A Bat in the Belfry

by Sarah Graves

  But tonight everything was quiet, raw, and damp, the kind of night that could bring all your demons creeping up out of the murkiness at you. And whatever was going on with Chip, I thought it was more than a brisk walk could cure.

  But he was a survivor, so even then, and even a half hour later when the long-silent church bell a few streets over began ringing and wouldn’t stop—

  Even then, I don’t think I was really worried about him.

  Not yet.

  When I went back inside, the fire on the dining room hearth had fallen to feathery embers; I checked to see that the screen was up securely in front of them and the damper open a crack, and turned out the lamps.

  Upstairs in their apartment on the third floor of the old house, my father and my mother-in-law, Bella Diamond, slept. Wade was asleep, too, in our room’s massive antique four-poster, and in the kitchen I’d seen the two dogs, Monday the old black Lab and Prill the Doberman, dead to the world in their dog beds.

  A burglar, I thought, could have a field day in here and those two wouldn’t stir. But in Eastport the odds were still very much against it: anyway, burglars who want home-repair tools and materials are not so prevalent, here or anywhere, and those were the majority of my belongings nowadays.

  So I dismissed the thought and went upstairs, where Wade lay with an arm flung out. Easing in beside him, I listened for last sounds that might mean I’d have to get up again—the furnace running despite my turning it down, a dog needing to be let outside one more time, or my own personal nightmare, a freak fireplace spark jumping the hearth screen to create an inferno, unstoppable unless I heard it early.

  But there was nothing except that foghorn. I drifted off, only to snap awake when the church bell began ringing.

  And ringing some more.

  Piloting her old Honda CRV one-handed and very fast through the streaming darkness of an unfamiliar rural road in the rain, Lizzie Snow turned the heat up and the defroster fan to high, swigged from the thermos of bourbon-spiked coffee on the car’s console, and cranked the volume on Steely Dan’s “Black Friday” up yet another notch. At the speed she was traveling, and under these conditions, she probably should’ve kept both hands on the wheel. But …

  Screw it. Just screw it, she thought as she drove through the rainy night on an empty road in the middle of Who-the-Hell-Knew-Where, Maine, while the Honda’s wipers slapped out a flat, back-and-forth rhythm: I quit my job, I quit my …

  “Shit.” Two glowing eyes in the murk ahead made her touch the brakes lightly and put the thermos down without looking at it. Two more pairs; she braked harder, her high beams coalescing around several large shapes in the road, wet leaves spiraling down around them.

  Deer. She slowed nearly to a stop on the shiny ribbon of wet asphalt. The animals peered incuriously at her, then continued their casual progress across the road, disappearing like ghosts in the tall weeds on the other side.

  She muted the CD player and lowered the car window, feeling her heart pounding in her chest. Rain pattered, loud in the late-night silence; ninety miles out of Bangor and she might as well have been nine hundred. Breathing in the cool, acid-wet smell of the last autumn leaves plastered to the blacktop and the whiff of salt in the night air, she was suddenly sure she’d made a mistake. Then the final deer, the very smallest one that she’d known somehow would be still be there, poked its nose from between two old cedar fence posts. Delicately he stepped in front of the car, pausing once to turn and look at her with his huge, dark eyes.

  His two fuzzy forehead bumps, she supposed, were nubbins of antlers. Only when he’d vanished into the brush at the far side of the road with the rest of his kin did she let her breath out. Just a baby.

  But that thought sent her hand out past the thermos in the center console to the photograph on the passenger seat, slipping it from beneath the .38 automatic that she had used to weigh the sheet of eight-by-ten photo cardstock down.

  The dashboard’s glow lit the photo of a young teenage girl, her thin, freckled face laughing into the camera. The baby in the girl’s arms was only a few days old back then, wrapped in a pink blanket and wearing a pink crocheted cap.

  The baby’s mother had just turned sixteen, and of course had no idea what was coming, so terribly soon. Oh, honey …

  Cecily had sent emails for a while, to let her big sister Lizzie know how happy she was in Maine, how free she felt. That was when Cecily still had a computer and access to the Internet.

  But after that, there’d been a job in a bar and then one as night clerk at a so-called motel, and those things had taken their toll. Besides, booze and drugs were effective pain meds, at least in the short run, and Cecily had been in a lot of pain once the baby’s dad took off and left her alone.

  A couple of months later, Cecily had called to say that she was broke, and could Lizzie send her some money?

  Which of course Lizzie had. She’d been up to her eyebrows in work at the time, though, trying to finish a combination master’s and bachelor’s degree, so she couldn’t just drop everything and leave to help Sissy, as she had always called her younger sister.

  Besides, Sissy hadn’t wanted her to come. “Wait till I’ve gotten myself situated for guests,” Sissy had insisted, so Lizzie had, secretly relieved not to be disrupting her own life just when her goals were so close, they’d seemed practically in her hands.

  And for a little while, that seemed like the right decision.

  Emails from Sissy grew happier, and the pictures of her baby showed a healthy, much-loved infant. Maine, Sissy had said, was a good place for a kid, not like back in Springfield, where she and Lizzie had grown up, in a neighborhood where creeps lurked on the corners and even the air was dirty.

  Nicolette was the baby’s name, Nicki for short, and by the time Lizzie got her degrees, it seemed that Sissy was doing well as a single mom. Drugs no longer seemed to be in the mix, and Sissy never drunk-dialed Lizzie anymore, or sent any emails that read as if they’d been drunk-typed, either.

  She still didn’t want visitors, promising instead to bring Nicky to Boston “soon.” Maybe that should have alerted Lizzie, but instead she’d let it go, concluding that the bad patch in her sister’s life was over, that love and responsibility for the baby had straightened her out when nothing else could. And that they would see one another soon; after the Christmas holidays, maybe. Or in the spring, when the roads weren’t so bad …

  Recalling this, Lizzie put the driver’s-side window back up and started off again, through the now steadily falling rain.

  I should have come. No matter how well she seemed, I should have come up here and checked on her anyway, and met the baby.

  When I still could.

  Because suddenly, there’d been silence from Sissy. After a week of it, Lizzie had taken personal time and driven up here—after it was too late, she accused herself, meeting her own gaze in the rearview mirror and glancing away guiltily.

  Still, she had at least done that much. She’d come here and initiated a serious, by-the-book search: every lead, any scrap of information or rumor that might lead to their whereabouts. If for any reason Sissy didn’t want to be found, Lizzie had told everyone she talked to, that would be fine. Lizzie only wanted to make sure mother and daughter were all right.

  But she learned nothing useful. And they weren’t all right. Ten days after Lizzie had arrived in downeast Maine, Sissy’s body had floated in on a lunar high tide. A wave flung it up onto some rocks just south of a place called Shackford Head State Park.

  There’d been no sign of Nicki, by then almost a year old. Nor had there been any clue to the child’s location among Sissy’s pathetic personal effects, in a trailer home that was older and in much worse repair than Sissy had let on.

  And there never had been any sign of the little girl, ever since. Until now. Lizzie reached for the other photograph lying on the car seat, glancing at it once more even though she’d long memorized its every detail: this one showed a little girl maybe n
ine years old or so, with cornsilk hair and pale eyes staring at the camera.

  Eyes just like Sissy’s; hair, too. Both photographs had been sealed in a plain brown envelope that bore no return address. They had shown up in Lizzie’s mail at her apartment in Boston a week earlier; no note, no explanation.

  And with their arrival, Lizzie’s dead sister and missing niece weren’t just old wounds anymore, guilty sorrows that could be put out of her mind if she applied enough work, enough intense physical exercise, and—let’s face it—enough alcohol so that she could sleep.

  Now another wave of anxiety washed over Lizzie as she recalled what had happened next, after the photographs dropped from a tan envelope, exploding her world. I quit my …

  Job. Just quit it and then boogied, as her old partner Liam O’Donnell would have put it. Boogied on out of there, and I’ll probably regret it. Still, she’d had no choice: sending the photos—one of Sissy cradling an infant Nicki, and with it a photograph of some other child, the implication being that this was Lizzie’s niece now—could’ve been someone’s idea of a joke, she supposed.

  But if so, it was a cruel one, and even that was far-fetched; who would do such a thing? Bottom line, Lizzie only knew that Nicki had been born nine years ago, and Sissy had been dead for eight. And that now, somebody wanted Lizzie to remember them.

  As if I could forget. Someone wanted it badly enough to go to some trouble, reminding her. Suggesting that Nicki was still alive.

  So—why? Lizzie had no idea about that, either. But she did know that no baby girl’s body had ever been found. And if Nicki’s bones weren’t in a shallow grave somewhere, or in the ocean—

  If they weren’t, Sissy’s little girl would be Lizzie’s only living kin, as well as her only link to the sister she’d let down so terribly and, in the end, she feared, fatally.

  She opened the thermos again and took a long drink from it. Cold, but the caffeine still packed a jolt and the bourbon was a sweet relief after the long, dark drive up Route 9 with the log trucks and the eighteen-wheelers thundering on both sides.

  Beginning to think that she should’ve reached the turnoff toward Eastport by now, she dragged the back of her hand over her mouth and peered with renewed intensity through the Honda’s dark windshield. Only more wet road showed ahead, and a glance in the rearview mirror showed nothing but her own reflection.

  Like a poster for a horror movie, she thought, her hair spiky and eyes darkly hollowed, her lips a slash of red, blackish in the gloom. Then behind her reflection she spotted a flashing red light coming up fast.

  Very fast. She hit the hazard lights and pumped the brakes rhythmically. Pulling over as far as she dared onto the road’s soft shoulder, she prayed that the driver of the car flying up behind her in the dark would have time to react.

  The overtaking vehicle’s roof bar flashed on, strobing the night with yellow. A single whoop-whoop from the car’s siren confirmed what she had already figured out: cops. And from the way they roared by, swerving expertly to the left and then back in again before their taillights vanished around a sharp curve, they were on their way to something.

  A crime scene, she thought. Or a bad accident, something hot and fresh. The last reflected glow of departing taillights paled and died, leaving her there in the dark with her heart pounding again.

  Thirty minutes later she was cruising over a long, curving causeway toward the island town of Eastport. The dashboard clock said one in the morning. Back in Boston, headlights and neon would still be ablaze, but here it seemed no one was on the road. She slid the window down again, smelling salt water and wet sand. In the distance, foghorns moaned guttural warnings to any sailors foolish or unlucky enough to be out on a night like this; nearer by, a bell buoy clanked monotonously.

  The sky ahead, though, glowed red. Some natural phenomenon, the northern lights, maybe, she thought, or a house fire. But then she recognized the glow’s deep hue: the same cherry-beacon flaring that she’d seen on the dark road half an hour ago.

  I quit my job, I quit my job. The words went on thudding in her head. But they didn’t matter, she realized suddenly.

  That color on the sky, as if the clouds had been pumped full of blood … just the sight of it set her heart racing again, her mind fizzing with gritty anticipation.

  Cop-car red. Crime-scene red. A lot of cop cars …

  Murder red.

  URGENT WEATHER MESSAGE

  WEATHER SERVICE CARIBOU MAINE

  FOR INTERIOR HANCOCK-COASTAL HANCOCK-CENTRAL WASHINGTON-COASTAL WASHINGTON-INCLUDING THE CITIES OF … EASTPORT … PERRY … PEMBROKE … CALAIS … LUBEC … MACHIAS

  … WEATHER ADVISORY IN EFFECT UNTIL MIDNIGHT EDT TOMORROW NIGHT …

  THE WEATHER SERVICE IN CARIBOU CONTINUES URGENT WEATHER ADVISORIES FOR HEAVY RAIN, GALE FORCE WINDS, TIDAL FLOODING

  * PRECIPITATION TYPE … RAIN HEAVY AT TIMES. LOCALLY AS MUCH AS 1 INCH PER HOUR.

  * ACCUMULATIONS … RAIN 3 TO 5 INCHES TOTAL EXCEPT WHERE DOWNPOURS FREQUENT.

  * TIMING … STORM IMPACTS WILL OCCUR IN TWO DISTINCT WAVES WITH A HURRICANE-LIKE EYE OF RELATIVE CALM, TODAY INTO TOMORROW NIGHT.

  * TEMPERATURES … IN THE LOWER 40S.

  * WINDS … NORTHEAST 35-65 MPH. WITH POSSIBLE HIGHER GUSTS ESPECIALLY COASTAL. CALM PERIODS MAY BE DECEPTIVE. STAY ALERT FOR DETERIORATING CONDITIONS.

  * IMPACTS … EXPECT TRAVEL DIFFICULTIES. WIND DAMAGE AND POWER OUTAGES LIKELY. LOCAL FLOODING LIKELY AND MAY BE PROLONGED DUE TO WIND VELOCITIES.

  PRECAUTIONARY/PREPAREDNESS ACTIONS … TRAVEL DELAYS WILL OCCUR. DO NOT UNDERTAKE UNNECESSARY TRAVEL. IF YOU MUST TRAVEL, PLAN EXTRA TIME TO REACH YOUR DESTINATION. SECURE LOOSE OBJECTS, STAY AWAY FROM WINDOWS DURING PERIODS OF HIGH WIND. DO NOT DRIVE THROUGH FLOODED AREAS.

  THIS IS PRIMARILY A COASTAL STORM. WINDS STRONGEST ON ISLANDS AND ALONG THE SHORE. FLOODING AT HIGH TIDES PROBABLE. HIGH WINDS WILL IMPACT COMMUNICATIONS IN AFFECTED AREAS. LOCAL EMERGENCY ENTITIES SHOULD TAKE NOTE.

  4

  The Motel East’s empty parking lot gleamed like wet licorice as Lizzie pulled gratefully into a space by the Office sign, then turned the car off.

  Made it. The trip from Boston had taken eight hours, all of it in darkness and most in the kind of rain that turned driving into an eyestrain exercise, enough to smear up the windshield but never enough to rinse it clean.

  Lizzie let her head roll back, then side to side. Not that it would help; since getting the envelope with the unfamiliar pictures in it, she’d felt like an iron rod was stuck between her shoulder blades and up through the base of her neck.

  The motel’s small office was dimly lit. Five minutes after entering the office, she was letting herself into her new home-away-from-home. She dropped her duffel bag and snapped all the lights on, starting with the ones in the large, reassuringly clean bathroom. Next came the lamps on the bedside tables, the ones by the chair and on the desk, finally the wall sconces and the overhead in the tiny microwave-and-mini-fridge-equipped kitchenette.

  She finished by snapping on the pair of lights just outside the sliding glass doors, on the small wooden balcony. The motel was built into a steep bank overlooking the bay, so the drop from the balcony to the courtyard below was at least thirty feet.

  Perfect, she thought; pretty much intruder-proof. Sissy had always raved about how safe Eastport was, how hardly anyone even locked a door and how when Nicki got older she could play outside without an adult hovering over her every minute.

  But then look what happened to Sissy.

  The silence in the motel room was stunning, making the words in her head sound even louder. Lizzie turned abruptly from the sliding glass windows, unable to see the bay in the darkness but knowing it was there, the ice-cold water that had swallowed her sister. Fiercely she forced her mind back to her own well-being; her drive into town on the main street running along the water’s edge had showed only rows of darkened storefronts.

  Nowhere open now to eat, she realized, and she’d skipped dinner. But a f
ew individually packaged snack cakes rested in a plastic basket on the room’s kitchenette counter; ordinarily, she’d never have touched them. She could fill up on them, though, wash their too-sweet gumminess down with what was left in the bourbon-and-Starbucks thermos, and, if necessary, with a couple of swallows from the bourbon bottle itself.

  Why was she thinking about food anyway? She wasn’t even hungry. But she knew. It was so she wouldn’t think about a certain guy, not even his name, and most certainly not the fact that she was here in the same state with him instead of safely far away, in Massachusetts.

  Far away, where she couldn’t just call him and he could be with her in a few hours. If he wanted to be, which was another whole questionable subject …

  Stop. She jumped up, facing herself in the mirror behind the dresser. Glaring back at her was a woman whose three-inch-heeled black dress boots defiantly increased her height; at five foot nine she was as tall as many of the men she’d worked with, taller than a few. She ran an impatient hand over her dark hair, whose short, spiky messiness made her look like a punk rocker, drew a spit-moistened index finger under each eye to wipe away smeared mascara.

  None of which helped much, nor did the short denim jacket, slim black Levi’s, or black silk turtleneck she wore. All I need now is a pierced eyebrow to make sure everyone in Eastport thinks I just dropped in from Mars. Her halfhearted try at mascara-gunk removal hadn’t done much good, either. Still …

  Screw it, she thought defiantly again. She didn’t want a shower, and even as tired as she was, the idea of sleep was beyond ridiculous.

  Because she was here. She’d done it. And she might very well end up done for, at least professionally, on account of it. I quit my job I quit my … Oh, shut up, she told the nagging voice in her head, and for once it actually obeyed.