A Beeline to Murder

A Beeline to Murder by Meera Lester





For my Scribe Tribe,

my readers,

and all the mystery writers—past and present—whose

books have inspired me.





Chapter 1


A drone (male honeybee) must be able to fly fifty feet straight up, or he will miss the chance to mate with the queen; it is nature’s way of ensuring a robust gene pool.

—Henny Penny Farmette Almanac





Abigail Mackenzie pushed the trowel deep into the soft, loamy earth where she had been planting lavender from gallon pots. She rocked back on her heels and cocked her head to one side, listening intently. The low-pitched drone could mean only one thing. Removing her gloves, Abby pushed a tangle of reddish-gold hair off her face and yanked up a hemmed corner of her faded work shirt to wipe the perspiration from her forehead. Squinting up into the dappled sunlit branches, she spotted them: thousands of honeybees writhing in a toffee-colored mass in the crotch of the apricot tree.

“Arghh,” Abby groaned. “Would it have killed you to wait another day?”

The sound of honeybees swarming ordinarily would have lifted Abby’s spirits; it meant an additional hive for her growing colony of bees. But today that buzzing pushed her stress level as high as the cloudless May sky. The queen and her entourage had left the hive en masse, and unless Abby acted quickly, they would follow their winged scouts to a suitable new home, even if that home was five to eight miles away. To rescue the bees, she would have to don her beekeeper’s suit, position a hive beneath the swarm, tie a rope around the apricot limb, and shake it with enough force to dislodge the bees into the open box—all adding up to precious minutes that she would have to shave from her already over-scheduled morning.

Watching the bees coalesce into a thickening corpus, Abby pondered the remote possibility that the bees might also hang around. But, for certain, the lavender wasn’t going to plant itself. More importantly, she couldn’t postpone delivering that file to the district attorney’s office before noon if she expected to get paid for her part-time investigative work. And, of course, she had better get those ten jars of honey to the chef at the Las Flores Patisserie by eight thirty or risk another dressing-down, although the chef’s cursing in French somehow rendered it less offensive.