Chapter 26
After Bruce checked Regina’s pulse and found none, Hayley scooped out her cell phone and called 911, reporting what they had found. Bruce jogged up to the main road to wait for the police to arrive while Hayley stayed with the body.
Chief Alvarez raced to the scene as fast as he could after receiving the call, but since they were deep inside Acadia National Park in a remote area, Bruce did not spot the flashing blue lights of the chief’s squad car approaching for a tense and uncomfortable twenty-five minutes. Within that time, Hayley had enough time to examine the body without touching it.
She had first noticed that there were red splotchy marks all over Regina’s face, bare arms, and legs. Her throat appeared to be swollen along with her tongue, which stuck out of her mouth. After swatting away a few bees that kept buzzing around and irritating her, Hayley noticed a hive nearby. It was lodged in one of the blueberry bushes close to Regina’s body. There was a wicker basket upended and blueberries were spread around all over the dirt and grass. Hayley quickly determined that Regina had been out picking blueberries when she died. The hive was also an important clue because the red marks and swollen neck and tongue possibly indicated symptoms of an allergic reaction to bee stings.
What Hayley found odd was how the hive was positioned. She didn’t get too close, fearing she might surprise the bees still inside and get attacked herself, but it seemed so out of place. The hive was tilted to the right, and just resting in the bush, not hanging anywhere, as if someone had deliberately placed it there.
The pounding footsteps of her husband, Sergio, and a couple of his officers snapped her out of her thoughts and she turned to see the cavalry finally arriving on the scene. Hayley didn’t have to give her brother-in-law the rundown of what she had noticed because he was a smart enough investigator to deduce all of what she had discovered on his own. Instead, she stepped back with Bruce as the cops took over. She did, however, turn to Bruce, who was sweating from the hot sun and clearly upset over having stumbled over Regina Knoxville’s dead body.
“You okay?” she asked.
Bruce nodded. “Just kind of a shock to find her out here like that. I told you dead bodies freak me out!”
Hayley rubbed his back with her hand to comfort him. “I know. Poor Regina . . .”
“Sergio wants us to stick around for a few minutes so he can ask us some questions once he’s done looking around,” Bruce said.
“Of course,” Hayley said, having no intention of leaving just yet anyway. She wanted to make sure that she and the police were both on the same page.
A bee buzzed past them and over to the hive lodged in the blueberry patch. Then another. Hayley turned to see Bruce waving his hand in front of his face as a third one danced around his head before flying away and over to the hive. Hayley touched Bruce’s arm. “I’ll be right back.”
“Where are you going?”
“Just over there,” Hayley said, not pointing in any particular direction. She watched as one bee after another whizzed through the air toward the hive. She set off due west, in the direction from which the bees seemed to be coming. She hadn’t gotten very far, maybe fifty yards, when she noticed a balsam fir tree with hundreds of bees hovering around one of the branches as groups of them, flying in ever increasing figure eights, buzzed off toward the honeycomb hive lodged in the blueberry patch. Hayley suddenly knew exactly what had happened.
When she dashed back to Bruce, he was already engaged in a deep discussion with Sergio, recounting how he and Hayley had first encountered the body.
“She was murdered!” Hayley shouted.
Bruce and Sergio stopped talking and turned toward her, both staring at her blankly.
“What?” Sergio asked.
“Regina! Somebody wanted her dead!”
Sergio tried not to come off as patronizing and so he pretended to be taking Hayley seriously. “We may come to that conclusion when we’re done investigating, but I have to be honest, Hayley, right now it looks like Regina bumped into a beehive and got a hell of a lot of stings all over her body—”
“Yes, I know, and from the flushing and swelling, it’s quite possible Regina was allergic to bees, but I think somebody already knew that!”
“How so?”
“Because that beehive is manmade. Most wild bees in nature colonize in hollowed-out trees or in rock cavities to protect themselves from predators. That hive was hung on a tree branch about fifty yards down the trail. But somebody moved it and placed it in that blueberry patch.”
“How do you know that?” Sergio asked, curious.
“Because I did a high school science project on beehives and I know for a fact that when a hive is moved, the returning bees will hover near its original location. Then they will start looking for their lost hive by flying in figure eights. They use their sense of smell to find where the hive is. Look, you can see the bees coming toward their nest.”
Sergio watched the bees arriving and knew there was no arguing with her.
She was right.
Bruce arched an eyebrow, impressed with his wife’s knowledge of the bee kingdom.
Sergio scratched his chin, still trying to put it all together. “But, Hayley, Regina’s body was a good distance from the blueberry patch with the hive. If we are dealing with a killer, how did he or she know the bees would go after Regina? It’s not as if she was doused in honey.”
“Maybe she knocked into the blueberry patch and she panicked and ran away when the bees swarmed around her, but she didn’t drop dead from her allergic reaction until she got to the point where we found her.”
Sergio considered the theory and nodded slightly. “You could be right. But I’m still not sure.”
Hayley had just come up with this wild murder theory off the top of her head, and so she couldn’t blame Sergio for hesitating to immediately classify Regina Knoxville’s death as a homicide. Because frankly, Hayley wasn’t entirely sure she had it right either. Would somebody actually come all the way out here wearing protective gear, move an active beehive to a blueberry patch, and just hope and pray that Regina would decide to go blueberry picking out in the park on this particular day and just coincidentally walk right into it?
No, there were pieces of the puzzle still missing.
And Hayley was more determined than ever to find them and put them all together.