The Beekeeper's Secret

by Josephine Moon

  ‘No one,’ George mumbled.

  ‘It’s the priest, isn’t it?’ Helen grinned, pulling out a packet cake mix.

  ‘No,’ he said, cranky that she knew as much as she did.

  ‘Yes it is,’ she said calmly, pulling out the mixer and a bowl and tearing open the cake mix. ‘I think it’s a great idea. The guy’s got a lot to hide.’

  Should he be concerned that she was so eager for a man’s remains to be exhumed at night, like some scene from a horror movie, or proud that she had such an analytical mind? She was a lot like him, after all.

  ‘How did you get the judge to order that?’ she went on, cracking eggs.

  Hilda’s fingers were getting firmer and rougher at his temples, the pressure almost reaching painful levels; she clearly wished their daughter would drop the subject.

  George gave up. They would both read about it in the paper eventually. ‘It’s not totally uncommon with murky cases like this,’ he said. ‘The man died in the seventies, before we had the level of forensic technology we have now. Today, we can do all sorts of tests on bones to get more information.’

  Helen narrowed her eyes at him. ‘Yes, but why?’

  ‘Yes, why?’ Hilda murmured behind him, caught up in the mystery.

  ‘The death certificate says that he died from an accidental fall. But I have a hunch.’

  ‘A hunch?’ Helen said. ‘I bet the judge loved that.’

  ‘Don’t you have homework to do?’ Hilda said, snippier than usual, her hands now kneading his whole scalp as though it was a recalcitrant lump of dough that her life depended on wrangling into submission.

  ‘It’s Saturday,’ Helen said, rolling her eyes.

  ‘Oh, that’s right.’ Hilda’s hands stopped kneading and began tugging at the short hairs behind his ears. ‘Isn’t there a bake sale on Monday to raise funds for Nepal?’

  Their daughter shrugged. So?

  ‘Good thing you found that packet mix; we’ll need it for cakes.’

  ‘But I wanna eat it now.’

  ‘Well, make cupcakes; then you can have one and we’ll send ten,’ Hilda said, massaging George’s shoulders now, which was a great relief, as there weren’t that many hairs left on his head to lose to her determined fingers.

  ‘Why not eleven?’

  ‘Because that would look like we ate one.’

  ‘We are eating one,’ Helen countered.

  ‘Technically, you’re eating one,’ Hilda said.

  ‘And sending ten is better than sending eleven?’

  ‘Yes. Clearly you don’t understand the politics of bake sales. There are some frosted flower decorations in the cupboard so use them to make them pretty. They can charge an extra fifty cents that way.’

  George couldn’t quite fathom how they’d moved from discussing body exhumation to cupcakes in a matter of seconds.

  His superior (in rank, not years), Prosecutor Blaine Campbell, hadn’t been quite so jovial about it and had taken some convincing to submit the application.

  ‘It’s a waste of time,’ he’d said, between a mouthful of burger, a slurp of coffee and a frantic cigarette, standing on the corner of Elizabeth and Edward streets in the middle of the day on his lunch break, which was the only time and place George could catch him in person. ‘The priest did the crime but he’s dead. We’re after the other bad guy, the one that covered it up. He’s still alive. We can get a conviction for him and send him to jail and win a lot of public goodwill in the process. What use is it to dig up the dead guy?’

  ‘You’ve been reading the testimonials,’ George said. ‘I’ve seen firsthand the hatred and venom his victims have for the priest and the bishop. I don’t buy that the priest fell down a well. Who falls down a well? That’s nuts. I think there’s a lot more going on here and it’s our duty to find out what.’

  ‘Probably a goose chase at taxpayers’ expense.’

  ‘Isn’t it about time the force stopped cutting corners with this thing and ignoring potential evidence?’ said George. ‘That’s exactly the attitude that got the royal commission going in the first place. The public support is there.’

  ‘If you don’t find anything, we’ll look like tossers.’

  ‘And if we do, they’ll call us heroes.’

  ‘Do you know how much it costs to exhume a body?’ Campbell said, raising his voice over the growling engine and hissing brakes of a passing bus.

  ‘Probably not as much as it has cost these people in lost wages, fractured marriages, health care and therapy.’

  Campbell sniffed. As a prosecutor he wasn’t motivated by personal stories, George knew, but by the thrill of winning a legal argument. He tossed the last of the burger in a bin, chucked the cigarette butt on the ground, swilled his coffee, wiped his mouth on a serviette and tossed that too, all the while playing a staring game with George, who held his eye and refused to be the first to look away.

  ‘I’ll talk to the judge,’ Campbell relented. ‘I’m meeting him tonight anyway so I’ll bring it up, see what he thinks.’

  George tried not to look too grateful. ‘Thanks.’

  ‘But no promises.’

  ‘Fair enough.’

  It was later that same night, as George was removing his reading glasses, putting away the latest Jeffrey Archer and easing into bed, that his mobile phone had beeped.

  Polish your shovel. Court order on its way.

  And for the first time that day, George had smiled.

  10

  It was God day. Even after all these years, Sundays still held a certain feeling like no other day of the week. Maria didn’t go to church regularly anymore, but she liked to think about God on Sundays. Of course, she thought about God all the time, if thinking about God included having a clear focus and intention for your work, which she believed it did. But she still liked to honour her past relationship with the rituals of Sunday mass, and that deep fondness in her core for ceremony and quietude, by hitting the large brass gong near the dining hall three times at sunrise. The sound reverberated across the grounds of Honeybee Haven and down over the mountains below, out into the space beyond. It was something Buddhist nuns and monks did too. Such a simple, peaceful reminder to be still.

  She would tend to the guests’ needs, of course, but most checked out by mid-morning and then she was left to spend the rest of the day in peace, with just herself and her gardening and bees. It was as close as she came to bliss.

  Now she was sitting on the ground, among the flowers, watching her bees work. She’d woken early this morning from a terrible nightmare, feeling sick, her heart pounding. In her dream, she’d come up here to check on her bees to find them all dead. Thousands lay lifeless across the grass, and her feet crunched over their bodies as she raced to the hive boxes. She frantically tore off the lid, the inner mat, the honey super, and pulled out all the frames, hoping to find some survivors, but hundreds of black and yellow bodies fluttered through her hands and blew away in the wind. She reached down to remove the queen excluder, but the queen was dead and the brood chamber empty. There was nothing left.

  Troubled by the dream, as soon as she’d finished setting out the breakfast things for the yoga women she’d rushed up here, recalling all the stories she’d heard from America and Europe and New Zealand about colony collapse disorder, where a beekeeper went to check her hive, which the day before had been healthy and productive and heaving with bees, and all the bees were gone, simply vanished, with no explanation and no evidence as to why. Just an eerie silence instead.

  But her bees were still here, buzzing away, industrious as ever, determined to make the most of the warm weather before winter set in. Autumn was an important time of year for the girls. They were busy filling the frames with as much honey as they could produce to feed the hive over winter and insulate the brood to a constant thirty-six degrees Celsius. Maria probably wouldn’t be able to take much more honey before winter if they were to survive; and she certainly wasn’t going to do what so many commercial be
e farmers did and take all the honey and feed the bees with sugar water. How ridiculous. It made her livid with anger. How did they possibly expect to keep a strong and healthy hive when they were replacing honey—an incredibly complex, living, enzyme- and vitamin-rich food—with refined sugar? People could be so breathtakingly short-sighted.

  One of her girls landed on Maria’s steel-capped boot. The baskets on the backs of her legs were laden with dark orange pollen and the sun shone on her tiger stripes. Maria smiled.

  ‘Well, hello, dear. You’ve got a huge bounty there.’ It wasn’t usual for a bee to stop on its way home to the hive—the phrase ‘making a beeline’ meant exactly that. She should be headed straight home. That precious pollen needed to get into the hive for the workers inside to store to feed the brood. And her belly would be full of nectar, which she needed to transfer tongue-to-tongue to other workers and communicate where it came from and where they should go to get more—a vital skill, given that bees had to make one million visits to flowers to make just a kilo of honey.

  ‘You should get home,’ Maria said, shifting her boot gently. ‘Your friends are waiting.’

  The bee regarded her for a moment with its huge dark eyes, vibrated its translucent veiny wings, and then alighted into the air and disappeared into the melee of fellow workers focused on their jobs.

  A gentle breeze swayed the tops of the lettuce and coriander that had recently flowered, the bees feasting on them almost as much as on the native banksias, flooded gums and stringybarks, which were their main source of food.

  But in spite of the happy buzzing around her, the dream had taken hold in Maria’s psyche. Maybe it was time she talked to the bees about what was going on.

  She cleared her throat. ‘Girls, I have something I need to tell you.’

  But the words halted as she was struck by the memory of the day Father Peter died—the last time she’d had to go and tell the bees.

  ‘Telling the bees’ was an old English custom and had been passed on to Maria by the head beekeeper before her, Sister Claire, who’d taught Maria everything she knew.

  ‘It’s crucial,’ Claire had said in her heavy Irish accent, ‘that the master of the house, or the head beekeeper, always politely and fully explains to the bees major changes in the house, especially deaths, marriages or comings and goings of members of the family. If you don’t, the bees have a habit of dying, or simply leaving. One day you’ll go out and they’ll just be gone.’

  Perhaps that was the cause of colony collapse disorder, Maria thought now. No one was talking to the bees anymore, just stealing their honey and feeding them lolly water instead.

  ‘Especially deaths,’ Claire had gone on, rubbing at her whiskery chin. ‘You must invite them to the funeral.’

  ‘The bees?’ Maria had asked, still a novice at that time, only seventeen years old.

  ‘Yes. Turn the hive to face the church, maybe even carry it to the churchyard or graveyard. Hang a black cloth near the entrance to the hive. Offer them wine and cake from the wake. Knock on the hive’s top to get their attention before you make your announcement. Wait till they are listening.’

  Maria had thought it all rather strange. But when Claire died just a few years later, she’d done exactly as she’d been taught to do. She took Claire’s worn pocket Bible and placed it on top of the hive, rapped her knuckles on the lid three times, and waited until the bees came, which they did, hovering around her in a buzzing, attentive cloud.

  ‘It’s my sorrowful duty to inform you,’ she said, her voice shaking with grief for the loss of her mentor, ‘that our much-loved beekeeper, Sister Claire, has died.’

  She paused, not knowing what to expect—perhaps the bees would swarm or attack her. But they seemed to quieten, many of them choosing to rest on the outside of the hive, as if shaken by the news. The noise of the buzzing dropped and she could hear the trickle of the creek nearby. Tears welled. It was as though the bees had wrapped her in an invisible comforting hug, saying how sorry they were.

  ‘The funeral will be in two days’ time,’ she said, and attached a handwritten invitation to the side of the hive with a thumbtack. ‘You’re all invited. I’m sure Claire would love to have you there.’

  A couple of bees hovered near the funeral notice.

  ‘I’ll be your new beekeeper now,’ she said. ‘I’ll take good care of you.’

  And when the funeral happened, two days later, a bevy of bees did indeed come to the gravesite, flying over the mourners and resting on the spiked metal fence nearby.

  So years later, when Father Peter . . . Well, Maria knew she had to go tell the bees, just as she’d done for Claire, and for many similar events over the years. But this time it would be a speech like no other.

  She’d approached the hives late in the afternoon, as the workers were returning home from the last trips of the day and settling in for the night. She rapped on the wooden lid and waited a few moments, while several guard bees came to the entrance to see what was happening and assess the situation.

  ‘I have some news,’ she began, and clasped her hands together because they were shaking so much. ‘Father Peter died yesterday.’ Her voice was quiet in the peacefulness of the afternoon, long shadows streaming across the vegetable gardens, and chooks clucking as they settled on perches for the night. Maria took a deep breath. And another. The bees watched her quietly.

  ‘The funeral will be at the end of the week, and you are of course invited to attend.’ She rushed through the words. And then she fell to her knees on the grass, the cool damp quickly soaking through her stockings.

  ‘I ask your forgiveness.’ Her eyes were downcast, focusing on the grass. ‘I want you to know that what I did was for the greater good, because I had no other options. No one would listen. Father Peter was not a true servant of God,’ she said, trying to keep her words measured and moderate. But a wave of anger and sickness washed over her and her fists balled. ‘He was evil.’

  She had looked into the bees’ eyes and confessed her sin, the sin she then believed she would never tell anyone else.

  That memory still had the power to evoke the exact same physical sensations as she’d felt on that day—the nausea, the shaking, the urge to cry. But time had trained her to process them faster, so Maria knew that within four or five breaths she would feel okay again.

  Now, once she was ready, she addressed her bees. ‘I need to tell you something important,’ she said, and sure enough, a number of bees settled nearby to listen. They would go back and communicate with the rest of the hive. Just as they communicated the most complex information about the precise location of pollen and nectar by vibrating their wings in a waggle ‘dance’, any information she gave to even one bee would pass through the whole family like electricity.

  ‘A long time ago I did something that I felt was the right thing to do in order to protect innocent young people from a man with power over them. But it was a grave sin.’

  She gave the bees a moment to absorb that information, and absently flicked off a couple of ants that had crawled up her arm.

  ‘The thing is that I’ve now been caught up in an inquiry, which seems like it has nothing to do with me, because it’s quite rightly investigating a bishop—now an archbishop—who didn’t do anything to stop the priest. I’ll be made to give evidence, which, honestly, I’d quite like to do.

  ‘But there’s one problem.’ The bees waited, cleaning their wings and storing the information she was giving, like little hard drives. ‘Someone else knows what I did—Archbishop Ian Tully, the man under investigation. He saw me. And his silence buys my silence, and vice versa. But once I tell the police what I know, he will speak up too. So, I’m sorry to say, there is a good chance that I might have to leave here.’

  She waited, tugging at a dandelion stalk in the grass next to her, giving them a moment to process what she’d told them. It was funny, the thought of leaving the bees made her sadder than anything else. She was devoted to the charity and its wo
rk, but these bees were her family, her clan.

  ‘But I want you to know that I will make sure you are well looked after. I love you, my darling bees. I won’t leave you untended, I promise, even if I’m going to jail.’

  11

  ‘Belle, I’m so glad you answered.’

  Belle had obviously pulled over on the side of the road. Tansy could hear the indicator tick-tocking and the low hum of the car in neutral.

  ‘What’s happened? You sound teary,’ Belle said, pulling on the handbrake with a sharp scritch.

  Tansy took a shaky breath and gulped a few hiccupy, sniffly sobs.

  ‘Has someone died?’

  Tansy shook her head. ‘It’s Dougal . . .’

  ‘Dougal died?’

  ‘No, sorry. We had a fight. A big one. Can you talk? I so wish I could pop around.’

  ‘I’ve just pulled over but don’t worry about that. I spend half my life on the side of highways now that Hamish is in the world. I think he’ll wake up any moment and need a bottle, but start talking and we’ll see how we go. I can always call you back after that if I need to. What’s happened? You two never fight.’

  ‘It started yesterday, while we were at the markets.’

  Tansy and Dougal hadn’t talked much on the way home from the markets. They’d stopped in the kitchen, with the package from the chemist, still in its paper bag, lying on the bench between them.

  ‘We should talk,’ Tansy said.

  Dougal’s face was drawn but he didn’t look angry, which was something at least. She was momentarily thrown by how handsome he was, which was a weird thing to be thinking at that time. But he was holding his age well. It wasn’t like he was a model or anything, but he was pleasant looking. A kind face and smooth skin, plenty of thick dark hair, and a reasonably sized nose. Nice teeth. Teeth were important. She’d always thought his sideburns were a touch too long, but it wasn’t as if they were Abraham Lincoln’s or anything.