Deadout (3 page)

“It didn't work for Cheryl.”

“Yeah, but you're not Cheryl.”

“Doyle, you just … you just don't understand.” And then she started crying for real.

Part of me was annoyed at her, but seeing her like this was breaking my heart, too. I moved my chair next to hers, put my arm around her, and kissed her head. She leaned into me for a moment, then pulled back.

She turned to me and said, “I need a break from this city. I hate it.”

Now, I hate this city, too, but I also love it. “Come on,” I said softly. “You don't mean that.”

She gave me a look that said yes, she did.

We were quiet after that. Finally, halfway through dinner, Nola said, “I spoke to Moose today,” as if she had just remembered it. Moose was a friend of Nola's, and mine, too. We were driving up to Martha's Vineyard to visit him. It seemed crazy to me, spending most of a night driving up and another day driving back, for a little more than a day in between, but I had offered to do the driving and maybe getting away from the city would do us both some good.

“He's really looking forward to seeing us,” she said, “but he says he's really busy with work. They're having trouble with the bees up there, so he might not be as available as he had hoped.”

“What kind of trouble?”

She didn't know exactly, but I wasn't listening anyway, preoccupied with my own troubles at work. And at home.

“Don't you think?” Nola asked, bringing me back to the moment.

“Absolutely,” I said, refilling her glass from the wine bottle.

“I shouldn't,” she said, raising a hand next to her glass. I poured for another second before stopping.

“It's okay,” I told her. “I'm driving.”

Her brow furrowed. “Are you sure you want to drive the whole way?”

“Absolutely.” I don't mind driving at night, but I don't like riding shotgun, and I wasn't looking forward to six hours of forced conversation. I poured her a little more wine.

*   *   *

I took a quick nap after dinner and we left around midnight so we'd be there for the first ferry of the day. Nola fell asleep as soon as we left, and I made good time. Would have been better in my own car, I thought sadly, but it was gone forever, demolished back in Dunston. I was driving a brand-new Chevy Impala on loan from a grateful nation until it could figure out how to replace the vastly superior Nissan Z that had been destroyed in its defense. I felt a wave of sadness thinking about the car, and a wave of something like vertigo as I tried not to think about how it had been destroyed.

Nola woke up when we got to the parking lot for the shuttle bus to the ferry.

“Are we there?” she asked, squinty-eyed and groggy. I don't think she quite knew which “there” she meant, but I said yes anyway.

I took our luggage out of the trunk, and as I was putting my Glock in the gun safe built into the trunk, she appeared at my side. She had asked me earlier not to bring it, saying it was like bringing work on vacation. Work that shoots bullets. I was ambivalent on the issue, but she smiled when I did it, so that was something.

The morning was gray and cold, with a stiff breeze. On the ferry, the breeze was even stronger. We sat inside, Nola leaning her head against my shoulder and drifting back into a semi-sleep as we watched the mainland receding. I felt somehow liberated, as if I had escaped the continent where all my troubles lay. I watched it slowly shrink, until the island in front of me was bigger than the continent behind me. Forty minutes later, the ferry shuddered as its engines thrust into reverse, and minutes after that, the entire vessel gently rocked as it came to rest against the dock.

 

4

Moose was waiting for us at the end of the gangway. I didn't see him at first, hidden as he was behind a woman and her children there to meet their dad. Moose stood up on his toes, and his face split wide with a smile that should have hurt so early in the morning.

Nola let out a squeal that sounded as perky as Moose looked, and she ran the last bit, wrapping him in a hug and swinging him around with a level of energy that made me think I should have gotten more sleep.

When she put him down, he turned to me. I put out my hand but he came past it for a hug, a quick squeeze and a pat on the shoulder. He stepped back and winced up at my face.

“You look tired,” he said. Then he turned to Nola. “How was the trip?”

She gave an awkward shrug and looked at me. Moose followed her gaze.

I put my arm around her shoulder and pulled her in. “She took a shortcut through la-la land.”

“Crafty,” he said, giving her a sly wink. “So it was the red eye for the big guy, huh? You want coffee or sleep?”

Hotel check-in wasn't for a few hours yet, so sleep wasn't an option. We stopped in Oak Bluffs for coffee, a place called Mocha Mott's, then Moose took us on a quick tour of the island. Nola had known Moose longer than I had, so I sprawled across his pickup truck's narrow backseat.

Starting in Oak Bluffs, Moose pointed out the Flying Horses carousel, then Back Door Donuts, which apparently sells the best apple fritters in the world every night from the back door of a bakery.

Next we drove around the Campgrounds, an almost cloyingly cute community of miniature Victorian homes, many done up with ornate gingerbread wood trim and painted in vivid pastels. In the center of it was a big, open-air church with a cross on the top. At one point, we drove past a garish pink confection with a big tulip flag, but the effect was ruined by a massive brown puddle in the front lawn. As we got closer, we could tell from the smell that it was what it looked like.

Moose hit the power windows a moment too late, and the odor of it filled the truck.

“Septic systems,” he said. “Something goes wrong, and it becomes a poop swamp.” He sped up, and a few turns later we were driving along the ocean.

The island was larger than I had expected, and stunningly beautiful, speckled with ponds and inlets providing water views seemingly every few hundred yards. Inland, the rolling landscape was crisscrossed with walls made from smooth, round fieldstones.

Moose kept up a running monologue on the island's topography, geology, and agriculture that counteracted the effects of the caffeine. Nola peppered him with questions about what crops they were growing, and how: low-spray, no-spray, no-till, Integrated Pest Management, all the agricultural esoterica that had become vaguely familiar since I met Nola.

Once again the car filled with a noxious odor, but before I could ask, Moose said, “Skunks. Island's full of them. Some knucklehead brought them over in the fifties, and they just went nuts, like the rabbits in Australia, no natural predator.”

Moose was in the middle of a long stretch about something called Island Grown and the local agricultural and beekeeping groups when he snorted and said, “Speaking of exotic invasives.”

On our left was a huge, brightly colored sign with incongruous palm trees and large gold script that said, “Johnny Blue's Berry Farm,” and under it, “Home of Johnny Blue's Berry Jamz.”

“What is that?” Nola asked with obvious distaste. I don't usually have strong opinions about signs, but it did seem out of place.

Moose shook his head. “You know Johnny Blue?” He named some reality talent show I'd never heard of.

“Well, I wouldn't know him either if he wasn't such a big story around here,” Moose rushed to explain. “He's awful—I think he was like third runner-up or something—but he had a song that was big last summer, catchy in a fast-food-commercial kind of way. As far as I can tell, his entire interest in farming stems from the fact that his last name is Blue, and he thought Johnny Blue's Berry Farm would be a hoot. He's promoting some kind of berry-flavored snacks called Blueberry Jamz. Apparently, you can make a lot of money from one awful song, because it's a pretty big operation.”

The sign loomed in front of the trees. Someone had nailed it with an egg.

Down the road was another farm, Squibnocket Biodynamic. Nola and Moose launched into a detailed discussion of the merits of biodynamic farming. I sat in the back, snickering at the name.

I was drifting off to sleep when Moose said something about how the situation with the bees had gotten really scary. I knew he had taken a job with a group called BeeWatch after Nola lost her farm. They sent him to Martha's Vineyard, which was so far pretty nice. I had no idea what he was actually doing, but I decided that if the whole police thing went down the tubes the way it was constantly threatening to, I could get a gig watching bees.

“What's scary?” I asked.

Moose turned around, surprised, like maybe he thought I'd fallen asleep. “The bees disappearing.”

“Doesn't sound so scary,” I said. I like honey, as far as it goes, but my relations with bees have generally involved swatting and flailing, the occasional smacking and squashing, and every now and then wincing and swelling.

Nola rolled her eyes. “It is if you're a farmer. Bees pollinate crops. No bees, no food. It's already affecting production.”

“Well, yeah, that's the worst part,” Moose said, “but the way the bees are disappearing is even creepier.”

I sat forward. “What do you mean?”

“Well, bees have been in trouble for a while. There's mites that have been killing them for years, but more recently there's colony collapse disorder, or CCD. With CCD, when people talk about bees disappearing, they're not just dying, they're literally disappearing. They fly out of their hive like they do every morning, but then one day they just don't come back.”

“Where do they go?”

“No one knows. First time it happened this big-time beekeeper has all these tractor trailers filled with bees. It's a big business. They drive around the country, down south for pecan season and peach season, come up north for blueberries and cranberries. Anyway, between seasons this guy parks his bees in this huge field in Florida. So there's all these trailers parked there, sixteen million bees. One day his workers come out to check on the bees, like they do every day, and three quarters of them are gone. Millions of bees. The hives are intact, but the bees are gone. And no one ever finds them, either. Millions of bees, vanished without a trace. And now it's happening everywhere. In England, they call it Mary Celeste Syndrome, after the famous ghost ship.”

I actually felt a chill. “That is creepy. So what's causing it?”

“We don't know. Maybe pollen from the genetically modified crops, maybe parasites like mites, some people think it may have to do with cell-phone towers, or those big industrial-scaled bee pollinating operations. Pesticides are almost certainly involved. Most scientists think it's a combination of factors. The whole reason BeeWatch is here on the Vineyard is because the island has been untouched by CCD. We're part of an effort to find out why.”

“Because they rely on their native pollinators,” Nola cut in, “instead of bringing in trucks of bees from Georgia or Tennessee.”

“Right,” Moose said, his voice flat. Then he turned to look at her. “Only now we're starting to see the same thing on the island.”

Nola whipped her head around. “Are you serious?”

He shrugged. “There's something going on. We have these monitoring stations set up—part of what we've been doing is a bee census. We were seeing plenty of bees, just like normal. Then, in the last two weeks, it's dropping off big time, especially up island, Aquinnah and Chilmark. Still early in the season, but there's definitely something going on.”

As he said it, his phone issued the opening chord from “A Hard Day's Night.”

“Speaking of which,” he said, thumbing the phone and raising it to his ear. “Hey, Benjy. What's up?”

He listened for a second, his shoulders slumping as he did. “Right,” he said. “Okay, I'll meet you over there.” He put down his phone and turned to look at each of us. “I won't be able to take you to see the cliffs at Gay Head. It's a shame, they're really something.”

“Trouble?” Nola asked.

He pulled over and started the first point of what would eventually be a nine-point U-turn. “Looks like we found our first deadout.”

 

5

I had only seen Moose drive a handful of times, but this was by far the most urgency he had shown, exceeding the posted speed limit by numbers approaching double digits. I wondered if we were in the midst of some sort of bee emergency.

We made a left into a gap in one of the ubiquitous stone walls and drove down a dirt road between two fields. After a hundred yards the road widened and we parked alongside a handful of cars and trucks, including one immaculately restored fifties-era custard-colored Chevy pickup.

Off to the side was a row of nondescript wooden boxes up on cinder blocks. One of them was open, surrounded by a small group of people, all wearing the same expression of sad concern, tinged with anger.

“These are my friends Nola and Doyle,” Moose announced quietly as we walked up. The air smelled of honey and something else.

To our far left was a heavyset guy with a bushy beard, an open face, and messed-up hair. He held up his arm, and as Moose stepped up, the arm came down and gave Moose's shoulder a reassuring shake.

Next to him was an older guy, wiry and small with graying hair. His eyes looked red, like he'd been crying.

The guy next to him was young, lean, and unlikably handsome. He eyed us suspiciously at first. Then his eyes hit Nola, and suspicion was replaced with something else as his eyebrows raised about a millimeter. I knew that look. I'd made that look. I'd probably made it the first time I met Nola. I didn't like the guy anyway, but that look made me like him even less.

Next to him was a gorgeous brunette in what looked like a beekeeping suit, except that it fit her surprisingly well. She had the hood tucked under her arm. I felt my eyebrows notch up a millimeter, but I don't think anybody noticed.