Doug Allyn - Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 131, No. 3 & 4. Whole No. 799 & 800, March/April 2008

Within minutes, the angry buzzing gave way to silence and he knew the bees had begun gorging themselves on the sweet liquid.

Soon, the first had returned to the hive and within thirty minutes one bee line was established. He tracked the line through a stand of red gums, down into Kelly’s land. Then he pulled a contour map from his backpack, plotted the course, packed up the box of bees, and moved to another paddock one kilometer west.

The move took Forrester across the Mudgee road. He parked his Land Rover near a crumbling chimney stack and repeated the tracking. When he finished, he made sure there were still a half-dozen workers feasting inside the bee box, then he locked it.

The sun was sinking low by the time he discovered the hive. It was humming in the belly of a Bramley apple, not one hundred metres from the humpy belching a twisted curl of smoke.

The bees began their assault on him when he was a good five meters from their cache.

But Forrester had been stung four times before it registered.

Gwynneth Davies found herself stopping yet again on the way back from nursing a client to read the headstones in the Protestant cemetery. It was in a clearing amongst stringybarks, just off the Mudgee road, a million miles from Caernarfon, where Dafydd had decided he’d been too young for marriage. After they’d been married eight wasted years.

There was a fascination about the inscriptions that lured her there. Week after week. “George Griffiths, who was killed through carelessness in the Newcastle Co. Claim, Tambaroora, October 4, 1872...” She couldn’t help saying the words aloud, savouring every syllable, even though she’d recited them a dozen times before. “...Sacred to the memory of Thomas William Anderson, who was accidentally killed whilst working in Rawsthorne’s Mine, Hawkins Hill...”

“Keep that up and they’ll lock you away.”

Gwynneth jumped. She hadn’t seen the tall stranger, clutching a thermos and paper cup, looking for all intents and purposes like a tourist searching for a good spot for a picnic.

“You scared me!” Hadn’t Dafydd always said she had an irritating habit of stating the bleeding obvious.

“Did not. You scared yourself.”

He was Australian. That was certain. Since the cave man, there’d surely been no race of male more infuriatingly direct. She fumbled in her holdall, finally extracting a mobile phone.

He laughed. “Reception out here stinks.”

Gwynneth glared. She’d plenty of experience with difficult patients. And at maintaining a diplomatic silence. But the inland heat laced with fear caused a rush of blood to her head. She waved the useless phone. “What gives you the right to go skulking about headstones, scaring innocent women?”

The man moved off the path to walk around her. Then paused and looked back. “I’m saying goodbye to my father,” he said. And suddenly she realised the thermos wasn’t a thermos after all and felt herself start to apologise. Until the stranger cast his unfathomable eyes over the pillars of sandstone and added: “Where’re the innocent women?”

And then, partly due to nerves and heat and partly because the situation was so ridiculous, she started to giggle.

Forrester felt a smile tug at the corners of his mouth as the pert blonde he apparently had the capacity to incense just by breathing the same air failed to contain her laughter.

The music that bubbled from her lips both refreshed and saddened him. It’d been a long time since he’d heard laughter like that. It reminded him of his youngest sister. Adie. The giggler. The thought of Adie’s bruised body killed the smile on his lips.

Gwynneth misinterpreted the stranger’s melancholic look and felt suddenly contrite. “You’ll be wanting to scatter the ashes.” She slid the mobile back into her holdall, immediately businesslike. “There’s a clearing amongst the stringybarks up the back, filled with the most stunning purple flowers...”

“Paterson’s Curse.” The man’s voice flickered with interest. “Salvation Jane. Echium plantagineum ...” He was gazing off into the distance, looking past her white rayon uniform and sensible shoes, and the hair she’d washed that morning in lavender-scented rainwater. “A lot of folk say it’s a weed, but my dad always said it made some of the best honey.”

He looked at Gwynneth, as if seeing something in her for the first time. “It’d be right to rest him there.”

She held the paper cup while he poured out the ashes. They were clumped into balls, like something from the bottom of a kettle barbecue.

“Do you have a prayer?” she asked.

For a moment he looked as lost as an unprepared little boy invited to say Grace at his first meal away from home.

“No, I...” He turned to her, at last taking in the uniform, the white stockings, and the nametag that announced “Gwynneth Davies, R.N.”

“If you’d like me to, I could say a few words?”

Assuming his nod to be a sign of assent, she continued. “...As we return to the earth from whence we came... even though the spirit is already with you, we ask that you receive these ashes of the one that you created, that you might create again from them life anew.”

Her somber words carried through the airless heat and the scattered ashes, craving a breeze, stuck fast in the purple flower heads and on the taut, hairy stems.

“We need some spring rain,” she said, then hurriedly added. “To freshen up the place, put a bit of life back into the soil.”

“Bees need water,” Forrester volunteered, startling her until he noticed the look she was giving him. “Josh Forrester’s the name. I’m an apiarist. I collect wild honey.”

She liked the way the stranger’s name rolled around on itself, like desert tumbleweed, yet with enough strength in it to have substance.

She quite fancied writing home to Mother, telling her about the lean, dark Aussie she’d met scattering his father’s ashes, about the sadness behind his smile.

And she particularly fancied the knowledge that her mother would be around to Dafydd’s drapery business quicker than a ferret after a rat to broadcast the news.

“The Hargreaves does a fine pub meal,” she ventured. “Would you like to meet up there tonight?”

“Sorry, got to sort out my ‘comb boxes.”

She genuinely believed at first it was some sort of joke, lopsided as this infuriating Aussie’s grin.

But then he added: “Got a big day tomorrow, raiding wild honey.”

She managed, under the circumstances, to hide her incredulity remarkably well.

“Tomorrow night, then. Seven o’clock.”

Gwynneth had decided.

Even Forrester had no answer to that.

Forrester could smell vegetables frying as he lifted his hand to knock on the humpy door. Paterson’s Curse cast a purple haze through the derelict orchard surrounding the weatherboard and iron hut.

“Settle down, Ben!” he heard an elderly male voice growl. There was shuffling inside, towards the door. Then it opened.

“Holy Mary, mother of God!” Kelly clawed at his chest, and leaned into the doorframe.

Forrester was at a loss what to do. Last thing he wanted was the old geezer dying on him. Not now. Not like this!

“Sorry, I...” he began, but Kelly raised a hand to silence him.

“You shocked me, that’s all.” He lifted rheumy eyes to take a hard look at the younger man. “God, but you’re like your dad.” The eyes narrowed. “What brings you back?”

Forrester’s gaze shifted away from the face etched with lines he didn’t remember. Lines earned from a life of freedom in the sun. It suddenly struck him how different the face was from his father’s, skin pale as a baby’s thanks to the protection of prison.