Free Telling the Bees by Peggy Hesketh Page A

She told me some years later that she had grown so accustomed to the constant hum the bees had produced while they were living in her parlor wall that she began to miss it once they were gone.
    “Still, she was hesitant to come close to our bees until my mother presented her with one of our spare beekeeper hats and netting and a pair of white cotton coveralls and a shirt that no longer fit me.”
    I recounted how my mother had tucked Claire snugly into this borrowed outfit, and my father had taken her by the hand and led her to within a few steps of our gentlest hive. Even after all those years, I could not suppress a smile.
    “Unfortunately, a robust party of field bees chose that very moment to return to the hive, and poor Claire went skittering back to the porch like a beetle across a hot stove. She refused to come any closer to the hives again for at least another hour or more.”
    I chuckled at the memory before remembering that the good detective’s initial reaction to my bees that late afternoon had been no less skittish.
    “Most people are fearful of bees until they get to know their ways,” I said quickly, hoping to defuse any unintended affront. I offered that such trepidation had been growing among the general public ever since reports of great hordes of killer bees advancing northward from Latin America had surfaced.
    “While I have yet to see one of these so-called killer bees—or Africanized, as they are more properly called—I am nonetheless certain that their reputed lethal nature is greatly exaggerated.”
    I set the photograph of young Claire back in its place on the grid.
    “Did you know that in Guatemala they now call these fierce creatures
bravo
bees?” The detective did not reply. I sensed a growing restiveness in his demeanor, as he had begun to rub a muscle in his neck just below his left ear with practiced precision. “But I digress, as surely you are more rightfully concerned with the lethal activities of our fellow man.”
    “I’m afraid so,” the detective said, releasing his neck and reaching unexpectedly for a photograph in the bottom row instead of the next one in line. The picture, which appeared to be one of the more recent of any there, was in color, and showed a smiling young serviceman, a Marine, in full uniform, standing next to a large military-style helicopter.
    “Tustin, 1975” was inscribed in a photographic studio’s gold-stamped imprint in the bottom left corner of the picture.
    “Do you know who this is?”
    Though the uniform was unfamiliar, there was no mistaking the young man’s dark wide-set eyes and the flash of his brilliant white smile, which was made all the more dazzling in contrast to his coppery skin. I shook my head, slowly, sadly, not knowing quite what to say or how to say it.
    The detective, whose growing impatience may have affected his perceptiveness, misread my silence for ignorance and replaced the photograph on the table and reached for another. Out of respect for the dead—or at least that is what I told myself then—I decided it best to let sleeping dogs lie.
    “That would be Claire and Hilda’s cousin, Margaret, from Detroit,” I said after a moment that stretched to eternity and back again as I directed my eyes toward the snapshot of a slender middle-aged woman in a bright floral dress that Detective Grayson handed me next. My mind, however, remained riveted on the young soldier in the previous photograph. I had often wondered what had become of David Gilbert. I certainly did not believe Claire’s assertion that he had returned to Alabama to live with his grandparents because I believed that there had never been any such Alabama relations. But there had been no opportunity for me to press the issue with her. It had been ten years since I’d last spoken to Claire face-to-face, and our final, long-ago conversation had been disastrous, to say the least.
    “Mr. Honig?”
    “I’m sorry,” I said, shaking my head. I sat down at the