Buzz Off - By Hannah Reed Page 0,93

“I’m surprised you didn’t think of that on your own. You know him? Right? The owner of Kenny’s Bees?”

“No way! You mean to tell me,” I said, “that the same Kenny who tried to hustle in on my territory wants to buy Manny’s property?”

“It was him all right. But he withdrew the offer about an hour ago. I’m actually looking for Lori to tell her the bad news. She isn’t going to like it one bit.”

“She was just in a little while ago.” The rush of additional information was too much for my overtaxed brain. But I was talking to her back end as DeeDee strolled into The Wild Clover with her big suitcase purse.

Thirty-nine

Ben rode shotgun next to me in the truck. Business at The Wild Clover had finally slowed down enough around mid-afternoon for me to take a long break. Carrie Ann said she wanted to stay on, that she needed the money, and the twins were there, too. So everything was covered.

By now there wasn’t the slightest doubt in my mind that Manny had been murdered. He’d been worried enough about something that he hid his journal under one of my beehives. It was a safe bet that one or more of the pages inside it played a significant role in his concern for its safety, and probably in his death.

I made a few assumptions:• Manny Chapman’s and Faye Tilley’s deaths were both murders.

• The same person probably killed both of them.

• Clay had the opportunity and means to kill Faye, but he didn’t have a strong motive to kill either her or Manny, at least none that popped right out at me.

• Grace had the opportunity and means to kill Manny, but no real motive. Okay, if she thought Manny was cheating on her, maybe she had a motive.

• Moving on to other possible suspects, Lori Spandle was a nasty person, but that hardly qualified her to be a multiple murderer.

• Stanley Peck had a beekeeping girlfriend, but so what?

• Kenny Langley wanted to take over my honey area and that was a fact. He had made an offer on Manny’s property, but then withdrawn it.

Why? Was Kenny killing off the competition so he could take over more territory? That seemed extreme.

Who’d ever heard of such a thing in bee circles? If anything, we usually supported each other. Although Kenny had a streak of competition that had put some distance between us, a little too much testosterone to play nice with a “girl,” as he called me.

I’ve been called worse.

I drove past Grams’s house, noting that her car was gone from the driveway. Then I turned into the cornfield and bumped along the side of it, parking close to my beehives. Bees flew through the air, coming and going, having forgotten their quarrel with me yesterday. I found their buzz comforting.

While Ben sniffed along the tree line, leaving his dog scent on pretty much everything that didn’t move, I stayed in the truck with the windows open and began to page through Manny’s journal, starting from the back and working toward the front.

I skimmed the journal quickly, paging over my own entries, trying to make sense of Manny’s notes. He had practiced selective breeding for years, hoping to extend honey production for greater yields, and he’d seen significant progress as seasons and time went by. He’d also been working on developing strong queens and healthy drones that were resistant to mites without the need for chemical controls.

The science aspect was way over my head. As a first-year beekeeper, I was more concerned about the basics, like providing food sources for my honeybees and making sure they had enough room inside the hives to keep filling honeycombs.

“If they run out of space to store their harvests,” Manny had said, “they’ll leave to find a bigger, better home. Keep an eye on them at all times.”

I had been happy to leave the question of which queens and drones to mix together for more experienced beekeepers to ponder.

I turned to several pages that laid out all the numbers for our most recent honey harvest, which was up by 20 percent over last year. Every year Manny’s percentages had climbed. He’d also included notes about the queens and royal jelly statistics. Bees needed royal jelly to survive. All I knew about royal jelly at this point in my beekeeping experience could be summed up in a few short bullet points:• It’s secreted from glands in the heads of nurse bees.

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