The Bee Charmer

By Brad Newby

Eighteen-year-old Mark Matthews has adored Sandy Lewis ever since he can remember. Unfortunately, Mark, a gifted athlete, and Sandy, a genius with lofty goals, are first cousins caught in the web of forbidden love. Seemingly destined to only see his soul mate twice a year, Mark hangs onto the hope that one day he and Sandy will be together. But Sandy is about to discover something about herself that will change both their lives forever.

As soon as Sandy discovers the ability to achieve astonishing physical feats, she begins to suspect that she has inherited powers that not only make her athletically dominant, but also telepathic. After she discovers that Mark is also psychically gifted, Sandy begins to show off her newly discovered capabilities of charming bees, but quickly reins in her gift after she is warned by a neighbor to keep her powers a secret from everyone. But when someone goes missing in their town, Sandy and Mark have no choice but to rely on their gifts to help.

The Bee Charmer is the engaging tale of a young couple’s evolving love and unique abilities as they become immersed in the danger, intrigue, and mystery emerging in their small New England town.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Nov 30, 2012
• ISBN: 9781475962550

Brad Newby

Brad Newby was born in Anderson, Indiana, and earned a bachelor of science degree in electrical engineering from Purdue University. He lives in New Jersey, where he enjoys reading science fiction and fantasy, as well as sport fishing and boating. His first book was The Bee Charmer.

Book preview

PROLOGUE

Legends and artifacts tell us that there is a race of great people who have walked among us since the beginning of time, virtually unknown to the general population and often themselves. They are born with certain gifts and capabilities that are unique among human beings. During the apocalyptic period of Christ’s time, when magic was powerful and inspiring, many became great magicians or seers. Considered heretics and devil worshipers, the Great Inquisition had them tortured and imprisoned or killed and drove them into hiding. At the Salem witch trials, the courts accused one such person of consorting with the devil and sentenced her to prison for many years.

At the simplest, most mundane level, their unique characteristic is that bees will not harm them. But when these Bee Charmers, as some prefer, work with their bees, the bees swarm around them and land on them in great numbers, a horrific sight for the uninitiated, leading to accusations of witchcraft, magic, and sorcery.

These people are born with genetic links to other gifts of great mental, physical, and extrasensory powers that they may inherit. One may be a great genius without knowledge of their more basic Bee Charming abilities or that they may have supernatural or super physical powers.

Most Bee Charmers live out their lives without ever knowing that they have these special talents because these powers and gifts lie undiscovered and undeveloped. Few people ever have the opportunity or inclination to handle bees so they never get the chance to know that they have this most rudimentary characteristic that identifies a Bee Charmer. Even then, without some general knowledge that Bee Charmers exist and that they may have other hidden powers, their journey of self-discovery may go no further. Many of the few that do know either foreswear its practice or do so in great secrecy because discovery can lead to potentially severe consequences.

Knowing, practicing Bee Charmers are quite rare, made more so by the apparent fact that they are all women. Consider great women in history, particularly those of great mental or physical power, and you may be looking at a Bee Charmer.

Part One

CHAPTER 1

We are sitting on a knoll along the side of a road. Our bicycles are parked behind the sign, against whose post we are leaning. I am Mark Matthews and this beautiful creature under my arm is Sandy Lewis. Sandy is stunning at five foot-ten inches tall with shoulder length golden blond hair that falls in long natural curls down past her shoulders. She has the deepest blue eyes I have ever seen. I am six foot-three inches tall with sandy blond hair, a well-tuned athletic build and, together, we are a beautiful couple. Born only two days apart, we turn eighteen in November.

Sandy and I are deeply in love and, unfortunately, we are first cousins. We’ve been taught that this is morally wrong. That does not bother Sandy, but it bothers me to an extent that seems to vary daily.

We are absorbing the warm rays of the sun and the beautiful scenery of Spring Lake valley. Sandy’s shoulder gently leans against my chest and her hand is on my knee.

Sandy, I love you more than words can ever do justice.

I love you too, Mark.

I chuckle to myself about how I am the one that always has the flowery ‘I Love You’ at hand. Sandy is the genius of the two of us, but her ‘I Love You’ is always short and sweet. I know a couple geniuses in high school and Sandy’s intelligence dwarfs theirs, if that’s possible.

Sometimes I wonder when, exactly, I fell in love with Sandy. It seems like we have been in love forever, but I know that cannot be true. When we were five, we were best friends. I never thought, she is a girl and my best friend should be a boy. This is because Sandy could and would do anything. She challenged me mentally, physically, and even tested my courage and, at times, it was difficult for me to keep up with her. For lack of a better term, I would call our love a ‘puppy love’ from eleven to fourteen or so. Of course, hormones were in play at that age, so naturally everything was much more intense. That is when Sandy wanted to sneak kisses and hold hands, even though I resisted. I was embarrassed and I made sure that no one could see us. However, I did love her then, I swore that I did and it was an honest and true love. When we were not together, I dreamed about her and pined for her. It was last year though, when we were seventeen that we both declared our love for each other and vowed that we would never love another. We began to display our affection for each other openly, although we did it discretely. The only spoiler has been me. I said those things and I meant them, but in the back of my mind, I thought that because we are cousins our love is forbidden and doomed. Since then, whenever I am with Sandy, there is a knot in my stomach from this conflict between my love for her and my concern that our love is taboo.

It is such a beautiful day, said Sandy. I think it makes me love you even more.

A car passes by—its tires ruffle the gravel on the shoulder of the road and throws up a cloud of temporarily blinding white powder. As the cloud clears, my daydream dissolves into a million tiny pieces that are too small to reconstruct and rescue. My serenity and joy vanishes and I slide into sadness.

The truth is that Sandy has not been to Spring Lake or on this hillside with me since we were eleven years old. Before then, her family came for holidays and Sandy came alone for one week every summer. Those were the best days of my young life. Now we only see each other a couple times a year, when my family drives to her home for an occasional holiday weekend.

I lived in the Village of Spring Lake, in the northwest corner of the Berkshire Mountains in western Massachusetts with Charles and Grace, my father and mother. It was just east of the hairpin turn on Route 2A. A few miles south was a sign that read Spring Lake, Established 1783, Population 186. From there, where I sat now, you could look out over the mountains and off to your right you could see the lake and our little village opening up before you.

Today was a cool crisp sunny day and you could see all of the lake and town and the surrounding hills from atop the knoll where our village marquee sat. We were nestled in the mountains at an altitude of about 1000 feet with hills all around that rose up another two hundred to three hundred feet. The lake stretched two miles long, a mile wide and forty feet at its deepest. One hundred feet below the lake, an aquifer provided its waters at a constant sixty-four degrees all year long. Today, the water was crystal clear and reflected high floating puffs of white clouds.

It was not always this clear and pristine. In every house in town, a wood burning furnace augmented their heating system, and in every house a wood burning fireplace decorated their living space—the firewood was free from the local sawmill. When you combined all of the wood smoke with the warm air from the lake, we often had a thermal inversion in which a still night’s cold air held the warmer air down at ground level; an effect that reminded me of a Scottish bog with the dense acrid smell of burning wood.

On the east end of the lake near town, there was a dam and a water wheel; with a large pool of dangerous churning water below and a train trestle up above. Before electricity, the wheel provided power to the sawmill with a system of belts and gears. Later, the water wheel drove a generator that replaced the mechanical conveyance. Now, the sawmill was plugged directly into the electric power grid for the area, but the sawmill owners still maintained the wheel for its appearance and the town’s nostalgic character.

The Spring River that flowed from the lake was one of the most beautiful trout steams in the entire Eastern United States. Four miles down stream, it emptied into the larger Deerfield River, an equally great and beautiful trout stream. Until that point, Spring River never froze in the winter and never got as warm as seventy degrees in the summer, which was the highest temperature that trout could survive. It was also a wonderful place to swim. Although a healthy person could stay in the water for over an hour without the onset of hypothermia, it only took about fifteen minutes before a person would start to shiver, and all but the toughest people would head for the shore.

Sandy’s first visit, back when we were five years old, was Memorial Day weekend and it was scorching hot for the Berkshires. It was cooler along the river, and we were wading upstream along the banks of the Spring River when Sandy ran ahead, stripped off her clothes, and jumped into this big swimming hole. I followed suit and since then, we never miss an opportunity to go skinny-dipping in that big pool.

Spring River flowed from Spring Lake through our own little private piece of heaven. The river wrapped around and on the outside of the bend there was a forty-foot pool that was five to eight feet deep where the water moved slowly. Towards the inside was a shoal, covered with nicely smoothed river jacks that you could easily walk on. Then, on the very inside was a ‘run’, which was fast deep water, filled with various size boulders where trout hung out and waited for dinner. You had to know the way to use the shallow places or jump from boulder to boulder to get across the river run or you could end up in waist high, dangerously fast water. The bend in the river encompassed a large flat grassy peninsula where we laid out our blankets and towels and sat in the sun to dry off.

CHAPTER 2

We did not have everything in Spring Lake and that might bother some people who did not live here, just like to have them might bother some people who did live here. We did not have a hospital, a bank, a drug store, any clothing or department stores, a full-time police department or fire department. Nor did we have a fancy restaurant; take out food, a bar, or a package store. All of that was available within ten miles in North Adams or twenty miles in Pittsfield.

We had two streets. Main Street was the primary street, covered with red brick pavers labeled WPA, for the Work Projects Administration from 1938 during the Great Depression. The WPA also gave us beautiful granite curbs and red brick sidewalks the whole length of town.

The first business you saw was Bobby Cole’s Gas Station that had a gas pump, a diesel pump, a tow truck, and a one bay garage. Bobby could not work on new automobiles much since he lacked modern computer equipment, but he could change and align tires, replace brakes, change oil and filters, replace belts and flush your radiator. Bobby did have two bonanza seasons: mounting snow tires in the fall, everyone used four snow tires here, and removing them in the spring when he has to re-align wheels and replace the rims that were ruined by winter’s potholes.

The real excitement at Bobby’s was when he got an old pre-computer car to work on. Recently, he had Dr. Wilson’s 1957 Chevy Impala in for repairs. That kind of event brought out five or six men who would stand elbow to elbow around the open hood, with Bobby front and center. The kibitzers periodically offered advice:

Did you check the coil?

I had a 283 engine just like this one and I would check for a crack in the distributor cap.

Bobby never lost his temper though, he was just glad to be the center of attention. It was Bobby’s where I learned the basics of automobile repair, which, I now thought, would be of absolutely no value in my future.

There was a wide unnamed dirt road for the logging trucks that went over the train tracks to the mill between Bobby’s and Mr. Sexsmith’s Blacksmith Shop. Sexsmith was a terrible moniker and Smitty, we called him, hated his surname his entire life. When I was twelve, I showed him a book from school with pictures of a sextant. I explained how they were solely responsible for the exploration of the entire seafaring world, and that this was where the time honored name of Sexsmith came from. He was very proud and made a sextant to decorate his sign. He kept the book a few days and waved it under the nose of every person that walked by. Imagine the condition it was in after being in the hands of a blacksmith—I had to replace it. I nearly fainted when I looked inside the cover page and it said seventy-five dollars. Fortunately, the replacement cost, per school policy, was only five dollars.

Smitty was not your large, heavy, stereotypical blacksmith. While he was bent from all the years of hard labor, his frame was tall and slim with large muscles, tendons and sinew that, on his excessively lean body, appear to be only attached by skin. Despite the fact that he was sixty years old, he looked like some schoolboy’s idealized superhero and he was, without a doubt, still the strongest man in town. He lamented the day that he would retire because he feared that would be the end of his Blacksmith shop.

Smitty’s was a great place for youngsters to hangout on a Saturday morning. Our fathers first brought Sandy and me here when we were six. As long as Smitty had an audience, he would explain, step by step, what he was doing and the reason why. If you stood there long enough, you would hear the same story for every horseshoe or each piece of wrought iron that he made. Smitty gave a little gift to all of his first time visitors. The boys received a square-cut nail made by Smitty. He twisted the same nail into a ring as a gift for the girls.

A yard of stables separated Smitty’s from the General Store. That was where Smitty housed the sawmill’s six huge draft horses and customers’ horses. Most mills used great cranes to move the logs. At Calhoun’s Sawmill though, they reasoned that it was cheaper and just as effective to use draft horses just as they did a hundred years ago. They used the horses with a system of large cables, pulleys and claws to lift the giant tree size logs off the truck trailers and stack them. Later, they moved one log at a time up to the conveyor that fed the big saws. It was an amazing scene to watch.

The General Store was, for many people, the heart of Spring Lake. It was a combination hardware store, gardening shop, working clothes for men, tobacco shop, coffee bar and penny candy store. For their special trusted friends, they kept a few bottles of Old Granddad and Jim Beam behind the counter. Mr. Griswald, or Griz as we called him, was a short jovial fellow that everybody liked, especially the local kids. Mrs. Griz was so short and petite that she stretched on her tiptoes to reach the old fashion cash register that they kept for atmosphere.

If you stopped in the store, you got a free piece of penny candy. My favorite was the strawberry twisters. Penny candy costs five or ten cents everywhere, but not at Griz’s. It was his loss leader. When your parents sent you to the store to buy something, Griz gave you a bag of penny candy that was, in some unknown way, proportional to what you bought. My friends and I spent many hours comparing the number of pieces of penny candy that we received to the amount on the receipt for our purchase, but no one ever discovered the formula.

Cross Street separated the General Store from the Food Store. It was here that the greatest crime in modern Spring Lake history occurred. A vagrant walked into town from Route 2A, ambled into the General Store and told Griz that he was looking for a meal, a bed, and a little bit of work. Now, Spring Lake did not have or attract vagrants. We hardly ever saw a stranger who was not just passing through town. We were a bit naïve and too good hearted. Griz gave him an empty room, a shower, a new set of work clothes and four hours worth of chores for the next day. The Café gave him dinner and breakfast. Then he was supposed to clean-up behind the General Store.

Sandy was here that week for her annual summer vacation. She was nine, got up early and decided to go explore town. She saw the stranger working out behind the General Store and wandered down Cross Street to see what was going on. He grabbed her and pulled her back behind the building where no one could see. Fortunately, Sandy screamed and kicked with all her might, enough to draw attention. Griz and a customer quickly subdued the man and held him until the State Police arrived. Sandy was not hurt but she was frightened to the point of hysteria. Her dress was torn and she had fingerprint size bruises everywhere. She still has recurring nightmares about the assault—nightmares that make it impossible for her to go back to sleep.

Nearly every morning you saw Captain Clinton’s State Police cruiser parked in front of Griz’s where he would get his first cup of coffee and check on the health and welfare of Spring Lake. Then in the evening, he often passed through on his way home for his last cup of coffee when he inevitably complained that he needed to cut back on his coffee. We called Captain Clinton the ‘sheriff’, a name that he seemed to take pleasure in, especially when we called the State Police barracks and asked for him by that name.

Griz was the self-appointed keeper of Spring Lake’s news and rumors. When someone entered the store, you might hear him say something like Did you hear about Fred’s chickens? or You know Mildred finally lost that ol’ dog of hers. Griz talked about marital problems and the big ‘C’ in whispers. The problem was that news and rumors didn’t happen that often in Spring Lake, so Griz had to hold on to the last tidbit, week after week, until something new came along.

I never passed Griz’s without stopping to see him. Today he seemed unusually anxious.

I’ve got a great job for you to finish off your summer. I need someone to fix up my seed shed, said Griz.

Fix it up? I can’t remember when it was ever used.

Well I need some new storage space. I asked Jeb, but he said the job was too big for his weary ol’ bones, said Griz.

My skills aren’t up to something like that. I’m sorry, but I have to say no. I’ll take a look at it though, maybe I’ll think of someone.

I walked out the side door onto Cross Street, past the place of Sandy’s attack, and down to the next building that was the seed shed. I picked up the door to open it because it sagged with the corner dug into the dirt. Even then, I could just squeeze through. I looked around. So much daylight came through that I did not need a light. The barn-board siding was drenched in rot. Over me were fractured timbers and a split center post. I backed out of there very carefully. I was scared just to be in there and I could not imagine who would fix it without knocking it down first.

As I walked back to Main Street, Griz stuck his head out and said, Well?

That’s a death trap. You’d better look for a bull-dozer.

There were two park benches in front of Griz’s store on either side of its entrance. On nice summer evenings, a group of older residents gathered there until Griz turned off the lights at 9:00 o’clock. They called themselves the Village Elders, a strictly self-awarded honorary title, and they discussed all things big and small, anything from the President and Congress to local affairs, beginning with the Red Sox. Some nights they only talked about the Red Sox. Then they usually made up jokes about Spring Lake, which were mostly about the mayor, or other towns’ people or even themselves. There was supposed to be a book somewhere that was entitled ‘Greater Spring Lake: Jokes and Resolutions’ and, now and then, someone would say . . . that last one has to go in the book. Oh how I wished I could find that book. I asked about it more than once. One night I passed by early and Frenchy, the most elder of the elders, was there chewing tobacco and whittling on a stick.

I asked Frenchy, How can I get a look at that book?

Frenchy spit, Oh, you’d have to see the chairman.

Who’s the chairman?

Oh, he’s not here tonight, rarely is nowadays, said Frenchy.

So, there was more than a good chance that the book was nothing more than a Spring Lake legend, a product of the Village Elders.

Our mayor was a part time position with no staff other than his answering machine and fax machine. Mr. Green has been our mayor for over twenty years and just how long he had run for office unopposed was a topic of discussion, as was the year that it snowed so much that only the mayor himself showed up to vote. Mr. Green distinguished himself from everybody else in town; he always wore a vest, usually a green tartan plaid, and a pocket watch. He was a regular on the benches; where he would protect himself from any new jokes or fabricated rumors.

Hey Mayor, did you order that cul-de-sac yet? Where are we going to put it?

Mayor, you know how some historic towns put up those gas lights? I thought we could be different and put up hitching posts. They will cost a lot less money.

Mayor, will our taxes go up if we split Main Street into North Main Street and South Main Street? It might draw more tourists.

They might, we’ll have twice as many streets to maintain; but one thing’s for sure, the state will make us put in a stop light and pay for it ourselves.

Then Griz might speak up and say, "But, if we do split Main Street, it will be right here at Cross Street next to my store. Right mayor?"

CHAPTER 3

Cross Street, where the assault on Sandy took place, was a dirt road that ran between Griz’s and the Food Store. It swept back over the train tracks, past a few homes, to the front entrance of the sawmill which was purchased by the Calhoun family in 1849 and was still owned and operated by them. Depending on the economy, the sawmill employed up to forty people at a time, and processed both hardwood and softwood trees into all the standard size boards that you see at the lumberyard. There was not a person in town that did not praise the generosity and integrity of the Calhoun family.

My parents moved here from Pittsfield about thirteen years ago so my father could work in the mill after GE laid him off. When you brought up the subject of the mill or its owners, my father would launch into a sermon about the Calhoun family. There was no one that he would rather work for because there was no employer that treated its