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steadying himself, and drew a deep breath. The greenish tinge in his face faded back into normal waxy skin tone. "Yes. Well. No harm was done."
    "Harm?" I exclaimed. "What's in the box, a bomb?"
    He shook his head, and his eyes shaded to hazel. "My most precious possession. If I had lost it, I would die."
    Figuratively, or literally? I opened my mouth to ask, then shut it again. Maybe I didn't really want to know.
    He squinted at me, as if trying to see me clearly. "Are you and Robert ...?"
    "We're dating," I said frostily, "but I'm breaking up with him as soon as I get my strength back."
    He nodded, as if he approved. Then he walked to a hive standing by itself and opened the lid. I blinked. It was a trunk. But I could have sworn it was a hive a second ago.
    He pulled out a tiny jar of honey, about the size of a baby food jar, and held it out to me. "Some of my own raw honey. It will be better if you eat honey from flowers in your area, but it will be weeks before my bees have collected enough to harvest."
    I took the jar and tilted it toward the light. A piece of honeycomb swirled in the gold, surrounded by tiny bubbles. Yellow sugar had collected at the bottom. "It's pretty."
    "Honey is a healing food," he said as he gently closed the chest. "It contains many trace minerals and silica that are of enormous benefit to the immune system."
    I'd been sick so long. My hopes rose. "Do you think this will help me get well?"
    "Yes." He said it with a certainty no doctor had ever used.
    Even if all it did was ease the nausea and let me eat food, it was worth it. I tucked it securely into my coat pocket. "Do you mind if I go now? I want to taste it right away."
    He nodded. "Be my guest."
    As I called Suki to the cart and drove away, I gripped the honey jar. Mal had given me a gift, even after I'd unwittingly tried to break into his private property. Dangerous ex-convict or not, there was something kind about him. A softening in his voice as he addressed the bees.
    Whatever was in that box affected him deeply. The only person I'd ever seen look like that was my brother, when his kid fell in the canal and we almost couldn't fish him out.
    My logical mind assured me that people who climbed onto roofs at night couldn't be trusted.
    But darn it, I wanted to like him. Especially if this honey helped me feel better.
     
     

Mal
     
    After Libby departed, I went in search of my brother. I needed to speak with him and discover what he was up to.
    I drove my camper around Arvin with the windows rolled down. Many odors struck my nose, but none were the particular reek of Robert Seren. Arvin did not impress me--suburbs built in the 60s and 70s, little shopping districts, a park here and there. Just another little town in the San Joaquin valley, surrounded for miles by farmland, with the shoulders of the Sierra Nevadas looming over it.
    It might have been picturesque had not the air pollution and lingering fog blanketed everything in dismal gray.
    I spotted a yellow hummer with a broken side window parked outside a red brick high school. I trundled the motor home into a far corner of the parking lot. Then I set off on foot, with my hands buried in my windbreaker's pockets. One might almost mistake me for a student, if one did not look too closely at my eyes.
    It was noon recess, and the teenagers clustered in groups, talking, snacking, or in some cases, studying. It was not difficult to locate Robert. He had surrounded himself with girls.
    I loitered outside the fence and pulled my hood up. Robert was twenty feet from the fence--too far away for me to hear him. But his mouth moved, and the females hung on his every word. An attractive bunch, all with similar-length hair with similar styles, and tight-fitting blouses to show off newly-acquired feminine figures. I admired them, myself, in the distant, logical way of an art critic.
    Robert took a girl's hand and lifted it to his lips. She jumped as if stung by a wasp, then laughed.
    I gripped the