A Drone with a Clipboard

The honey pavilion was hot in the particular way of a tent that had been in the sun since nine. The smell was a fight between fried dough and four hundred jars of honey, and the fried dough was winning on points. June Ashby stood at the end of the candle table with her hands folded over her apron and tried to look like part of the tablecloth.

She had sold six tapers and a beehive-shaped votive to a woman who had asked whether it was edible. Her wildflower honey had taken a third-place ribbon, which was the right size of ribbon. A third place meant you were competent. It did not mean anyone would remember your name at the general store, and that suited June fine. She had been home five years, and in Larkspur Hollow that made her roughly half a local. On a good day she was a little more. Her plan for the rest of the afternoon was to collect the ribbon, load the car, and be on Orchard Road before the tractor pull let out.

Biscuit had other plans, and most of them involved leaving now. He stood against her shins, all forty-nine trembling pounds of him, brindle and white like a cow someone had sketched in a hurry. Every time a goat in the 4-H barn complained, he looked up at her with the reproach of a dog who had once run on a track for money and had never agreed to any of this. He hated the fair. He hated being left at home more.

"Ten minutes," June told him. "Then the car."

Biscuit pressed his long nose into her knee and sighed.

At the judges' table, Gordon Pike was holding court. He was a large, pink, tweedy man who came up from Connecticut every September to judge the honey, and he ran the job like a coronation. Three years in a row June had watched him hold a jar to the backlit rack as if he were checking it for a forged signature. He wore a tweed cap indoors. He wore a clipboard the way other men wore a wristwatch. In June's private taxonomy, Gordon was a drone with a clipboard: large, loud, fed by others, and certain the hive had been built around him.

"Of course I can't go near the hives themselves," he was telling the maple-sugar woman, who had not asked. "Anaphylactic. One sting and I'm in the ground. Never without my pen." He patted the leather satchel slung across his chest. "Never. And I'll tell you, the honey they put out at the Covered Bridge Inn this morning was a crime. A crime. I had to put it on my eggs to get it down." He patted his jacket next, then his trouser pockets, then his chest again, with growing indignation. "Where have I put my readers? Lyle. Lyle, have you seen my readers? The tortoiseshell ones."

"On the chain?" said Lyle Prentice from the steward's desk.

"I never wear the chain. The chain is an insult."

Lyle laughed. He was tearing a slip off his pink carbonless pad with the care of a man defusing something. He was sixty-eight, rangy and weathered, with white cotton steward's gloves and a pencil behind one ear. He had known June since before she had teeth.

"I'll find 'em, Gordon. They'll turn up in a jar of buckwheat, you watch." He tagged a late entry, set it on the table, and caught June's eye down the length of the tent. "June. Your mother once lost her glasses for three days and found them in the smoker. Lit the smoker, too. Said the bees were the most nearsighted they'd ever been." He winked. "Good honey, the wildflower. I'd have given it second."

"You're the steward," June said. "You don't give it anything."

"That," said Lyle, "is the tragedy of my life."

She smiled despite herself. Lyle's stories about her mother came out the way windfalls came off a tree, in no order, bruised and sweet. She had never once asked him to stop.

The microphone shrieked.

Everybody in the tent flinched, and Biscuit flinched hardest. Gordon had leaned into it again. He stood at the front with the ribbon pegboard behind him, and he didn't wait for the feedback to fade.

"Before we close," he said, "I have a duty to this fair."

The tent went quiet, apart from the calliope, which had no sense of occasion. June watched heads turn toward the goldenrod table. Odette Fairbanks stood beside it, straight as a fence post, her silver brooch catching the light. Odette had won the county blue ribbon for goldenrod eleven times. Her entry sat front and center under the blue ribbon she'd been awarded that morning, a one-pound queenline jar labeled Fairbanks #12.

Gordon picked it up. He held it to the backlit rack, and the honey glowed, thin and clear.

"Clear as gin," he said. "I put it on the refractometer twice. This entry has been cut with syrup."

He unpinned the blue ribbon from the pegboard.

It was absurd. That was June's first thought, and her only one. She had watched Odette lecture a 4-H child for ten minutes about a fingerprint on a jar shoulder. Odette alphabetized her extracting tools. She would sooner have cut her own hair with a hive tool than put syrup in her honey, and she would have done the haircut evenly. The idea arrived in June's head whole and ridiculous, like a goat in a church pew.

She laughed.

It was not a polite laugh. It came out of her before she could stop it, a single loud ha that hit the canvas roof and came back down. Half the village heard it, and the other half saw the first half turn around.

June did not take it back. She probably should have. She felt the heat climb up her neck and kept her mouth shut and her chin up, and she didn't look away, because looking away would have meant she'd been wrong to laugh.

Odette's hand had closed over her brooch. Her face had gone white at the edges.

"You find that funny, June Ashby," she said. It wasn't a question. Her voice carried. "You're laughing at a lie. I hope you enjoy it. Your mother would have known better."

She reached for the jar. Gordon drew it back against his tweed as though she'd tried to pick his pocket. "It stays with the fair until the paperwork's done," he said, and the microphone caught it and made it sound like scripture. Odette let her hand fall. She looked at the jar once, the way you'd look at a dog that had bitten you, and then she walked out of the pavilion empty-handed, with the bare pegboard hook swinging behind her.

There was a silence of perhaps a second and a half, which in Larkspur Hollow counted as a long one.

Then Bev Thibodeau, by the kettle-corn end, said to nobody and everybody, "Well, June laughed, did you hear June laugh? Right out loud, I've never heard her laugh in public in five years, and Odette said lie, she said lie, Marjorie, you heard that, and Gordon had the ribbon right in his hand." She already had her phone out, though reception at the fairgrounds was a rumor. She didn't need it. The bulletin was moving down the tables on foot.

At the back of the tent, under the guy rope, stood Trooper Hank Mercer in uniform. He had been there all afternoon for crowd control, which at a county fair mostly meant directing people to the bathrooms. He met June's eye and winced the way he had in second grade when she'd told Mrs. Lavallee her lesson plan was out of date.

June untied her apron. Her ribbon could be mailed.

"Car," she told Biscuit. He did not need telling twice.

The Hollow Root Cider booth sat just outside the pavilion, a plank counter on two barrels with a hand-lettered sign and a steaming kettle. The man behind it was in his early thirties, dark-haired and sunburned across the nose, with sleeves pushed up. She had seen him at the store a few times since spring. Rafe Delgado, the new cider maker who was leasing Lyle's old barn. Bev had already reported on his truck, his radio, and the fact that he said thank you to the coffee.

He held out a paper cup as she passed.

"On the house," he said. "Hot cider. I hear it's what you give people after they laugh at the wrong moment. Or I just made that up. I'm new."

"I didn't laugh at the wrong moment," June said. "I laughed at the wrong man."

"Even better. Then it's a celebration cup." He kept holding it out. He didn't look like he was enjoying her embarrassment, only like he was sorry she'd had to carry it out in public. "It's the Northern Spy blend. I'm told it's mediocre."

"Who told you that?"

"Me. I'm my harshest critic. Also Bev."

She took the cup. Before she could say thank you, Biscuit did something he had never done for a stranger. He crossed the gap to the booth, leaned his whole narrow body against the barn coat hanging off the back of Rafe's stool, and folded down into it with a groan of deep relief. Faded canvas, corduroy collar. One pocket bulged.

"Oh," said Rafe. "Hello. That's my coat."

"Not anymore," June said.

"There's cheese in the left pocket. I should probably disclose that."

"That explains it."

Rafe crouched and let Biscuit lean on his knee as well, carefully, the way you'd approach a hive on a cold day, slow and without assumptions. Biscuit allowed it. June filed that away under things she would think about later and decide meant nothing.

It took her four minutes to get her dog out of the coat. She drove home with the cider cooling in the cup holder and Biscuit sulking in the back seat, his chin on the window ledge. The covered bridge drummed under her tires. She went over the afternoon again and couldn't find the moment she'd stepped into it. Somewhere between the squeal of the microphone and the swing of that empty hook, Odette Fairbanks's fight had become hers.

---

The red headlamp hung on the iron hook by the barn's back door, where it always hung. June looked at it, and then at the window, where the light was coming up grey-gold over the ridge, and left it there. You only wanted red for the bees in the dark. They couldn't see it, so you could open a hive at midnight and they'd go on about their business as if you were weather. At twenty to seven on a September morning there was enough daylight to count frames.

Biscuit stayed in the farmhouse. He never came up to the apiary anyway; he regarded the hives the way he regarded the church bell, as a power that had not yet chosen to destroy him. She left him curled on the porch window seat in a nest of afghan, nose on his paws. He watched her go with his usual opinion that it was a mistake.

The orchard grass was soaked. Her boots were dark to the ankle by the third tree, and the windfalls had gone soft and vinegary underfoot. Frost hadn't come yet, but it was thinking about it. Her breath showed. This was the part of the day June liked best: the hives cold and quiet on their cinderblocks, the colonies clustered inside like a held breath, nothing moving until the sun hit the boxes. Her mother had called it taking attendance. You walked the rows, you put a hand on each lid, and you listened to a low, satisfied hum, like a refrigerator in a happy kitchen.

She heard it before she saw it.

It wasn't the hum. It was a high, thin, furious whine, the sound of bees who had been insulted and intended to discuss it.

June stopped halfway up the slope.

The two rows were wrong. White, sage, sky blue, sage, and then two gaps in the back row where the yellow hives should have been: two squares of pale, flattened grass. Her mother had painted those boxes buttercup yellow the spring before she got sick, because she said a beekeeper ought to have one color that made her laugh.

They were down at the edge of the east path, forty yards off, side by side against the dry-stone wall where the walkers came through. Someone had set them there crookedly on the bare ground.

Their entrances were open. She could see that from where she stood. And the bees were boiling out of them. In the cold, before the sun had touched a single board, they were pouring out of the slots and rising in a dark, agitated cloud. They should have been clustered and sluggish, too cold to bother anyone. They were flying in hard loops, searching the air for the place their home had been.

June's mouth went dry.

At the foot of the wall, in the goldenrod, there was a tweed cap. Beside it, face down in the asters, lay a clipboard.

She did not go closer. Every beekeeping habit she had stopped her feet before she told them to, and under the habits was something colder that she didn't want to name. She stood very still among her mother's crooked trees and made herself look only at what she could see from where she was. Cap. Clipboard. Yellow boxes. Bees.

Then the old russet beside the wall, because she always looked at it. Her mother's tree, a heirloom nobody could name the variety of. It was down to three good limbs this year, the rest grey and lichened. On those last good limbs, at the level of her shoulder, there were cuts. They were small and clean and pale against the bark, made with a sharp blade, and new.

June backed down the slope twenty paces, to the corner of the barn where her phone sometimes got one bar if she held it over her head like an offering. She called Hank.

"It's me," she said. "Gordon Pike is at my wall. I think he's dead. I haven't gone near him. Somebody moved my hives."

There was a pause on the line.

"Stay back," said Hank. "Don't touch anything. Ten minutes."

It was twelve. She spent them sitting on the barn's bottom step with her hands between her knees, listing what she knew in a low voice, because saying it was better than thinking about the cap. "Two hives. Moved. Entrances open. Bees flying before sunup. The russet's been cut. The cap is his. The clipboard is his." Then she said it again, in the same order, until the cruiser came up Orchard Road with its lights on and no siren.

Hank Mercer got out with his hat already on. He looked at her, then up the hill at the cloud over the yellow boxes, and stayed where he was by the car door for a moment longer than he needed to.

"You all right," he said.

"No."

"Okay." He nodded, as if that were the right answer. "Wait here."

He went up the orchard on the far side, by the treeline, keeping a good thirty feet of open grass between himself and the nearest hive. June had known Hank since second grade, when he'd climbed out a classroom window to escape a single wasp. He had told everyone afterward that he'd been checking the gutter. He was not afraid of bees. He would tell you so at length, from a considerable distance.

More vehicles came. An ambulance, then a grey van, then a second cruiser. June sat on the step and didn't watch, except once, when she looked up despite herself and saw people from away moving carefully at the far edge of the orchard. A stretcher went down the fire road behind the trees, covered, small at that distance. She looked down at her boots after that.

The bees were still roaring when Hank came back. He took his hat off and turned it in his hands.

"He came up the east path," he said. "Early walk. Looks like he got too close to the boxes. Man with an allergy like that." He shook his head. "Car's parked down on the fire road. Rental."

"He didn't wander," June said. "Hank. Look at them."

"I looked at them."

"From the treeline. You need to look at them properly. Those are my yellow hives. They live in the back row. They've lived in the back row for six years. Somebody moved them in the night and put them on the path, and they left the entrances open. You don't do that. If you're moving a hive, you close it up first, when they're all home. You screen the door. Otherwise you get that." She pointed. "They're not supposed to be flying. It's forty-four degrees. They're supposed to be in a ball in the middle of the box, being sensible."

Hank looked uphill and then back at her. His jaw did the thing it did when he was being patient against his will.

"Maybe they're agitated because a man fell against them."

"Then explain how the hives got there."

"Kids. Somebody's idea of a joke after yesterday." He didn't look at her when he said it, which was how she knew he'd heard about the laugh. Of course he had. He'd been standing under the guy rope. "June. People moving boxes isn't a crime I can charge. A man with a known allergy walking past beehives in the dark is, I'm sorry, a sad accident."

"He carried a pen," June said. "An EpiPen. He told everyone. He told the maple-sugar lady yesterday. Never without it."

Hank was quiet for a second. "We didn't find one. Not on him. Not in the car." He said it plainly, the way he'd report a flat tire. "Probably left it in the motel."

"He patted his bag for it. Right in front of me."

"People pat things."

She looked at him. He looked at the hives.

"Did he call anybody?" she asked. "Last night. After the fair. He was angry about something. Not just Odette. He was going on about breakfast honey at the inn. Did he complain to anyone, call anyone?"

Hank rubbed the back of his neck with his free hand. He had done that since they were eight, whenever Mrs. Lavallee asked who'd let the gerbil out.

"Medical examiner'll have a look," he said. "You'll want to get somebody to move those boxes back. Not you alone. Get help." He put his hat on. "And you might want to call Odette before Bev does. Or after. Bev already has."

"That isn't an answer."

"It's all the answer I've got this morning." He opened the cruiser door. "Go home, Ashby."

"I am home," June said.

He paused with one foot in the car, looked at the barn, the farmhouse, Biscuit's long anxious face in the porch window, and the orchard going gold as the sun finally came over the ridge. Something moved behind his eyes and was put away.

"Then stay there," he said, and drove off.

June stood in the dooryard with her arms folded until the dust settled on Orchard Road. Up the hill the yellow hives roared on, telling her as clearly as they could that something had been done to them in the dark. Hank had gone without hearing it. She turned toward the barn.

---

She fed Biscuit first, because whatever else was true, it was breakfast. He ate with his ears flat, watching the window, and when she tried to leave he leaned against the kitchen door with his full weight in his most persuasive argument. She sat on the floor with him for a minute and spoke in the slow, flat voice she used for him and for frightened swarms.

"It's all right. Nobody's going near the bees. You're going to stay inside and be magnificent. I'll be across the yard."

He sighed through his nose and let her go.

The barn smelled the way it always had, of warm wax, old wood, and the sweetness worked down into the floorboards over thirty years until it was part of the grain. The front bay was dim. The chalkboard still said Wildflower — $14 in her mother's capitals, which June had traced over every season since rather than rewrite. The candles stood in their rows. The honor box was where she'd left it, with a five-dollar bill and an IOU from somebody named Dot.

She went through to the honey house, took her key ring from her coat pocket, and turned the deadbolt.

It clicked. It was a heavy, old-fashioned double click that June had heard every working day for five years, and for her mother's thirty before that, and she had never once really listened to it. She heard it now. Click, click. Locked, then not.

She'd locked it last night. She remembered doing it: Biscuit already halfway to the farmhouse, her hands smelling of cider, her face still hot from the tent.

Inside, the whitewashed room was cool and full of a soft square of light from the east window. The stainless extractor stood in its corner. The uncapping tank was half-full of the pale wax she'd scraped off Thursday, almost white, the way new comb should be. The settling buckets ticked slowly as honey ran down their sides. June went to the work she had planned, because she needed something with an order to it. There was a slow drip at the gate valve of the second bucket that had bothered her all week, and a stack of jars that needed lot numbers.

She pulled open the bench drawer for a labeling pen. It stuck, as it always stuck, halfway out on its swollen runner. A glossy envelope sat on top of the clutter, thick cream paper with an embossed letterhead that caught the light. She put her flat hand on it and pushed it to the back, under the pad of old invoices and a roll of masking tape, without looking at it. She'd had practice. She found the pen and shut the drawer with her hip.

Then she turned to the bench and saw the glasses.

They lay at the near end of the long maple bench, just inside the patch of sunlight, folded neatly. Tortoiseshell half-moons. A beaded chain trailed from the earpieces in a little loose coil, as if someone had set them down with care. They were reading glasses for a man who never wore the chain because the chain was an insult.

June didn't touch them.

She stood with the labeling pen in her hand while the honey went on ticking into the bucket. It was the first thing she noticed, and it seemed indecent: the room went on being its ordinary self around them. Then she noticed the floor.

There were crumbs below the bench, near the leg, three or four small flakes and a smear where something had been stepped on and dragged. Wax cappings. But they were dark, a deep brown like old furniture, like the comb you find in a forty-year-old hive somebody's grandfather kept behind a shed, where generation after generation of brood has darkened the cells. June didn't run comb like that. She'd never run comb like that. Every frame in every super she owned was fresh foundation, pale as candle stubs. Her mother had been fierce about it and June was fiercer. The tank across the room was proof: a heap of wax so light it was nearly white.

These crumbs had not come off any frame of hers. They had come in on somebody.

"All right," June said aloud to the room. Her voice came out very calm. "All right."

She went to the shelf by the door, where her mother had always kept a box of freezer bags for samples. She took one, turned it inside out over her hand the way you'd pick up something a dog left on a neighbor's lawn, lifted the glasses by the chain, and turned the bag right side out around them. She sealed it. The tortoiseshell looked cheap and absurd through the plastic. She scooped two of the dark crumbs into a second bag with the edge of a jar label and sealed that too.

Then she stood with both bags and made herself think in order.

The honey house had been locked. The barn had been locked. Nobody had broken anything. Gordon Pike had lost these glasses at the fair yesterday afternoon in front of forty people, and this morning he was gone, and his glasses were on her bench in a locked room.

Hank had driven off twenty minutes ago telling her to stay home. If she walked across the dooryard and called him now, he would come back up Orchard Road, and he would look at the glasses, and then at her. He would think about the laugh, and Odette's voice saying lie, and Bev's bulletins already making their way down the county. And he'd find that the only person with a key to this room was the woman who'd been heard laughing at the dead man's last public pronouncement.

He wouldn't believe it. Probably. But he'd have to write it down.

One day, she decided. One day to find out what she was standing in before anyone else told her. She knew, even as she decided it, that her mother would have called it pigheaded. Her mother had been right about most things.

June went out through the shop to the back door. The cast-iron key hook hung beside it, as it always had. Her mother's brass key hung from the second prong, next to the red headlamp, and beside it the old brass spares that had hung there as long as June could remember, worn smooth and dull, the kind of keys a house collects the way a pocket collects lint.

She held up her own ring and counted out loud, the way she counted frames.

"Mine." She touched the hook. "Hers." She ran a finger along the rest, and they swung and settled. "The spares. Same as ever."

All accounted for. None of them had moved. The dust on the prong was undisturbed, a thin grey line she'd been meaning to wipe for a year.

She did not know how many more there were, out in the world. Her mother had kept bees in this barn for thirty years and trusted half the Hollow with the kind of easy carelessness June had never had. June had never asked who else might have a key. It had never occurred to her that she might need a list, and now there was nobody left to ask who would know it by heart.

Somewhere in this village was a person her mother had trusted with a key to this door, and that person had used it last night to set a dead man's glasses on her bench.