what I wanted. Lori was my sworn enemy, and this was her sister. On the other hand, I couldn’t blame DeeDee for having a rotten sibling. Although she wasn’t much of a gem herself.
“I don’t have all day, Missy Fischer,” the police chief said.
“Let her go, but I don’t want her in my store anymore.”
“I can go along with that,” Holly, the female all-star, said, nodding in agreement.
A few customers applauded. I heard one boo.
DeeDee was out the door and gone before we realized that the packs of gum were still missing. I hate it when I’m outsmarted.
But I had bigger robberies to worry about.
“I want to report a theft,” I told the police chief after Holly went up front and I had pulled him into a corner. I explained how Manny’s bees had vanished. “You’re all over the county looking for trouble,” I finished. “I’m just giving you a heads-up in case you see beehives where there weren’t any before.” Then I remembered that I’d moved my bees to Grams’s back field, which would constitute a bee change of venue in the picture I was painting. “Except if you spot any near my Grams’s house.”
“Is this some kind of joke?” Johnny Jay said. “You can’t file a report for something that doesn’t belong to you in the first place.”
“I’m just keeping you in the loop, then.”
“What makes you think I care about your loop?”
“Fine, forget it.”
Johnny Jay looked pleased, like he’d won a round, and I remembered what Sally the dispatcher had said about the consequences of turning down Johnny Jay’s prom invitation. I’d suffer for the rest of my life for that one.
Then he said, “Maybe you have something after all. Where could those bees have gone? And do they figure into the break-in?”
“What break-in?”
“Manny must have told you.”
“I didn’t hear anything about it.” Not too surprising. Manny wasn’t a man of many words. Unless it had to do with his bees. Then he could go on for hours.
“I thought you two were such good friends.” He said friends in a suggestive way that I didn’t like, but that’s Johnny Jay. Always nasty. “The robbery happened about a week ago,” he continued. “Somebody broke a window in his kitchen and crawled through. Stole a camera and a few dollars out of the bureau. I chalked it up to an inexperienced burglar, kids probably. Whoever it was left behind things that were more valuable than what they took. Amateurs for sure.”
“Maybe the robbery has something to do with the missing bees.” I said that last part out loud instead of thinking it, like I planned.
“Well, Missy Fischer, you gave me a reason to think I might have been wrong about it being kids who broke in. Now I think bees were involved. The bees could have been looking for something special inside the house. When they didn’t find it, they must have tortured Manny to get it out of him and finished him off. Then they took whatever it was and disappeared.”
“Very funny.”
When the police chief strutted out, I knew he wasn’t going to help at all.
Twenty-two
The visitation and funeral for Manny Chapman was held at the new Lutheran church on the southern end of Moraine. At four o’clock we began arriving for the viewing. It was our last chance to see Manny in a state as close as possible to the one we saw him in when he was still alive.
A poster board with pictures of Manny doing what he loved best, hanging around in his beeyard and spinning honey in his honey house greeted me as I entered, which surprised me, since Grace seemed to hate his bees so much. In one photo Ray and Manny were loading honey into the back of Ray’s truck for distribution. I distinctly remembered being there when Manny asked Grace to take that picture. In fact, my smiling mug should have been in the picture. I spotted more photographs that I should have been in, but wasn’t. I had a growing suspicion that Grace had used a software editing program to eliminate me. Delving into other people’s minds wasn’t my forte, however, so I focused on the open casket on the other side of the room rather than on Grace Chapman’s motives for cropping me into nonexistence.
“Nice pictures,” I said to Grace’s brother, Carl.
“Thanks. I put them together myself. Grace didn’t want me to include the bees, but they were Manny’s whole life, so I managed to talk her into it.”
“She