Deadout (5 page)

She laughed and nodded.

I texted Moose back.

“How do you know Moose?” she asked.

I didn't say he was friends with my girlfriend, and I didn't say we bonded while thwarting a crazy evil plot involving genetically modified crops and a scheme to make billions in pharmaceuticals. “He used to work for my parents. He took care of their garden, before they died last summer.”

“I'm sorry,” she said. “He seems like a nice young man.”

“He is. He's a good kid.”

There was a pause in the conversation, and I was looking at her and she was looking at me and I was thinking, what am I doing here?

Then the door opened and Moose walked in, and I could see he was thinking the exact same thing.

“Doyle!” he said, looking at her and making my name sound like an accusation.

Annalisa and I shared a little smile before I turned in my seat to face him. “Hey, Moose. How's it going?”

“Okay.” He looked back and forth between Annalisa and me about six times. “I was wondering if you could lend me a hand with something.”

“Uh, sure. With what?”

“With the bee lining. We're shorthanded.”

“Bee lining?” I said. “I'm not really crazy about bees.” Annalisa raised an eyebrow. “Um, okay. Sure. Right now?”

He nodded and snuck another look at Annalisa. She smiled at him.

“All right,” I said, grabbing my coffee and my newspaper. “Well, it was very nice running into you.”

“You, too,” she replied with a smile. “Be careful with the bees. But don't worry, they're harmless.”

 

7

“So what was that about?” Moose said as soon as we got outside.

“What do you mean?”

“Her. Why were you talking to her?”

“What?” I laughed. “Nola was gone when I woke up, so I went in for a cup of coffee. I recognized Annalisa from this morning. Wait a second, where is Nola? I thought she was with you.”

“She was,” he said, looking down at his car keys.

“Where is she now?”

“She's at one of the farms, learning some of the newer techniques.”

Newer techniques, I thought, as we got into his car, consciously fighting the urge to stiffen my entire body. “Teddy what's-his-name?”

“Teddy Renfrew,” he said nonchalantly. “Yeah, why?”

“No reason.” It wasn't that I didn't trust Nola, I just really didn't like Teddy what's-his-name.

“So, I'm not really crazy about bees,” I told him.

He gave me a half smile, deciding whether or not to mess with me about it. My less than half smile convinced him not to.

“They're okay,” he said. “You just need to stay cool, and they'll stay cool, right? You don't swat at them, don't make loud noises, don't mess with their hive, and they'll be cool.” He let out a sad laugh. “Besides, the way things are going, we might not even see any.”

I looked out the window as we drove. “So where are we going?”

“I need to check the bee-lining stations so we can analyze the data.”

“What are the bee-lining stations?”

“You know what a ‘beeline' is?”

“A straight line.”

“Exactly. When bees are out getting nectar from flowers, they zigzag all over the place. But once they're full, once they can't take any more, they fly straight back to their hive. Wherever they are, they know exactly where the hive is. They make a ‘beeline' for the hive. That's where the phrase comes from. When you're bee lining, you set up bait stations filled with sugar water. The bees find it, they fill up and fly straight back to the hive. You set up three bait stations and plot the beelines on a map, the point where they intersect is where the hive is.”

“Huh. That's actually pretty cool.”

“It can be pretty tedious. Up until last year, you'd have to lie there for hours, watching and then trying to track the directions the bees were flying in.”

“So what happened last year?”

He looked at me with a smug smile as we slowly turned down a bumpy driveway. “Benjy got a grant,” he said, raising his voice over the sound of his tires grinding the dirt and gravel. “And BeeWatch went hi-tech.”

Forty yards down the driveway, a generator was quietly humming. We pulled up next to it, and Moose pressed a switch on the generator, sending it quiet. A cord ran from the generator to a small cluster of hi-tech equipment another twenty yards away. There was a cluster of metal cases, a couple of feet on each side. At the center was a pair of short tripods, each topped by a sleek black box about six inches high, a foot and a half wide, and three feet long. A red plastic bucket was hanging under one of them.

“That's the feeding station at the bottom,” Moose said as we walked up. I looked around for bees, but didn't see any. “The things on the tripods are LIDAR units, like radar, only using lasers. A motion detector kicks them on if anything bee-sized comes into the area. The lasers sweep the area, take a few three-dimensional images, and then calculate the trajectory of the bee through space. Add some super-sensitive GPS. Bingo: instant beeline.

“Are bees the only things that set it off?”

“Anything close to a honeybee will set it off, but we know the wing-beat signature of a honeybee as opposed to a beetle or a mosquito. So we filter for that. The mapping software even plots the locations for us.”

He walked up to the station and disconnected a small gray box and replaced it with the one under his arm, which seemed to be identical. “Pretty simple, right?”

“So … what do you need me for?”

“These units are pretty heavy, and sometimes we have to move them. It's a lot easier with two people.” He shrugged, and his face colored a bit. “Plus, I figured we could hang out.”

It seemed like he had something else on his mind, and once we got back in the car, he said, “So, how are things going with you and Nola? You guys doing okay?”

“Why do you ask?”

“Just a vibe. Is something up?”

I sighed. “Relationships are tricky. Living together is tricky. Apparently living with a cop is tricky.”

“Nola told me about that Jarrett guy. She was a little freaked out by it.”

“I was a little freaked out myself. It's not like that kind of thing happens all the time, but it happens. I know she doesn't like it, but that's the way it is. It's like, she's not a vegetarian, but she doesn't like to think of where meat comes from. And I get that, I'm the same way. Sometimes law and order isn't pretty. She's been seeing a little more of that side of things since moving in with me. With Simeon Jarrett, she got to look at it right up close.”

“How about you? How are you doing?”

I turned to look at him, and he looked back, holding my gaze. Moose and I had been through some stuff in the short time we'd known each other, but it was still a short time.

“I'm getting there,” I told him. “Sometimes it's easier than others.”

“Still having nightmares?”

“I'm not ‘having nightmares.' Did Nola tell you that? I had a couple of nightmares. What, you haven't?”

He looked away. “A few. But I think you saw a few more things than I did.”

I wanted to remind him that I was kind of a badass and he was kind of not, but he had a point.

*   *   *

At the next stop, we had to move the whole station, which was a bit of a production. Moose asked if I could move it myself, because if I could then he could monitor the GPS and that way we could do it more precisely.

I said sure, because that's what you say when your little friend asks if you are strong enough to do something. But I didn't realize until too late that meant moving the whole tripod, with the LIDAR unit on the top, all the cables, et cetera, and the feeding station hanging from the bottom.

I wrapped my arms around the whole thing and lifted, inching forward and to the right according to Moose's directions. We were about ten seconds into it and the unit was starting to get heavy when two bees emerged from the top of the feeding station. I guess they weren't finished, because they did not fly straight back to their hive. Instead, they flew straight up at me, one landing on my shirt and the other one getting close enough to my ear that it sounded like a goddamned buzz saw.

I did not freak out, or at least not totally, but I wanted to, having bees on me and not being able to do anything about it. I planted the whole unit right where it was, and I backed the hell away from it.

“Nope, not yet,” Moose said, oblivious as I brushed at my shirt and my hair. The bee near my head must have flown away, but the one on my shirt tumbled onto the ground in a little ball.

“Actually, that's close enough,” Moose said, then he looked up at me. “Are you okay?”

I nodded. “Cramp.”

He nodded back. “Okay, well, why don't you relax while I reattach the power supply.”

I nodded, watching as the bee on the ground got its legs under it, then took a few steps and flew off. My stomach felt squirrelly from the little surge of adrenaline and I leaned against the truck. It was a kind of unreasoned, little-kid fear that I hadn't felt since I was eight years old. It reminded me of then, of being so afraid of bees that I used to wish I was allergic so I'd have an excuse for the terror bees provoked in me.

That summer, I had decided I wasn't going to be scared of bees anymore. I went out of my way to confront them, stomping on them and swatting them, proving I wasn't afraid. By the time school started, I tried killing a few with my bare hands. I got stung a couple of times, and it hurt, but it wasn't the end of the world. As the nights got cooler, I realized the bees would soon be gone, but I felt like I hadn't quite made my point.

On a warm Saturday afternoon that October, I caught a bee in a jar and put it in the freezer, just long enough to knock it out. I tied a piece of thread around its middle and the other end around a stick. I guess I thought I was taming it or something. Then the bee woke up and started flying in circles. I sat there, mesmerized, watching it go round and round. At first I thought I was really something. I had tamed this thing, dominated it, made it more scared of me than I was of it. And each time it came toward me, a blur of black and yellow, I felt like it was looking at me, afraid and wondering why I had done this, why I had been killing bees all summer long. Like it knew who I was and what I'd been doing.

I ran inside to get the scissors, but by the time I got back the bee was faltering, flying a few feet and then landing, and resting. I waited until it landed and snipped the thread as close to the bee as I dared.

I could remember how hot my face felt as I started to cry, watching it flying away, trailing the thread, bobbing and swaying, under the weight of it, exhausted. It disappeared over some bushes, but I knew it never got home.

“You okay?” Moose asked when he came back to the truck.

I nodded. He looked concerned. “How about you?”

“Have you seen any bees?” he asked.

I looked right at him. “A couple.”

“Good,” he said. “I haven't seen any since Pete's place this morning.”

*   *   *

“So how serious is it?” I asked as we drove off. “The whole bee situation.”

“We'll know more once we get this data analyzed. People are noticing though. They sent a news crew out to interview Benjy today.” Moose smiled when he said it, like, as troubled as he was by the big picture, it was still kind of cool to get on TV. “It's great that people are starting to pay attention, but scary that the problem has gotten bad enough that they would, you know?”

By the time we were done, there was plenty of shade and the tops of the trees were a fiery orange. I knew the island wasn't small, almost ten miles wide and more than twenty miles long, but I was still surprised by how much of it there seemed to be.

We drove past Edgartown on the way back, the uniform white houses and black shutters a contrast to the colorful jumble of Oak Bluffs. A thin ribbon of road took us north, the ocean on our right and salt ponds sparkling in the late-afternoon sun to our left. The air still had a chill, but the warmth of the sun held a reminder that summer was coming.

Moose got a text while we were driving back. “Dinner tonight,” he said, his eyes shifting back and forth between his screen and the road. “A bunch of folks are meeting up at Offshore Alehouse. You up for it? You'll love the Alehouse.”

“Sounds good to me,” I said as we swung into Oak Bluffs. “I'll check with Nola.”

It seemed strange that I'd barely spoken to her since we arrived, but when Moose pulled in across from the hotel, she was standing on the big front porch, smiling and waving. With the sunlight behind her she seemed to be glowing, and I pictured her back on her farm, in Dunston, in the late-summer sun, looking beautiful and smiling at me. I felt a warm rush at the sight of her, and a tiny, inexplicable pang of sadness.

Moose parked next to the harbor, and as we crossed the road, Nola came down the steps. When she stepped up next to me and slid her arm around my waist, I realized how much I'd been missing her.

“You boys been out playing with bees?” she asked, stepping up to give me a kiss.

“Yeah, Doyle helped me with the monitoring stations while you were out there playing in the dirt. How was it anyway?”

“It's an amazing place. Teddy's got quite an operation.”

I fought the urge to stiffen. “You were at Teddy's the whole time?”

“Yes, I had no idea the place was so big. It's impressive.”

“Totally is,” Moose conceded.

I kept my cool and was glad I did as Nola slid her hand up to the back of my neck and worked her fingers up into my hair.

“So did you guys talk about tonight?” she asked. “Are we on?”

“Yeah, Benjy sent me a text,” Moose replied. “Sounds good.”