Telling the Bees (3 page)

“We wouldn’t like to see a nice-looking young man like you get all stung up by those nasty bees,” she said, beckoning to me with her cane as she turned to go back into the house. When I protested that honeybees were not in the least bit nasty, and that they were, in fact, my dearest friends, my father cut me short with a stern glance. A gentleman to the core, he would brook no disrespect by me toward my elders. And so I was hooked.

Following Mrs. Straussman reluctantly indoors, I was assaulted for the first time by the sharp camphor tang of mothballs as I passed the hall closet. I took a shallow breath and held it in as I trailed her monstrous wake through the hallway. The Straussman sisters followed close upon my heels.

The kitchen was a spotless white room at the back of the house. It was furnished with a pale pine table and four unadorned chairs, an icebox, and a small stove. Glass-faced white wooden cabinets encircled the upper half of the room, and white tile covered the countertops beneath. Not a plate, a dish towel, or even a single bread crumb had been left lying about the Straussmans’ perfectly ordered kitchen. Nor were there any lingering odors of bacon or toast or even boiled oatmeal. Certainly nothing of the sweet aroma of my mother’s homemade scones and honey. I smelled instead the acrid blending of pine tar and lye soap.

As Mrs. Straussman eased herself into the chair nearest the door, I climbed into the chair across from hers and observed what I could only conclude was a particular Straussman family ritual. Hilda began it by lighting the stove’s back right burner with a long kitchen match and setting a hammered-aluminum teakettle to boil while Claire withdrew two fine yellow-and-gold china cups and saucers from a cabinet shelf and set them on the table next to two silver teaspoons. Claire next set out a matching gilded china teapot and creamer between us, scooped several teaspoons of loose tea into the pot, and fetched fresh cream from the icebox, which she poured into the smaller pitcher beside it. When the water came to a boil, Hilda filled the porcelain teapot with the steaming water from the aluminum pot and waited several more minutes before pouring the steeped tea through a metal strainer into her mother’s cup halfway to the brim, and then she did the same into mine.

I had never taken to drinking tea, nor had I been trusted to sip from fine china at home, so I could only follow my hostess’s lead as she reached for the china creamer and topped off my cup and then her own.

“It cuts the bitterness,” she said, swirling the sweet cream with her silver spoon and urging me with her eyes to do the same. “Take care not to clink the side of the cup with your spoon.”

“Why?”

“It’s rude, boy,” Mrs. Straussman said, setting her spoon gently onto the saucer behind her cup with its handle aligned with the cup’s handle. “It’s bad luck, besides.”

Hilda and Claire were not invited to join us at the table but rather hovered about ever ready to refill our cups with more steaming tea.

“Is this real gold?” I recall asking Mrs. Straussman as I raised the teacup to my lips. Surprised by my own boldness, I stared into the cup’s brilliantly gilded rim.

“Twenty-two carat,” she replied. “That’s why we only take it out for special company, young man.”

I took a certain pride in being deemed “special” by the imperious Mrs. Straussman—more special, if truth be told, than her own two daughters, who seemed to have been relegated to our personal serving staff. As the youngest in my family, I’d never experienced such polite deference before.

Staring once again into those teacups and the dark liquid reservoired within, I found it painful to reconcile the reflection of the gaunt, bespectacled old man I’d become with the innocent boy who’d sipped from that startlingly iridescent tea set for the first time sixty years before.

I don’t know how long I would have stood gazing at that abandoned chinaware, dawdling like a schoolboy in my recollections, had not the baleful hum of bees that first drew me to my neighbors’ house finally penetrated my reveries. I realized then that the hum seemed to be coming from the front end of the house.

Once again, I called out to my neighbors as I moved cautiously past the kitchen table and on into the narrow dark hallway leading to the parlor. Oddly, the odor of sour milk grew stronger as I moved forward. With rising dread I made my way to the front room, where to my everlasting sorrow I found the Bee Ladies at last.

Lying like rolled rugs on the polished hardwood floor, they stared into each other’s faces with blank, unseeing eyes. There was no blood or marks of injury on the women that I could detect from where I stood at the entrance to their parlor.

Nothing appeared to be out of place in the room, nothing at all except of course for the Bee Ladies, who lay face-to-face on their sides with strips of silver duct tape binding their wrists and ankles. It appeared that red bandannas had been stuffed inside both their mouths and fastened in place with more silver tape. My distress continued to mount as I noticed the disquieting gray-green tint to both women’s complexions.

It was at least a minute or more before I saw the first bee flitting about the fireplace opening, and perhaps another half minute after that before I spotted three more bees crawling about the framed photographs that were set in a tidy row on the wooden mantelpiece above the hearth.

Three

H
IVE MORALE:
When the morale of the honeybee colony is high, its bees are predictable. They make honey, they pollinate flowers, they propagate. When the morale of the hive is adversely affected, the colony reacts in unexpected ways.

T
he first emergency vehicle arrived no more than ten minutes after I called 911 from the black wall phone set into a tiny vestibule just off the Straussmans’ service porch. The coroner followed shortly after several marked and unmarked police cars began rumbling up the Straussmans’ graveled driveway.

I noticed somewhat abstractly that everything seemed to be moving slower than normal, yet the lines of the hallway and the grain of the wooden floor seemed preternaturally sharp. I watched with detached curiosity as an official investigator approached me where I stood leaning weakly against the wall. Clad in a square brown suit that seemed cut from an earlier era, he was shorter than me by at least an inch or two but much broader across his shoulders and chest. He nodded to an underling and flipped open his leather billfold containing his badge and photo identification, which he flashed quickly at me. From the easy flick of his wrist, it occurred to me that this was the sort of thing he had been doing for years and that he was loath to acknowledge just how many as his thick sandy hair was now peppered with more gray than what showed in his photograph. Judging from the jowling on his face and the snug fit of his shirt around his middle, he had added another twenty pounds as well since the photo had been taken. I noticed that his leather shoes, like his suit, had clearly been chosen more for utility than style, though they were meticulously enough maintained that I assumed the detective had some military experience in his background. His stylish gray-and-tan diagonally striped tie was the only contradiction of his frank, utilitarian style. Its colors seemed to play nicely off his hazel eyes, which suggested to me that it had been chosen by a more sophisticated sartorial eye than his.

“Detective Grayson,” he said. Offering me a printed identification card that he urged me to keep, he slipped his badge back into his jacket pocket and extracted a narrow spiral notebook and pen with his left hand while grabbing my right hand with his, all in an impressively efficient syncopated motion. “And your name is . . . ?”

“Albert. Albert Honig,” I said, extricating my hand from his hearty grip. “I live next door.”

“That’s H—O—N . . .” the detective said, setting his pen to pad and looking up at me expectantly. There was a weariness to his eyes that seemed to absorb rather than reflect the light around him.

“H—O—N—I—G,” I said, and the detective dutifully recorded this, followed by my address and telephone number. I remember thinking how absurd it was that the two of us were obliged to dally over such mundane information while my deceased neighbors lay bound and gagged not five feet in front of me. The uncomfortable closeness in the air that I had first noticed upon entering the house had become almost unbearable. Just then the front door creaked open.

“Can you excuse me just a moment?” Detective Grayson said, turning his attention to another team of police investigators who had just arrived.

“Of course,” I said.

Detective Grayson nodded and motioned for me to stay where I was. I realized that my hands had begun to shake and I slipped them into my trouser pockets and leaned against the doorframe that separated the hall from the parlor from where I could observe the detective directing one officer to take photographs of the parlor and the kitchen. He then instructed another officer to begin sprinkling the countertops, doorframes, windowsills, and furniture with a fine black dust, after which he turned his team’s attention to the Bee Ladies’ teacups, teapot, and milk pitcher, which the officers dusted as well, after siphoning samples into individual glass tubes that were then stoppered and labeled before depositing the emptied tea service into plastic bags, as still more officers busied themselves outside, wrapping yellow tape around the tiny cottage and fending off the crowd that had begun to gather in small bunches to whisper and point.

So many people,
I remember thinking.
More people than the Bee Ladies had welcomed into their home in a thousand months of Sundays. What a shame they could not enjoy the company.

It had been more than a decade since I last had come calling on my neighbors, and nearly as long since I had thought of them as what they once were: my dearest friends. I am sure I was the last person, besides the two women themselves, to call them by their proper Christian names. And regretfully, over time, even I had taken to referring to them by the nickname the neighborhood children had given them after they began selling jars of honey and beeswax candles from a little stand on their front porch.

Of course I had never called them the Bee Ladies to their faces. But in my head, it seemed somehow easier to think of them as something other than what they once were to me, if only to dull the ache of our estrangement.

My melancholic reverie was eventually interrupted by Detective Grayson’s return.

“Sorry to keep you waiting,” he said, retrieving his notebook from his pocket. “So . . .”

It was just a single word. But he said it softly, as if for all the times he’d had to ask the next question, it was never an easy one: “I understand you found the bodies?”

I closed my eyes, wishing to erase the image from my mind. Reading the gesture as acquiescence, the detective clasped my shoulder as he strode past me into the parlor, where he circled the bodies like a wary beast.

“So,” he said again, this time just a bit more firmly, “what can you tell me about all this?”

All this.

I suppose I could have told the detective that long after our stubborn silence had grown into a mighty rift, I had taken to observing Claire and Hilda silently tending their hives from the distance of our two yards. I could have explained that my dear mother, bless her soul, used to say there was no moving me off plumb once I’d dug my heels in, which was true enough, though in my own defense, the same could just as easily have been said about either of the Straussman sisters and that I truly believed that they had found some measure of contentment within the binary solitude of their later years, just as I had taken solace in the companionship of my books and my bees.

The detective, who had bent to examine the body of the larger of the two women, turned his head back to me.

“Her name was Hilda. Hilda Straussman,” I said. The name tasted like rust on my tongue.

The detective wrote her name down as he sidled past Hilda and knelt rather laboriously next to the woman lying frozen at Hilda’s side.

“This would be Claire. Claire Straussman,” I said. “They were sisters.”

I started to walk toward the detective in the parlor, but he held up his hand, which was broad and surprisingly well manicured.

“Please, Mr. Honig. This is a crime scene.”

“Of course,” I said, chastened.

“I take it this is the younger sister?” Detective Grayson inquired from across the room. I nodded.

Curled into her unnatural repose, Claire seemed so small and withered. That she had taken to wearing her once luxurious curls pulled back into a single silvery braid wrapped around the back of her head in a thick bun reminded me once again of how old we’d both grown. A few strands had sprung loose from the braid and lay in errant wisps across her cheek. Alive, Claire would have suffered not even a single hair out of place, and it seemed to me the detective’s thick hand hovered momentarily above her cheek as if to brush the hair from Claire’s face as he bent closer to examine her body. Or perhaps I just wished it so.

“Neither one of them ever marry?” the detective wondered aloud. I shook my head no, and his eyes filled with the special pity reserved for elderly spinsters. I thought of my own lifelong bachelorhood and how even after my father’s death I had seldom felt the lack of companionship, except perhaps at mealtime when I was forced to cook as well as clean up the detritus of pots and pans and plates I invariably made of even my most meager culinary efforts.

“Any family at all?”

“None to speak of.”

We were interrupted, just then, by a string of curses erupting from the back of the house, and I turned to watch two coroner’s attendants roll a pair of steel gurneys down the long hallway from the kitchen to the parlor.

“What the Sam Hill?” Detective Grayson fairly barked at the young men.

“
Gosh durned
bees!” the taller of the two attendants exclaimed, pointing to a small cluster of bees in the hallway, except that he didn’t say gosh durned, and I felt my cheeks redden at the sound of the Lord’s name being taken in vain. Though I no longer attend church as regularly as I did when my dear mother walked this earth, I do believe there is a common decency that should be observed in the avoidance of vulgar epithets.

“There’s a
flaming
swarm back there in the hallway,” the first one added, more or less.

Observing my discomfort at what they really said, the good detective intervened.

“Watch your language, son,” he said sharply.

“Bees are upset by coarse language,” I agreed, and as if to prove my point one of the bees broke away from the cluster to hover skittishly above the nearer of the two attendants. When he tried to swat it away, it drove its stinger defensively into the back of his hand.

“Don’t pull it out,” I said. I kept my voice low and calm as the young man yelped and flailed about in circles. “Use a knife blade or your fingernail to scrape the stinger off.”

Both the attendants and the detective looked at me as if I had grown an extra head.

“Plucking it out only releases more venom into the wound,” I tried to explain as the young man continued to worry the offending barb with his forefinger. “Some Mrs. Stewart’s Liquid Bluing rubbed on the sting helps to relieve the pain. I’m fairly certain the Straussmans have some on hand—in the pantry, just to the right of the kitchen. Or if not, swabbing on some Clorox helps, or even table salt. I’m also told meat tenderizer contains an enzyme that neutralizes the irritant in the sting, but I have yet to try this remedy myself.”

“
Jiminy
, there’s more of the little
flamers
on the window over there,” the shorter of the two attendants shouted before shrugging apologetically in my direction. “And there, on the mantle!”

“Keep your voice down, and try not to move suddenly,” I instructed. “Bees will not sting unless they are frightened or offended. Loud noise and sudden motion both frighten and offend them.”

A large drone flew out from the fireplace and lit on Claire Straussman’s skirt just then.

“You seem to know a thing or two about bees,” the detective said to me. “What do you make of this?”

By this, I assumed he meant the growing number of bees gathering in the Straussmans’ parlor, as he did not appear to be well enough schooled in apian habits to find the appearance of a solitary drone outside the hive odd, in and of itself.

“The bees seem to be coming into the house through the chimney,” I said as another pair of field bees entered the parlor in just this manner.

“I can see that,” the detective replied, a terseness creeping into his voice that surprised me. “What I’m asking is, why?”

“In my experience,” I replied, “I have found that bees are generally forthright, intelligent creatures. It’s not in their nature to offer false testament any more than it would be natural for a worker and a drone to mate or a queen to leave the hive to gather pollen. While I might not readily understand their actions or intentions in certain situations, that has always been my shortcoming, not theirs.”

Detective Grayson had meanwhile begun to reflexively click his ballpoint pen open and shut in what I could only read as irritation. I wondered what about my measured response had so offended him. As if reading my mind, he repeated his question.

“This time,” he added, “in twenty-five words or less.”

I told him then as succinctly as I could that I did not know the precise reason for the bees’ entry into the Straussmans’ house, per se, but it seemed to me the natural rhythm of their precisely ordered world clearly had been disturbed.