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yesterday, and the morning before, Julie had been there, too.
    Now she was alone. And the barn seemed much bigger than it ever had before.
    "H-Hi, Greta," Molly called to Flicka's mother, who was gazing placidly over the door of her stall. Though she'd spoken more to hear the sound of her own voice than to greet the horse, the big bay mare whinnied in response. Encouraged by the sound, Molly screwed up her courage to move farther into the barn, stepping carefully through the gloom to the stall shared by Flicka and Greta.
    She reached into her pocket and pulled out some of the sugar lumps, feeding one to the colt, then one to the big mare. As the animals munched the sugar cubes, Molly moved across the stall and opened the outside door. The horses followed her into the pasture, nuzzling at her pockets in search of more sugar. Molly, giggling, pushed them away, then went to the trough and turned on the water tap, letting it run until it flooded over, just as Kevin had showed her. While the water ran, she filled the feeding trough with fresh alfalfa, then returned to the barn to get a coffee can full of oats to add to the fodder.
    It was while she was scooping the oats from the barrel near the tack room that she first heard the sound.
    A faint humming noise, coming from somewhere in the barn.
    Molly peered upward into the darkness of the loft, but could see nothing.
    She frowned, wondering if she ought to find Kevin, or maybe even his father, but when she looked around again and still saw nothing, she decided to ignore the strange noise.
    She took the oats out and added them to the fodder, then turned the other two horses out of their stalls into the pasture.
    Returning to the barn, she began mucking out the stall that Flicka and Greta shared. She raked up all the soiled straw, shoveled it into the wheelbarrow, and took it outside to add to the big compost heap over by the kitchen garden, where Kevin had promised that she'd have her very own rows of squash and tomatoes. "They grow real fast," he'd told her the day before yesterday. "With a lot of stuff, you can hardly see anything. But with squash, you can practically watch them grow." Maybe this morning, before they had to get ready for the wedding, he'd help her plant the seeds.
    The wheelbarrow empty, she started back to the barn, pausing to shrug off her jacket now that the sun was fully up. The day was starting to get hot. Leaving the jacket on the ground by the door, Molly went back into the barn, intent on finishing the cleaning of Flicka's stall.
    The humming sound in the barn seemed louder at first, but as Molly swept the last of the dirty straw out of the stall, it began to fade away into her subconscious. She worked steadily, concentrating hard to be sure she didn't forget any of the things Kevin had taught her. Only when she was finally satisfied that the stall was as clean as Kevin himself could have gotten it did she move to the bin beneath the hayloft to gather fresh straw.
    Now the humming was much louder. When Molly looked up, she saw its source at last.
    High up, just beneath the eaves that soared above the hayloft, bees were circling, barely visible except when they flashed across the beams of sunlight that filtered through the cracks and knotholes in the barn's siding.
    Fascinated, her eyes fixed on the darting insects, Molly started up the ladder to the loft. She had barely gotten to the top when she heard a voice from below.
    Otto Owen's voice.
    "You stop right there," he said. Though his voice wasn't really loud, there was an urgency in it that stopped Molly cold. She froze on the ladder, and then, looking slowly upward, she saw it.
    Her heart began to pound.
    Not more than five feet away from her, clustered around one of the posts that supported the barn's roof, was an enormous, crawling, humming mass.
    A swarm of bees.
    Terrified by the sight, Molly nearly lost her grip on the ladder.
    The swarm was almost two feet across, black with the bodies of