Plan Bee (10 page)

“How about doing a smoothie in this issue?” my favorite recipe tester suggested while we arranged the bouquets. “Door County peaches are plump and juicy right now. What if I whipped up a peach smoothie with a hint of ginger?”

“I like it,” I said. Milly never seemed to run out of ideas to create special recipes with whatever was in season at the time. “What else?”

“Well, corn on the cob is ripe in the fields. How about grilled corn with some kind of honey butter?”

“I can almost taste it.”

“And something sweet to finish it off. I’ll put on my thinking cap.”

While Milly sat down behind the counter to sketch out the next newsletter, I busied myself with honey supplies to restock the outside booth. This was the last of my honey until later this month when I started harvesting, processing, and bottling this year’s batch. Honey from our area of Wisconsin consists of a blend—wildflower, alfalfa, and clover nectar. We don’t have large monofloral fields like they do up north with their cranberry bogs. Cranberry honey is wonderful stuff, but it isn’t in my future unless I move north, something that isn’t going to happen.

Today, I’d sell raw and processed honey in bear-shaped jars and regular jars and creamed honey, which is whipped so it spreads like butter. I’d created five different flavors:

• wildflower

• cherry

• cinnamon

• apple

• raspberry

Plus, I had beeswax candles in a variety of fragrances, and cranberry lip gloss (my first effort to make a gloss, and
it actually turned out!). I also replenished the flavored honey sticks.

Patti came in wearing her press pass and a knowing leer. “Hunter looks good in yellow,” she said, referring to my bathrobe.

“Quit spying on me, Patti.”

“Just keeping tabs on my best friend, making sure you’re in good hands. Which apparently you are.” That comment, along with her smirk, implied that she’d been watching the whole thing, but I let it go. Not that I had much of a choice.

Patti leaned in confidentially. “Aggie Petrie is setting up outside. Same spot as yesterday. Her husband isn’t with her, though. She said he’s home sick.”

“So?”

“So, we have our first missing person.”

I thought about that for a minute. Aggie was one nasty woman. And her booth was on the sidewalk right in front of the spot where I’d had my mysterious encounter. What if she’d killed Eugene and stashed him in the cemetery, then when I wasn’t looking hauled him off to bury him in her backyard? Who would be the wiser?

Patti and I looked at each other.

“What should we do?” I asked.

“Do you know where they live?”

I shook my head. “Not really, no. Colgate area, that’s all I know.”

“Let’s work on finding out.” And with that, Patti disappeared out the door.

Grams came into the store right after that looking sweet and chipper.

“I heard about your trouble last night,” she said, “with a body giving you the slip like that.”

“Johnny Jay couldn’t have been madder.”

“That boy always had a temper. Too bad he never
learned to control it. Who do you think that body belonged to? Didn’t you get a good look?”

So I told Grams about how the black plastic hid the body’s identity and how I’d been afraid to unmask it.

“I had no idea it would disappear,” I said. Of course, if I’d known, I would have handled it differently. I still wouldn’t have looked, but I would have stuck to it like glue instead of leaving it alone.

“Nobody’s perfect,” Grams said reassuringly. “But you’re as close as they come. I’m going to get some pictures of that beehive you’ve got outside. It’s a real winner.” Her pocket camera dangled from her wrist.

I had a question for her. “Do you know where Aggie Petrie lives?”

“She’s right outside the store. Why don’t you ask her?”

Grams had a point, if my intentions had been a little different. But I couldn’t exactly tell Aggie that I wanted her address so we could check to see if she’d offed her husband. So I punted. “I’m sending her a thank-you gift for her contribution to the festival. It’s a surprise.”

“Oh aren’t you the sweet one,” Grams gushed. “But you shouldn’t tell fibs to your grandmother.”

“How did you catch on so fast?”

“That’s the meanest woman I’ve ever met. You wouldn’t give her a present other than a swift kick in the pants, which is exactly what she deserves. Besides, I know that you and the other business owners tried to keep her from competing with our locals. You wouldn’t encourage her.”

“You’re one smart cookie.” Actually, I was surprised that Grams said anything negative about Aggie. Usually she has only good things to say about everybody whether they’re nice people or not. She’s extremely tolerant. “So, do you know where she lives?” I asked again.

“You bet I do.”

By now my cousin Carrie Ann had arrived. Stanley finished
setting up the observation beehive and Holly was due to help out today along with the twins, the same as yesterday. After I wrote down the Petries’ address I went outside, called Patti on my cell, and gave her the information.

“Go check it out,” I said to her from my end of the phone.

“You have to come along,” Patti said from right behind me, scaring me into almost dropping my cell on the sidewalk.

“Patti, you have to stop sneaking up on me. I can’t take much more!”

“Thank you. You don’t know how much that means to me.” She beamed. “That’s the best compliment you could give me. Okay, let’s go.”

“I have work to do. The festival, remember? But here’s the address.”

“You have a full staff working. And Aggie’s house is only twenty minutes away. How long can it take to make sure Eugene’s alive and kicking? You’ll be back in an hour, maybe less. Meet me at your truck.”

I glanced down the street and saw Mom making her way along past the vendors. I decided that I really didn’t want to be around when she arrived at our booth. Two seconds later we blew out of the back parking lot for a quick spin down the road.

The tiny burg of Colgate was on the shore of a clear, small lake that had been named Lake Five. Growing up in a fishing family, we caught a few trout on the Oconomowoc River, which runs behind my house. But if we wanted variety, we rented a boat on Lake Five. I’d caught my share of crappies, large-mouthed bass, and bluegills in that neck of the woods.

The Petries lived in a nondescript brick ranch house surrounded by mixed hardwood trees, only a stone’s throw from the lake. At one time land here had been cheap, which must’ve been back when Aggie and Eugene bought in.
Now no one could touch those lakefront properties unless they had big bucks. Some of the locals even had to sell out due to escalating property taxes. Which made me realize that Aggie’s junk business must be doing pretty decent for them to still live there. Or maybe Eugene had something going that I didn’t know about.

Patti knocked on the door while I waited in the truck. My job was to act as backup, according to Patti. Whatever that meant. I saw her knock again, wait, turn back to me, shrug. Then she made hand motions to indicate I should join her.

“He’s not answering,” she said, which was perfectly obvious to me.

“Let’s look around back.” I got out of the truck and headed around to the backyard where the lake shimmered under the morning sun. I saw a dock, a tiny fishing boat tied to it, a small shed off to the side of the yard, and a good-sized garden.

Patti knocked on the back door with the same results.

“Maybe Eugene went to church,” I suggested.

“Maybe she buried him in the garden,” Patti said, after she walked over and studied the garden plot. “Look there.” She pointed. “Fresh digging.”

Now that she pointed it out, I could tell that someone had turned the soil along one edge. The dirt there was darker, wetter, and clumpier.

“A shallow grave,” Patti said in a stage whisper.

“A row of vegetables recently harvested,” I suggested.

Patti crouched down. “Too wide,” she said.

“Fine, let’s call Hunter.”

Which was the wrong thing to say.

Patti gave me a scowl. She thought I relied on Hunter too much, invoking his name whenever things went wrong, which might have a teeny tiny bit of truth to it. Call me a coward, but I like to stay out of Johnny Jay’s riflescope. Besides, in my last few escapades with Patti, I’d been the
one taken in for questioning and threatened with charges. Not her. Even though she’s the one who deserved it.

“Well,” I said, “we can’t call Johnny Jay. He wouldn’t show up after last night’s episode. In fact, he has some kind of standing order for dispatch to ignore me. Hunter’s our only choice.” Which wasn’t exactly true. Our other choice was that we could forget this whole thing. I’d only been humoring Patti anyway. I didn’t expect to actually find Eugene’s body six-feet under.

“We’ll take care of this without the help of any man,” Patti said, slurring the word
man
like it was the latest dirty word. She went to the shed, opened its unlocked door, disappeared inside, and reappeared with a shovel.

She dug into the garden soil, but hadn’t taken more than a few shovelfuls before her cell phone rang. She stopped. “Here,” she said, handing me the shovel so she could answer her phone. “Hang on to this a minute.”

While she moved off, talking low on the phone while I tried to listen in, I slid my hand across the handle of the shovel and felt a rough spot.

Jeez! A splinter. Right over the stinger wound from this morning. That really hurt. I pulled the sliver out, my hand throbbing with pain.

I turned over the wooden handle and noticed that the wood had a gouged spot, like an animal had chewed on it. That’s one of the reasons why most of us keep our shed doors closed up tight at night, to keep out gnawing creatures.

So there I stood, knee-deep in garden dirt, holding that shovel, and who should I see round the corner but Eugene Petrie!

He certainly wasn’t dead—far from it—but we were seconds away from that non-breathing state ourselves. Because Eugene had a shotgun clutched across his chest in an I-mean-business sort of way, and he was coming fast. “Freeze!” he yelled at us, planting his feet and aiming the gun.

I froze like an ice statue. Over on the edge of the garden, so did Patti.

“Hands up in the air where I can see them.”

“It’s me, Eugene—Story Fischer.”

“My eyesight is just fine.” He still had the shotgun on his shoulder, taking aim. “I said hands up in the air.” We obliged.

A woman called out from the house next door. Once I pried my eyes away from Eugene, I saw it was his daughter-
in-law, Alicia, heading our way. “What happened?” she asked him.

Eugene eyed us. “I don’t know yet, but I’m about to find out what they’re up to.” I remembered that Eugene had been in the marines when he said, “A little waterboarding ought to open them up like clams.”

Waterboarding! I knew what that was. Torture, that’s what. Forcing a person (in this case, me) to inhale water and making them feel like they’re drowning. Not my idea of a good time. Plus, I was pretty sure waterboarding was totally illegal.

I glanced at Patti, hoping she had an idea, one that would get us out of this mess. But all she did was stare back at me, her eyes wide. Next time we dig for dead bodies, we really need to have a backup plan in place in case we get caught. If there is a next time.

“We heard you were sick,” I said to Eugene, “so we stopped by to check on you. Patti noticed you were starting a new row, a second crop of something, so we decided to help you out by getting it ready for your next planting. Weren’t we Patti?”

Patti nodded and gulped. “I have press protection,” she squeaked, holding up her homemade press pass like that was going to help. If anything, playing the reporter card might have the opposite effect.

“It doesn’t sound like much of a crime to me,” Alicia said. “Almost neighborly.”

Eugene didn’t look so sure, but swung the gun clear of us. “Get out of here,” he said. “Next time, I’ll fill you with buckshot.”

And that’s how we got out of that one.

“Don’t ever ask me to help you again,” I warned Patti on the return trip. “I understand you wanting to ingratiate yourself with
The Distorter…”

“
Reporter
,” Patti corrected me.

“…but leave me out of your next harebrained scheme.”

“You did a nice job with backup,” Patti offered, sounding contrite.

“As far as I’m concerned, from this moment forward, I never saw a body in the cemetery. I made up the whole thing to get attention, just like Lori Spandle said. I’m done.”

Once I made that declaration, I felt an enormous weight lift from my shoulders, one I hadn’t even been aware of until now. Nobody had believed me anyway. Except Patti, and because of her I’d been threatened with a weapon and waterboarding. I needed some semblance of normalcy—the festival, the store, time with my man—not all this intrigue.

I pulled into my parking spot behind The Wild Clover. The streets were bumper to bumper with cars searching for parking spaces as close as possible. People were staking out parade-viewing spots with lawn chairs and coolers.