Mind Your Own Beeswax (5 page)

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 when 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.

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.”

“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.