She found a spot to sit among boulders already warming from the morning sun. The ferry was a moving speck on the water as it coasted toward the mainland. She fervently hoped Panda was on that boat because if he was still at the house, she’d have to move out, and more than ever, she didn’t want to leave. The ugly words he’d flung at her last night still burned. People were never cruel to her, but Panda had been deliberately vicious.

She didn’t care why he’d lashed out at her or even if he believed what he’d said. His words had destroyed any lingering nostalgia over their great adventure. And that, ultimately, was a good thing.

By the time she was back on her bike, she’d resolved to put herself on a regular schedule. She’d take advantage of the cooler mornings to go out on the lake or to explore the island. In the afternoons, she’d start writing the chapters she’d promised her father.

As she neared the turnoff to Goose Cove Lane, she glimpsed the same robin’s-egg blue house she’d spotted yesterday. The island’s undulating shoreline made distances deceptive, but this must be where Toby and his grandmother lived—not all that far from the Remington home as the crow flew.

A mailbox leaned at a precarious angle on one side of the driveway with an abandoned farm stand on the other. Although the house was several miles from town, it had a decent location for selling summer produce, since the highway led to the south beach, the largest on the island and the place where she’d gone last night near sunset. A faded sign dangling crookedly from a broken chain read CAROUSEL HONEY FOR SALE.

Impulsively, she turned into the driveway.

Chapter Ten

BREE SCREAMED AND SPRANG AWAY from the hive.

“Oh, god … Oh, god … oh, god …” She moaned, hunched her shoulders, shivered. The mass she’d seen in the bottom of the brood box wasn’t an arbitrary collection of debris. Oh, no. It was a mouse. A dead mouse, petrified inside the sticky mass of protective propolis the bees had deposited around it.

She shuddered, jerked off her stiff leather beekeeper’s gloves, and retreated across the yard. According to Toby, Mr. Wentzel had given the bees a strong sugar solution last month, but now the hives needed to get new brood boxes. This was only the third hive she’d opened. What was she going to find inside the rest?