Stolen Honey (4 page)

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 Leroy, 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.

Today, though, he was reluctant to come. He was done with classes by afternoon, but he had to pass chemistry and sociology—”No thanks to Donna,” he said pointedly—or his father would “kill” him. But when she said, “Okay, Tilden, we’ll find someone else,” he changed his mind.

He’d be over in twenty minutes, he said, and he was, looking as though he, too, had a fever, he was so red-nosed and mad-looking. He’d had an argument with his father over his grades, was trying to calm down. He adored his father—or feared him— she didn’t know which. The sad thing was that Harvey, a little martinet, seemed to favor the older two sons over Tilden. He just wanted Tilden to “achieve” so he could brag that he had a son who’d “graduated college.”

Feeling sorry for the boy, she spent extra time showing him what to do, where to mow; and finally, around three o’clock, she went alone to the Willmarth farm, donned her gloves and bee veil, and inspected the dozen hives she’d left there. They appeared to have wintered well, but the hives were crowded, and there was always the worry about swarming. Bees wanted plenty of space in the hives, and since the queen liked to move upward to lay her eggs, the best way to give her more space was to rotate the hive bodies throughout the springtime, putting the full upper hive body on the bottom and the empty bottom hive body on the top. By May the top body would be filled with brood, pollen, and golden nectar—food for any queen.

When she opened the first hive, though, she found the bees in a defensive posture, their abdomens raised in the air in the sting position. Hungry, she decided, and defending their honey, of course—a metaphor for her own life. “Right?” she said aloud. But the bees only purred. She puffed smoke along the frame tops to quiet them, then medicated the brood against disease and closed the hive.

Would she be able to nurture her own daughter’s life so easily? She’d hardly had a wink of sleep the night before, worrying about the college boy’s death, about the oddities of the situation. Russell, too, claimed on the phone that he hadn’t seen or heard a motorcycle when he left that morning. “You better go out and pull up that damn nightshade,” he’d said. “Could have been our own kids got in it. And get rid of some of those hives while you’re at it.”

Russell was always complaining about her bees—he’d been stung once too often. You didn’t
keep
bees, he argued, bees were wild creatures; let them inhabit the tree hollows, gather pollen where they would. His ancestors, he said (although he had almost as much French blood as Abenaki), never
kept
bees.