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

“Dad...” He almost faltered. “...died. Wanted his ashes scattered. He had some good times here, before...”

Kelly tut-tutted and shook his head. His gaze dropped to the curling verandah boards. “Heard last night in the pub that he’d gone.” Kelly crossed himself.

“He considered you a friend, Ned.”

Kelly’s face twisted. He wasn’t good with words at the best of times, particularly when it came to comforting the bereaved or accepting a compliment. To be landed with the job of doing both at once threatened to swamp him.

But there was no stopping Forrester, with his father’s candid eyes and his unsettling honesty.

“He asked me to come and tell you that. That he considered you a mate.”

Kelly could only shrug. He’d been thirty years in the same place. In all that time he’d never felt the need to cross a state border, let alone explore the edges of a comfort zone.

Relief surged through him when Forrester changed tack.

“Enjoying the simple life, Ned?” The interior design of Kelly’s humpy seemed to Forrester like a snapshot from the Edwardian era. Wood fire, kero lamps, the pervading smell of soot.

Kelly didn’t waver. “Don’t need a lot to make me happy.”

Forrester misread the awkwardness as offence.

“I wasn’t suggesting...”

“And I wasn’t suggesting that you were. Now, I’d invite you in, except the dog don’t take too well to strangers.”

Forrester turned to go. Then stopped, as if suddenly remembering something.

“You’ve a hive of wild bees in one of your Bramley stumps.”

Kelly hadn’t been prepared for this. Small talk wasn’t one of his strengths either. “Mad as hell, they are. What of it?”

“I could get rid of them for you. I’m an apiarist. If you’d let me have the honey.”

The old man shrugged again.

“Honey’s no good to me,” he said and turned inside, locking the door.

Forrester lost no time attacking the hive.

Usually, he’d stand and observe awhile, reading the behaviour, planning his approach. But these girls were wild as a coachload of spurned wives.

And he’d waited long enough.

He rushed at the tree with a block splitter, making chips of apple wood fly into the rapidly warming morning.

Attack was his best means of defence, and the wilder the bees the stronger the attack needed.

“Bad bees are like rogue dogs...” His father was speaking to him again, so sharp he almost stopped chopping to look for him. “Show no fear and you’ve less chance of being stung or bitten...”

Sweat beaded his brow and stained the back of his shirt.

He swung the block splitter back and forth, back and forth, until the stump cracked and split.

The cavity was bigger than he expected, occupying the central core of the tree. Forrester estimated it must have been home to generation upon savage generation of bees.

By now the bees that were left in the hive were too busy salvaging what honey they could from his dreadful assault. They had neither the time nor the inclination to sting the wild beast attacking their treasure.

Forrester heard the air humming with their furious endeavour as he smeared his hands with a protective layer of honey and plunged them into the hollow.

He managed to pull out the comb intact, with little damage to the symmetry that still made him marvel, and placed it carefully in his honey bucket.

Back at the Land Rover, he carved off a wedge of comb, pushed it into a clean jar, and topped it with the golden liquid.

Then, with his forceps and scalpel glinting under a livid inland sun, he unlocked the bee box and took out the first of the six workers he’d chosen to sacrifice in the name of rough justice.

From the commotion inside, it seemed there was more trouble with old Ned’s dog.

“A token of thanks...” Forrester held out the jar to a startled Kelly when he finally pulled open the door. “...for the honey, I mean.”

Despite his best intentions, Kelly found himself taking the jar.

“Thought those bees’d eat you alive,” he said. “Haven’t been able to walk that bit of ground in years.”

“Bad bees are like rogue dogs...” Forrester heard himself repeating his father’s advice.

Then he looked into the room Kelly was so intent on guarding. “...Where exactly is your dog, Ned?”

It was after eight o’clock in the public bar at the Hargreaves before Forrester decided he’d been stood up.

“Story of my life...” he began.

He was, after all, familiar with deceit. He’d been introduced to it as a kid. When his old man had taken the rap for a missing find of gold in the shape of a peacock. Then been arrested by his best mate, Senior Sergeant Ned Kelly.

“Give the girl a call...” Eleanor Parry was a good listener. She’d heard her share of confidences traded for the price of a beer. But after over an hour of Forrester’s heady anticipation for “the sweet Welsh nurse with the heart of gold,” even she finally cracked.

“She didn’t give me her phone number.” Two too many whiskies on an empty stomach had started to slur the visitor’s words.

Parry tossed her blazing halo of hair back from her shoulders. “Since when did that ever stop a man!”

She’d intended to provoke him, but Forrester’s thoughts ran deeper. “Gwynneth’s a sensitive soul...”

Parry snorted. “Have a few more drinks, Josh. Next you’ll be quoting poetry.”

Forrester was packing to leave town when Eleanor Parry caught up with him. Her deadpan expression told him immediately that something was dreadfully wrong.

Adrenaline pumped through him.

But he willed himself to stay cool.

Anticipating the news about Kelly.

“Gwynneth Davies.” Parry didn’t bother to clothe the words in sympathy. She spoke in short, sharp sentences. “Found her this morning. Dead.”

Forrester felt the suspension of belief. Shock sucked at his breath.

“Are you sure?” The question was ridiculous. He knew it. Didn’t care.

“Ned Kelly phoned to say she hadn’t turned up to do his leg.” Parry’s words came faster now. “You thought she’d stood you up last night. So I went round...”

Forrester’s head throbbed. He felt weightless. He had to slump against the running board to stop himself falling.

His head fell forwards, then jerked up again at Parry’s next words.

“Looks like she found a stinger in that wild comb honey of yours. Had the jar open, place crawling with ants. Caught it right at the back of the tongue. Throat puffed up like a robber’s dog.”

Sweat beaded on Forrester’s upper lip. His tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth. His mind spun cartwheels. Could Parry hear the hammering in his chest?

“I didn’t give her any wild honey.”

The ex-copper grimaced.

“No, but Ned did. Old coot’s so shaken up he’s even starting to sound half sane.”

Parry’s cool eyes surveyed Forrester.

“Said he couldn’t eat the stuff you gave him. Being diabetic. So he passed it on to his nurse. Then, he produced this...”

Parry extracted a faded khaki satchel from the floor of her Landcruiser, opened the drawstring, and extracted The Peacock.

“Kelly’s fessed up enough to guarantee your dad a pardon, posthumous though it is.”

The news was infinitely satisfying to the ex-copper. Taking her old adversary of a senior sergeant into custody had given her a buzz she hadn’t felt in years.

But it was little comfort to Forrester. The earth was tilting. He couldn’t stop it.

“Honey’s been sent off to pathology...”

Parry frowned as she looked again at the bee man, pale with shock, starting to rock.

And reached for her cuffs.

© 2008 by Cheryl Rogers