fertilized them with unicorn droppings and irrigated them with the tears of saints. Cars stopped to take pictures, and I gave away armfuls of flowers every day. It seemed that the more flowers I cut, the more flowers bloomed. I finally put a sign in the yard that said, Help yourself to a few.
I was just handing a large bouquet to a carful of curious members of the Sullivan’s Island Garden Club when Mark pulled into our driveway. He got out of the car sporting a broad smile, which had to mean the investigation had gone our way.
“Hi!” I said. “What brings you to my neck of the woods?”
“I have some very good news for you,” he said.
“Should we go inside?” I said. “Would you like a glass of iced tea?”
“Why not?”
It was a hot August afternoon and let me tell you, August on Sullivan’s Island was like the seventh circle of hell.
We went inside. He followed me to the kitchen, where I pulled a cold pitcher of tea from the fridge and filled two glasses.
I pushed the sugar bowl and a dish of lemon slices across the table to him.
“I have a friend who works at the county morgue. It always pays to have a friend in places like that. Anyway, she said Sharon died of a heart attack. Natural causes. There was no evidence of a single bee sting, not a drop of venom in her blood. They’ve released the body to the funeral home.”
It wasn’t my bees!
“Hallelujah! My bees are innocent.”
“Right.”
“No kidding! Wow! But why would someone her age have a heart attack? She wasn’t even old! She was like forty-one or -two.”
“Well, she may have had that thing Tim Russert had. The widow-maker, except hers would’ve been the widower-maker. Anyway, don’t matter. It wasn’t the bees that did her in.”
“Then why was she in my yard?”
“Because she was trying to kill the bees.”
“She was? Why? Why in the world would she do that?”
“Who knows? The crime scene guys found a power spray gun she must’ve thrown into the oleanders. It was filled with a mixture of soapy water and a neonicotinoid like Ortho Bug B Gon, which is what people use to kill bees.”
“That awful . . . well, she was awful! Sorry.”
“If I had to guess, I’d venture that she came over here with the intention of wiping out the bees, she sprayed the hives, the bees got crazy and started coming after her. Then she started running and had a heart attack and boom, dead body in the backyard. But we will most likely never know the truth.”
“You’ve got some imagination,” I said. “You should write a book!”
“What? You don’t think that’s a plausible scenario?” Mark said.
“I wouldn’t know. But I do know that if I was Sharon, I wouldn’t be taking on almost two hundred thousand bees with one little spray gun.”
“Two hundred thousand? How many hives you got?” Mark’s jaw was somewhere in between the table and the floor.
“Three. The real number is probably closer to one seventy,” I said. “But there’s not a doubt in my mind that she didn’t know that. She probably thought that maybe there were a thousand or so in the hives. Most people do.”
“Just so you know, we’re not entirely out of the woods yet. While I know there’s not a judge that would hear the case of you telling the bees to kill her, to some people you’ve got something potentially dangerous in your yard, and there’s still the civil suit from her parents.”
“Let them sue me. What I really cared about was Archie and his little boys, and I’ve lost them now. It’s not even my fault.”
“That doesn’t seem right,” Mark said. “I’ll bet they come around. Give them some time.”
I looked at Mark, and I hoped I didn’t seem ungrateful, because he had gone to an awful lot of trouble on my behalf.
“Mark, I hope you know how much I appreciate what you’ve done for me. For my whole family, really. I just wish we could make the rest of this nightmare go away.”
“Well, we got rid of the criminal piece of Sharon’s death, and I’d call that a good start.” He winked at me. “My grandmother was a beekeeper. Kept bees for probably fifty years. So I know how it is with honey bees. Around here, anyway. But I never realized she kept that many bees, I gotta say.”
So he knew.
“Maybe it was just a coincidence. And I don’t think they would’ve