Chapter 10

As we sat in the car, I wondered what we should do first. Part of me wanted to race to the store to ask Larson about the ledger. I knew he’d be the perfect one to decipher what the numbers in it had to say to us. But I had to put some time between finding the ledger and knowing its contents. I was still too angry with Roni…and not quite ready to know the truth.

Besides, the fireflies may have returned to Mickey but I felt a whole swarm of butterflies aching in my belly over this new discovery. And when the butterflies are fluttering I tend to be a bit too rash. I didn’t want to go to Larson guns blazing. A little more cleaning would probably serve to calm me down. We had another house to attend to.

As we pulled away from Mickey’s place, I took one last look at the mystery vehicle at the curb. I wondered if I was just being paranoid about it.

“Do you think somebody bad owns that car, Dunc?” Mickey asked. I swivelled so quickly that he jumped in his seat. “What?”

“Stop reading my mind, is what.”

“Well. There’s never any strange cars parked on this street. It’s all old people without visitors here. You know that.”

“I was just thinking that, myself,” I said. “It kind of sticks out here like a pickle at an ice cream party. I don’t like it, Mickey. But why would someone trash your house and then leave the car right there in the open? It’s too easy.”

“Yeah,” he agreed. “Unless it’s stolen maybe.”

***

As we walked through the front door, my first thought was about the police. I couldn’t believe they were leaving us alone, even though they knew both of our houses had been broken into. I found it rather odd that they weren’t on us like glue, tracking our every move. 

“If Roni hid something here, where do you think it’d be, Duncan?” Mickey asked as I absentmindedly tossed my keys where the front hall table usually sat. They hit the wall and slid down behind a pile of shoes that were flung from the closet. Mickey bent to retrieve them and tossed them in his pocket.

I looked around at the whirlwind of chaos and laughed. “Do you think there’s any possible way that whatever it was wasn’t found? Mickey. Look around you. There’s not a doilie unturned. If Roni hid something here, they found it.”

“Well, maybe you have a hidey hole like the one in my floor? Do you?”

“If I do, I don’t know about it,” I said as we entered the kitchen. “Look at this mess. They even unwrapped the freezer meat.”

“It’s starting to stink up the place.”

“Yep,” I said, trying to stop the gag in my throat from coming up. If the meat had thawed and started to turn, they must have broken in to my place a day or so earlier, while I was still fading in and out of consciousness in the hospital. And yet they waited until that day to ransack Mickey’s place.

“Where do we start?”

I went to the cupboard under the sink and grabbed out a large garbage bag and some yellow gloves. “I’m starting with the meat. The sooner we get this out of here the better.”

“Good idea, Dunc.”

“That’s why I get paid the big bucks.”

“I’ll go upstairs and start there,” he said. Mickey has a weak stomach and the smell was obviously getting to him. He looked a little green around the gills. “I’ll pick up your clothes and stuff.”

***

Two garbage bags later and the kitchen was beginning to look more like its old self. The whole time I toiled I was aware of the lack of noise coming from upstairs. After tossing the second bag out the back door I decided to pay Mickey a visit.

He was sprawled across the mattress, which was half on and half off the box-spring. He was buried deep in the Hive ledger and he wore the scrounged up concentration face that always seemed so painful on Mickey.

“Whatcha doing, bud?” I asked. I tried to sit down on the edge of the mattress, but it shifted like a tanking yacht so I jumped back to my feet.

“Anything. Take it. Follow the. Under the big one. The list. Don’t tell. Deeper.” He mumbled random words and appeared to be lost in thought, unaware of my presence.

“Hey. Mickey!”

He jumped and the listing mattress tossed him to the floor.

“Duncan. I forgot you were here.”

“No doubt. You were lost to the world, Mick.” I gestured toward the ledger, which had fallen from his hold and rolled back up into a tube. “Whatcha doing?”

He blushed pure red and rose to his feet, apologetic. “Just looking.”

“What were you saying, though? Sounded like you were doing a lot of talking.”

“Well, nothing. Only. Only it’s filled with words too, Dunc. Like one of those puzzle things where you have to find all the words.”

I stared at the ledger, my pulse quickening.

“And put them together like. To figure out the secret message. Like a movie star’s name or something. Only it’s a lot bigger, Dunc. Like a story.”

I sat on the floor, picked up the ledger and started scanning its pages. Tiny words where there should be numbers. Everywhere. Placed randomly throughout the pages.

“…and when I got to the part about the ladies’ room. Well, that’s when you scared me.”

“What?”

“The ladies’ room. All the other stuff was all jumbled. But then the part about the bees. I got that, Dunc. I figured that part out myself. The bees were easy.”

I desperately flipped pages, scanned line after line of numbers. Nothing was coherent.

“What about the bees, Mickey? What the hell. What are you talking about?” I didn’t realize that my voice was rising with each word. I didn’t notice that I was screaming in his face and that he was cowering further and further away with each word. Until he was back down on the mattress, pressing himself into it and attempting to disappear from what he thought was my anger.

“I’m sorry, Dunc,” he moaned, flinching away from my hostility. “I’m sorry.”

“No. Don’t be sorry. Don’t be sorry. Just tell me what you mean about the bees. I’m not angry, Mickey. I’m just excited. I’m sorry. But you have to tell me what you mean about the bees.”

“The hive.”

He said it as though it would all come clear to me. Like two words would bring the whole picture into focus.

“Mickey. Jesus. Don’t be cryptic. Tell me.”

He grabbed the rolled up ledger from my fist. It was only then that I realized I had been holding it over his head like a weapon. I tried to give myself time to breathe…to calm down. Mickey opened the book and scanned his way through it until he found the part he had been referring to. He handed it up to me, a peace offering.

In the ladies’. This was followed with a thick barrage of numbers. Where the bees buzz. And another assault of numbers. Under their eyes. And at the bottom of the page, after columns and columns of numbers. Everything.

“Everything, what?” I asked. Mickey relaxed slightly and rose from the mattress.

“Everything, Dunc.” He said. “Everything we need to know. All the secrets. They’re hidden in the ladies’ room at the Hive. She hid something there. And she wanted me to know it.”

His fear now turned to pride and he puffed himself up by the strength of this newfound knowledge.

“Oh my God. But wait. Would she make it so obvious? Anybody who found this would be able to figure that out. It’s too simple, Mickey.”

“Maybe she knew I was the only one who knew about the hole in the floor. Maybe—”

“Yeah. But that doesn’t explain why she would hide something at my house.”

I tossed him the ledger and righted the mattress onto the box-spring. I was just about to pick up an overturned dresser when he grabbed my arm.

“But maybe she didn’t.”

“Maybe she didn’t what? Help me with this,” I said. He grabbed an end and together we hauled the dresser back into place.

“Hide something in your place. Maybe she didn’t have to.”

I shook my head. “Nope. She did a weird thing once, Mick. She went into the house once. That Fourth of July. We had a cookout. Everybody was there. Remember? She went into the house for a shirt, but came out without one. I thought of that a while ago. Maybe she was hiding something then.”

He shrugged. I could see his wheels spinning. “Maybe she just wanted it to look that way?”

“Why would she do that?” I asked. But even before the question was out, the answer popped into my head like a sore. And with it, I felt some of the butterflies releasing. “Because somebody who was at that cookout was a somebody who was involved in whatever it was Roni was involved in!”

I struck my forehead to complete the Eureka moment. Mickey’s face lit up. “And she was only throwing them off the scent, Dunc. What she really wanted to do was make them think it. So they wouldn’t find the hole in my closet floor.”

“Ha! Yeah, Mickey. So they wouldn’t find the hole in your closet floor. I wonder if this means that the ledger doesn’t mean anything at all?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know numbers, Dunc. They make me all fuzzy and stuff. That’s why the words stuck out so much.”

“Well, let’s finish cleaning this mess. Then we have to see Larson. Just in case.” I rolled the ledger up and put it in my back pocket. “And maybe you can go through the rest of the words and see if there’s anything else in it that makes sense.”

Mickey beamed with the pride of one who is needed. “Sure thing. I can do that.”

“Great Mick. Then, when you’re done doing that, maybe you can figure out a way for us to sneak into the Hive without landing in the back of Cal’s cruiser.”

“That would be bad, Dunc. That would be the worst thing.”

I allowed his simple but accurate words to linger there, hang in the air about us as we set to our task of righting the rest of the house. There was nothing more to add to them. That was the pickle we were in. We had come to the point where we would have to break the law in order to figure things out.

And though Cal could possibly and finally have his mind put to rest through the outcome of our crime, he’d be the first to throw the book at us. He’d have the key for our cells thrown away long before he’d ever think to ask us why we did it.