Free Telling the Bees by Peggy Hesketh

“Mrs. Straussman was playing with the boy in the front room when she thought she heard someone knock on the kitchen door and she went back to see who it was.”
    I explained to the detective that since we lived so near the railroad depot, it wasn’t at all unusual at that time for the occasional tramp to inquire after odd jobs. But there was no one at the door, at least according to Claire’s account, and when her mother returned to the room she found the boy lying unconscious on the floor. After her initial efforts to bring him around failed, she frantically rang up the doctor, and, as the story went, the doctor hurried over to the house, but it was already too late.
    “Claire said her mother left Harry Junior alone for only a moment, and just as quick as that he was gone.” I put the photograph back down on the table. “He couldn’t have been more than two or three years old. Claire often said she didn’t think her father ever quite got over young Harry’s death. Or her mother either, for that matter.”
    “How long ago would that have been?” the detective asked.
    “Let’s see . . . 1915, maybe 1916 at the latest,” I said, and the detective scribbled this information down, too.
    “And you say no one ever figured out what killed him?” he said.
    “Not to my recollection,” I said. “There was some speculation it might have been pneumonia, but no one seemed to recall him being particularly ill at the time. Of course this was all before I was born. Before Hilda and Claire came along, even. And you have to understand that in those days families didn’t talk about this sort of thing. What little I know of the poor boy I heard many years later from Claire, who likewise heard the story secondhand, from her father. And this being a particularly painful subject, Claire said her father did not elaborate beyond the bare facts, even when she pressed him as far as she dared.”
    “So there wasn’t any formal inquiry?” he pressed.
    “Not that I’m aware of. But again, Detective, back then it wasn’t uncommon for a family to lose a child, or even two, before they reached maturity. Tuberculosis was not uncommon. Flus were pandemic. This was before penicillin. Before so many advances in modern medicine. My own dear mother lost a baby at birth. We nearly lost her as well. It’s a wonder she even consented to try again. Had she not wanted to give my father a son, I doubt I would even have been born.”
    The detective seemed to consider how best to respond without making too big a fuss over what he rightly perceived to be a most personal revelation on my part.
    “That’s a shame,” he said at last, though he did not specify the particular shame to which he referred. The detective stared at me a moment more as if he had something else to say, but perhaps I misread his intent as he turned back to his notebook and underlined the last few words he’d written before moving on to the next photograph.
    Thankfully, this one brought back much happier memories. Though the face in the snapshot was shrouded by a large beekeeper’s hat and veil, the young girl beneath was only too easy to recognize.
    “That’s Claire, wearing one of my old bee hats,” I said, smiling from the memory. “I remember the day I took this picture, with my mother’s Brownie camera, out in our backyard.”
    “And when was that?” Detective Grayson asked.
    “The spring of 1932.”
    “You’re sure of that?”
    “Absolutely.”
    I explained that although we had lived next door for many years, Claire and I had not become friendly until after my father was summoned to the Straussmans’ home to remove a wild colony of bees that had taken up residency in their parlor wall.
    “Claire was frightened of the bees at first, but she was fascinated by them as well,” I said. “So much so that shortly after my father had rid her family’s home of all its unwanted guests, she began to stop by our house after school to watch us tend our hives.