"Come on, Silver, it's Malloy, remember? Your partner in crime. We both know who Emily is. Emily Kaempfert. The underage girl I hauled out of the pig party. The one you took me there to find."

  "But her name was never released,” she said carefully. “How do you—?"

  "You called out to her at the bust, remember? And Westover's a small campus. I had no trouble finding out who she was. And where she lived."

  Sara's face went suddenly still. Unreadable as a mask.

  "Kappa Rho,” I went on. “The sorority for promising academics. And Emily was very promising. A math whiz who graduated from high school at fifteen. Valedictorian. Precocious, but also pudgy and plain. With no social skills at all. But you know all that, don't you? Because you live at Kappa Rho, too. In fact, you're a mentor there. For freshmen like Emily. You knew her, didn't you?"

  "I knew ... who she was,” Sara said carefully. “That's why I was so shocked to find her at that party."

  "Bull! You knew damned well she'd be there. You helped her to get in. The security guard and Braxton both knew me but they still checked your ID. They must have checked Emily's too. The papers ran pictures of the fake ID Emily used to get into the party. Pretty lame. It wouldn't have fooled me. Don't think it would have fooled that security guard or Braxton either."

  "What is it you think you know, Malloy?"

  "I think Emily had a much better fake ID, maybe pro quality. But she's only a freshman and a fifteen-year-old at that. She wouldn't have a clue about how to find an ID good enough to get her past security. But you would. You did a story on it last semester."

  "That's crazy."

  "Is it? When you grabbed Emily's purse in the scuffle, I thought you were trying to help me get her out of there. But now I think you swapped the crude ID for the one she actually used to get into the party. The raid would be a very different story if the star reporter was guilty of setting up the crime she helped bust. My God, how could you do it?"

  "Do what?"

  "A chubby geek like Emily probably never had a date in her life. Certainly not at Westover. So when she told you she'd been invited to the Delta House party, she had no idea what it meant. But you did. You should have warned her, Sara. Instead, you furnished her with fake ID, then hired me to help you get pictures. Knowing that kid was headed for total humiliation, or a whole lot worse."

  "Pig parties have been an open sore on this campus for years. You said it yourself. They're loud, lewd, and degrading to women. Somebody had to bring it down."

  "The parties may be sophomoric but they've gone on quite awhile with no major damage done. But that's not true anymore, is it? Nearly two dozen futures smashed up and one poor shlub looking at serious jail time. Thanks to you."

  "With your help."

  "True, and that's what bothers me the most. That I came here looking for a fresh start and wound up wrecking a lot of innocent lives."

  "Puhleeze!” she snorted. “There was nothing innocent about that party."

  "Emily was innocent. God knows what'll happen to her now. The pig party was idiotic, but it was just one night. The fallout from the raid will go on for years. I can understand your wanting to end it, but I can't believe you sent Emily in there, knowing what might happen to her."

  "Believe what you like,” she said acidly. “If you want more money, maybe we can work something out. But if you try to go public with this crock, my editors will sue you into the poorhouse."

  "Don't worry, Sara, I can't talk without throwing Emily to the sharks and she's suffered enough already. I don't want to hurt anyone else. Not even you."

  "As if you could,” she sneered, rising. “Good luck with your career, Malloy. Maybe I'll look you up sometime. If I need a drink."

  And she walked away. The prettiest, smartest woman who's ever asked me out, or probably ever will.

  And the coldest.

  Oddly enough, I think I preferred the Sara from the party, braces and all, to the perfect, plastic Barbie doll she's become.

  Beauty's a tricky business. We all think we can define it, but one guy's woofer is the next guy's true, true love. In the years between, I've watched the mating game play out a thousand times and I've decided real beauty comes down to character. When people respond to each other, soul to soul, everything else suddenly becomes very small change. A plain woman in love can take your breath away. A cover girl without a heart is only a picture. And a flat one at that.

  But if beauty's complicated, ugly's a lot easier. Because looks don't have a damned thing to do with it.

  Pig-party rules are simple. Bring the ugliest date you can find.

  For most guys, that means a plain Jane or the Wicked Witch of the West, not a media babe like Sara Silver.

  As for me? I've only been to one pig party. Wildest night of my life.

  And I definitely took the right girl.

  (c)2008 by Doug Allyn

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  Fiction: SUCH RAGE OF HONEY by Cheryl Rogers

  Since Cheryl Rogers last appeared in EQMM she has won the 2006 Henry Lawson Award and sold stories to several Australian and U.K. magazines. Some terms that might be unfamiliar to U.S. readers in this tale set in the gold-mining country of New South Wales are “mullock heaps": the debris from gold mines; “Metters No.2": a type of wood stove; and “humpy": a settler's hut.

  Such rage of honey in their bosom beats.—Virgil

  Forrester hadn't expected the sight of a bit of rust and red dirt to bring a lump to his throat. He thought he'd prepared himself, spending the best part of three weeks circling the vineyards and the timbered hinterland before homing in on the old gold-mining town. It was the wagon step in the ringlock fence that threw him.

  "Leave it, boy." His father's warning flew at him out of the mullock heaps, across the nodding heads of wild oat. Through time. "You want to leave a bit of past for them that come after us."

  The words bit sharp as the sting of the wild bees whose hives Forrester raided. In the woodland outside Mudgee he'd stirred up a swarm of robber workers. They'd been tucked up in a chimney, in an abandoned rabbiter's hut. He'd heard the mud bricks rattle with their rage. But he'd stayed calm. Reached for the smoker and topped up its burner with dry pine needles. Gently puffed in the cool and fragrant suggestion of burning pine to soothe their troubled souls.

  Yet now the apiarist found his hand reaching for the step, rubbing at the rust with the flat of his thumb. He wondered at the leather—work boots, moccasins, the odd feminine heel—that had dished out the forged iron. Wondered at the prospectors, fortune hunters, and downright gold diggers who'd hitched a ride in the wagon, now reduced to one rusted step hung in ringlock in a fenceline jagged as a bushman's smile.

  And as the flakes peeled away, Forrester felt the years slip away too. He was a boy again, scooping armloads of autumn leaves from the avenue flanking the road into town, pretending to bury the youngest of his screaming herd of sisters. Trapping crayfish in Tambaroora dam. Blackberrying the snarl of thicket skirting the hills and selling the pickings in punnets from a trestle table at the edge of the road.

  Remembering his father's warning, he stopped rubbing as abruptly as he'd started.

  "...leave a bit of past for them that come after us..."

  The words rang clear as the inland sky on a summer morning, yet Forrester couldn't have been higher than his father's gun belt when he'd first heard them. Couldn't have realized that he'd be one of those ” ... that come after us..."

  But now he understood why he'd spent the past twenty days circling loops around the heart of his boyhood.

  Like a bee.

  Dancing.

  * * * *

  Every Friday night old man Kelly followed the same ritual. He'd eat tea—he didn't hold with calling the evening meal “dinner"—early.

  Then he'd let the fire in his Metters No. 2 burn down to nothing. And when the heat had all but gone and the chimney was cool enough to touch, he'd turn the key in the lock of the only door on the weatherboard humpy others tried to pretend was something it wasn't.

  "Your cottage really should have a back door, Mr. Kelly." The pretty little Welsh nurse who came every day to dress his leg ulcer had been a picture of concern on her first visit. Thirty something, homely, running away from a broken marriage. "What if there was a fire?"

  "Then I'd fry," he'd informed her, and congratulated himself when her frown deepened.

  "Don't want you frying now, do we, Mr. Kelly?" She'd at least had the optimism to give his arm a playful slap before raising her blond curls and taking a hard look around her. Oil lamps, enamel mugs, hunting knives, a bedroll neatly folded on a low camp stretcher.

  She'd pretended not to notice, or perhaps, he wondered later, she had genuinely found nothing remarkable in his austerity, for all she'd said in her lilting accent was: "Besides, with fittings like these you must be heritage listed."

  It was only when he was sure the lock was safe that he'd allow himself to reach up into the breast of the chimney and remove the loose brick.

  On this particular Friday he stood the brick as he always did, on the side of the hob next to the pan of potatoes, carrots, and peas he'd cook up as bubble and squeak for breakfast.

  Then, using both hands, he reached up again and pulled a faded khaki satchel from the dark hole. The weight of it brought a smattering of soot and dust down on the remains of his hair.

  Kelly's hands, weathered brown by his passion for working dirt, shook a little as he brushed cobwebs from the bag and loosened the drawstring. He tipped the contents onto a scrubbed pine table and smiled.

  Like a schoolboy poring over a particularly pleasing collection of cats, jacks, and queenies, he picked up each piece of gold-veined quartz and each gleaming nugget in turn. He held the treasure up to the late-afternoon sun streaming through the dust-smeared window in the humpy's west wall and turned it until threads of gold danced in the light.

  He left until last a godfather of a nugget, four times as big as the tombolas he'd nicked as a kid. The weight alone told him it must be almost solid. The main body was in the shape of a bird, with enough of a fan rearing up behind it for him to call it The Peacock.

  Kelly could only ever use this name in his head, which, as anyone in town would tell you, was addled by too many years on the turps until he'd settled into semi-sobriety. The Peacock was the king of his pickings, his prize for spending thirty years chasing the remains of alluvial gold that the earlier waves of prospectors had failed to find.

  Had he been honest with himself, he would have admitted that the nugget had brought him about as much luck as the bird it represented.

  But honesty had never been Kelly's strength.

  He'd even let an innocent mate take the blame when he'd poached the nugget from the front seat of the ute belonging to the prospector who'd unearthed it.

  And as greed succumbed to reason he'd realised that he had a gold piece too distinctive to cash in, yet way too valuable to conveniently “lose” down one of the abandoned mine shafts that pocked the landscape.

  Kelly kissed the big lump before packing it away with the rest and returning the satchel, with some difficulty, to its hidey hole inside the chimney.

  With the brick too replaced, he shaved, using a dish of water and a manual razor. He didn't believe in wasting electricity to cut hair, even if his humpy had been connected to the mains. Which it wasn't, because he'd be damned before paying money to a state institution!

  He closed the ritual by lifting a tan leather dog collar and lead from a nail behind the door. The dog tack was stiffened with fencing wire so that the lead and collar held firm when he gripped the loop of leather in his right hand, even without a dog in the collar.

  "Come on, Ben.” Kelly gave a sharp whistle. “Show yourself, boyo, pub time!"

  Anyone who heard him would think him mad, he knew that. Half the town said so already, and the other half thought it but was either too kind or too timid to say so. Not to his face. But he rather liked the idea of a dog called Ben.

  Ben Hall. After the bushranger who'd plundered the nearby hills until felled by police gunfire at Billabong Creek.

  "Ned Kelly and Ben Hall,” he said aloud, then laughed before whistling up the dog again. “Ah, there you are at last, you mullocky mongrel..."

  Kelly stooped and fastened the collar, then, lead in hand, he unlocked the door and set out for his regular Friday night pint of lager in the public bar at the Hargreaves.

  Ben Hall was a popular figure in the bar, and Kelly knew he'd receive his fair share of comments on the state of the dog. Except, of course, the collar was empty because there was no dog and never had been. You had to wonder, sometimes, who was madder, the pub patrons or the wild-eyed old man who conned them into seeing a dog that wasn't there.

  * * * *

  A faded mustard Land Rover pulled into the angled parking outside the Hargreaves Hotel. Publican Eleanor Parry stopped restocking the bar fridge to study the vehicle.

  The mirror over the public bar caught her—back straight as a ramrod despite a birth certificate that put her age the other side of sixty. She disguised the years with pancake, mascara, and a slick of scarlet lipstick she considered totally appropriate for an ex-cop who'd taken on a run-down pub and pulled it up by its bootstraps.

  Yet there was enough country copper still kicking in Parry to justify keeping the snap-locks on her handcuffs lubricated with machine oil.

  Her ice-blue eyes widened as the lean, dark figure slammed the door as hard as one does when a vehicle reaches that precarious state between sentimentality and the scrap heap.

  The former police sergeant made a quick assessment—she couldn't stop herself, even after ten years out of the force. Caucasian, male, thirties, tanned—suggesting a job outdoors or enough money to spend a lot of time on the coast. Probably the former, given the clapped-out state of the Land Rover.

  "Holy hell,” she murmured as the stranger removed his Akubra and pushed open the heavy pub door with his right forearm. In his left hand was what looked like a small thermos flask, wrapped in a cloth.

  The lines in Parry's life-honed face set as the visitor peeled off a pair of wrap-around lenses. The big woman's flint eyes narrowed. “You the Forrester kid?” She shook her mane of bottle-burgundy hair in disbelief. “For a minute there, I thought you were your old man."

  Forrester held the look, read the mistrust, returned it. “That'd be hard."

  Parry picked up a chewed biro and scribbled something illegible in an invoice book. “Your dad still ... away?"

  "Nope.” Forrester surveyed the premises. He'd heard Eleanor had introduced some brassy class to the old pub. There were panning dishes hung on hooks fastened over a low-slung beam, sepia photographs of the gold rush, local produce arranged on a dresser. “Did his time and got out."

  "So...” Parry summoned a wary smile, felt it flicker and let it die. “What's he up to now?"

  "Not a lot.” Forrester pulled the cloth away from the container and put it on the counter. “He's in there. Only been out six weeks when he died."

  Parry shifted her weight from one black patent killer heel to the other, and back again. She stared at the urn. It hadn't been easy, watching her bent senior sergeant arresting the father with the mother already dead.

  Harder still when he claimed all the credit. She'd spoken up only to see her chance at promotion permanently shelved.

  Welfare authorities wearing well-meaning smiles had stepped in to deal with the Forrester kids. The girls had been fostered out back in Sydney. The boy had been just old enough to slip into the shadows of the outside world.

  Now Parry felt her glance darting between the urn that contained the senior Forrester's ashes and the coolly seething face of the son.

  "Is that what your dad wanted?” Parry grabbed a tea towel and began drying glasses with undue vigour. “To be laid to rest, here!"

  "At the old cemetery.” Forrester picked up the urn and wrapped it again in the cloth. “You got a law against it?"

  The convicted thief's son didn't wait for an answer, and Parry's copper training told her not to attempt one. But the change of direction with the next question surprised the woman who'd once claimed she'd heard everything.

  "Want to buy some honey? On commission? It's local."

  "Where'd you get it?"

  Forrester didn't rise. “Mudgee, Sofala, far north as the Burrendong. I'm an apiarist. It's what I do."

  The retired copper's relief was such that she heard herself gushing. Hadn't the father kept bees? To supplement the meagre living he'd made as a prospector who did a bit of rabbiting on the side.

  If only he hadn't been fool enough to get greedy.

  And to get caught with evidence linking him with the theft of one of the biggest gold nuggets west of the Great Dividing Range.

  Parry shook her head, rejecting the memory. If the boy had made good, then that was some sort of atonement.

  "Show me what you've got,” she said, opening the till.

  * * * *

  It took Forrester the best part of a warm afternoon to track the bees to the orchard surrounding Kelly's hut.

  He'd seeded a small wooden box with honeycomb and brushed the cork from a bottle of anise oil lightly across the lid. Then he lured four workers from a patch of Paterson's Curse, fluoro mauve in the syrupy heat, into the bee box and felt it throb with their wrath.

  "It doesn't take long for their greed to overcome their outrage...." His father's homily carried to him on the wind. Across the purple flower heads. From an afternoon in a long-ago September when the earth surrendered the scent of dust and pollen to him. In that moment he'd realised his destiny would be inextricably linked with the annual honey trail.

  Within minutes, the angry buzzing gave way to silence and he knew the bees had begun gorging themselves on the sweet liquid.

  Soon, the first had returned to the hive and within thirty minutes one bee line was established. He tracked the line through a stand of red gums, down into Kelly's land. Then he pulled a contour map from his backpack, plotted the course, packed up the box of bees, and moved to another paddock one kilometer west.