Excerpt: When the Bees Have Chosen

Reaching The Willows after a run-in with Dupree was like diving into a cool lake on a humid day. The cottage was old but in impeccable repair, the enormous garden spanning from door to road creating a profusion of sights and scents. And, of course, the Liebowitz sisters, older than the house but in better repair, flittering around as delicately as a pair of luna moths. Judith came to the door, peering out, as the steambike putt-putted to a stop just to the side of the drive. When she recognized them, her lightly wrinkled face broke into delighted grin, and she turned back into the dim recesses of the house, no doubt calling for Esther.

Saffronia extricated herself gingerly from the sidecar and pulled her bag from the floor, checking to make sure that its contents had survived the wild ride intact. She hurried along the walk to catch up with Wagner, who was halfway to the house and already caught in one of Judith Liebowitz's spine-cracking hugs. She stood back and watched, cheered as always by the sight of this rotund man being crushed in the arms of a woman a third his size and twice his age. Of course, it didn't do to mock him too terribly: her turn was coming next.

Judith released Wagner and made a great show of peering around his bulk. “Saffronia back there somewhere?” she asked. “Or did you sit on her by mistake?”

“I'm right here, Miss Judith.” Saffronia still laughed every time at the old joke. Wagner turned red at it – just like he did every time.

“Then come here and give me a hug, child.”

Now Saffronia was caught in the same relentless grip. Unlike Wagner, though, she knew how to bend with it, sparing her ribs the worst of the damage. She wrapped her arms around Judith and hugged back. She loved Wagner, and even Millie in her way, but no one hugged better than Judith.

Esther hovered on the porch, hanging as always behind her more ebullient elder sister. Saffronia's mind flashed briefly on a hundred other times they'd stood in exactly this tableau, and then before, before Wagner, when it had just been the three women. Strange, how life's patterns settled onto you, no matter how much you thought you were shaking yourself up. “Afternoon, Miss Esther,” she called, inclining her head deferentially.

“Good afternoon, Saffronia.”

In Esther's face and voice, Saffronia saw and heard what Judith had worked much harder to conceal: a sadness and loss, a tinge of fear. She looked around. “Miss Judith, Wagner says you've suffered the same loss here as Hailey and Gibbs, but your garden looks as amazing as ever.”

“Oh no, dear,” Judith said, and now the loss crept into her voice, as well. “All our loss was in the back.”

“Dear God,” Saffronia whispered, her mind racing ahead of Judith's words. “Is...is everything gone from the back.”

“Well, we haven't looked for everything yet,” Judith hedged.

“Judith.” She raised a hand to cover her mouth.

“It's all gone, Judith,” Esther called. “Come, Saffronia. You should see.”

And that, all in that one exchange, was the essence of the Liebowitz sisters. Judith was outgoing and full of bravado, but when calamity struck, it was quiet, reserved Esther who stepped forward and did the unpleasant tasks that could not be avoided.

With her heart in her throat, Saffronia followed Esther and Judith around the side of the cottage. She paused as she always did to touch the bark of one of the cottage's namesake willows for luck, but she had the suspicion that they had moved far beyond the kind of luck the tree could provide. If the moonflower was truly gone, they were beyond luck of any kind.

Saffronia hadn't seen the other fields. Wagner had been at Gibbs's place a few days after the theft (was that the word she wanted? What manner of thief could make off with an entire field of crops, leaving the land looking as though it had never been cultivated?); he had tried afterward to describe it to her and Millie but had eventually surrendered in disgust, swearing that no words existed that could adequately convey the devastation. She suspected she was going to regret her first glimpse of the thefts coming at this home, almost as dear to her as her own, but she needed to see. She had to know what she was up against.

What she was up against was almost unbelievable. Her mind refused to wrap around it. While The Willows' front garden was almost entirely given over to flowers other decorative growth, the rear garden had been exclusively devoted to food crops. Three Sisters, potatoes, onions, tomatoes, herbs of all imaginable category – if it could grow in Minnesota, the Liebowitz sisters made it flourish. Esther said the acidity of the soil was perfect for vegetable cultivation. Judith, in her cheekiest moments, liked to claim with a wink at Wagner that they owed their success to the bodies of impertinent men buried beneath the soil.

But nothing flourished here now. Not a scrap remained. No leaf detritus above the ground, no spidery roots peeking up from below it. In her life, Saffronia had seen scores, perhaps even hundreds, of fields after harvest. She knew what they looked like, how little a scrupulous farmer left behind. This was something different entirely. Apart from the neatly furrowed rows that waved across the field, there was absolutely no inclination that anything had ever grown here. A few lone crows hopped around, beady eyes fixed on the ground, cawing in bewilderment; what had become of one of their best food sources in the neighborhood?

Slowly and with great reluctance, Saffronia turned one hundred and eighty degrees. The terror of what she would discover behind her was almost too terrible to bear.

Well. Here was something curious. The apple trees the sisters had planted as a wind break between the house and the field still stood, but they had been stripped of every last apple. And beneath them-- “Oh, no,” Saffronia moaned. Beneath them stood nothing, not even a weed. Ruin was upon The Willows. And ruin was upon Eight Dogwoods with it.

The Liebowitz sisters were not apiarists, which made them a bit of a rarity in this bee-mad community. But they were the only successful cultivators, for at least a hundred miles in every direction, of the moon-flower. It bloomed for only two heady days in early spring, and the honey that plant produced was the fullest, lushest, most perfect nectar Saffronia had ever tasted. And the sisters allowed only one beekeeper to graze her bees on its blossoms. The annual profits from the small batch of moon-flower honey supported all of Millie's wild schemes and the continuation and expansion of Saffronia's business for the rest of the year. Indeed, they could sell nothing but moon-flower honey and live quite well, if more modestly than either of them would prefer. Without the Liebowitzes' moon-flower crop, they were just another local honey producer in a region sticky with them, two women falling behind the leaping advances of the rest of their profession.