The Music of Bees by Eileen Garvin (free ereaders txt) 📗

At the time, Alice hadn’t thought much about the county’s defensive posturing. She’d been busy helping her parents move, and though the oil spill distressed her, she really believed the county would do the right thing, which was to force Cascadia to clean up the sidelined railcars and greasy oil before they began running trains along the river again. They should also make Cascadia set speed limits to decrease the likelihood of a future derailment. Only the county hadn’t made Cascadia do any of that. It had taken a lawsuit from the watershed group, hadn’t it?

Alice fumed as she scrolled through the rest of her email. Why not let people talk to each other? They were members of this community, not county robots. And wasn’t the county supposed to be looking out for its residents?

Apparently, Alice wasn’t the only one who missed the after-hours email. There was a scramble for seats in the conference room. Bill sat at the head of the table, breathing through his nose and drumming his fingers on the table. He tugged his sweater down over his belly as he waited for people to settle.

Nancy was teasing the new intern, Casey, about a picture of his girlfriend on his phone. The kid was blushing up the back of his neck into his red hair. Alice could smell the hot plastic stir stick in Nancy’s eternal cup of coffee. Chairs squeaked and groaned as people made room for each other.

Bill cleared his throat. “Good morning. Thank you, everyone, for being here. I think you all know why we’ve gathered, so I’ll get right to it.”

And back to my golf game, Alice thought.

Bill put on his glasses and read from a piece of paper. “‘All employees of Hood River County are bound by the individual nondisclosure agreements they signed upon entering employment, and which are understood to renew automatically each year. Said agreements include any and all county business as well as affairs among and between individual contractors and private corporations.’”

Bill dropped the paper on the table and pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket, coughed, and mopped at his mouth. “I’ll turn it over to Legal now for the specifics.”

The county’s lead attorney, Jim Murphy, gave a general wave from where he sat at the front of the room. Skinny and amicable, Jim wore a faded button-down shirt and rumpled khakis. He opened his laptop and began to explain the fine print of the nondisclosure agreement. Alice wasn’t really listening. She was thinking about the Cascadia oil spill in Mosier. She was thinking about the neonicotinoids in SupraGro pesticides that had killed the bees in Nebraska and other states. Out of the corner of her eye she saw Bill lean back in his chair and thought he was looking at her, but he was looking past her at Nancy, who was still whispering to Casey.

Jim, reading through the legalese, suddenly stopped. “Yes, Rich. Question?”

All eyes turned to Rich Carlson, who had his hand up. Rich lowered his polyester-sheathed arm and folded his hands in front of him like an altar boy.

“How would that last article affect an employee of the county? That section about communication with the media, I mean?”

Jim looked down at the screen and back at Rich. “Well, I think the terms are pretty clear, Rich. It just means that no county employee is authorized to speak to the media regarding any county policy unless so directed by the leadership of the organization. In other words, no interviews.”

“Thank you, Jim,” Rich said. He glanced at Alice, leaned forward, and typed on his laptop, his thin lips curled into a smirk.

Alice thought of Pete’s photo, and her face grew hot.

“Anything else there, Rich? Okay, then. I’ll keep going,” Jim said.

After the meeting, Alice waited for her colleagues to file out of the room. She could see Rich talking to someone in the hallway and blocking everyone’s way out. He tapped his bald spot with his fingertips as he talked. The memory arose of the mistletoe, Rich’s dry lips. She shuddered. Jim, one of the last to leave, caught her eye and winked.

Alice returned to her office, hoping to find Bill. She wanted to go over the drafts of the waterfront project regulations for her afternoon meeting at the building site. But Bill’s office was dark. Alice sighed. He’d probably headed home already. Nancy’s chair was empty too. Alice sat down, knowing she should work on the weekly compliance reports. Instead, she opened Google and typed “SupraGro honeybee death.”

There it was, story after story, and not just on beekeeping forums. There were articles in the San Francisco Chronicle, the Oklahoma Observer, and Huffington Post. The most recent lawsuit was in Sacramento, where commercial beekeepers had reported losses of 75 percent over the year before. Scientists had traced the deaths to SupraGro used on almond orchards in and around California’s Central Valley. That lawsuit was significant because the almond industry was so heavily dependent upon commercial beekeepers. California had so few honeybees remaining that it had to truck in hives from all over the West to pollinate its crops. That meant that the bees that had died had come from Oregon, Washington, Montana, and Canada. An estimated seven million honeybees died during a five-day period.

Alice kept reading, poring over the stories about SupraGro’s refusal to even consider the science behind the complaints in county after county around the West. When Nancy returned, Alice reopened her reports and ignored her colleague, who wanted to gossip about Jim Murphy and his much younger wife. She pouted when Alice wouldn’t join her for a smoothie at Ground and left. The morning dragged. Alice tried to focus on work, but her mind was drawn back to the news stories about the bees and the multistate lawsuit against SupraGro. Stan had to know about that, didn’t he? Was the Watershed Alliance in that fight? Alice itched to make some phone calls, calls she couldn’t make at work—to Stan, Chuck Sauer