Jonas, page 5
“Just your local—or maybe international—meteorologist.”
She just blinked at him.
“I’m a weatherman.”
“A weatherman.”
“You know. I predict storms and—”
“Nearly run people off the road?”
His smile vanished. “I beeped. And slowed down, and you had about a half mile of space.”
“I could have jumped in front of the car—”
“Why would you do that? Are you a deer?’
She looked at him, and maybe he shouldn’t have said that, but he’d thought he was being a little bit of a hero. “I didn’t run you off the road. I saved you.” Sheesh. Twice, he wanted to add, but maybe that wouldn’t go over so well.
“Saved me? I can run faster than your little windup car.”
He stared at her. Wow, just—wow. Where was the woman who’d invited him to go paragliding with her?
She folded her arms. Looked away, her mouth tight. “Okay. Maybe.”
“Maybe? Listen, Miss Reality Check. You were in their headlights. If I hadn’t come along—”
“Fine. Yes. Thank you.” Only she said it with a Z at the beginning, like zank you.
And shoot, it sent a little zing right through him. Oh brother. Clearly he’d been dreaming a bit too hard about this girl, his brain looping their encounter into a fairy-tale ending.
Hel-lo. “You’re welcome.”
She narrowed her eyes at him, as if dissecting his reply.
“Listen, I’m not sure what’s happening here. A month ago, you were asking me to jump into the blue sky with you. And now, what? I’m the bad guy?”
She looked away. Closed her eyes. “Fine. Yes. No.”
“Yes? Or no?”
“Both!”
Ho-kay. He held up his hands. “Can I drop you somewhere?”
She stepped up to him. “Who were those guys?”
“I haven’t the faintest idea—”
“Then how did you know they were chasing me?” She folded her arms.
“You were running.”
“I could have been…what do you call it?—jogging.”
“At top speed? In your hiking boots? And a backpack? Only if you’re training to climb Everest.”
Her mouth tightened. Then she sighed and released her arms. “I think they were Russians. They tracked me down in a bar after my grandfather’s dog—” Her eyes widened, and her voice fell. Maybe he wasn’t meant to hear the next part, because she looked away from him as she said it. “Lenard. What was he doing there? Without my grandfather?”
So much there to unpack. “Um, I’m going to need more than that. Because after I left your house, I drove into town and passed these guys going to your place.”
She looked at him. “What?”
“They went to the field, where my dirigible crashed. One truck went to your farmhouse.”
She stilled, then swallowed, her eyes wide.
“Um. You okay? Something you want to tell me?”
“I don’t know!” She rounded back to him. “I don’t know, okay? I just know that my grandfather wouldn’t leave without Lenard. Not if he didn’t have to…”
And then, despite the darkness—wait. “Are you crying?”
“No!” But she had put her hands over her face. “Yes. Maybe.” She turned away from him. “It’s just been a really bad day.”
No duh. But maybe his day hadn’t quite matched hers, because she walked over to the Panda, past it, and sank down on the ground against the wall of the barn.
Oh. Somehow that was the last thing he’d expected from her.
He followed her. Sat down beside her. “Okay. Let’s just take a breath here.” He looked over at her. “My name is Jonas. We’ve met, but not in the best of circumstances, so I’m going to start over. I’m here, researching storms because this area seems to have a lot of them.”
She had stopped crying, it seemed, although she’d hardly made a peep before, so who knew if she’d actually been crying. Maybe simply hiding.
Which he got. Could be that Slovenia was one giant forested hiding place.
“I invented weather dirigibles. Like giant balloons, only they go where we want—they’re programed and driven by drones. Powered by batteries, renewable by the sun. And last week, while I was in Italy, four of them crashed. I’ve been trying to locate them and retrieve their black boxes, which contain all the data.”
She was looking at him now, her eyes shiny in the rising moonlight, her face resting on her folded hands.
And for a second, it hit him that, wow, she was pretty. In a regal, European way—high cheekbones, piercing eyes. And despite the crying, she seemed pretty put together. Brave, even, given the way she’d jumped off that mountain.
But boy, she held the patent on confusing.
“That’s what I was doing in your field—looking for Frannie. That’s what I call dirigible number four.”
“Good, because I don’t think Frannie would appreciate being referred to as a number.”
A beat, and then she smiled.
Oh, now she was being funny?
Okay… “She is a little crabby. Disappeared off our radar for a full twenty-four hours before blipping back up. We thought she’d made it through the storm, but maybe she was damaged, because she went down three days ago. It took me this long to find her.”
“Poor girl.”
Still being funny?
“Maybe, yes, because when I found her, she had this weird casing on her. Like someone had grabbed her out of the sky and attached a bomb to her.”
Now Sibba sat up. “A bomb?”
“Or something. The casing was destroyed, and I’m wondering if that’s why Frannie came down. And I searched the field. The black box is nowhere to be found.”
“You think maybe these guys who chased me and went to my farm have something to do with the crash?”
“Maybe. If the black box was attached to her, then they could be looking for it. It would have all the data on it about when she was taken and where.”
“You don’t have that on a computer somewhere?”
“The connection is spotty in the mountains, so no. She goes off the grid for a day and then pops back up a hundred miles from where she went down, and we have no idea what happened while she was dark.”
She sat there, considering his words, quiet.
Then she sighed. “I’m sorry, I have no idea what happened to your black box.” She got up. “But I do need to find my grandfather.”
Right. But, and…wait—“Maybe he saw it crash. Maybe he has the black box.”
She gave a non-laugh chuckle. “Sorry. I just…he’s…” She made a face. “My grandfather is a simple man. Our land was owned by my grandmother’s family. They rented it out, and he kept honeybees. Sold the honey locally. He likes to stay under the radar and, since Babička died, he keeps a quiet life. I hardly think he’d take your black box.”
Right. “But still, he could have it.”
She blinked. “Not a hope.”
“Could have been watching as it went down and thought, hey, what’s that? And picked up the box attached to the device. It’s no bigger than a shoe box—”
“He has shoes.”
“Not my point.”
“He doesn’t have your box.”
“I’ve got no other leads.”
“I’m telling you—”
“Where do you think he is?”
She stared at him as if debating an answer. “Where did you say you were from?”
“Minnesota.”
Another beat. “Where is that?”
“Middle of America. We’re a state filled with very nice people who don’t like spicy food.”
She cocked a head at him. “Nice? Try bossy. Arrogant. Stubborn.”
Wow, really? But maybe. “No, that’s just me. Which you didn’t hate so much when I was carrying your friend off a mountain, so…” He didn’t smile and added a shrug.
“This feels like extortion.”
“And a little like the pot—”
“The what?”
“Never mind. C’mon. I’m just looking for the black box. If he doesn’t have it, I’m gone.”
She stepped back, her hands on her hips, looking up the road where the truck had gone. She turned back to him. “Okay, Minnesota. My grandfather has a little cabin in the woods, about a half kilometer from the farmhouse, where he keeps his bees. My grandmother was always a little afraid of having them near the house.”
He got up. “We can’t go back to your place—not if they’re still there. Or watching it.”
“I know another way.” She pulled the hay off the Panda. “But you might have to get out and push.”
He sort of liked it when she tried to be funny.
Sorta.
They cleared the Panda, then he pulled out, kept the lights off, his eyes used to the dark and adjusting under the moonlight, and headed down the road, slower now.
Better to drive in the darkness at twenty miles per hour than to light up the night like a firefly.
The landscape was eerily dark, despite the moonlight—a few lights here and there, but mostly, as they drove by farmhouses, windows unlit, he felt like he’d dropped into the Dark Ages.
“Take a right up here.”
He peered down the road. “Where?”
“Here—here—here!”
He slammed on the brakes and tried to make out the turn. “That’s a footpath.”
“The Panda isn’t that wide. It’ll make it.”
“It’s a rental.”
She looked at him. “It’s a couple kilometers from here. We go through this field, then past that farmhouse, and behind it is a pasture. You go through the pasture and then—”
“I’m turning! Sheesh.”
He bumped onto the path, praying he didn’t kick out the drip pan, and then rumbled across the darkened field. Please, let him not hit a cow. But the moonlight silvered the grasses, and the sky had turned an inky blue, the stars strewn like so many gilded jewels across the sky.
And she seemed to be relaxing, even as she hung on to her seatbelt.
“So, you don’t live at the farmhouse with your grandfather?”
“No. I have a place in Cerkno.”
“I’ve been there. Stayed at a tourist farm—Želinc. Great žlikrofi.”
“You know Želinc? Go around the house.”
They’d reached the other side of the field, jostling onto the drive. He drove up the driveway and around the house.
“See the trail?”
“The goat trail? Yes.”
She laughed. And this time it took the tension out of his shoulders.
Okay, he might be having fun. “Nixon and I went to Želinc on our way back from Mount Triglav. Stayed two nights. I was surveying the area for weather events.”
She’d turned quiet.
“How’s your friend?”
“Ina? Good. Her ankle wasn’t broken, just sprained.”
“It looked bad. I’m shocked it wasn’t broken.”
“Me too. It was…not a good night. Stop up here. We’ll walk up the mountain.”
He pulled into a wooded area and got out. She pulled her backpack from the back seat where she’d tossed it after she’d gotten in.
She produced a flashlight and clicked it on. The beam shone on a path through the tangled, dark woods. It also lit up the night around them.
“Not afraid they’ll see you?”
“It’s them or the bears.” She worked on the backpack.
She was kidding, right?
Right?
Four
Right now, she wasn’t alone. And Sibba hated how much she appreciated that.
She might have been overstating her comment about the bears, and maybe she should have kept her mouth shut, because every crack and snap in the forest as they walked the trail raised the hairs on the back of her neck.
If not for Jonas, walking behind her, she might have taken the trail at a faster clip. She didn’t know why, but again, just him having around seemed to slow the ever present rattle inside her. Again.
Maybe that’s why she’d invited him to fly with her that day. She’d labeled it simply a lapse in judgment then.
Now…
“How much farther?”
“Not much. From my grandparents’ place, it takes about ten minutes to walk. But we came from the Gorlic farm, so it’s a little farther.”
“Bees, huh?”
“His apiary is in a large field near the house. It was started by my great-grandfather. We have one of the largest Carniolan honeybee farms in the region.” She stepped over a downed log. “Watch your step.”
“I didn’t know there was a difference between bees.”
“Absolutely. A lot of people raise Italian bees—they’re gentler and tend to breed faster. Which means more workers when the nectar comes in.”
Their feet crunched on the half-dried leaves, the pine needles crinkling under each step. Overhead, the moonlight bled through the tree cover. She probably didn’t need the flashlight, but here and there, the tree cover blotted out the sky completely.
“Carniolan bees, however, are stronger bees. They’ll survive better in winter. But they aren’t as gentle.”
“I thought bees died in winter.”
“Wasps and hornets do, but honeybees will often hibernate in the combs they produce, living off the honey. Which is why when you harvest the honeycombs, you don’t want to deplete their means of survival. You need to give them someplace to hide.”
“So, he raises the feisty, tougher bees.” He seemed to be laughing or smiling when he said it. She didn’t know what was so funny.
“Native Slovenian bees,” she said. “But they make the best honey.”
“Of course they do. So, bees means bears.”
“Sometimes. My grandfather has been known to have to scare away a hungry brown bear. But he’s probably already harvested most of the honey for the season, so probably the bears won’t come around.”
Silence. “You were playing me.”
She smiled. “Just making sure you kept up.”
He made a low sound, deep in his throat, and it sounded a little like a bear, so maybe she wasn’t that far off.
“The field is just up ahead.”
“You know your way around these woods pretty well.”
“I helped my grandfather with the bees. He didn’t even suit up when he harvested the honey. He taught me to harvest too.”
“Weren’t you afraid of getting stung?”
“Terribly. And when I first started, I used a bee suit. My grandfather always smoked the bees with pine needles and lavender. I still love the smell. It makes the bees sort of groggy and disguises your smell. Most of the bees inside the hive are drone bees, and they don’t have stingers. You just have to watch out for the worker bees. My grandfather taught me how to read the bees, to move slowly, and to remain calm. He’d even let them swarm on his arm and they wouldn’t sting him.”
“Wow. I have to say…I don’t like bees.”
“The biggest thing is to use slow, deliberate, nonthreatening movements, and most of all, don’t panic.”
“Good advice for life.”
And in bomb removal, but she didn’t add that. Usually her profession sort of sent an awkward silence through any conversation. But yes, her history with bees probably informed her current career, a thought she’d never entertained before.
“So, your dad didn’t raise bees?”
“He worked with Dedi when he was young, but he and my mother died when I was a year old. My grandparents raised me.”
“Oh, I’m sorry.”
“I have an uncle, in America, but it was easier to stay here, so…”
“How’d they die?”
“During the Ten-Day War in 1991 after Slovenia declared their independence from Yugoslavia. The airport in Ljubljana was bombed by the JNA—the Yugoslavian People’s Army—and our community was destroyed by a stray bomb. I was found in the rubble.”
Silence behind her. She hadn’t really told many people the story—after a few years, the details of their deaths had become less important.
“My grandparents loved me. I never really missed my parents, because I never knew them. But it still made me hate war.”
They came out to a field, and she stopped. He drew up beside her. “Are those the beehives?”
About fifty boxes sat in the field on long wooden planks, their homes quiet as the moonlight bathed them in an ethereal glow. The cold air had driven the bees inside for the night.
The wind shivered in the trees, and the smell of autumn hung in the air.
“So, Weatherman, is there a storm coming?”
He looked at her, then the sky. “Clouds are high and thin, mostly clear night, so…I think we’re safe for now.”
Safe for now. She glanced at him. He’d shoved his hands into his coat pockets, turned up his collar, but standing next to her, maybe yes. Safe for now.
She shouldn’t have jumped to the conclusion that he was some sort of villain.
“The cabin is this way.” She headed out across the clearing toward another trail.
“Why does he have a cabin if the field is close to the farmhouse?”
She laughed. “Because Babička sometimes had a sharp tongue.”
He made another sound, like before.
She’d hoped to see a light flickering in the window of the cabin as they approached, but the place was dark, silent. And unchanged since the last time she saw it, with the rough-hewn pine logs, the front porch with a couple old hive boxes still needing repair, a netting hat hanging near the door, the worn bee brush, and a honeycomb extruder on a bench.
She opened the door and shone her light inside. “Dedi?”
The place did seem recently used, the smell of coals in the potbellied stove, the lantern, although snuffed out, in the middle of the table. And his red woolen jacket hanging from a knot in the pine logs.
The two thin beds that ran along the back wall seemed untouched, however. And the kitchen, a simple counter with cupboards over it to hold his ceramic plates and pots, had been tidied. The cast iron pot sat clean on the stove.
Jonas had stepped in behind her. “Not here.”
