Keirnan knew he should skip town. The newest body was probably connectable to him. He had kept Thomas’s wallet and dumped his car. He had made sure that his DNA wasn’t on the body. However, there would still be a call log that they could get from the provider.
Despite this, Keirnan stayed put in the place he had grown up. He did break several of his hidden drawers. The police would have to dissemble the boxes of insects to find the bodies he had there. He also set up several bee hives around the barn. Bees were a good deterrent. Most people were afraid of bees.
He’d always wanted to get into the beeswax and honey business anyway. This was his chance. He had one of the eco-friendliest farms around anyway, adding bees made sense.
Besides, he had a scapegoat. The number he had given to Thomas was registered to Charlie. Charlie hadn’t carried it in a while because he’d lost it in the goat pen one day, but it was still Charlie’s number and the phone was still activated because Keirnan kept it activated. It was part of Charlie’s salary. After coming home with the beehives, he had put the lost phone in Charlie’s bedroom across the road. Then he and Charlie had set up the beehives. If the cops needed more evidence, Charlie had built the insect boxes. Keirnan had really just modified them. Charlie was good with woodworking, even if he did have brain damage.
The best part was that Keirnan had falsified receipts for his victims. Each victim had visited him to get something from his farm the day they died, according to his receipts. He’d even paid the sales taxes and put money in the bank for the transactions. Charlie could have seen them there while they were buying stuff and then killed them and Keirnan would have been known the wiser.
That was the story if Keirnan needed it. If he worked at it, he could probably even convince Charlie that Charlie had indeed stalked the victims and killed them. But that seemed a little over the top and more effort than Keirnan was willing to make. After all, he hadn’t been tied to a body yet. Not even his daddy’s.
The bees, while a cover story, were not an impulse purchase. He’d been eying them for a while. An old guy a town over had been wanting to sell for over a year now. He hadn’t had any takers because he was overpriced and the boxes needed some serious work. It was this that Keirnan and Charlie set to task on now. He had bought an old hive ages ago. He now tore it apart for him and Charlie to look at.
It didn’t take long to figure out the engineering. Bee boxes were simply constructed for easy access by both bees and humans. The important part was having a queen. Hives died without a queen and queens didn’t grow on trees. They had to be bought or discovered. It was really the queen that a person was paying for when buying hives. Each box contained a hive and each hive had to have a queen.
The trays were the trickiest part, but Charlie was able to tackle them without Keirnan’s help. Keirnan was busy trying to figure out how to seed the new hives. Moving the queen to the new box wasn’t enough. They had to have honey and wax put into them as well. There was a special way to do it. The old guy had told him and he was now working on it.
Lewis was milking the goats and watching the younger men. Every so often, he’d shake his head. Whatever Keirnan had done the night before, it must have been bad. Lewis had watched the young man long enough to know he only made large purchases when he was trying to forget something from the night before. The day after murdering his father, Keirnan had bought brand new goats to introduce to the herd, nearly doubling it in size. Two years later, the insect farm had shown up after Keirnan had disappeared for a weekend. It was as if adding to the farm made Keirnan forget the monster that lived in his soul.
Not that Lewis cared. Myron had been a bastard. He’d only stayed because his sister had married the fucker. He wished he’d been brave enough to kill his brother-in-law instead of letting his nephew do it. His sister had insisted he stay on after her death. Keirnan had agreed, never knowing that Lewis was his uncle.
Lewis preferred it that way. He’d done some bad things in his life. He’d killed a few times himself, before coming to the farm. The farm helped him keep his demons in check. He’d given up drinking after seeing Myron come home drunk the first time. Since that night, he’d led a good life. Watching Keirnan was his penance. Keirnan might have grown up to be a good boy if Lewis had acted that first night. Lewis would never be able to express the regret he felt for not killing Myron.
That night, his sister, pregnant with Keirnan, had come running to the little shack where he lived. Blood ran down her face, her arms, her legs. It soaked what little clothing she had on. Myron had come home and taken a belt to her. She was sure she was going to miscarry the baby growing in her. Lewis was drunk too, but not so drunk that he couldn’t help his sister.
When Myron showed up, demanding the return of his wife, Lewis has stood his ground, saying she could return only when Myron had sobered up. Myron had taken the belt to him and beat him about senseless, but he went away that night. His sister didn’t miscarry, but she was beat up pretty good. The following day, Lewis walked up to the house and pulled a gun on Myron. Swore if Myron ever beat his sister like that again, he’d kill him. Myron had seemed remorseful and Lewis had left.
He managed to keep his temper in check for the rest of the pregnancy. It was after Keirnan was born that things got insane. One night, Lewis was sitting at home, watching TV when Myron barged in. He grabbed Lewis shotgun, but the barrel to his chest and demanded that Lewis shoot him. Lewis had just stared at the deranged man in disbelief. If he’d pulled that trigger, things would have been different. He didn’t and from that moment on, Lewis avoided Myron and at times, his sister. He had let her die and he knew it.
There was no need for Keirnan to know this or that he was related to the older man. It was a secret Lewis would take to his grave. Of course, Keirnan wasn’t much different than his father, except that he didn’t like blood. Charlie had cut himself one time on an old blade and Keirnan had puked until he passed out. When the cops did eventually show up, Lewis would point this out to them and claim to have done whatever Keirnan did. He had a pretty good idea of what it was. It had started with his father’s body and moved to the insect farm. Keirnan just thought he was the only one that knew about the secret drawers in the insect boxes. Lewis had opened them on more than one occasion. He was sure they were drug addicts and prostitutes, that was what Myron liked to kill when he wasn’t killing his own family.
He watched the boys for a while longer, readying bee hives that would eventually become productive additions. They could sell honey and beeswax. Keirnan’s future secured, financially and physically, as long as he was willing to accept Lewis’s sacrifice and not fuck it up afterwards. That was the big problem, making sure that if Lewis confessed, Keirnan either stopped, slowed down, or started doing things different. They would be found out pretty quick if he didn’t.
“Lewis, what do you think?” Keirnan yelled to the older man.
“Looks good,” Lewis shouted back, nodding his approval. Keirnan smiled. He liked Lewis and he had no idea why, but he did. Having his approval was important to him and that meant something, since Keirnan rarely felt he needed approval for anything.
Keirnan had wondered a few times if Lewis had stayed because he had been in love with Keirnan’s mother. It felt like the two of them had something that Keirnan didn’t understand. He was sure his father had understood and he never knew why Myron had let Lewis stay. Maybe Lewis had known something about the monster Keirnan’s father turned into. It was as good a theory as any other.
The bees were beginning to move. Keirnan sat in a big wooden deck chair near the barn door and watched them. Charlie went into the house and came back out with three beers. Within minutes, all three men were sitting watching the bees move, drinking a beer, and enjoying the silence that stretched between them. This was comfortable and familiar to Keirnan. It was something he needed after the night he had.