Mad Honey, page 6
At the bottom of the stairs she hesitated, hands hovering over the front door latches, and decided to make coffee before going outside. She detoured first to the right, into a library/office where she did the farm’s paperwork because they couldn’t afford an accountant. Floor-to-ceiling shelves were crammed with books about gardening, mushroom harvesting, composting and other esoteric farming lore. There was a fiction shelf too, filled with her favourites from childhood to the present. It was her habit to reread books she loved; some of the paperbacks were ragged with use, their spines splotched and tatty. Charlotte’s Web, everything by Tom Robbins, The Shipping News. The computer was dusty and surrounded by stacks of paper, reminding Melissa that she had neglected receipts and accounts payable for far too long. She powered up the computer, wiped off the keyboard and opened the mail program, then the invoice folder. Scrolling idly, months and years whizzed backward in time, until a long-forgotten name popped up: Balvinder Singh. She tapped the mouse, looking for her father’s old letters to the owner of Produce Point. They weren’t there. Chewing the inside of her lip, she entered Balvinder’s name in the search bar – nothing, not even in the trash. Unconsciously she puffed at her hair, and caught herself before the tucking began. She clicked the computer off.
Across the hall was the living room. Beck wasn’t in there either. A cozy space no one used from spring thaw to first snow, it had a cracked red leather couch, a wooden rocking chair, an overstuffed armchair, a stone fireplace and an invitingly shaggy hearth rug. It was the only room that contained a photograph of Melissa’s father – an autumn portrait of her happy little childhood family, before it disintegrated, was propped up on the mantelpiece. Charlie Makepeace, tall and relaxed in a lumberjacket and jeans, wore a slanted smile. Jill filled the right side of the frame, in a fall sweater and cashmere wrap; she was stylish and self-aware, pouting for the camera. In a broad space between her parents stood the child Melissa in a knitted poncho, purple stretchy pants and ladybug rubber boots, an outfit her six-year-old self must have chosen. She was grinning, poised to take a step, the top of her mussy brown head at her father’s hip level, her mother’s elbow. Her mother had tried to put this picture away over the years, and every time she did, Melissa had a tantrum. One family picture, is that too much to ask?
She went down the hall to the kitchen, flicking her head to the right as she passed the dining room. Beck wasn’t there, of course. No one had wiped the table after dinner; flies were feeding on grains of rice and splotches of saffron-hued curry. She tsked in disapproval. In the vivid kitchen, she ran warm water and a dribble of dish soap onto a cloth while the kettle boiled, then scoured the dining table, generating the indignant drone of thwarted flies. She poured thick, bitter coffee from a French press and carried her mug out the back door, feet slapping in an ancient pair of leather Birkenstock sandals. Bow Lake sparkled below the fields. A loon ululated in the distance. She made her way to the front of the house, passing first the boat launch road, then her father’s old work shed, where these days Joseph repaired broken vehicles and jury-rigged irrigation systems.
Melissa rounded a maple tree, and almost dropped her coffee. Beck was stretched out in textbook Warrior II pose, one knee bent deeply, arms stretched out in a line perfectly parallel with the surface of the earth, his gaze trained meticulously over the middle finger of his left hand. His body was oriented directly toward the bee yard, some thirty metres distant. She must have gasped, because she broke his concentration and he stepped out of the pose.
“Why are you here?” she blurted.
“I was too tired to walk home, so I slept on the porch. I didn’t think you would mind.”
She went to him where he stood on the grass, glancing at the beehives in the distance as she walked. There was no one else in sight. She heard chickens squawking in the henhouse, and the thrum of a tractor in the farthest fields. A cloud of brown dust roiled above green crops. A buzzing insect zoomed beside her left ear and hovered until she waved it away. She handed Beck her coffee and he smiled, took a small sip and handed it back.
“Melissa, let me help with harvest season. Please. Let me mow the lawn, drive the tractor and plough a field, stack bales of hay in Hotay’s lean-to. I know it doesn’t make sense, but this farm feels safe – safer than the cabin.”
Beck pressed his hands into prayer position on his breastbone, literally begging. When Melissa didn’t answer right away, he reached out and touched her arm, squeezing it lightly, imploring. Just that, his skin in contact with hers, unseated her, and her brain released a host of hormonal activity that had lain dormant.
“What really happened?” she asked softly.
Beck cringed and snatched his hand away. He was traumatized. Why hadn’t she seen it yesterday? He hadn’t turned into a colony of bees of course; that was a construct, a story shielding him from some other unspeakable horror. He rotated, presenting his back to the bee yard.
“I’m telling the truth. I know it’s outrageous, but it’s all I’ve got.” His shoulders collapsed. “I need to talk to my parents. Can I stay until I’ve talked to them, at least?”
The tiny spare bedroom leapt into her mind’s eye. She could invite Beck to stay, feed him and help him gain weight. She could allow him to help out with harvest and maybe he would take over his beekeeping duties again. His stay would be on her terms, and they wouldn’t necessarily wind up in bed together. He couldn’t keep up this bee pretense for long; the truth would emerge and they would confront it together. But the invitation got stuck in her throat.
Beck’s smile was a thin enigma. She gulped her coffee and set the mug down on the path. Beck fished her cellphone out of his jeans pocket and held it aloft. “I found this on the porch and left a message for my parents.”
She grabbed the phone and tossed it to the ground. He stepped in close and took her hands in his. The rising sun crested trees on the eastern horizon and poured pinkish-orange light, illuminating the stone farmhouse facade, making grass and trees glow, releasing energy stored inside every blade, every leaf. The sun healed Beck’s pallor in an instant, washing over his black hair and toffee skin, restoring his humanity. He eased his face closer to hers, and she fought both the gravitational pull of his lips and the overwhelming urge to start touching each of her teeth with her tongue in turn.
The phone rang in the grass at Beck’s feet, and the charm was broken. Their hands separated. Melissa scooped up the phone, wiped beaded moisture from the screen and answered the call. It was an international number she didn’t recognize; the connection beeped, popped and fizzled before a confident woman’s voice broke the pastoral serenity.
“Buenos días, Melissa – Beck, he is with you now?”
She passed the phone to Beck. He took it, grinning like a circus chimpanzee rewarded with a banana. She wheeled away from him, puffed three times and tucked hair severely behind her ears. From behind the house came a distinct rough engine idle, and the gate between the yard and fields squealed. A rusty secondhand truck bounced along parallel dirt ruts between house and shed and slowed to a stop beside her.
Jill had bought this replacement utility pickup for the farm after Charlie left. “We need another beater,” she had said. The truck had since merged in Melissa’s memory with her father’s old vehicle, a jalopy he had alternately cursed and praised, once upon a time a flat white, the top of the cab weather-worn to a silver sheen, metal corroded around the door handles, dings and scuffs along the body, lovable in its imperfections and predictable for the way it would break down at the most crucial junctures. Melissa glanced at the muddied licence plate, letters and numbers jumbling dyslexically for a second as her brain tried to rearrange them to form a plate she still watched for, one the local police assured her would pop up on their screens in lurid red, signalling it matched the plate in her father’s missing person’s file.
Behind the wheel Daphne smiled, a blue bandana tied around her forehead, gold-rimmed aviator sunglasses flashing. Waxed cardboard boxes, dotted with holes to aerate perishable produce, were stacked in the back of the pickup.
“Ready for market day? Hey, Beck – is he coming to help out? Just like the old days!”
Melissa leapt onto the duct-taped bench seat and slammed the heavy passenger door. She leaned out the window. Beck had wandered to the gap in the hedge with her phone pressed to his ear, his free hand clutching a handful of his hair. He spoke in a loud, insistent tone, then fell silent and nodded while the person on the other end took their turn.
“He’s not coming; he’s not well enough to work. Hey!” Melissa shouted at Beck, and as he turned she felt a lightness in her chest, a momentary giddy happiness he was really there, before the weight of his betrayal extinguished the spark of joy. “Leave my phone on the porch when you go.”
Melissa saw the implication he should go back to his family’s cabin settle on Beck like a jail sentence. She had imagined this moment as satisfying and triumphant, but instead it felt miserly and cruel. After a long pause, he gave her a thumbs-up and went back to his call.
Daphne stepped on the gas and cranked the radio, tuned to a crackly local Top Forty station. Melissa stared out her window as they whipped past trees and fields, grateful for Daphne, who sang scraps of songs, kept the energy in the truck buoyant and left her alone with her thoughts. Once in Lanark, Daphne slowed the truck to an urban chug and palmed the steering wheel, whistling. Wrenching into reverse, she backed into their spot at the weekly farmers’ market, a ten-foot-wide slot of public real estate.
They had their market routine perfected, erecting the canopy and table, unloading the truck and piling the week’s produce in an artistic, enticing display designed by Jill. Vegetables and fruits tumbled from straw-lined baskets turned on their sides, colours mixed carefully, carrots beside broccoli, then beets, lettuce, tomatoes and kale. There was barely enough room for everything, but extra space destroyed the cornucopia effect, Jill claimed. Week after week, their competitors watched enviously as customers flocked to the Hopetown Farm market stall, and Melissa was grateful for her mother’s business acumen. Jealous or not, the other farmers hailed her and Daphne warmly as they unloaded their truck, and jokes about the week’s hot weather shot back and forth across a well-trod aisle of brown grass between two rows of stalls.
“Whoa, Melissa, you’re Queen of the Market again. Damn, what are you fertilizing with these days? That broccoli is unnatural. I don’t know how, but you’re cheating,” said Natalie from the farm next door, who was also their neighbour at the market. “Hey, did Beck finally get back to you? He looks terrible.”
Melissa glanced at Daphne, whose sunglasses hid her expression.
“He’ll be okay,” Melissa said. “We’re using our rocket-fuel mushroom compost, the stuff my mom invented. So yeah, basically cheating.”
Natalie winked at them, laughing, before her attention was pulled by a customer.
“So where was he – did he tell you?” Daphne lowered her sunglasses with a finger.
“Later,” Melissa said, feeling the double burden of keeping her promise to Beck and being less than honest with Daphne. She thought about Beck’s beehive hallucination and shuddered. A cog had slipped a wheel in his psyche; he had come unglued. She felt silly for not seeing it coming. His obsession with the bees, his agoraphobic tendencies, the dearth of intimacy between them – how close she had come to professing love for a lunatic! But as she fumbled in her apron for a customer’s change, Beck flooded her senses, his lean limbs and bright eyes, and she felt a wriggling in her guts, a churning of excitement and hope.
“Well, if it isn’t Melissa Makepeace. Long time no see. Good to see you’re keeping things shipshape for your mom.”
A woman moved in front of the stall, eclipsing the market with her bulky presence. Sleek blond hair was combed into a ponytail pulled tight behind a round face, and navy-uniformed arms hung akimbo, primed to grab sidearm, two-way radio, pager or baton. In spite of the heat she wore a jacket, with crown-and-flag embroidered Ontario Provincial Police crests on the sleeves. Her blue trousers bunched between legs thick as concrete pilings.
“Oh, hey, Constable Hickey. Can I talk to you for a sec? Daphne, you got this?”
“You bet,” Daphne said.
Susan Hickey had been a rookie cop in Lanark when Charlie Makepeace went missing. It had fallen to the young female officer, by intention or orders Melissa never knew, to comfort the eleven-year-old girl as police interacted with her distraught mother. Over the years Constable Hickey had graduated from provider of lollipops and pats on the shoulder to Melissa’s chief liaison with her father’s case. She followed Melissa around the produce stand to the front of the old truck, rubbing a stick of waxy balm on her lips and smacking them with satisfaction.
“What can I do for you, Melissa?”
“I’ve been meaning to come by the station, but it’s been crazy busy at the farm. I was going through old emails, and I found some between my dad and Balvinder Singh.”
“Singh, the pharmacist?”
“No, the Almonte Singhs. The family that owns Produce Point Market.”
“Oh yeah, sure. I know who you mean. So what did these emails say?”
Constable Hickey extracted a small spiral-bound notebook from a back pocket and flipped it open. She licked a finger and riffled through pages covered with scribbled notes until she came to an empty one, poised a pencil between her fingers and waited, one eyebrow raised.
“Not much. They were mostly like, friendly reminders of invoices and questions about what Balvinder stocked in his store. I just couldn’t remember if anyone ever talked to him about my dad, back then,” Melissa finished lamely. She wondered if she should admit the emails had been inexplicably deleted from the farm computer.
“Balvinder Singh, eh?” Constable Hickey printed the name deliberately, finishing with a final flourish-and-stab of her pencil. “I can’t recollect offhand. Been awhile since I looked at it, but I’ll check your father’s file when I get back to the station. You never know. Colder cases than his have been solved. Have to follow up on every lead.” She closed the little notebook, jammed it in her back pocket and patted it three times, as if to reassure Melissa the name was safely tucked away. “You hang in there, okay?”
“Wait, there’s one more thing.”
“Oh yeah? What’s that, now?” The police officer folded her arms across her chest, and made a show of vigilantly peering around Melissa’s truck toward the market, signifying she was on duty, watching for trouble, and couldn’t be waylaid for much longer.
“I probably should have talked to you before. You know Beck, who was working for me?”
“Beck, you mean your boyfriend Beck?”
Melissa winced. “Yeah, sure. Well, he was gone all summer. Did his parents call you, wondering where he was, or anything?”
“That sounds familiar. Yes, his father came by the station. But we decided he was a young man, and it was summertime, and there was no reason to suspect foul play. His dad didn’t want us to open a file. Didn’t you know he was going away? I seem to remember something about Beck leaving a letter for you.” The police officer put a hand on her back pocket, ready to jot more notes, if necessary.
“Yes, but also no. Sort of. Well, he just got back yesterday.”
“Oh, he’s back. Great. Is that all?”
Constable Hickey stepped out from behind the truck and surveyed the market, shielding her eyes from the sun with her hand. “Duty calls,” she said, and clapping Melissa on the shoulder, she left. Melissa watched Constable Hickey’s ponytail sway as she wove through the thickening market crowd, swivelling her head from side to side, patrolling her enviable beat.
“Uh, boss? If you’re done? We got a situation here,” Daphne called out.
Startled, Melissa saw Daphne struggling to serve customers who crowded the Hopetown stall, clutching bunches of carrots and fanning the air with green twenty-dollar bills. Her thoughts had drifted far away, like dandelion seeds searching for fertile ground.
Five
Alamar, Cuba
twenty-five years earlier
There was a fine mist that morning, a translucent veil pulled over the dark green fronds of palm trees. Mist shrouded the pink, yellow and orange blossoms of lush flower gardens (a shame these were hidden) and masked the concrete apartment buildings (a blessing to have their grey ugliness cloaked). Eurydice heaved an expansive yawn that stretched the skin on her cheeks. She was sleepy, in spite of the big cup of black coffee she had swallowed at dawn along with a thick wedge of buttered bread. How was it December already, almost the day of the Procesión de San Lázaro? Had she let so many days slip by without pausing to consult the grubby pages of the calendar tacked up in the kitchen?
By midmorning the mist had dissipated, evaporated under the Caribbean sun and puffed away by salty ocean breezes. She knelt in her flounced white cotton skirt and pink tank top, a mat of woven palm fronds placed under her knees. She was trying to keep clean in case Matthew Wise, the Canadian photographer, came back to the organopónico today. He wasn’t there to photograph her, of course, but to document the burgeoning independent farming movement. She knew what kind of photos Matthew wanted because Pedro, Matthew’s translator, told Emilio the mechanic, who told Rita the housekeeper, who passed it on to Eurydice. He wanted images of leafy vegetables, succulent yellow fruta bomba, rows of waving green onion stalks, colourful butterflies, tiny iridescent hummingbirds and masses of shiny wet worms like the ones she scooped up now with deft fingers, shaking off black clods of rich earth. And of course, he wanted pictures of the Santeria shrine at the west gate of the organopónico. Foreigners always hung around that shrine, squinting at it, poking their fingers into the eyeholes of the skulls. Matthew Wise had snapped pictures of the shrine from all angles, zooming in on the little heap of blood-spattered sacred stones, brightly painted cow skull and strands of coloured beads draped over the frame. So far Matthew hadn’t photographed people, and he certainly hadn’t taken a picture of her, Eurydice Maria Lopez de Famosa, because she would have noticed. In her fantasy, Matthew captures an image of her on film, develops it in darkness and suspends it for processing in a windowless room with a scarlet glow. The image sharpens, and he is struck by her beauty.
