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that’s all you’ve been doing lately,” he had the nerve to say. “With Hunter Wallace.”
    “I’ll see you in court.”
    “It’ll be my pleasure. But I tell you, I could use a break from dealing with you, so I’m heading up to the Boundary Waters.”
    The Boundary Waters, way up north, is as remote as you can get. The fishing is good but everything has to be helicoptered in. There aren’t even any toilets or any phone service, that’s how isolated it is. Johnny Jay went at the same time every year and the whole town looks forward to the break. Ten days without the police chief was ten days in heaven.
    “I’d be packed and gone right this minute,” he said, “if I hadn’t had to stop and handle another Fischer incident.”
    And with that, Moraine’s unpopular police chief drove off, leaving me with an expensive problem to deal with.
    Thanks to that woman.
    Wait until I caught up with her again.
    I used my cell phone to call Holly.
    “Breakfast is yummy,” my sister said, chewing into the phone. “Thanks for bringing it for us.”
    “Anytime. Listen, tell me, is one of your guests out trail-riding on one of your ATVs this morning?”
    “That would be Camilla Bailey. She’s one of Max’s team members. Oh, here she is, just back from her ride. Why?”
    “No reason,” I said, hanging up and thinking that this was going to be a really long, stressful day. On one hand, I knew where to find the culprit, so I could make her pay the fine instead of me. On the other hand, her group was visiting my beeyard this afternoon and I’d have to be polite to her. And later I was actually preparing dinner for the Battle-Ax, and her teammate the Ice Queen.
    I wished I hadn’t gotten out of bed this morning.

Four

    Some days, there isn’t a thing you can do but try to get through them all in one piece without too much drama and disaster. This was definitely going to be one of them.
    Johnny Jay’s sneers, plus the pricey ticket he gave me for an act committed by someone else was just one more example of a sucky day happening no matter what I did to try and stop it.
    In regards to his allusion—my real name is Melissa Fischer, but I’ve been called Story as long as I can remember. Mainly because I could look my elders straight in the eye and bald-face lie with such a sweet, angelic expression, it took a long time for them to finally catch on.
    I admit it.
    I used to make up stuff.
    But Johnny Jay is wrong. I
have
grown up. Telling the truth is always the best path—I’ve learned the hard way—even when the consequences can be more painful than a bunch of angry honeybees defending their hive.
    Nonetheless, in spite of my good intentions to tell the truth, the first thing I said to Patti Dwyre when I saw her in The Wild Clover later was, “Love your tattoo.” I’d turned right around and lied mere seconds after mentally expounding on the benefits of truthfulness and priding myself on my changed ways.
    But when it comes to paying compliments, dishonesty is still a gray area for me. How can I not lie sometimes? Pretending not to notice something as obvious as Patti’s tattoo wouldn’t work. Not wanting to cause hurt feelings should justify the occasional fib, right?
    P.P. Patti, which stands for Pity-Party Patti (the reason becomes apparent quickly), is my next door neighbor and a cub reporter for the local newspaper. She might be inexperienced in investigative journalism, but she makes up for it with unconventional enthusiasm. She views herself through rose-colored glasses, in which she’s a step above one of Charlie’s angels. The rest of us see her more as a cross between Inspector Clouseau, Maxwell Smart, and a reincarnated medieval torturer.
    Patti’s mode of attire is always dark. “Shadow wear” she calls it. Today she wore an ebony halter top and a black ball cap, along with a homemade press pass around her neck that she’d made with items from an office supply store. Her pockets are always filled