“I am not supposed to comment. I mean, I’m sorry, I can’t comment because it’s a police matter. Anyway, if Andrea has any questions, just ask her to call me, please?”

“Sure thing.”

I knew that within thirty minutes every single person who worked or shopped at Publix was going to know something big and really terrible had happened on the island. And that it had something to do with me.

The doorbell rang at nine. It was Mark Tanenbaum, Darlene’s husband. He was a nice man with age-defying looks, a very successful lawyer and in amazing shape for his age, which I guessed was somewhere around fifty.

“Good morning,” he said. “May I come in?”

“Please! And thanks for coming!” He followed me to the kitchen. “Coffee?”

“Yes, please. Just black. By the way, your garden is unbelievable.”

“Thanks.”

“How’s your momma?”

“If I told you, you wouldn’t believe it.”

“Really? Is that a good thing?”

“She’s fine. She’s with Leslie and her husband in Las Vegas.”

I poured two cups and put one in front of him. Then I sat down.

“Las Vegas. That’s a crazy place, eh? We had an ABA meeting out there a few years back. It was like, wow!”

“That’s what they tell me,” I said.

He took a small notebook from the chest pocket of his sport coat and a pen from another.

He took a sip of the coffee and said, “This is really good coffee. Starbucks?”

“No, Folger’s. This is some mess,” I said.

“Well, Darlene told me what she heard on the wire, but why don’t you tell me what happened in your own words and then we can see what to do.”

I gave him the sequence of events, but I didn’t tell him about the more mystic aspects of my bees or that they might be responding to my pleas for help in ways that they could. It just sounded too crazy. But I did tell him about the bees dropping tiny bombs on Sharon’s car and about them bearding. And I told him about Sharon’s personality and how I thought she was way too uptight. And I mentioned her strawberry allergy.

“So it’s clear there was no friendship between the two of you.”

“No.”

I told him about my relationship with Archie’s boys and Archie and that I had been good friends with Carin. I might have mentioned something about Sharon being a complete paranoid, germophobe, and perfectionist. Maybe.

“She wouldn’t let the boys bring library books home because they had been touched by other people who might have filthy germs,” I said.

“Really. Wow,” Mark said.

“I know,” I said. “Wow.”