Plan Bee

by Hannah Reed

  While Patti was on the phone, I called Holly’s phone to tell her to suck it up and get into work. She didn’t answer.

  Patti hung up and said, “You were right on the money. It was Bob Petrie.”

  I thought about Aggie’s hotheaded son and all the rumors about his previous run-ins with the law.

  “Now what?” I asked.

  “Now I go after him.”

  “You did say you’re a good interrogator.”

  Patti grinned. “Bring it on!” Then the grin faded. “You’re coming, too, right? That’s what friends do, right?”

  I sighed. “Right,” I said.

  Twenty-nine

  The next several hours were busy, so Patti went off on her own with a promise to return soon.

  Stanley Peck came into the store looking for his grandson. “Anybody seen Noel around?” he asked.

  Carrie Ann answered. “Did you check the ammunition dump?”

  “We have an ammunition dump?” Stanley said, gaping at her. “And I didn’t know about it?”

  “Gee, Stanley,” Carrie Ann said, laughing. “You’re getting gullible in your old age.”

  “Well,” I said, “if the county had a live ammo and explosives storage facility, Noel would be volunteering there.”

  “Which reminds me,” Carrie Ann said. “I haven’t heard any explosions lately.”

  Stanley pulled a shopping basket from a stack and said, “That kid’s been working nonstop, barely takes his head out of that notebook of his. But he wasn’t around when I got up this morning and he hasn’t come back since.”

  “He must be testing his experiment,” I said. “I’m sure he’s fine. None of us have seen flames shooting in the air or heard exceptionally loud noises.”

  “Noel needs a friend,” Stanley said. “Somebody to spend time with instead of always being alone. It isn’t natural.”

  “He seems perfectly normal to me,” I said, not believing my own words but wanting to make Stanley feel better. Besides, what’s normal anyway?

  With my reassurance, Stanley headed down an aisle toward the beer cooler.

  Sometimes I enjoy guessing what my customers will put in their shopping baskets and carts. Aurora, who specializes in otherworldly things, comes in to buy soy in all its forms, along with tofu, milk, beans, flour, nuts, and tart juices like cranberry without any added sweeteners. She’s easy to guess.

  Patti purchases quick energy boosters in case she doesn’t have time for meals while she’s stalking potential story leads. That means energy bars and certain specialty drinks containing enough caffeine and sugar to fuel a rocket ship.

  Speaking of turbo power, if Noel did come in, he’d buy drain cleaner and ammonia, no food at all except maybe a fistful of my root beer honey sticks.

  Right now a tourist passing through Moraine was at the checkout. I bagged for Carrie Ann—breath fresheners, a diuretic, and celery. This one had an eating disorder for sure. Which gave me an idea. So I asked my cousin, “Was anyone in right before or during the festival buying bleach, latex gloves, and black trash bags?”

  “How would I remember a thing like that?”

  “Just curious. If you remember anything significant, let me know.”

  I searched for the twins and asked them the same thing, but if anyone really had purchased crime-scene cleanup supplies, none of the staff remembered.

  Mom came back from nursing Holly and she was toting a yellow cloth bag. I recognized it as mine, one I used instead of paper or plastic to save the environment.

  “How’s Holly?” I asked.

  “I gave her painkillers. She’s going to stay in bed a little longer.”

  “What’s in the bag?”

  Mom said, “All those hickory nuts piled up by your door. I put them in this bag so I can get them over to Milly for her recipe.”

  I opened my mouth. Nothing came out. Mom opened the bag so I could see how many she’d gathered. Lots. More than a squirrel could pile up in a week, maybe in a month.

  “Did you see anybody over at the house?” I managed to croak.

  Mom looked at me weird. “Just Holly,” she said.

  “Other than her.”

  “No. Are you okay?”

  I nodded.

  And if I thought things couldn’t get worse than a pile of suspicious nuts, Lori Spandle strutted in to prove me wrong. Once, in the past, Lori had entered the store wearing a bee veil when she was recruiting residents to rise up against my beehives. She hadn’t won that round. Today, she had the nerve to come in wearing a hockey helmet with a face cage.

  We exchanged pleasantries.

  “I have to wear this just in case you lose your temper again,” she said. “You’re a menace to society.”

  “Nobody’s forcing you to come into my store.”

  “I need to know what you’re up to next, check out what’s going through your twisted little mind. This is the only way.”

  “And you think that helmet is going to protect your pea brain?”

  “Watch it, Fischer.” Lori flounced past me to the fruit aisle. I followed.

  “A quick question,” I said. “When you rented Clay’s house to Ford, did he mention anyone else would be with him?”

  She squeezed a lemon, then another. “No.”

  “Does my ex know how badly you messed up?” I said. I really had wanted to call Clay and tattle on Lori’s incredible lack of good judgment, but I couldn’t stand the thought of speaking to him. Besides, he’d probably defend her.

  “Don’t you have anything better to do than pry into my affairs?” she made the mistake of saying, since affairs were her specialty.

  I didn’t have to respond. My smirk said it all. I turned on my heel and walked off, thinking she looked utterly ridiculous in that helmet.

  Patti returned with a full report on Bob Petrie. She filled me in while I walked Dinky around the perimeter of the cemetery. “I CCAP’d him,” she said, pronouncing it c-cap. CCAP stands for Consolidated Court Automation Programs and is a website where Wisconsin governmental agencies upload information about cases in circuit courts. And they update it hourly to keep it as current as possible. So if a person has been in legal trouble, anybody can find out about it, unless it involves sealed records like underage individuals or adoptions, that sort of thing. Any other records are wide open.

  “He isn’t a habitual traffic offender,” Patti said. “Speedy Delivery probably checked with the motor vehicle department and cleared him for hire without investigating any further. But he’s been in trouble for petty theft, disorderly, and vandalism.”

  “What a nice guy,” I observed. “Perfect profile for what we’re looking for.”

  “And he’s getting off work just about now.”

  “Let’s go wait for him at his house.”

  On the way over, I told her about the hickory nuts my mother found at my doorstep. “Are you as confused by those nuts as I am?” I asked her.

  “A threat of some sort. And I still can’t believe I let that guy get away with my telescope.”

  “Your hands were tied,” I said, meaning it literally as well as figuratively. “It wasn’t like you had a choice. Any more info on the murder weapon?”

  “Just brown fibers so far.”

  We came over the hill into Colgate and parked close to the road leading to the lake. And waited.

  “What should we do when he shows up?” Patti asked. “Run him into the ditch?”

  I hadn’t thought that far. “We better stop him before he gets home,” I said. “Otherwise we’ll have to deal with all the Petries and we won’t accomplish a thing other than get run off their property. Or get put to work spreading bark mulch.”

  “Spreading what?”

  “Never mind. Do you know what Bob drives when he isn’t working?” I asked a bit late in the game.

  “No.”

  “That’s problematic.”

  “I’ll walk out in the road and flag down every car,” Patti said, twisting around and
peering into the back of my truck. “I could use one of those construction flags. Do you have one?”

  “No. And if he’s the guy who tied you up, what makes you think he won’t recognize you and run right over you?”

  “Good point.”

  “You’re the experienced investigator,” I said, using finger quotes around the experienced part.

  “I’m thinking. Shhhh.” Pretty soon she said, “If we had an ax we could chop down a tree, fell it right across the road. That would bring him to a stop fast. Then I could blast him with one of my sprays.”

  I glanced over at her vest, the one with all the little pockets. And wondered about the contents.

  My phone rang. It was Hunter.

  “What’s new?” he asked.

  “Not much. Just sitting around talking to Patti Dwyre.”

  “That ought to be interesting.”

  “It always is.”

  Then I remembered about Grams and her conditional offer to adopt Dinky. “I need help training a dog,” I said.

  After a slight hesitation, he said, “Not Dinky. Please don’t tell me you want to train Dinky.”

  “She needs work.”

  Hunter laughed. “She had to be the runt of the litter. Only a runt could be that stubborn.”

  “I have to do it. It’s doable, right?”

  “We might have to spend long, intense hours together.”

  “Let’s get started soon,” I suggested, then hung up. The sooner the better.

  Patti said, “For a minute I thought you were going to tell him about Petrie and ask him, in a simper voice, to take over for you.”

  “What do you think I am? A helpless female?”

  Just then, a white van came over the hill, one just like the van at the Petrie booth during the festival.

  Sure enough, Bob Petrie was behind the wheel.

  But we reacted too late to stop him from turning down his road.

  Thirty

  “We’re implementing Plan B,” I said, starting my truck.

  “Which is?”

  But I was already in motion, tearing after Bob. Tires squealed. We peeled.

  We caught up with him before he got out of the van. Patti jumped out. “Bob Petrie,” she said, flashing her press pass. “We have a few questions to ask you. Please come with us.”

  Bob looked startled. So did I. My hasty plan hadn’t included putting him in the truck with us.

  But the whole situation could have all worked out for the best, because he refused.

  Except Patti kneed him between his legs.

  “@%#&,” I said, the four-letter word slipping out. Then I got out of the truck and ran around to the other side where Bob was down on the ground between my truck and his car, sucking frantically for air.

  “Help me load him,” Patti said.

  “No way. We can’t kidnap him.”

  “He’s the guy! The one who attacked me!” Patti was grunting from the effort as she tried to get him up off the ground and into the truck.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Never been surer. Now help me!”

  Bob continued to roll around, absorbed in his own problems.

  “I have a better idea,” I said. “Put him in his own vehicle, and you can drive it. We can’t leave it here for his family to see.”

  “Okay.”

  Between the two of us, we managed to get the job done, stuffing fetal-prone Bob into the passenger seat. I didn’t even want to think of the consequences of our actions. There wasn’t time. Any minute Aggie or some other family member was going to hear us or see us if we didn’t move out fast. Plus, very soon Bob was going to get his cojones under control and he was going to brain Patti.

  Besides, there was a method to my madness. This time, if we were caught (and that was pretty much a given, considering the way we were carrying on), Patti could be the one to face the music in Johnny Jay’s locked interrogation room.

  A few minutes later we tore out onto Colgate’s main thoroughfare, me in the lead driving my truck and Patti following in Bob’s van.

  Grams’s property wasn’t too far. I headed there. In the rearview mirror I saw Bob’s head swing up. Then some kind of commotion between them before Bob’s head disappeared from view. I wasn’t even going to ask what she’d done to him.

  We turned into the field Grams rented out to a local farmer. He’d planted corn this year, rotating annually between corn and alfalfa. The corn was a whole lot taller than knee-high, almost ready to pick, which meant we were concealed from view. I kept to the far edge of the field, bouncing along, scraping against the closest row of stalks until I was sure we were out of sight.

  Patti pulled up, got out, ran around, opened the passenger door, and did something to her prisoner, then slid into the seat next to me.

  My head swiveled toward the van. “You can’t leave him alone in there,” I said. “Won’t he drive away?”

  “He’s handcuffed. Besides, he has a temporary vision problem.”

  I couldn’t believe what Patti was capable of. I needed to remain in her good graces for eternity, so she didn’t practice her methods on me. Or else I needed to run away from her as fast as I could. Whatever my future choice would be, I was stuck with what I had at the moment. “How do you know for certain that Bob was the one who attacked you?”

  “I smelled him,” Patti said. “Then it all came rushing back.”

  I thought about that. She’d groin-punched Bob, kidnapped him, and handcuffed him all because of his smell. This was not a good thing.

  Patti must have sensed my doubt because she said, “Haven’t you ever noticed a person’s smell? Until they weren’t there anymore, you didn’t think that person had a particular scent of their own. But then you put your head down on a pillow they’d used. Or you picked up a piece of clothing they’d worn that hadn’t gone through the wash yet. And suddenly you breathe in something familiar. You smell them.”

  Patti’s little speech had a touch of poignancy to it. Don’t tell me P.P. Patti actually had a soft, tender side?

  Not that you’d know it by her recent actions.

  And more amazingly, I understood exactly what she meant. That exact thing had happened when my grandfather died. He had his own little den where he smoked his pipe. After he died, I’d go in there just to smell him. Grams would, too. That room was where we felt closest to him.

  “Okay,” I said. “What’s Bob’s scent? What tipped you off?”

  “Sort of a cross between peppermint or menthol…”

  “Like the stuff you rub on your skin to make a sore muscle feel better?”

  “That’s it! And garlic. And stale cigarette. He smelled exactly like those things the other day and he still smells like them. I’m going to make him spill his guts.”

  I trotted over to his van right behind Patti, who had her own special scent—she reeked of determination. What if she got even more extreme?

  Bob didn’t look so good. He’d just endured one of every man’s worst nightmares. Patti must have sprayed him with something toxic, too, because his eyes were all red and he couldn’t stop blinking. And his hands really were handcuffed.

  “Help!” he croaked when he saw me. “Is she going to kill me? I didn’t do anything. Please believe me.”

  Patti leaned in close to him. “You tell us the truth,” she said. “And we’ll let you go.”

  Bob looked frantic. I backed away and considered taking off, leaving Patti behind. She’d done it to me in the past, so I figured I was justified if I did. I made up my mind. Any more torture and I was outta there.

  “Now,” Patti said to her captive, “do you recognize me?”

  Bob nodded.

  “From where?”

  “I delivered a package to your house.”

  “And then you grabbed me from behind and tied me up and duct-taped my mouth.”

  “I didn’t do that part,” Bob said.

  I edged closer.

  “Who did?” Patti wanted to know.<
br />
  “I don’t know. Somebody called the main office where I work, just like you did. Looking for me.” Bob’s face twitched. I assumed it was some kind of aftereffect. “I was finishing up for the day, clearing my paperwork when the call came in.”

  “And?”

  “And they said there was some cash in it for me if I let them know if you had any deliveries come through. Your house is in my delivery area, so I said, sure, cash was always appreciated.”

  “How much?”

  “A hundred.”

  “Did you collect?”

  “Not yet.”

  I couldn’t resist joining in. This was so cool. Patti really was making him talk. “All you have to do,” I said to him, “is give us your contact information. The number you called.”

  “It wasn’t a phone number,” Bob said, his eyes never leaving his tormentor, Patti. “E-mail.”

  “What’s the address?” Patti said, getting out her flip notebook and pencil.

  Bob rubbed his eyes with his free hand. “Are you going to let me go if I tell you?”

  If it was me, I’d also be asking him about Ford and feeling around for clues that he might be Ford’s partner. I looked forward to my turn to interrogate him.

  “We’ll let you go,” I said, “after a few more questions.”

  “But,” Patti said, adding a caveat, “tell anybody about this and I’ll start screaming rape. You hear me?”

  “I hear you loud and clear,” Bob said.

  “I should have been given a chance to question him, too,” I said as we drove back to the store.

  “What questions didn’t he answer?” Patti asked.

  “You don’t even remember, do you? All you could focus on was you and your own problems.”

  “A violent stalker isn’t a major neighborhood problem? Next time it might be you on the ground all tied up and dying a slow death.”

  “I wanted to find out if he knew Ford. Remember that? Murder trumps stalking in most people’s priorities.”

  “You could have asked.”

  “Yeah, sure,” I snorted out in a whine.

  Because right after Patti removed the handcuffs, Bob got out of the van, and she kneed him again. No discussion with me in advance, no sign whatsoever. Just blam.