THE CASE OF THE RIVAL QUEENS
Carolyn Wheat’s short stories have won her an Agatha, an Anthony, a Macavity, and a Shamus Award. Her book How to Write Killer Fiction (Perseverance Press, 2003) is a must-have addition to any writer’s bookshelf. She teaches writing at the University of California, San Diego extension school and offers freelance editorial consulting services. She makes her home in San Diego and has added yoga and meditation to her teaching repertoire.
The Hotel del Coronado’s young bellboy was clearly overawed. Swallowing hard, he managed to squeak out the words, “Mr. Spalding would be grateful if you could spare him a moment, Mr. Holmes.”
The mulish look on Holmes’s face told me he had no intention of sparing Mr. Spalding, or anyone else, a moment. “We are here on holiday,” he said curtly. “I do not wish to be disturbed.” Holmes had taken against San Diego when he discovered that one of its more famous denizens, the legendary American lawman Wyatt Earp, had not gunned down evildoers in its city streets, but had instead opened an ice cream parlor. Holmes had formed his ideas of the American West from the pages of dime novels and seemed affronted at every sign of gentility.
The boy said, “But it’s Mr. Spalding, sir.”
Holmes raised a single eyebrow. “I have no memory of that name,” he said slowly, “which means Mr. Spalding is not a member of the criminal classes.”
The boy gasped. I stifled a laugh and put an end to Holmes’s ignorance. “In fact, Holmes, you have already made Mr. Spalding’s acquaintance. Don’t you remember the baseball game we saw in 1889? Mr. Spalding organized the tour and was the chief bowler. We were introduced to him at the reception following the game.”
“Pitcher,” the boy said with an air of reverence. “Mr. Spalding pitched for the Chicago White Stockings. He invented the Spalding twister.” At our blank looks, he explained, “It’s a curve ball. The batters never figured out how to hit it.”
“A googly,” I murmured. “I remember thinking the American game was faster than cricket. In fact, I thoroughly enjoyed our exposure to the American pastime.”
“I vaguely recall some outlandish sporting event you insisted I attend with you,” Holmes replied. He still lay at his ease on the chaise longue nearest the window, where the balmy Pacific breeze blew the sheer curtains to and fro. “I found it tedious in the extreme.”
“Mr. Spalding is not only well known as a player,” I said, realizing that I at least looked forward to meeting our visitor, “he is also the chief manufacturer of the balls used in the sport. He is, in short, a rich man and a leading citizen of San Diego.”
“Very well, Watson,” Holmes cried, leaping up from his place on the couch. “If it pleases you, we shall see this plutocrat.” He exchanged his smoking jacket for proper afternoon wear and we made our way from our room to the magnificent Otis lift that would whisk us to the lobby floor. The Hotel del Coronado was as up to date as any resort in Europe, a fact that Holmes found intensely annoying, as he’d been looking forward to swinging saloon doors and sawdust on the floor. Ridiculous, of course, in the second year of the twentieth century.
A waiter led us through the wood-paneled lobby to the terrace where tea was being served. It was open to the ocean breeze and looked out over the Pacific. I wondered at first that we were not shown to the bar, and then realized the reason: Mr. Spalding had brought his wife. Albert Spalding was a solid man with a bushy moustache and hair parted in the center. He wore a black suit with a high collar and a thickly knotted tie. His wife wore a walking suit of lavender festooned with ecru lace. Together they looked the picture of well-to-do American respectability.
We made introductions and ordered tea. I mentioned the historic baseball game in which I had seen Spalding play. He nodded perfunctorily, as if to indicate that sport was the furthest thing from his mind.
“Mr. Holmes,” he began after his wife had poured tea into each cup, “I am here on a matter of utmost importance. I would not dream of interrupting your holiday for anything less, I assure you. At first, I thought the matter was, well, a figment of my wife’s imagination, but of late I have come to agree with her. Something is amiss at the Brotherhood.”
“The Brotherhood?” Holmes looked as puzzled as I felt.
Spalding opened his mouth to reply, but his wife’s words came first. “The Universal Brotherhood and Theosophical Society,” she explained in a loud voice that would have been more appropriate on the lecture circuit. “Albert and I live on the grounds. I am very active in the Society.”
I had heard that a branch of the Theosophical Society made its home in San Diego. Strands of gossip, such as one overhears in hotels, came back to me. “Godless heathens,” I’d heard a woman say of the colony on Point Loma, “all dressed in white, dancing under the trees, speaking Greek.”
I realized I’d stopped listening and came back to Mrs. Spalding’s penetrating voice. “There have been incidents undermining Mrs. Tingley’s excellent administration,” she said. “Heinous acts designed to ruin the Brotherhood and bring disgrace to our Society. First, it was the silkworms, then the avocados, and finally, the disappearance of the queens.”
I was about to ask what an avocado was when Spalding said, “I cannot agree with you about the silkworms, Elizabeth. I’m afraid they committed suicide. But those honeybees,” he added in a firm voice. “I’d stake my life those bees were murdered.”
I dared not look at Holmes. I had persuaded him to see the Spaldings, and now we were trapped at a tea table with two mad people.
To my surprise, the look on Holmes’s face was one of rapt interest. “This Brotherhood,” he asked. “Is it anything at all like the Mormons of Salt Lake?” Holmes had a fascination for secret societies and arcane religions, particularly those that found a congenial home in the former colonies.
Spalding hastened to reassure us that male Theosophists were content with a single wife. Mrs. Spalding added, “The chief goal of the Brotherhood is spiritual education, Mr. Holmes. We maintain a very successful school called the Raja Yoga Academy, and Mrs. Tingley has plans to open a college for the Revival of Lost Mysteries.” She said the last with capital letters, and I sensed an excitement in Holmes. Perhaps this exotic Brotherhood would make up for the regrettable lack of gunfights.
Her husband continued the theme. “The Brotherhood has pioneered modern farming methods in California, Mr. Holmes,” Spalding said. “We have a thriving apiary, and we are experimenting with the use of honeybees to pollinate avocado trees. It is most unfortunate that our experiment was undermined, as I am certain we would have revolutionized the burgeoning industry.”
“Tell me more,” Holmes said, choosing a tea sandwich and leaning back in his chair, clearly prepared to be entertained by our visitors. “I remember as a boy spending hours watching the bees on my grandfather’s smallholding. Bees are fascinating creatures, are they not, Watson?”
I had few opinions on the subject of bees and had never heard Holmes speak of them before. He seldom mentioned his boyhood and I found myself wishing he would reveal a bit more to his biographer.
The Spaldings took turns explaining that they suspected a prominent member of the Theosophical Brotherhood of deliberately undermining the avocado experiment and the excellent apiary, which provided the group with a tidy profit as well as supplying honey and beeswax to the community.
“And I’m convinced she killed the silkworms, too,” Elizabeth Spalding said with a stubborn set to her mouth.
“Silkworms are delicate creatures, my dear,” her husband replied in a mild tone. “Give them one brown mulberry leaf, and they die. Let the temperature drop by one single degree, and they die. We are not the only community that has failed to bring the silk industry to these shores. I hardly think Mrs. Imbler can be blamed for the silkworms.”
“Mrs. Imbler is the lady you suspect?” Holmes asked.
“She is the chief beekeeper,” Spalding said. “It would be the easiest thing in the world for her to destroy the hives upon which our avocados depended.”
“But why would she destroy the hives?” I asked.
Mrs. Spalding leaned forward in her chair and opened her blue eyes wide. “She wants to supplant Mrs. Tingley. I’m certain of it. She has made cutting remarks about the way things are run and hints that she could do better. She has even dared to challenge Mrs. Tingley on matters of Theosophical thought.” She lowered her voice and almost whispered, “I fear for her life, Mr. Holmes. It pains me to say it, but I fear for Mrs. Tingley’s very life.”
This struck me as a wild exaggeration, but Holmes seemed entertained by the prospect of a visit to the Theosophists’ frontier utopia, so we agreed to set off the next morning.
We could see the outline of Point Loma from the pavilion at the Hotel del Coronado. It was a peninsula that jutted out from the mainland and curved southward like the trunk of an elephant. Our peninsula, Coronado, was the bulbous end of a long narrow sand spit nestled under the elephant’s trunk. Between Point Loma and Coronado, a sparkling bay separated the two land masses and opened out to the Pacific.
Our trip from Coronado to Point Loma required a train, a ferry, and a hired hack.
We bumped along a winding, dusty road in an open carriage drawn by a plodding horse, passing few cottages, several species of cacti, and huge swaths of scrubland. On the way, our driver regaled us with stories about Lomaland, as he called the Theosophical colony.
“Children torn from their parents, brought up by strangers,” he’d said, in between copious spittings of tobacco juice. “The parents worship Hindu gods. But that’s not the worst of it, sirs,” he said, lowering his voice. “It’s run by women, run by the Purple Mother, so called because she dresses in purple robes like a pagan priestess. It would be a disgrace—if it wasn’t such a popular tourist attraction.” He said the last with a tobacco-stained grin, and I realized with a start that we were no longer the only conveyance on the road. In the distance, charabancs and public omnibuses, filled with chattering visitors, stood in a line awaiting entrance.
“Some of them are staying at Camp Karnak,” the driver said, and explained that the Society operated a tent city similar to the one next to the Hotel del Coronado. I marveled at the ingenuity of these Americans, who offered lodging at budget rates to travelers who enjoyed the same magnificent views and ocean breezes as the wealthy, the only difference being sleeping under canvas instead of a roof.
Beyond the line of carriages, I could see a sliver of the blue Pacific. The carriages entered the grounds through a magnificent gate decorated in Egyptian motifs. To our right, inside the gate, several large white buildings with colored domes gleamed in the bright California sun. One dome was covered in purple tile, another in aquamarine. Atop the domes were smaller globes of tinted glass. It was a fairyland, reminiscent of the Royal Pavilion at Brighton, where I’d been taken on holiday as a child. I wondered what it was about the seaside that brought out the fanciful in architects.
The cabbie stopped the hack at the gate and asked directions to the Spalding house. The guard pointed to a structure I’d taken for one of the temples. Like the largest building, it had a purple dome topped with a purple glass globe; it also boasted a circular staircase on the outside of the building next to a portico. Spalding was, I decided, the most uxorious man I’d ever met. Few husbands would have indulged a wife to the extent of living in such a monstrosity.
The cabbie pulled in the reins with a flourish next to a walkway lined with stone urns filled with geraniums. I alighted and knocked on the front door, noting the lavender stained glass blocks in the upper section of the windows. A servant answered, and before I could announce myself, she welcomed us and bade the driver bring in our Gladstone bags.
Inside, the sun’s brightness was muted, and the large circular foyer glowed pale amethyst from the purple glass. Exotic bas-relief carvings decorated the columns in the foyer, which was circular and dominated by the rise of the dome.
Mrs. Spalding appeared on the landing and beckoned us upstairs to our rooms. We cleaned the dust of our journey from our persons and clothing and accepted our hostess’s offer of a light lunch with Mrs. Tingley. We were to meet the Purple Mother in the flesh.
Katherine Tingley was a formidable woman in her early fifties, although she stood a mere five feet two in height. She had raven hair, large dark eyes, a determined chin, and the firm voice of a captain of industry. She was not dressed in purple, but wore a perfectly proper Nile-green dress with a double ruffle at the throat. I smiled; my fiancée would have told me the ruffles were a deliberate attempt to soften the air of command, to add a feminine touch to Mrs. Tingley’s masculine directness. I wondered whether Holmes, unblessed by feminine confidences, would draw the same conclusion.
“I am delighted to make your acquaintance, Mr. Holmes,” the Theosophist said. “And yours, too, of course, Dr. Watson. I have enjoyed reading your accounts of Mr. Holmes’s amazing deductive feats.”
I made the proper murmurs of self-deprecation, but I felt a glow of pride that my writings should be known in the hinterlands.
We did not speak of the problems at Lomaland. Instead, Mrs. Tingley turned to Holmes and said, “I understood from Dr. Watson’s accounts of your adventures that you are a man who appreciates music. I should like you to know that at Point Loma music is regarded as much more than an amusement. It is a part of life itself, and it is one of those subtle forces of nature which, rightly applied, calls into activity the divine powers of the soul. Do you not agree, Mr. Holmes?”
Holmes did agree, warmly, and soon he was listening with great attention and respect to the methods of musical education employed at the Raja Yoga Academy. Only after the remains of our light luncheon were cleared away did the talk turn to the reason we had come. Mrs. Tingley said in her firm voice that she was grateful to the Spaldings for inviting Holmes to protect her, but that she had full confidence in Grace Imbler, the head beekeeper. “Indeed, she has promised me a treat tomorrow—fresh honey in the comb. We pasteurize most of our honey, but honeycomb is a special favorite of mine, and she always saves me some before she bottles the rest for the kitchen and the store.”
We stepped away from the lunch table, thanked the Spaldings, and stepped out onto the circular porch. Down the steep, chaparralovergrown canyon, a sliver of beach received silver-capped waves.
“I am eager to show you our community, Mr. Holmes,” Mrs. Tingley said. “I think you will find it to your taste as a man of intellectual pursuits.” Mrs. Tingley walked toward a large square building that from a distance looked like marble, but was wood covered in white stucco. Three smaller domes rose from the towered corners, and the edifice was topped by a huge aquamarine dome some three hundred feet in circumference.
“We call this the Homestead,” she told us. “It is our headquarters. The small round building is our Temple.” The Temple was no less impressive, and boasted two tiers of Greek columns, crowned by a spacious dome of amethyst.
Music sounded in the distance, but strange and discordant. I asked Mrs. Tingley about it and she smiled. “Our practice rooms,” she explained. “Our students practice together, but they do not always play the same pieces. It is part of their discipline, to play their own music without allowing themselves to be distracted by their fellows.”
I glanced at Holmes. A slight frown between his eyes gave evidence that he was disconcerted by the cacophony. What sort of music would the students play if they practiced in such chaos?
Children, young and old, passed us by, the younger ones walking in neat rows, attended by adults I assumed were teachers. They wore uniforms similar to those worn by any schoolchild, and I found myself almost disappointed that they were not in togas or saris or something equally outlandish.
Mrs. Tingley made up for the conventional costumes by referring to the young pupils as “Lotus Buds.” Holmes’s thin lips twitched in a near smile.
We learned that the small round buildings with mushroom-cap roofs were Lotus Houses, where the children lived. They did indeed live apart from their parents, who could visit them on weekends. This struck me far more humane than the British tradition of sending children as young as six to boarding schools several hundred miles from home.
We walked west, in the direction of the privately operated tent city. The land was hilly, and large canyons covered in scrub opened the vista to the sea. In the distance, I could see small white boxes and a larger whitewashed building without decorative accents. Next to me, Holmes pointed and said, “The apiary, I presume.”
I was surprised and then realized I’d been visualizing the beehives of my youth, the moundlike skeps made of hay that dotted the English countryside.
“Nothing we do here is done purely for the sake of commerce,” Mrs. Tingley said as we continued strolling along the bluff. “Our bee farm is not merely a source of honey, but also of inspiration. The bees have much to teach humanity about the virtues of cooperation and hard work.”
She stopped walking and said, “This is where I live. I have some correspondence I must attend to. I will leave you to meet Mrs. Imbler on your own. Follow the path just past the theatre.”
My eyebrows must have gone up, for Mrs. Tingley said, with more than a touch of pride, “We have just built the first Greek theatre in the New World, Dr. Watson.”
Not only a theatre, but a Greek theatre! I saw wooden benches cut into the hillside, focused on a small flat patch of ground that served as a stage. I could not but marvel at the sight of an open-air theatre in the ancient Greek mode sitting on land once occupied by red Indians.
Holmes and I bade farewell to Mrs. Tingley, who went into her house, a much more modest affair than the Spalding mansion, and we made our way down the hill toward the neat rows of white boxes to meet the lady who might or might not be plotting Mrs. Tingley’s demise.
As we drew closer, we smelled an overpowering sweetness in the air. Holmes remarked, “This must be the honey house” and strode forward to knock on the door.
Mrs. Imbler, a stout lady whose face and arms were brown from the intense sun, opened the door a fraction and peered out at us. She seemed distracted and not particularly pleased to have visitors, but she invited us inside after Holmes mentioned the magic name of Tingley. With forced good grace, Mrs. Imbler showed us how she used a heated knife to cut through the beeswax, and extract the honey, which drained into a can below the table. Heat would be applied to separate honey from melted wax and keep the honey from granulating. It was clear she’d given this tour before, but equally clear that she wanted to cut it short and send us on our way.
“I’m about to open the hives and check on my queen larvae,” she said. “Queen work is the most exacting part of bee culture.” Her tone said she would much rather perform these duties in solitude.
“I’m told beekeeping is farming for the literary soul,” Holmes remarked. “Indeed, I recall reading about honeybees in Virgil’s Fourth Georgic at school.”
A thin-lipped smile graced Mrs. Imbler’s weathered face. “In the first place, Mr. Holmes, no one really ‘keeps’ bees. Bees deign to live in our hives and allow us to steal some of their honey, but they are far from domesticated. In the second place, your Virgil was quite wrong when he wrote of ‘kings’ and ‘warriors’ in the hive. The queen rules the colony, and all the workers are female.”
Mrs. Imbler seemed to come to a decision about our presence. She reached for one of the veiled beekeepers hats, which hung from wooden pegs on the wall nearest the door. She put it on and offered two others to Holmes and me. We put the hats on and secured the netting at chest-height with a strap. Mrs. Imbler took the extra precaution of putting on heavy gloves that reached to her elbow. She picked up an odd-looking metal canister with a bellows at one end and a conelike protrusion over the top. Smoke emerged from the cone. In her other hand, she held a long rectangular piece of metal.
“Come along,” she said briskly and opened the door.
We stepped from the dimness of the honey house into the sun. Through the veil, the sharp-edged landscape took on a gauzy, painterly tone. It was as if a gentle fog had descended over Point Loma. I decided I liked the muted landscape better than the harsh one revealed by the California sun. Mrs. Imbler led the way toward the neat rows of whitepainted boxes that lay nestled at the bottom of the canyon, about fifty feet from the water’s edge. As we approached the hives, the sound of buzzing filled my ears. It was an otherworldly sound, and I found myself unable to conjure up a comparison. It was as loud as a foghorn on the Thames, as menacing as a tiger’s roar, as angry as a raging mob. The hairs on the back of my head stood up, and I felt a fear so primitive that it shocked me.
I stopped. “Are you certain it is safe for us to proceed?” I had no wish to appear a coward, but neither did I fancy being stung by the thousands of little warriors that circumnavigated the hives.
“It is never safe,” the beekeeper replied, and I sensed a smile I could not see through the thick veil. “The bees will die in defense of their hive and their queen. They see us as the enemy, and because we are bent on having their honey, they are right. We tend them, and then we rob them. That is the cruel reality of bee culture.”
Holmes stepped closer to the buzzing hive and seemed to take a great interest in the worker bees flying to and fro. Several of them seemed to be engaged in what would be called a scuffle, had the participants been human. They zoomed and darted, thrust and parried, like guards repelling an assault. I said as much, and Mrs. Imbler remarked, “You are quite right, Doctor. These bees will repel any intruders who come from other hives to steal the honey.”
“How can they tell these bees are intruders?” I wondered. “There must be thousands of bees in each hive.”
“There are nearly fifty thousand at the height of the season,” the beekeeper said. “And the bees know their own through scent, although they have no olfactory organs such as we would recognize.”
The hives were tall rectangular boxes with three sections. The bees made their way in and out through a slit at the bottom. Mrs. Imbler explained that the top box was where the honey was stored, the middle box was where the bees kept the pollen they fed their larvae, and the bottom box was where the queen lived and laid her eggs.
“There is but one queen to a hive,” she said, “and she is the only fertile female. There are a few drones, kept for mating with the queen, but they are driven from the hive at the end of mating season when they are no longer needed.”
“It is a cruel society,” Holmes murmured.
“Nature itself is cruel, Mr. Holmes,” the beekeeper replied. “It is survival of the fittest.”
Mrs. Imbler stepped toward one of the boxes, and I saw what the canister was for. She applied pressure to the bellows, and smoke emerged from the conical top of the device. Smoke encircled the hive, and the bees all flew inside.
“The bees believe their hive is on fire,” the beekeeper said. “They are going inside to save their most precious asset: the honey. They will drink their fill and then come outside again, only they will be too heavy with honey to fight us.”
I glanced at Holmes. I could not see his expression underneath the veil, but I knew he must have been thinking of the late Irene Adler, whom he had smoked out of her home, and who had also taken her most precious possession with her.
Mrs. Imbler walked behind the hive and motioned us to follow her. “Never stand in the way of the bees,” she advised. “Always open the hive from behind.” She set down the smoker and lifted the metal tool. She wedged it under the top of the hive and levered the top off. Bees streamed out the bottom of the box, but there were many more left inside, squirming and jostling one another. Mrs. Imbler lifted the top box and set it on the ground. Golden honey glistened in the sun, dripping from hundreds of six-sided combs.
Beside me, Holmes stood poised in what I began to realize was quivering excitement. “It is a city,” he murmured. “A city as complex as London, with a hierarchy of work and government and productivity. Tell me,” he said, eagerness in his tone, “how do the bees communicate? How do they know what to do, where to go?”
“You have put your finger on the great mystery, Mr. Holmes,” Mrs. Imbler replied. “No one knows how bees do what they do. All we know is that they are able to communicate quite complex messages to one another, and that somehow the queen is the center of that communication network. She gives orders that are followed as far as five miles away—but exactly how she conveys her wishes is not scientifically established as yet.”
As she spoke, Mrs. Imbler lifted the second box off the stack and set it on the ground. More bees tumbled over one another in writhing profusion inside the wax cells of the honeycomb. Several flew in my direction, and I lifted my arms to swat them away, and then blushed as I remembered the veil’s protection.
She directed our attention to the third, lowest box. “Here is the birthing chamber,” she explained. Holmes leaned in to look closer. I did not care to crowd him, so I stood back a few steps.
“Those little grains of rice,” he asked, “are those the larvae?”
“Yes,” the beekeeper said. “They will become workers or drones. They will make their way into the cells of the comb when it is time for their metamorphosis.”
“Which is the queen?” I asked.
To my surprise, it was Holmes who answered. He pointed to a space deep within the box and said, “There. She is longer than the others and she has three black stripes on her back.”
“However could you tell?” I asked. “They all look alike to me.”
“It is a matter of seeing the anomaly,” Holmes replied. “I could not have picked out the queen had she been alone, but I could see that one bee was not exactly like all the others. She is not only larger, but also more purposeful, and the other bees are crowded around, tending her. She did not fit the pattern.”
Mrs. Imbler’s response was tinged with something like respect. “You have the makings of a bee master, Mr. Holmes.” She pointed to a section of the comb that contained closed-over cells, some of which bulged out like miniature wasps’ nests.
“That is where the new queens are hatching,” she said. “They are fed with a substance called royal jelly. The hive feeds several larvae, so there will be a new one when this one dies. The first to hatch will immediately kill all her rivals. There can only be one queen to a hive.”
On that ominous note, we took our leave and asked directions to the avocado groves. They lay a hot and dusty distance from the main beehives, and I was perspiring freely by the time we arrived at the stand of glossy trees. As yet, I had learned nothing that justified our visit to this improbable place, but Holmes seemed to be enjoying himself.
Avocados, I learned, were alligator pears, and were particularly suited to the California climate. The trees were large and had thick spreading branches and dark green leaves that created a welcome shade in the burning sun. A small gardeners’ shed stood at the edge of the grove. As we approached, the door opened and out stepped a wiry little man with ginger hair and a ginger moustache. He introduced himself as Jonas Imbler.
We must have looked startled, and I hastened to explain that we had just met Mrs. Imbler. The little man said, “My wife. We had a small bee farm in Alpine before we came here, but Mrs. Tingley believes that beekeeping is women’s work, so my wife tends to the hives while I manage the avocados.”
Holmes went straight to the point. “We were informed that you had a bit of bad luck with your pollination experiment.”
Imbler motioned toward a beehive that stood between the avocado groves and the bluff overlooking the canyon. “I thought surely the bees would pollinate the trees better than any horticulturist could possibly do by hand.”
“What happened?”
“The queen died,” Imbler said shortly. “And when the queen dies, the bees get dispirited. They behave like rudderless ships, aimless.”
“They no longer pollinate,” Holmes said, “because without larvae, they have no need of pollen. Pollen is food for the larvae.”
Imbler nodded. “You know your bees, Mr. Holmes. The queen is all in all to the hive. She is their reason for living, the beacon around which they all swarm and gather. Not unlike our own Mrs. Tingley.” This last was said with a sly little wink, as if he’d made a mildly risqué joke. The image of Katherine Tingley sitting inside a giant beehive, surrounded by buzzing insects, was one I had no desire to contemplate. And yet, gazing around the peaceful grounds and remembering the white-clad students walking to and fro, I could not help but see Mr. Imbler’s point. But for the queen, the hive would die. But for Mrs. Tingley, what would happen to the good people of Lomaland?
And yet, we had no evidence that anything of the sort was being contemplated. A dead queen bee and a dead Mrs. Tingley were two very different things.
The next day, Spalding surprised me by offering me a round of golf. The hilly desert landscape struck me as a highly unlikely place for the Scottish sport, but he assured me that his private course was as challenging as, and far more interesting than, any I had experienced before. Holmes encouraged me to play, suggesting that his day would be spent more profitably, perhaps, but with considerably less enjoyment.
The nine-hole golf course sat on the eastern edge of the colony. The putting greens, their emerald grass well tended and heavily watered lay amid roughs that were rougher than anything found in Europe. Stray balls hid behind cacti, rolled down the canyon, lodged in twisted branches of mesquite, and seemed bent on defying all attempts to get them safely onto the minuscule patches of grass. It was a most enjoyable game, and I thanked my lucky stars I had chosen to leave Holmes to the bees.
At the close of the game, I thanked Spalding and went in search of Holmes. I found him in the avocado grove gazing through his binoculars at the neat white beehives. The intense blue of the sky and the waves and the strong sun bouncing off the white buildings were almost painful to the eyes.
Suddenly Holmes turned and darted off in the direction of the Spalding house. I followed hastily and caught up with him just as he reached the porch. I followed him through the front door and into the kitchen. He took a wooden bowl, opened a sack of flour, and dusted the sides of the bowl. He opened the pantry, removed a jar of honey with the Lomaland label, and spooned a glob into the center of the bowl.
“Come, Watson,” Holmes said, his eyes alight with the fervor of the chase. “Let us track our murderess.”
Mystified, I followed as Holmes strode, bowl in hand, toward the North House, in the opposite direction to the hives. When we reached a bed of blue Nile lilies, he set the bowl on the ground near the flowers and motioned me to join him some several feet away. I watched as bees landed in the bowl and edged toward the glob of golden honey.
One of the bees, having drunk its fill, landed on one of the flowers. It rested there a moment and then moved off and flew in its drunken way to the next.
The look on Holmes’s face was one I had never seen before. It held all the suppressed excitement I knew from past adventures, yet there was something alight in his eyes. I fancied I had a glimpse of the youthful Holmes studying bees on his grandfather’s land. It stood to reason that a man of scientific bent had once been a boy of scientific bent.
We waited for about ten minutes as bees came and went. Finally, Holmes crouched closer to the flowering shrub and examined a bee that sat on a blossom. I looked closely, too, and realized that its underside bore a coating of white. The flour! This was a bee that had sampled honey from Holmes’s bowl. Had it returned to the hive with its load of nectar and come back to this flower for more? And what did Holmes hope to learn from watching its progress?
When the flour-marked bee tired of this stand of blossoms, it zigzagged its way to the beds beside one of the Lotus Houses. Holmes picked up his bowl and moved it to an area four feet to the east of the flowerbed.
With each successive movement of the bowl, we moved further and further away from the Point Loma apiary in an easterly direction. Looking closely, I could see that now several of the bees wore white flour stockings on their little legs.
Following honeybees proved to be a tedious activity. We waited for the return of the flour-dusted bees to our little trap, and Holmes smiled when they brought others to feed on the glob of honey. At last we reached the end of the cultivated Lomaland grounds and entered the scrub wilderness at the edge of the settlement. We were heading away from the ocean and toward the mainland from which the elephant’s trunk of Point Loma jutted. I trudged after Holmes with a thousand questions in my mind. Something pink in the distance resolved itself into a magnificent stand of rosebay bushes. Their pink blooms and dark leaves glowed in the strong afternoon sunlight. I marveled at the sight; everything else around us was scrub. Someone must have brought water to these flowers—but who and why? There was no habitation that I could see nearby.
Holmes raced toward the bushes as if Moriarty himself could be found at their center. I puffed as I ran alongside my friend, the pain in my leg growing sharper with every step. The heat of the day, combined with my English tweeds, produced a flood of perspiration that dripped from my forehead.
“Surely, there is no need for this immoderate haste,” I said at last, bringing my gait to an exhausted walk.
Holmes slowed his step, but only slightly. “As to the need for haste,” he replied, “I will not be certain about that until I find what I am looking for.”
“And what,” I puffed through gasps of breath, “is that?”
“Beehives,” he said as he plunged into the wall of bushes, heedless of the hundreds of bees buzzing around the pink flowers.
“But, Holmes,” I protested. “We know where the hives are.” I gestured in the direction of the rows of white boxes, some two miles to the west.
As I pushed aside a heavy-laden branch, a bee buzzed at my face. I brushed it aside, and then realized my mistake. “Oh, I see,” I said. “You mean there could be a natural hive out here.”
Holmes’s answer was grim. “There is nothing natural about this hive, Watson, or about the placement of it among these particular trees.”
The blooms were lovely, the shade ranging from palest to deepest pink, the masses of flowers hanging with heavy profusion upon the dark-leaved branches. Rosebay, a lovely spring bloom, also known as—
“Oleander,” I said aloud. My eyes opened wide; I understood Holmes’s urgency. “One of the most poisonous plants known to man.”
“Indeed,” Holmes said. I could hear him ahead of me in the overgrown grove. I followed his voice and step, making my way through thick branches and increasingly agitated bees.
“Aha,” he said at last. “Come quick, Watson.”
I pushed aside the last branches and found myself in a small clearing. In the center, a large hollow tree stump buzzed with insect life.
“Honey made from oleander nectar will be as poisonous as the plant itself,” Holmes said. “The keeper of this rogue hive made certain these bees would feed on oleander by locating the hive here.”
Holmes took two steps toward the tree stump. I took two steps back. The honeybees, already agitated by strangers in their midst, buzzed loudly and menacingly. I felt a sharp stab of pain along the side of my neck and slapped at it automatically. “I’ve been stung,” I cried.
“As have I, several times,” Holmes replied. “It is the occupational hazard of the beekeeper.”
Holmes inched closer and closer to the hive, and the bees, sensing danger, began to swarm around the hive and Holmes. Soon, he seemed enveloped in a cloud of angry, buzzing insects.
Bees were everywhere, crawling inside the hollow log. Holmes, brave as ever, crept closer to the hive and peered in. He shielded his face from the bees with his handkerchief, but I could see that this was wholly insufficient to guard him from stings.
He raised his head, and the look on his face chilled my blood. “The honeycomb is gone,” he said. “There is no time to lose.”
I understood at once. Mrs. Tingley had expressed a preference for honey straight from the comb. She might be eating her deadly treat at this very moment.
We were both stung over and over again as we fled the oleander grove and made our way as fast as we could back toward the colony.
Once back inside the Lomaland grounds, Holmes stopped the first person we saw, a young woman carrying a book. “Do you know where Mrs. Tingley is at this moment?”
“I believe she is taking tea at her house.”
By the time we arrived at Mrs. Tingley’s modest cottage, we were very much out of breath. Holmes flung open the door and we raced through the foyer and found Mrs. Tingley sitting with the Spaldings at a tea table on the rear porch.
In front of her sat a plate with a dripping honeycomb on it. She had lifted her spoon and was about to plunge it into the comb when Holmes whisked the plate away from her.
She raised an eyebrow and said, “What is the meaning of this, Mr. Holmes? I am quite looking forward to my little treat.”
“This treat would be your last, Mrs. Tingley,” Holmes said. “This comb is not from the hives Mrs. Imbler tends. Instead, it comes from a hive hidden deep inside an oleander grove. This honey is poisonous.”
“I knew it!” Elizabeth Spalding said. Her plate contained bread and jam, no honey. “I knew I was right to bring Mr. Holmes here. He has saved you from that presumptuous beekeeper.”
“But would this honey really have killed me, Mr. Holmes?” Mrs. Tingley asked. She seemed almost amused at the prospect of having nearly eaten it.
“It is not unknown for honey to be tainted with the nectar of whatever plants the bees feed upon,” Holmes pointed out. “Cases have been documented in Greece and New Zealand. Those poisonings were, of course, accidental, but one who knows the principles of bee culture could easily arrange for his hive to feed upon poison flowers. Such was the case with Jonas Imbler.”
I started, as did Mrs. Spalding. “Jonas Imbler?” she said with a gasp. “But surely it was Grace Imbler who wanted Mrs. Tingley gone.”
“No, madam, your suspicions of Mrs. Imbler are quite unfounded. She did not create the rogue hive in the oleander bushes. Her husband, who is also a skilled beekeeper, did.”
“Holmes,” I protested, “you distinctly said you were hunting a murderess. Did you mislead me on purpose?”
He smiled. “I was referring to the bee. The workers are female; the workers made this honey; ergo, the workers are murderesses. Q.E.D.”
“But why?” Albert Spalding protested. “Imbler has shown no interest in Theosophy and would never wish to become head of the Brotherhood. What reason could he possibly have for murdering Mrs. Tingley?”
For once, I had an answer at the same time as Holmes. He opened his mouth to explain, but I found my voice first. “Not all husbands are as tolerant as you, Mr. Spalding,” I said. “You are content to live here on Point Loma because your wife is a part of this community. You busy yourself with your golf and your civic activities and you are happy here. It was clear to me at our meeting that Jonas Imbler felt very differently. He chafed under the rule of a woman. He resented his wife’s commitment to the Brotherhood and her responsibility for the beehives.”
Holmes nodded and picked up the rest of the tale. “The bees failed to pollinate the avocado trees because their queen was gone,” he explained. “Queenless bees cannot survive. They were queenless because Jonas Imbler removed the queen to start his rogue hive in the oleander grove. The sabotage of the pollination experiment was a mere byproduct of his larger scheme to murder Mrs. Tingley. Without her, he felt sure the Society would fail and his wife would be willing to leave Lomaland.”
“It seems a strange way to commit murder, Mr. Holmes,” Mrs. Tingley said. “Surely there are more straightforward methods available to one who is determined to kill another human being. Poisoned honey seems rather a roundabout way to do it.”
“Roundabout, yes,” Holmes replied, with a small smile. “But for Jonas Imbler, it had the virtue of poetic justice. He saw you, Mrs. Tingley, as the queen bee of Lomaland, and he felt that one queen deserved death at the hands of another.”
Mrs. Spalding’s face continued to wear its stubborn look. “How can you be sure,” she asked, “that Mrs. Imbler was not her husband’s willing accomplice?”
Holmes shook his head. “I am convinced that Mrs. Imbler knew nothing of her husband’s activities. She might be capable of murder; I believe most people are. But she would never use her bees as weapons. She has far too much respect for them. It would be,” he added, turning to me, “as if our own Mrs. Hudson were to put poison into her breakfast porridge.”
I hastily agreed that this was not to be contemplated. I could see that Mrs. Spalding was not mollified, but Mrs. Tingley nodded her agreement.
“The soul is not invisible, Mr. Holmes,” she pronounced. “It reveals itself in our every waking action. And Mrs. Imbler has shown me a soul devoted to order and peace. Her well-tended hives are her character reference.”
We stayed one more night with the Spaldings before returning to the Hotel del Coronado. It was a night of sheer magic, for the magnificent orchestra played exquisitely as the sun lowered itself into the Pacific and the lights went on, one by one, inside the glass globes over the domes of Lomaland.
I stole a glance at Holmes. He was entranced by the music, and I saw another glimpse of the child he had once been as I watched a tall, slender boy of about twelve raise his violin to his chin and draw his bow across it.