Read Online Telling the Bees by Peggy Hesketh - Free Book Online Page B

of a young woman—just a girl, really—still in her teens, with plump rosy cheeks and a soft, wavy haircut. Dressed all in white lace, she held a small rose bouquet in one hand and with the other clutched the arm of a taller, fine-boned young man in his middle twenties who wore a starched white shirt, a diagonally striped tie, and a dark suit with a carnation in his lapel. Both bride and groom wore the unsmiling expressions fashionable with formal portraitures of the time, which would have been right before the start of the First World War.
    “They were married in Saint Louis, I believe. Shortly before they moved to California,” I added, though I’m not quite sure why I said it, or even why I recalled such a detail at the time.
    “So this was the whole family?” Detective Grayson said, picking up the next photo in line and holding it to the light as if to get a better view. Mrs. Straussman was seated this time in the great wing-backed chair that used to dominate the corner next to the fireplace in the family’s sitting room. Grown slightly heavier since her wedding photograph, though still not unappealingly so, Mrs. Straussman wore a long-sleeved, straight-waisted dress, most likely made of wool or some other such sturdy fabric. It flared out just below the hips into a loosely pleated skirt trimmed in a curlicued embroidery of sorts. In her arms she cradled a baby, swaddled in a pale hand-crocheted blanket and topped by a tiny lace bonnet. To one side stood a solemn, plain-featured toddler, wearing a white knee-length sailor dress, white stockings, and white shoes. The older child’s stubby fingers were loosely intertwined, allowing her hands to straddle Mrs. Straussman’s right knee. Off to the other side, and slightly to the rear, stood Mr. Straussman, clad in a dark suit and fedora. His left hand rested on the back of his wife’s chair, his right hand fingered a long, chain-link watch fob.
    “Yes,” I said. “This is all there was of the family at that time.”
    “When do you suppose this was?” Detective Grayson said. “I’d make it to be about 1925, maybe ’30, by the way they’re all dressed.”
    I shook my head and pointed to the baby in the picture.
    “Earlier than that,” I said. “Claire can’t be more than three or four months old here, and since she was born in 1920—June twenty-third, to be precise—I would have to say this photograph dates from sometime in the fall of that year.”
    Detective Grayson nodded and put the photograph back on the table. He picked up the next one in the grid and handed it to me. “So who’s this kid?”
    I stared at the sepia-toned portrait of the small, wide-eyed boy with ringlets of light curly hair. He sat perched like one of Botticelli’s cherubs on the arm of an overstuffed davenport. No more than two years old, the boy wore the kind of white baby shoes that doting parents used to bronze as keepsakes, white kneesocks, short pants, and a light-colored shirt with large dark buttons. But unlike Botticelli’s laughing seraphs’, the child’s countenance was as somber as his elders, and his pose appeared just as formal, in its own way, with his little-boy legs crossed at the ankles and one chubby arm artificially draped across the back of the sofa.
    “This was Claire and Hilda’s older brother,” I said. Though I never knew him in the flesh, it seems strange the boy’s name did not leap readily to my tongue. I stared a moment longer at his preternaturally large, sad eyes. “Henry, I believe his name was. No, that wasn’t it,” I stammered. “It was Harry. Harry Junior. He died before I was born.”
    Detective Grayson frowned but did not speak. He had withdrawn his notebook and ballpoint pen from his jacket pocket. He clicked the pen several times.
    “What happened to him?” the detective asked. I took a moment to consider how best to answer. Everything I knew about him was only so much hearsay.
    “As Claire explained it to me,” I said,