Telling the Bees (22 page)

Thirty-four

C
OLONY COLLAPSE DISORDER:
There has not been a satisfactory explanation for the profound loss of beehives that has taken place since 2006. Some apiarists are beginning to believe there is no single cause but rather a perfect storm of pathogens, parasites, pesticides, poor beekeeping practices, and even electromagnetic emanations from cell towers that are to blame.

F
rom my singular perspective, it is perhaps forgivable that I had for so many years viewed the tragedy of Claire’s murder as a one-dimensional event: a tragic point in time that began and ended with the horrific image of her lifeless body that, once beheld, instantly and irreparably transformed all my most cherished memories into the seed of my most bitter regrets.

Even after I read in the newspaper about the poor misguided young woman who had been found dead of a drug overdose in a liquor store parking lot not more than a mile and a half from where the Straussmans’ old house once stood, I failed to draw the connective tissue between the individual points.

Instead, I regret to say that I may have smiled slightly to myself, drawing even a modicum of satisfaction from my belief that this unfortunate woman had received her just desserts after all. It seemed to me a sad but fitting end to a senseless tragedy all around.

And even when her name appeared on my neighbors’ cross several days later, I was not surprised by their misguided need to place the blame of her death on the malevolence of science.

As a man of both faith and reason, I blamed the end of this young woman’s sordid life on her very human inability to control her wanton desires. And to be quite candid, I took great comfort in my mother’s oft-stated belief that God works in mysterious ways.

But of course as my dear mother also used to say, “There are none so blind as those who will not see.”

I suppose that it took me so long to see what had been right in front of my nose because I did not want to admit my own complicity in the progression of acts that had unfolded over the years as inexorably as distaff Greek tragedy.

Blind to the convergence of causal events and relationships, I had for so many years missed the most basic yet telling signs that Claire’s and Hilda’s murders had been anything but a random act even though this had always been the most troubling aspect of their deaths from my point of view.

I recall how at the very beginning of his involvement in the case Detective Grayson had been likewise disturbed by the apparent motivelessness of the Straussman sisters’ murder. This of course was before we learned for certain that robbery had been the indirect cause of their deaths.

And so at the beginning of the investigation, which was well before the bungled burglary had been discovered, the good detective had asked repeatedly whether I had noticed anything missing from the house when I found the Bee Ladies’ bodies. And over and over again I told him that in all my recollection of the house there had been little of value to recommend it to strangers and, from my limited observation of the Straussman sisters’ affairs since our friendly discourse had ceased, a sudden appetite for material possessions would have been a most unlikely change of disposition for either of them. Which is to say that like their parents before them, the Straussman sisters had led an austere life.

In the early days of the investigation I had told the detective more than once, in response to his unremitting inquiries, that the only household treasure to speak of that I could recall in all the years I’d known them had been the golden tea set of which Mrs. Straussman had been so inordinately proud. And that was the very item that had been left in plain view on the kitchen table when I’d discovered Claire’s and Hilda’s bodies.

“If robbery had been the motive, that tea set should have been taken,” I reasoned. “It’s rimmed in twenty-two carat gold, after all.”

The detective, however, had just as vehemently disagreed, explaining to me in that gruff, impatient manner I eventually grew to find almost endearing that porcelain pieces such as these were far too fragile to easily transport and so would likely have held little appeal to any robber, despite its relative twenty-two carat gold value.

Odd, then, that it was its relative value which finally persuaded me of the true significance of the tea set having been left out on the table that fateful day.

“You must look in,” Harry Junior had told me in no uncertain terms the last time I saw him. And as I sat long into the night pondering his words, I found my attention drawn without conscious thought to the incessant humming of the high-tension wires that run past my bedroom window. And as I wondered at my neighbors’ folly, God’s will, and my own incertitude, I attended more closely to the magnetic dissonance of the power lines. And it was then that the continuous flow of electrical current slowed—almost imperceptibly at first, but after a time I began to perceive a series of rapid, interlocking oscillations from which I could differentiate the algorithmic whir and snap and sputter and buzz of each connection from within the aggregate swarm of electrons pulsing through the lines—and as I listened long and hard to the indistinguishable hum, individual notes became distinguishable, and the single point upon which I had for so many years been so exclusively focused suddenly, without warning, became two, then three, four, a half dozen, a dozen, and infinitely more. The laying worker. The cross-tempered hive. My neighbors’ crosses. The crosses in the grove. The china dolls. The golden china. The silver coins. The silver duct tape. And with each new note, the line took on yet another dimension of painful memory, connected by time and space, that became a symphony of notes weighted by the composite sights and sounds of each tragic movement. Of course Harry Junior had been right all along. I cannot say for certain why or even how I knew it then, but there it was: There had been no marauding strangers. No robber bees. When a hive goes bad, it nearly always does so from within.

I dug the first letter Detective Grayson had written to me out of the drawer of my telephone stand, where I’d kept it along with other important correspondences. We had exchanged three or four more letters in the interim, mostly about beekeeping. It was in that first letter, however, that he had included his telephone number, along with a polite admonition that I “stay in touch.”

Nevertheless, I am sure Detective Grayson was surprised to hear my voice when I reached him by phone at his home in Idaho as he had always been the one to initiate all verbal contact between us prior to this point.

“Someone came to visit them that day,” I told Detective Grayson straight off after identifying myself and exchanging perfunctory pleasantries as I assumed distant acquaintances such as we were did. “Someone they were happy to see.”

“See who, Mr. Honig?” he responded, clearly taken aback by my unexpected call, and with good reason: It had been nearly two decades since we’d last spoken directly. “What are you talking about?”

“I’m sorry, Detective,” I replied, “I’m referring to Claire and Hilda Straussman’s murderers of course. Those two young robbers weren’t telling the whole truth about what happened that morning.”

There were more questions and answers and more words, some of them more profane than I care to relate, before Detective Grayson deigned to pay attention to what I should have told him years ago if only I’d realized it then.

“They were invited in.”

“Who?”

“Miss Perez and Mr. Garcia.”

“That already came out at the trial,” he said.

“No, only that they were invited into the kitchen to look at the candles and such.”

It was a small distinction but an important one, one that I should have realized at the time.

“The gold tea set was left out on the table,” I said. “The Straussmans brought that set out only for company. They never drank from it when they were alone.”

“But what difference does that make?” the detective said. “Those two punks admitted they killed the Straussmans. They were tried, convicted, and sentenced to prison. The case is closed, Mr. Honig. Done.
Fini.
Over and out.”

“But don’t you see?” I said. “They said that Claire and Hilda were outside working with their bees when they first attempted to break into their house. They said it was only by happenstance that they were discovered.”

“I still don’t get where you’re going with this,” the detective said. I’d almost forgotten how impatient he could be. I reminded him once again that Miss Perez had testified at the trial that Claire invited her and Mr. Garcia into the kitchen to view the honey and candle samples and that it was at this point, before they’d brought their wares out, that Mr. Garcia grew impatient and demanded they show him where they kept their valuables.

“So?”

“But if Claire and Hilda had gotten up early to work in their apiary only to be interrupted by our young criminals, why were there no candles and honey left on the table? Why was their table set for company?”

“I don’t know. Maybe the Perez woman forgot to mention their little tea party. Or maybe they were expecting someone later,” the detective speculated.

“I don’t believe so. There was tea already poured in the cups and milk was in the pitcher,” I reminded him.

“Okay. But the only prints we lifted off the cups were Claire’s and Hilda’s.”

I could tell by the slight shift in the tone of his voice that I had finally piqued his interest.

“What if the tea set was left out from the night before?” Detective Grayson queried.

I firmly dismissed this possibility, reminding him of the family’s obsessive tendency toward cleanliness.

“I’m sure someone came to visit them that morning. Someone special enough to bring out the company tea set.”

“Well, that puts us back at square one,” the detective said. “You yourself said they were practically recluses. So who would’ve come to see them?”

“Detective,” I said, “do you have any idea what happened to David Gilbert’s daughter? Tina or Tini, I believe her name was.”

“I really don’t know. The grandparents were from somewhere in Mexico—Sonora, I think. I assume she’s still there.”

There had of course been no real reason to assume otherwise. Once David Gilbert had been dismissed as a suspect, there had been no need for further inquiry into his family. And so the detective, for all of his investigative diligence, had missed the obvious. As had I.

In the cycle of the hive, no single action of any one of the thousands of honeybees who reside within it occurs in isolation, but, cloistered in the solitude of my own grief, I had failed to consider all—or, in truth, even any—of the other people and circumstances leading up to and away from the one overriding moment in which I had remained frozen for so many years like an insentient insect in amber.

“Could you perhaps use whatever investigative connections you have to look into what happened to David Gilbert’s daughter?” I asked. “I know you’re retired, but you must have some friends on the police force.”

“I suppose I do,” he said after a moment’s pause. “But really, Mr. Honig, what difference would it make? We already know who killed the Straussman sisters.”

“But we don’t know why,” I said.

“Sure we do. It was a stupid mistake by a couple of stupid punks. That’s all there is to it.”

“Did you know that the Perez girl died last month?” I said.

The detective admitted that he hadn’t been aware of it.

“I don’t exactly keep tabs on my old cases anymore. Especially ones like this, Mr. Honig. You know, the ones that are
closed,
” he emphasized.

“I understand that, Detective, but . . .”

“But what? Look, I wouldn’t lose any sleep over her.”

“It’s not my sleep I’m concerned about,” I said. “Or hers.”

I told him about the crosses in my neighbors’ yard. About the name on the twenty-first cross—Christina Perez—and how I didn’t recognize her name at first, but, when I did, it made me think about Claire and Hilda all over again.

“What neighbors? What crosses?”

I patiently described my neighbors’ gaudy mock cemetery, their tasteless holiday displays, and their silly signs detailing their strange electromagnetic theories.

“Oh, jeez louise,” he exclaimed, more or less. “Not those crazy meth heads on Gain Street? Mr. Honig, those guys are tweekers.”

I wasn’t familiar with the term. Detective Grayson explained to me as best he could what it meant to be a methamphetamine addict.

“They’re full of conspiracy theories and all the chemically induced energy in the world to go hog wild on them,” he said. “We busted those Gain Street crackpots on possession once. Not enough to nail them for a felony, but . . .”

“Be that as it may,” I interrupted, “Christina Perez was the name on the cross.”

“Well, hell’s bells, Mr. Honig. They were druggies. She was a druggie. Not to sound too callous, but I’m not exactly surprised she OD’d. She admitted she was an addict at her trial. Jesus F-ing Christ. That was their whole defense: ‘Boohoo. The drugs made me do it.’ Look, Mr. Honig, cats like that don’t usually change their spots.”

“I’m sure you are correct. Believe me when I say that the cause of her death isn’t particularly important to me at this point. That she was mourned by my neighbors, crazy as they may be, is what matters. I am sure Christina Perez was profoundly connected to this place.”

There was an audible sigh, followed by a long pause. In my mind’s eye, I imagined him swiping his mouth with his hand and tucking his shirttail into his trousers. “So what is it again you want me to do, Mr. Honig?”

“I would like you to investigate the present whereabouts of David Gilbert’s daughter,” I said. “I suspect that
Tini
is short for
Christina
.”

Thirty-five

B
EE VENOM:
The poisonous matter secreted by special glands attached to the stinger of the honeybee, it is used primarily in defense. Derived from the Latin
venenum
,
meaning drug, poison, magic potion, or charm, it is related to the Latin
venus
,
for love or sexual desire.

H
ydraulically speaking, a bee’s stinger is a marvelous example of divine engineering, but as an offensive instrument it is curiously ill designed. Delicately tapered and polished, it is, under close examination, actually two separate daggers forming a V shape, with tiny barblike serrations running along each dagger. And at the top of the V rests a small poison sac that supplies the venom released through tubes running through the daggers. When driven into the flesh of its victim, the barbs catch like tiny fishhooks and spurt venom into the wound. But as any experienced beekeeper knows, one never removes a stinger by grasping it directly between thumb and forefinger. To do so merely squeezes the sac and releases more venom into the wound, which makes the sting even more painful but seldom deadly, as, in most cases, the venom is more irritating than lethal to any foe but her own sister.

And in those rare cases where death does result, it is more often an accident of nature—a reaction to other, unforeseen factors rather than by design or with intent. But the worker bee who does unleash her stinger upon a perceived enemy renders herself an irrevocable death sentence—and a needless one at that—because, given enough time and calm surroundings, the stinging bee theoretically should be able to work her stinger free from the wound without damage to herself. But that is seldom, if ever, the outcome. This is because once aroused, even the most placid and intelligent bee abandons all reason, invariably ripping the stinger from her body, rupturing her abdomen, and in the end dying in much the same manner as the hapless drone who mates on the fly.

Contrary to common wisdom, the stingerless worker bee’s death is not necessarily instantaneous. In an effort to determine how long a honeybee could live without her stinger, scientists discovered that within a protected environment—and by that I mean one in which she is separated from her hive mates—a worker could lose her stinger and yet go on about her business for up to five more days, flying about, eating honey, and grooming herself, even with her tattered intestines trailing behind her all the while.

Of course it should be noted that in the relatively short life span of a worker bee, those five days are roughly equivalent to an additional ten years of human life. But if, on the other hand, the stingerless bee is forced to remain with her sisters, she is always attacked and unmercifully driven from the hive, where she soon succumbs to the chilling consequences of isolation. It is this psychic ostracism from her own kind that kills her long before the physical consequences of the wound can run its course.

But this tragic tale is only half told. Like a separate sentient being, the stinger, once detached from the bee, continues to work its way deeper into its victim’s flesh even as it keeps pumping venom into the wound. Indeed, the pumping action is so strong that it can penetrate a felt hat or a leather belt or shoe, and continue thusly for up to twenty minutes after it has been detached. But to what end?

I can say this much for certain: The physical wounds we see are often much less virulent than the broken hearts we hide. And the pain we inflict upon others continues to do damage long after we have taken our leave. It matters not whether the hurt is intended or not, the pain is just as sharp, or perhaps even sharper, for all its grave indifference.

By the time I heard from the good detective by telephone for the last time, I hardly needed him to confirm what I had long since deduced. The final thread of the Straussmans’ tormented family line had died just as the others had before her, alone and unmourned by her own.

“You were right,” Detective Grayson said. David Gilbert’s daughter, who had been released from prison in 2005, had died of a drug overdose in a liquor store parking lot not more than a mile from where the Straussmans’ home once stood. It had been two months and seventeen days since I’d first seen Christina Perez’s mysterious memorial display on my neighbors’ front lawn.

“Looks like Christina’s father and that crazy woman from Gain Street’s father served together in the military. First in Texas and then on that helicopter base not far from where you live,” Detective Grayson informed me. “I’m guessing those two girls were pretty tight when they were younger.”

I said I wasn’t surprised. “Perhaps that’s why she came back here.”

The paper trail, as the detective called the official records, was there for any to see if only it had occurred to any of us to look. On record was a missing person report that had been filed by Christina’s grandparents with both the local Mexican authorities and several police agencies in Southern California, where they feared the girl may have returned to in order to renew old acquaintances she had made while still living on the Tustin Marine Base with her parents during presumably happier times.

The detective also informed me that Christina’s father had been unaware of her flight from Mexico, as he had been deployed on a training mission in Saudi Arabia when the girl had disappeared, and friendly contact between him and his deceased wife’s family had long since ceased.

Of course had he chosen to attend the trial of the two young people accused of robbing and killing Claire and Hilda, I am sure that he would have recognized his own daughter, despite their years of separation, and her double life would have been exposed. Or David Gilbert may have chosen to remain silent. At the heart of this troubled man, I cannot say for certain in which direction the bad blood would have flowed stronger: toward the woman who had first loved and then denied him or toward the daughter who had similarly renounced him.

It was only in hindsight—and a very long hindsight at that—that there was any real reason to suspect a connection between the preternaturally composed young woman who had sealed the mouths of the Straussman sisters forever with the fatal strips of silver tape and the exuberant little girl who’d been dazzled so many years before by a handful of silver coins.

Time does not heal all wounds.

As Castelvetro once noted, there are two dimensions to tragedy: one accessible to the senses and external and measurable by the clock, the other accessible to the intellect and internal and measurable by the mind.

For all these years, the tragic deaths of the Straussman sisters had been portrayed by everyone involved—from the police investigators to the district attorney’s office, the public defender’s, the newspaper reporters, and the perpetrators of the crime themselves—as an unfortunate accident of fate.

But then there was the tea set. The company tea set.

I am sure, even now, that the burglary had been planned much as Christina had testified to at the trial. But I no longer believe she chose the Straussmans’ house by accident.

A secret cache of coins must have seemed like quite a king’s ransom, and, as all childhood memories do, the size of the treasure would have grown with each passing year. Just as bad blood never fails to poison the vessel.

It may have been a chance automobile drive past the Straussman house that stirred Christina’s childhood recollection of her one and only visit to her father’s estranged family, or she may have been obsessed for years by her memory of their “honey money,” but what does it matter? Either way, she deliberately set out to rob her own family.

And that is only the half of the tragedy. I am certain Claire recognized, on some visceral level, this grown-up child and welcomed her into her home, just as I have to believe that Claire had truly come to regret the harsh words she had spoken to drive David Gilbert and his family away from her that awful day. Else why would his picture have been displayed among her family photographs on the mantle? The opportunity to make amends must have dispelled any natural suspicions that Christina’s sudden appearance on her doorstep may have aroused.

I can only wonder what might have transformed this simple larceny into something far more heinous. Perhaps it was, as Christina testified, merely her young man’s violently impetuous nature that turned the morning’s events so murderously awry. Or perhaps it was something much closer to home. Something Claire might have said over an innocent cup of tea that reminded this dolorous young woman of all she’d lost. Or of all she’d never known. There is no telling how deep her wounds ran or how long they’d festered.

This much I am sure of: After the secret treasure had been plundered and Claire and Hilda had been bound and gagged, Christina had to have washed and put away the teacup she’d drunk from. And she had to have known precisely what she was doing and what the consequences would be. Once Claire realized who Christina was and what she wanted, it was already too late.

Indeed, it has been too late for as long as I have held my tongue out of cowardice and spoken half-truths and foolish pride.

Yesterday morning, I lingered longer than perhaps was necessary in my mother’s herb garden, weeding, watering, and trimming back spindly growths. I suppose it may seem strange to some that I still call it my mother’s garden since she’s been dead for more than sixty years. But it was for her that my father cleared the tiny patch of earth which borders our back porch, and it is in her memory that I have maintained its useful verdure. I don’t cook with herbs. I hardly cook at all these days as I find my appetite waning with the years. I do, however, enjoy watching my bees flit between the tiny buds that sprout on the basil and oregano this time of year, filling their pollen sacs until they seem far too burdened by their rich bounty for their delicate wings to carry them aloft.

There aren’t as many bees now as there used to be. There will be even fewer next year, I imagine, as there are fewer trees and flowers each year to pollinate.

I can only wonder what will happen to this garden when I am gone. Left to their own devices, I would like to imagine that my remaining bees will continue to comb these delicate blossoms for the life-sustaining pollen and nectar that these fragrant plants produce. But I know better, as I am sure that once I have departed my sister’s children will have no desire to reclaim the land upon which our dear parents chose to settle and raise a family.

And so.

Eventually I am sure our home, our orchards, our garden, and everything else I hold dear will be gone. And so will my bees. Replaced by more houses and people and gas stations and convenience stores. I don’t regret the march of progress, the changing face of the neighborhood—truly I don’t. What I do regret is that after I am gone, there will be no one left to remember how the moonlight used to shimmer like silver gossamer beneath the trees and that here on this sweet patch of land there once lived a woman who died unmourned by all save one.

I believe Kierkegaard said it best, when speaking of his beloved Regina: “I was too heavy for her and she was too light for me.”

Kierkegaard was not speaking of tangible weight, the measurable differentiation between one heart and another. He was a philosopher. I am a simple beekeeper. One who on this day has paused to consider the marvelous banality of a postal scale that is able to calculate the weight and distance of human correspondence and ascribe an absolute, definitive value to it.

Yesterday afternoon, I received a package in the mail from Detective Grayson. The value of the red-inked postmark, stamped Coeur d’Alene, was five dollars and sixty-eight cents. Inside was a handwritten note that said simply:
I thought you should have this. ~Raymond

The note was rubber-banded around an old diary. It was Claire’s diary. I cannot say for sure how or why the good detective was able to procure this precious artifact from the police department’s evidence storage locker. That is where I was led to believe it would languish forever since there was no next of kin who wished to claim it. When I’d asked what was to become of the diary on the day the Straussman sisters’ murder trial concluded, Detective Grayson had urged me simply to forget about it.

I have forgotten so many things over the years.

I don’t cook much these days, I find I’ve lost my appetite. I use my kitchen table as a desk of sorts. It is where I read, when I have the heart to do so, because the light that streams through the window like golden honey over my sink cheers my fading eyes.

The light was still bright when I sat down at my kitchen table and I opened the diary. Its spine cracked, both audibly and visually, from all its long years of disuse. I turned to the first page:

March 7, 1928: That silly goose! What does a girl have to do to get noticed anyhow?

I turned to the next page and the next and the next. I read into the afternoon, and on into the dusk, and on through the night, rising only once to switch on the electric light overhead.

They were intimate pages, stories of a life, some light and delightful, that reminded me yet again why I had first been drawn to Claire. But there were darker pages, too, dark in a way I had only suspected, and there are details that will haunt me to my own lonely grave.

Perhaps Harry had died from pneumonia. Claire seemed to have some doubt when she wrote that her mother revealed the doctor’s diagnosis to her shortly after she’d returned from Detroit in one of the few moments of intimacy the two ever shared. Claire had certainly wanted to believe her mother’s account. Before penicillin, such deaths were common. It was a simple explanation, but not a satisfying one to Claire, who had herself been the luckless recipient of physical punishment from her father if I read between the lines correctly. What was beyond dispute was that their grief—her mother’s and father’s—destroyed them all, conflating and diminishing them in all manner of insidious ways.

The loss of her mother’s leg and the heft she’d acquired in the progression of her diabetic illness had, much like the public account of Harry Junior’s death, explained everything and nothing at all. To Hilda’s way of thinking, according to Claire’s diary entries, it became the underlying reason, or the continuation of the reason, why her father first turned to her. It was much more complex than that, I am sure, but to a girl who had been, if not every bit as vivacious, as desirable even, as her mother once had been, it was how a sad desperate need to please a father whose heart had hardened from lack of use had gone so wrong. And, in time, Hilda’s hope of diminishment became her only hope of salvation. In that incisive, precise way she had of expressing herself from the first day I’d met her, Claire had tried to explain how blowing up and whittling away everything beautiful about herself, and the reflection of what her mother once was, had been the only way Hilda knew how to protect herself.