Bees in the Butterfly Garden Read Online Free

headstone.
    Behold and See as You Pass By
    As You are Now so Once was I
    As I am Now You Soon will Be
    Prepare for Death and Follow Me
    Ian had nearly begged John—Skipjack to those who knew him best—not to order such words to reside over him until the end of time. Not to bring such a dour warning out here to the country air they loved, the air that had served them far better than that stinking cloud hovering over New York City.
    But John had been insistent. He’d changed in the last few months of his life, had acted as if he’d known death would summon him sooner than any of the rest of them suspected. The inscription itself gave no clue as to why John had presumed the quickness of death, other than the fact that it might be imminent for anyone—something Ian would rather not consider.
    It was all Kate’s fault. She’d changed John with her new talk of hellfire, God’s judgment, and all that. She might have kept it to herself if she’d known John’s heart had been brittle as glass. The stress of life had proved too much for him.
    Ian folded the instructions and handed the page to the undertaker, who would see to all of the details. With it he sent enough money for the cabinetmaker to build a proper coffin—the newer kind, with lining—and for the stonemason to brick over the grave as an extra precaution, even though John would be buried here on Ian’s own property, a safe distance from the city. No physician’s experiment would John be.
    Ian returned to the bedroom where his friend’s body waited. Roscoe followed, the tips of his nails sounding a familiar tap on the uncarpeted floor. Pubjug was in the room, watching over the body alone for the moment. If Ian didn’t count Kate, he and Pubjug would miss John the most.
    Served Kate right not to be here when John died, though it was a shame his last moments had been in a borrowed bed. That was Kate’s fault too, having recently thrown John out of her flat. Until they could be wed, of all things! After all this time.
    Ian saw Pubjug seated on the chair near the bedside, arms folded, legs sprawled. Barely awake. Ian jabbed his shoulder when he passed.
    “I’s watchin’, Pinch,” Pubjug said, calling Ian by a leftover nickname that only he—and John—ever used anymore. “He ain’t moved a mite, not a mite.”
    “It’s all right, Pubjug. You can go now. I’ll watch over him for a while.”
    Even as Pubjug left the room, Ian knew it was no use. John didn’t need to be watched over anymore. Ian believed the doctor who’d said John was dead. He no longer breathed. Ian had placed his hand under John’s nose often enough just to make sure, ever since he found him when Roscoe started howling that dawn, alerting Ian that something was amiss.
    Now Roscoe took up the place he’d been coaxed away from earlier, on the bed and close to John’s cool body. The undertaker would be back shortly to shave and redress him, pack his body in ice to preserve it as well as he could before moving him down to the ballroom, where even now furniture was being rearranged and the dining table brought in. Ian hoped John would look better than he did at the moment, with a few days’ stubble on his chin and his mouth frozen open.
    No one could see him this way. They should see him as the man he’d always been in life: strong, handsome. Though no longer charming or decisive or confident. So confident he could make someone believe up was down or the other way around if he wanted. All that was gone now.
    Ian ignored the pain in his gut as he thought once again about the note he’d sent with Keys that morning—the one that was to be delivered first thing. Why had he done it? Why had the first note been to her? It wasn’t because John had said to take care of Meggie, because that hadn’t, in fact, been his most urgent instruction.
    No. John had indeed told Ian to take care of her . . . but to do it from afar. Just as John had done all his life.
    And yet visions of Meggie had