Dorothy Garlock - [Tucker Family] (11 page)

“It’s beautiful.” She smiled.

“I guess so.” Tyler shrugged as if this was the first time he had ever given the matter any thought.

“This was what you wanted to show me? The clearing?”

“Sort of,” he answered. Taking her gently by the shoulders, he turned her toward a corner of the field opposite from them and pointed. Following his direction, Christina could barely make out three white boxes arranged closely together; in the glare of the sun, they were almost invisible to the eye. From so far away, she imagined that they were chests of drawers.

“Do you know what they are?” Tyler asked.

“No, I don’t,” Christina admitted.

“Those are my beehives.”

As if Tyler were a magician who had drawn back the stage curtain to reveal his newest sleight of hand, Christina immediately became aware of things she hadn’t seen only moments before. Bees buzzed in the air all around them, landing on the wildflowers along the edge of the tree line, their tiny bodies heavy on the petals, the stems bowing, before righting themselves to collect nectar. From one flower to the next, the bees proceeded about their work. The air hummed softly with their activity. One landed on Christina’s wrist; she quickly shook it off.

“How…how many bees are there?” she asked nervously.

“Thousands, for sure.” Tyler beamed with pride. “There’s no way of knowing exactly, since I don’t reckon they’d hold still long enough for me to count them.”

“Aren’t you afraid of being stung?”

“Not anymore.” He shrugged. “The first couple of times it happened, it hurt like holy hell, but after a while I managed to get used to it. Nowadays, it’s not much of a bother. Besides, it’s not as if I just mosey on over to the hives dressed like this.”

“What
do
you wear?”

“Let me show you.”

Tyler led the way to the corner of the clearing that was closest to the hives but opposite. Nervously, Christina watched as bees buzzed all around them, flitting from one flower to the next, paying little attention to their new visitors.

A metal footlocker lay in the tall grass, a sprung padlock hanging loose from a clasp. Tyler threw back the lid with his foot and revealed the trunk’s contents. A wadded pile of white cloth and meshing half-covered a strange metal contraption that resembled a coffeepot.

“What’s all of this?” she asked.

“This is what I wear when I
do
want to get near those hives,” he explained as he pulled the cloth out of the trunk and held it up for her to see. It was a full-body suit of heavy fabric that would cover almost every inch of its wearer. Attached to the neck of the suit was a bit of fine mesh, topped with a brimmed hat.

“And that’s enough for you to keep from being stung?”

Tyler chuckled as he shook his head. “Even if I wore a suit of armor, a couple of those little buggers would manage to get through. They can be quite persistent when they want to be. Even when I’m wearing this,” he explained, rustling the suit, “I always get nailed once or twice, mostly on account of the fact that I never use gloves.”

“Why not?” Christina exclaimed, nearly shivering at the thought of exposing her own skin to a swarm of insects. “You’re just asking to get stung!”

“I need to have my hands free so that I can work with the hives,” Tyler said. “Farming honey takes a nimble hand. It isn’t the sort of thing that can be done wearing gloves. Besides, when I get stung, it’s just a matter of scraping the barb out with my fingernail before it starts hurting too much.

“But that doesn’t mean that I’m not a cautious fella. I make sure they’re as docile as possible before I go rustling around in their homes.”

“How do you do that?”

“With this,” he said, pulling the odd metal device out of the trunk. Up close, it appeared even stranger than at first glance. A metal cylinder was surrounded by rough wire mesh and topped with a retractable cap; it really
did
appear to have been made out of a coffeepot. Where the handle would be a metal glove had been welded to the side; inside was a metal wire that ran to the pot’s lid.

“Do you brew them something to drink?” Christina joked.

“Very funny,” Tyler replied sarcastically. “This is a smoker. All you need to do is fill it with dry pine needles, maybe a length of old twine, anything that will produce a lot of smoke, and set it on fire.”

“And that confuses them?”

“Strange as it may sound, it actually calms them down,” he explained. “Once they’ve gotten a good dose of the smoke, they all abandon the hive and start feeding. I don’t really understand the science of it all, but that’s what they do. Then, while they’re flying about, gathering pollen, that’s when I extract the honey from the hives.”

“But you still get stung, even with the smoke?”

“That’s just part of the job, I guess.”

“It seems…complicated…”

“It is and it isn’t.” He shrugged.

“Even if I were wearing that suit,” Christina said, running her fingers against the fabric, “and using the smoke, I don’t think I’d feel safe.”

“You’re only in danger if you
believe
you are.”

Christina turned to look at Tyler; he was staring at the beehives, but there was something in the way he’d spoken that made her wonder if he was talking about the trauma she’d witnessed in his family. Memories returned of the aggressive way he had grabbed her, along with the way he’d stormed from the dinner table.

Does he think that Holden’s problems are all in his head?

“Maybe you could help me sometime,” he suddenly said, pulling her from her thoughts.

“Oh…oh, no…there’s no way that I could…it would…,” she mumbled.

“Why the heck not? Rustling together another suit wouldn’t be all that difficult. Heck, I’d even make sure it had a pair of gloves.” Tyler chuckled warmly. “If you were too frightened, you could always stand a ways back from the beehives, but then you wouldn’t see the honeycomb when it’s first pulled out. Missing that would be a shame.”

From the moment she had met him, it had been clear to Christina that Tyler Sutter was a man of contradictions. He had been charming, loud, and brash at his mother’s dinner table. When following Christina in his car, he had been a prankster, obnoxious, and finally aggressive. Back at the garage, he’d been disarming, annoying, yet apologetic. Even now, standing among the buzzing bees in the middle of the clearing, he demonstrated a curiosity about the living world that made her rethink how she looked at him. When she had gone to bed the night before, she had never wanted to see Tyler again, even wondered if she had made the right choice in coming to Longstock, but now she had begun to feel more at ease, even a bit comfortable in her new home. Gone was the desire to distance herself from Tyler. Instead, she wondered what side of himself he might show her next.

“I…I suppose I could think about it…,” she said.

“That’s good enough for me,” he answered, “for now.”

“You know, I never would have imagined that a guy like you would be interested in something like this.”

“That’s only because you don’t know me very well.”

“I suppose not.”

“We’ll just add that to the list of things we need to work on.”

Christina was surprised to find that now, unlike in most all of her other conversations with Tyler, she didn’t feel the need to disagree. She was happy and at ease, completely unaware that they were being watched.

A
NNETTE WILSON COULD
not
believe what she had seen.

Walking back toward Longstock beneath the thick canopy of trees, she couldn’t get the image of Tyler Sutter talking with some strange woman…some
whore
, out of her mind. She had seen him smiling at her, laughing at something she’d said, had watched helplessly as the two of them held hands as if they were lovers.

Turmoil and torment gnawed at Annette’s stomach, and she had to fight the urge to vomit into a bush.

And it had been such a wonderful day…

Only an hour earlier, Annette had been bursting with excitement at the possibilities before her. Hurrying down the street under a gloriously clear sky, a picnic basket swinging in her hand, she had hoped to make it to the garage before Tyler left for lunch. She’d thought that a surprise might cheer him up a little. The last time she’d spoken to him, he’d told her that he never wanted to see her again for the rest of his life, but she’d known he didn’t really mean it.
Everyone
in Longstock knew how great a burden Holden had placed upon his family, so she had felt certain that Tyler was under such stress that he couldn’t be held responsible for everything he said. He just needed to spend some more time with her to realize he shouldn’t
ever
be without her.

Just as Annette had rounded the corner, Tyler stepped from the garage; seeing his face filled her heart with love, so intense that it nearly burst. She raised her arm, beginning to wave, and nearly wept when he’d returned the gesture with a smile, but immediately she had known that something was wrong, that he hadn’t seen her, but rather that he had been happy to see someone
else
.

Since that moment, Annette had felt as if she were sleepwalking. Under the glare of the summer sun, she’d watched while Tyler directed his attention toward the woman in the car, eventually helping her from the car and leading her behind the garage and into the woods. Feeling as if he had taken
her
by the hand, Annette began to follow them, somehow managing to put one foot in front of the other.

Watching them from a distance, trying to stay both out of sight and close enough to peer at them between the branches and leaves, listening to them as they talked with an intimacy that shocked her, Annette could not comprehend how Tyler could do such a thing to her.

After all, they were to be married.

If Annette were to admit it to herself, the truth was that things between them were delicate and they always had been. Tyler Sutter had never
told
her that he understood the special nature of their relationship, but Annette knew that he was aware nevertheless.

From the very first moment she had looked into Tyler’s blue eyes, Annette had
known
that they were destined to spend their lives together. They’d only been schoolchildren, but even as a boy he had mesmerized her with his handsomeness, the way he spoke, and his charming personality. It was undeniably love at first sight. She had excitedly embraced the idea that he was the man she would grow old beside. Immediately, she had made the decision to stay as close to him as possible, always to be by his side, certain that he would return her feelings and they would live happily ever after.

But on the day she had first told him how she felt, Tyler’s response was to push her down into a mud puddle.

That first setback was only the beginning; he pulled her hair, called her terrible names, and one time spat at her feet. Try as she might, he remained stubborn, behaving horribly toward her. Her older sister assured her that this was the way
boys
were, but as they became men things would change; his taunts and expressions of disgust would turn to a tender courtship and professions of love practically overnight. At this point in their lives, Tyler was
clearly
still a boy.

“Hold on to what you know in your heart is true,” she told herself.

The worst part was that Tyler became more and more handsome as he got older, drawing the attention of almost every woman in town. Annette suffered as she watched girls blush as they handed him love letters, saw him holding hands with one hussy after another, and sat with each in the back of the Odeon, Longstock’s movie theater, her imagination running wild at what Tyler was doing in the darkness with his date only a couple of rows ahead of her. Though humiliated, Annette remained undeterred, determined not to allow her love for him to waver.

But then, one snowy winter afternoon when they were seventeen, Annette had watched Tyler and Caroline Satterly share a kiss behind the school. Every embarrassment, every slight Annette had ever received from Tyler, seemed to be nothing in the face of this betrayal. At first, she had been furious at the man to whom she had willingly given her heart. But no sooner had the thought entered her mind than the
truth
revealed itself to her; it was the fault of all of those young girls, those promiscuous
whores
who were trying to tempt her beloved into doing things that would keep him from the life he was destined to have. And so, with hatred in her heart, she had decided to take matters into her own hands.

She would never allow a girl to come between Tyler and her!

Caroline Satterly and her family lived on an apple farm on the remote, far northern edge of town, reached only by a winding dirt road. Even in the cold winter months, Caroline’s parents were often busy making preparations for the upcoming season, leaving their daughter to walk home most nights. Without any neighbors, she was alone for miles.

One cold evening, beneath a gently falling snow, Annette waited in the bushes just off the road, concealed by the blanketing darkness of night. Her gloved hand held an imposing length of metal pipe. Though her exposed skin felt the harsh bite of winter and she had to stamp her feet from time to time to ensure she could still feel her extremities, she was infused with a burning hatred, a desire for revenge that could overcome any obstacle put before her.

Finally, Caroline trudged into view.

Annette couldn’t remember much of what followed. Her memories were a confusing jumble of images: the sight of her arm frantically swinging the pipe over and over into Caroline’s legs, the girl lying defenseless on the frozen ground, her piercing screams going unanswered. But even as Annette gulped deep gasps of the frigid air into her burning lungs, the pipe falling from her hand to clatter at her feet, she knew that she wasn’t finished.

Grabbing a fistful of Caroline’s blond hair, Annette told her rival for Tyler’s affections that if she didn’t break off their relationship immediately, the beating she had just received would be nothing in comparison to what would come next. Furthermore, if she told even a single soul anything about Annette Wilson attacking her, she wouldn’t live to see another day. Immediately, pleadingly, Caroline had nodded her tear-streaked face in agreement and Annette had left her sobbing in the middle of the road.

Caroline had ended her romance with Tyler the next day.

But Tyler still hadn’t come around.

Try as she might to fight her growing discouragement, Annette wondered when Tyler would finally accept her love. Over and over she tried to show him the depth of her affections. Every time she wrote him a letter, he threw it away unread. When she suggested that they go to the movies together, he laughed in her face and walked away. If she called him on the telephone, he hung up as soon as he heard her voice.

Annette knew she wasn’t a beauty in the sense that Lana Turner and Rita Hayworth were. When Annette looked at herself in a mirror, lamenting her hazel eyes that were set too close together, her slightly hooked nose, and an unavoidable overbite, she wavered in her conviction that she was attractive enough for a man as handsome as Tyler Sutter. It didn’t help matters that she hardly came up to the middle of his chest and was a bit dumpy on top of everything else. But whenever she felt depressed about her appearance, she remembered how her father had always told her that his younger daughter was drop-dead gorgeous on the
inside
and that was all that truly mattered. She would always remain a dutiful wife, a woman who would be proud to cook, clean, and raise children in a loving home. How could Tyler
not
see that?

And so she had persisted.

When Tyler and the rest of the young men of Longstock had gone off to fight in the war, Annette had waited for him to return as if they had already been married. Every Sunday, she had gone to church, sitting in the pews with the other women, mothers, wives, daughters, and sisters, praying with all of her might that Tyler would be returned to her safe and sound.

As the war with Germany and Japan dragged on, Annette’s father eventually suggested that she take another man as a husband; he knew an older apple grower whose wife had passed away a couple of years earlier and who was now interested in remarrying. By Longstock’s standards, he was wealthy; Annette would have had a comfortable life. But she steadfastly held her ground. What was the point in accepting a man’s hand in marriage if her heart belonged to another?

She was determined to be Mrs. Tyler Sutter.

But now the war had been over for nearly a year and Tyler
still
refused her overtures. She had been at the depot the day the train carrying many of Longstock’s returning soldiers had pulled in; she’d dreamed of a tearful reunion that would signal the start of their life together. But when she finally ran to him on the platform, he walked right past her without a word; she might as well have been one of the depot’s lampposts for all the attention he paid to her.

Over and over she had tried to speak with him; she waited outside the garage where he worked, outside his mother’s home, even stood along the road on which she knew he often drove, but all to no avail. She called him on the phone, wrote him letters, even baked him cakes that she left outside his door. But every time he saw her he was as dismissive as ever, often in a rude enough way to make her blush.

But I still love him and I always will!

Rushing down the trail back toward the garage, Annette was suddenly surprised to realize that she still clutched the picnic basket in her hand so tightly that her fingers were bone white. She flung it into the woods and it smashed against a tree trunk, spilling sandwiches, potato salad, and a couple of slices of apple pie onto the ground.

Tears welled in Annette’s eyes. They were not tears of sadness that her special day with Tyler had been completely ruined but tears of anger at the interloping slut who had stuck her nose where it didn’t belong. In a heartbeat, Annette knew that Tyler’s rejection of her wasn’t due to any shortcoming on her part but rather because someone, some
bitch
, was distracting him.

Annette had been through this before; memories of the beating she had given Caroline Satterly sprang into her mind. What she had done that dark, snowy night had squelched that romance and that was ultimately best for Tyler whether he chose to admit it or not.

“I’ll do whatever it takes to keep that tramp away from my Tyler,” Annette fumed, “even if it means that I’ll have to kill her.”

Luther Rickert stepped into the deeper, darker shadows of an empty garage across the alley from Samuel Barlow’s office just as the doctor slammed on the brakes, bringing his car to a sudden, screeching stop. When Barlow got out of the car, the old man took a wheezing breath as he wiped sweat from his brow with the back of his hand. Just the sight of the bastard who’d murdered his brother made bile rise in Luther’s throat and he had to restrain himself from going after the son of a bitch right then and there.

For the last couple of days, Luther had been watching every move Barlow made; he had waited outside the doctor’s house, followed as he walked the short distance to work, and even stood outside his bedroom window when Barlow shut his light off for the night. Luther was always in the shadows, always watching. Only hours earlier, he’d even been there as Barlow had driven off with that pretty new nurse of his.

If there was one thing that Luther had learned in the time he’d been following the doctor who, as a result of his own neglect, had allowed Luther’s brother to die, it was that he would have no trouble murdering Barlow.

“…gonna have to kill somebody…,” he said to himself.

Luther rubbed his thumb against the cold metal trigger of the pistol shoved into his waistband. Touching it made him feel powerful, as if he were capable of doing anything he wanted, that he couldn’t be stopped. Even now, it would be simple for him to walk into Barlow’s clinic, kick down whatever door the old man chose to hide behind, and put a bullet in the middle of his forehead, all in broad daylight. There was no one who would stand in Luther’s way. It would be as easy as snapping his fingers.

But that was
too
damn easy…

From the first moment that Luther had sworn off alcohol, there had been a clarity to his thoughts that he hadn’t felt for years. This wasn’t to say there weren’t problems; his craving for booze gnawed at his gut every second of the day, whispering to him to give in to his urges, even making his limbs shake from time to time, a cold sweat dotting his forehead. But he somehow managed to keep his demon at bay. He had no choice; there was a job to do.

The simple answer to his problems would be to kill Samuel Barlow. After all, he was responsible for what had happened to Donnie, for taking from Luther’s life the only thing that truly mattered. It would be an eye for an eye, a fair trade. But regardless of how much satisfaction he might gain from watching Barlow plead for his life, killing him wouldn’t bring Luther’s brother back.

It also meant that Luther would go to prison for the rest of his life.

Luther had never given a damn about what he had done to his life up until that point and didn’t see much of a reason in starting now. A part of him expected to spend some of his life behind bars. Still, in exchange for so many excruciatingly long years locked up he reckoned that he should get something in return worth such a steep price. Just taking Barlow’s life would be too simple, not rewarding enough. What Luther really wanted was for the man to suffer just as much as he had, as much as he
still
did, to wake up every morning with a longing ache for what had been taken from him and he could never have again.