably caused by the nightshade. It can turn the skin purplish. Make it look like he was hit, when he wasn’t.”

  “They’ll call in an ethnobotanist. Somebody who knows the indigenous plants around here.”

  “Why not let me talk to them? I know as much about nightshade as anybody.”

  “Conflict of interest, Gwen. We need an objective observer.”

  “Are you an objective observer, Olen? You’re a family friend.”

  He flushed. “Now, look here, don’t worry. I’ll be on the case as long as they’ll let me. I won’t let anything happen to you. Or Donna.”

  “Or Leroy? What about Leroy? He was the last to see that boy. By his own admission. He’s smitten with Donna, we all know that. But I’m sure he’d never hurt anyone.”

  “It’s a motive.” He was looking hard at her now, his lips pressed together. The look said she didn’t know Leroy all that well. Leroy would have known where the nightshade grew, he could have dragged the boy over there, moved the motorcycle. It was possible. It would be manslaughter at the very least—if he’d deliberately pulled the boy into the nightshade. She cupped the glass in her hands, squeezed it until Olen took it away.

  “You’re going to break it,” he said, smiling.

  “You’ll help Lero
y, too?”

  He thumped his empty wine glass down on the table. “We have to look at every contingency, Gwen. The boy’s parents, I met them this morning. They have money up the wazoo.” He rubbed his fingers together. “Poughkeepsie, New York. Father’s a lawyer, they’ll know how to litigate.” He was looking angry now, bitter at the wrongful distribution of wealth in the world. “I can’t come over here too often, though. I’ve got to appear impartial. Even though”—and his voice softened—”I’m not.”

  She was glad when he left. She was feeling flushed, uncomfortable. She opened a window, but only warm spring air blew in. And the familiar murmur of honeybees.

  * * * *

  Tuesday afternoon, Leroy came down with a fever, and Gwen called Tilden Ball from the farm up the road to come and mow. Tilden was a tall, quiet young man, rawboned and awkward-looking—he seemed to have grown a foot every time she saw him. Like Donna, he was a freshman on scholarship at Bran-bury—the first in his family to attend college. He was there because of a farmer who’d sold his four-hundred-acre farm to a developer and then given three scholarships to local farm boys. Tilden wasn’t especially bright, but driven by his father, he was a hard worker; he’d earned B’s in high school. According to Donna, though, he was already in academic trouble at Branbury. He’d wormed his way into two of her classes, she said, so she could help him write his papers—which she wasn’t about to do.

  Tilden would be far happier, Gwen thought, as an automobile mechanic, as Mert had been. The boy loved old cars; he was always driving souped-up models.