Stolen Honey Read Online Free Page B

gave a yell. “Stay back,” Olen warned, and lurched forward. For a moment the woods were silent except for twittering birds and snapping twigs where some small animal had squeezed through.
    But she wasn’t going to stay back. If they’d found something—someone—in her woods, she wanted to see. This was a controversial area they were in now. A variety of unusual plants grew here: oleander, nightshade, pokeweed. Marijuana. She didn’t want them to recognize that!
    “Be careful, I told you,” she called out. “Watch for any plants you’re not familiar with.”
    “Too late for this kid,” the sergeant shouted back, and when Gwen caught up, she heard Olen say, “Oh, Jesus Christ.”
    A dark-haired boy lay there, face down, the skin horribly red and swollen on the back of his neck and hands as though he’d been rolling in the leaves. When the sergeant turned him over— though Olen swore at her for doing that—she saw the hot red dry puffy skin of his face, the purple black bruises on the neck, something that looked like an unhealed cut on his cheek. Flies were buzzing about his head; she heard the hum of wild bees in the white Adder’s Mouth that grew nearby. She saw the discolored place in the grass where the boy had been vomiting. He appeared to be sleeping—if that’s what he had been doing—in a patch of deadly nightshade.
    Gwen had a headache when she woke up the next morning; it was drumming and drumming in her temples. She had just had a call from Olen. The news was bad. She had asked Olen to give her time, to let her talk to the young people alone. She had had to turn aside his insistent questions yesterday. “You can see Donna later, not now,” she’d told him, feeling disoriented, swept away. “She’s upset enough without you hurling questions at her.” Now she, Donna, and Leroy were walking the woods together. She wanted Donna to retrace her steps, Leroy to tell his part of the story. She needed the facts herself before Olen tried to elicit them in his plowmanlike fashion.
    “I want the whole story. The whole truth,” she insisted, “out of both of you.”
    “It was here,” Donna said when they’d gone twenty yards into the woods. “I mean around here I left him—I can’t remember exactly. He tried to—well, he tried to do stuff, I didn’t like it. I fell—”
    “She was pushed,” Leroy said, his hands hanging like rakes at his sides. “She was on the ground.”
    Donna glared at him. “I fell. That’s when he—Anyway, then you came, Leroy. You had no business following us in like that! You should leave me alone. Stick to what you’re paid for. The bees. My personal life doesn’t concern you.”
    “Donna,” Gwen murmured, seeing Leroy’s stricken expression. “Enough.”
    “If I hadn’t come by just then—” Leroy went on, and was shushed by Gwen. She didn’t want to hear this part. She just wanted facts. Where and when, not what.
    “It wasn’t here,” Leroy said. “It was over by that sugar maple. I remember, it’s the tree with the red slash. I made it myself when Brownie wanted a path he could ski.”
    Gwen looked at the tree, at the ground beneath it. The snow had already melted in the April sun that snaked down through the budding leaves; there was no sign of a struggle, of a body lying there.
    “He was there when I left,” Leroy said. “He was out of it. He was drunk. I tried to wake him up, get him to go home. It didn’t work. So I left him there. I figured he’d wake up sooner or later, get on his big motorcycle, and go home to his safe little bed.”
    “You said you’d take care of him. You did!” Donna cried, grabbing his arm.
    “Well, I tried, didn’t I?” He shook his arm free. “I told you I tried. It’d stopped snowing. The moon was back out. It wasn’t that cold, he wasn’t gonna freeze. He had a big fancy coat on. I noticed he didn’t give you that coat to wear. You were the one would of froze if I hadn’t—”
    “Stop it,