A Bat in the Belfry

by Sarah Graves

  Once had been enough. By the next morning, both girls—Sissy fourteen, Lizzie four years older—had left the house, never to return. It was the start of Lizzie’s path into law enforcement as a career … and of Sissy’s much different route, one that ended in her body getting washed up onto some rocks.

  And led to this, to what I’m doing now. To finding my niece if I can, or finding out what happened to her.

  And Dylan’s no part of that. “So you can keep your advice to yourself,” she finished, “and everything else to yourself, too.”

  If she’d known last night that he would find her today, she would have gone back to Boston and waited until this other thing, this local murder case, was over, and Dylan was back in Augusta.

  Uh-huh. The skeptical voice in her head was relentless. Sure you would. Give me a break, when you saw him across that church lawn last night, you could’ve eaten him up with a spoon.

  Like right now … and you know it. So does he. He always did.

  And he always will. “Lizzie,” he said simply, letting his hands drop to his sides again.

  But knowing is one thing and doing’s another. And no matter what kind of chemistry they’d had in the past, he was bad news. Turning away, she grabbed a sweater from the dumped bag on the bed and began folding it.

  “Yeah,” he said after a moment, shrugging. “Well. I guess I couldn’t expect open arms, could I? Not even if I …”

  Oh, enough. She flung the sweater down. “Not even if what, Dylan? You had a wife, she loved you, and she was wrecked when she found out about me. And you’d never told me.”

  He looked down once more, no doubt remembering just as she did the awful scene: Lizzie’s apartment, the wine and the candles and silken caresses. They’d already drunk most of the wine; the music, she recalled, was a guitar concerto they’d discovered together in a used-record shop that afternoon.

  And then the door bursting open. Locked, of course, but Dylan’s wife had had a key, a copy of the one she’d found on her husband’s key ring and hadn’t recognized. After that it had been a simple matter of following him on several evenings, then finally staking out Lizzie’s apartment and waiting.

  At least Dylan’s wife hadn’t had a gun. All this time later, Lizzie was still grateful for that little detail. It was the only thing she was grateful for about that night. That night, and all the ones since then …

  “But go ahead, Dylan,” she said bitterly, “tell me, what else could’ve happened, what’s different that might change anything? I mean, that you haven’t lied to me about already?”

  Lies like the one he had told her about him and his wife being separated and planning to divorce, about how Lizzie wasn’t hurting anyone by loving him.

  She waited. No answer. “Well?” she asked softly. “How about it, Dylan?”

  He wasn’t wearing a wedding ring, but that was meaningless. He hadn’t worn one back then, either. “What’s the big difference now,” she persisted, “that makes you think you can just waltz in here like you own the place? Like you own me.”

  Still frowning at his shoes, he appeared to consider his answer, or whether he would answer her at all. Then: “She died.”

  And as Lizzie felt her mouth drop open wordlessly, “Sherry got sick just … it was only a month or so after we’d stopped, you and I. That she started having symptoms, I mean.”

  She stared as he hurried on. “And we were living right there in Boston, so of course we saw all the best doctors, went to the best centers for that kind of thing. Tests, surgery …”

  A humorless grin touched his lips, vanished. “And you can say what you want about the union, but it turns out they really wangled us some decent health insurance out of the last contract. Everything she needed, nurses at home, the hospice …”

  “Dylan. I’m very sorry.”

  Lips pursed, he nodded. “Thanks. It was fast. Only four months, can you believe it? It was like a forest fire, like … it just went through her. Nothing they did could stop it, or slow it down, even.”

  Lizzie couldn’t help herself. “Did she ever …?”

  He laughed ruefully, knowing what she was about to say, as usual. The feeling that somebody really got her, understood her, had been one of the first things that had attracted her to him.

  “Did she forgive me?” he finished her sentence for her. “Yeah. Yeah, she did.”

  She couldn’t tell if he was shaking his head at his wife’s foolishness, at what he’d managed to get away with, or what he’d done that needed forgiving. Not that it matters … does it?

  “At first it was just that all of a sudden we had so much else going on,” said Dylan.

  He spread his hands expressively. “I mean, we had to fight this thing, you know? This … this monster that was attacking her, we thought at first we could beat it, and we had to at least be speaking to each other to do it.”

  Watching him as he spoke, she saw how the battle he was describing had marked him, tracing thin lines around his eyes and softening his expression, especially when he didn’t know she was looking.

  “So there was that, for a while,” he said at last. “The shared fight we had to face, just getting through each day, it was the glue that was holding us together. Until …”

  His voice trailed off while she imagined them, Dylan and the wife he’d betrayed, sitting quietly together somewhere. Shame swept over her when she recognized the emotion she felt. Jealous of a woman who was fatally ill …

  And now was dead. Nice. Very nice, Lizzie. Gotta hand it to you, you’re a real sport. “And then what happened?”

  He met her gaze squarely. The dancing light she recalled in his eyes back then was a steady flame now; another change. “Then everything went too fast, like fast-forwarding. First a hospital bed. Then hospice care. And then she was gone. Just … poof.”

  His look recalled the stunned shock he’d felt. But Lizzie had seen people at the ends of their lives, up close; two of them she’d put there herself, once dropping a fleeing psycho who’d slashed his mother, the other time when a perp wouldn’t release the beat cop he’d taken hostage, one arm around the trapped cop’s throat, the other hand waving the cop’s service revolver.

  That time, she’d had to put one in the guy’s head. It was, she realized now, why she’d been so angry with the smart-ass cop last night: the unsecured weapon. Anyway, she was pretty sure that for Dylan’s dying wife it had been anything but “poof.”

  The pain lingered on his face. Lizzie wondered if it ever went away completely. “She liked Maine, though,” he added with a half smile. He’d taken the new job here just a dozen or so weeks after he and Lizzie had … what? Broken up? Imploded?

  She still didn’t know what to call it. “She said if it had to happen anywhere,” he went on, “she was glad it was here.”

  “Yeah, well. Somebody’s got to like it, I guess.” Lizzie couldn’t repress a grimace.

  What the hell, it wasn’t as if the dead woman knew she was being contradicted. And as far as Lizzie was concerned, one tree, one moose, one old backwater seaside town—they were all pretty much like one another, and ditto for rocky coastlines.

  She liked sandy beaches, preferably with azure water, warm sunshine, and plenty of muscular, swim-trunked waiters scurrying around carrying drinks with little umbrellas in them.

  And don’t even get me started on lighthouses. Or, God help us, hot dog buns stuffed with mayonnaise-glopped lobster chunks.

  She’d take the broiled tail, garlic butter, and a good, cold Chardonnay, thanks, leek mousse and possibly a nice barley pilaf. She wondered what would happen if she ordered that at the eatery just down the street from the motel, called, if she remembered it right, the Muddy Duckster.

  From the aroma of french fry grease wafting from its vents even early this morning, she thought a blank stare was the best she could probably hope for. But the thought of food at all reminded her that the last thing she’d eaten was a Little Debbie cake in the middle of the night.
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br />   “Yeah. Well, I’m sorry about all of it, Dylan. I really am, but …”

  She walked past him toward the door and opened it. “And it’s been nice to see you again.” Much more of this and my nose will start growing.

  Outside, the deluge of half an hour earlier had diminished to drizzle, but the sky still roiled with clouds and there was an unnatural look to the midmorning light, as if it angled upward from the earth instead of slanting down from above.

  It said this break was a reprieve, not an end to the rough weather. That there might be even worse to come.

  “But I have a busy day planned, and I’m sure you must, too,” she added, thinking, Go. For the love of God, just …

  Dylan stepped outside. Then he turned, tipping his head to look at her with that wry, crooked-lipped grin she remembered so well. That, at least, hadn’t changed.

  No, it hadn’t changed at all. “Not even curious, Lizzie? That’s not the girl I remember.”

  “Curious about what?” But then she realized he was talking about what he was doing here in Eastport.

  “I’m on a new task force out of Augusta. I’m supervising the investigation of violent crimes against women.”

  She couldn’t help her curiosity. “So it’s not your case? At the church last night?”

  “Nope. I’m an observer.” He was leaning over her now, one hand on the doorframe. “So what’s the deal with the kid?” He changed the subject abruptly. “The one the chief of police picked up on Key Street this morning?”

  It took her a moment to understand. “You … you were watching that? Dylan, have you been following … are you stalking me?”

  Suddenly it all made sense: his knowing she’d quit her job, that she was here in Eastport. There was no reason at all for him to have noticed her car, no decals or bumper stickers to catch his eye and jog his memory; he hadn’t just found her by chance.

  But: “I was in the coffee shop across from Bob Arnold’s office when you went in there this morning,” Dylan explained. “You looked,” he added with his trademark brand of easy charm, “like you just stepped out of a French fashion magazine.”

  At this, a little burst of pleasure exploded in her heart; following at once, however, was the fresh realization that she stuck out like a very sore thumb here in Eastport, Maine. “But you haven’t said yet why you’re in town,” he added.

  None of your business, she wanted to retort. She hardened her voice.

  “Cut to the chase, Dylan, okay? Tell me what you want. Maybe I can help you, maybe not.” Because this was all well and good, this blast-from-the-past stuff …

  Or maybe it wasn’t, she corrected herself wryly; her peace of mind was definitely taking a hit. But she could handle it, now that she’d gotten her breath back, and meanwhile if she knew one thing about him, it was that despite his history, he didn’t let anything or anyone lead him around by the zipper on his pants.

  Back then, he’d gotten involved with her for the same reason he’d slept with other women before her: because he wanted to, not because he couldn’t resist some random impulse. And as flattering as it might be to think he’d found her again now for sentimental or even just sexual reasons, she knew better than that, too.

  Because at heart—Oh, at heart, something deep in her own whispered softly—Dylan Hudson was a serious man. And the only question was what he wanted from her, not whether he did.

  His answer at once confirmed this. “Actually, I thought we might be able to help each other,” he admitted. “See, I know what happened here to your sister and …”

  Of course he did. She’d told him about Sissy. “… her little boy?” he finished.

  “Girl,” she corrected, waiting, willing herself not to be disappointed; after all, this was no surprise.

  He nodded, returned to the pitch he was making. “Anyway, I think I also know the only reason you’d ever come back here.”

  She stared past him at the gray, wet street, the beat-up vehicles moving in it—vehicle-wise, keeping up with the Joneses was a foreign concept around here, apparently—and the elderly white clapboard houses set far apart in the neighborhood uphill from the motel. Yeah, she disliked it, all right.

  A lot. “Something happened, didn’t it?” asked Dylan. “That is, recently. You found out something about your sister, or—”

  Gazing down acutely at her, he guessed correctly as he had always been able to; not just serious but smart, too. Give him two dots and Dylan could produce a third like a rabbit out of a hat, then connect them in a line that led straight to an answer everyone else had missed.

  “Or about her child,” he suggested. “Something new, that’s made you come back for another look.”

  She drew her gaze back to him, unaccountably furious all at once at how easily he’d drawn these accurate conclusions about her and unwilling to confirm them as a result. But she didn’t have to.

  He knew that, also. It wasn’t an act, an interrogator’s strategy. Or even a smart cop’s trick; he’d simply always known how she thought and felt, what she wanted and what made her feel afraid.

  And what made her feel other things. Probably he knew now how near she could be to reaching for him, drawing him back in to where the sheets were already in comfortable disarray, and shutting the door.

  “That’s none of your affair,” she told him instead. But he had an answer for that, as well.

  Of course he did. “It is if we can help each other. Because, look,” he went on before she could say anything, “I’ve got an in with these cops. You don’t. I mean, sorry, kiddo, but …”

  I quit my job I quit my … Local police chief Bob Arnold was the one person she’d confided her past to, not wanting him to find out later and feel deceived. She’d asked him to keep it quiet for now and believed that he would.

  Eventually she’d hoped to parlay her bona fides into inside info from cops who might recall Sissy’s death, or who might have heard things since. But her plan, she realized now, wouldn’t have worked; Bob Arnold had been polite and she pegged him as trustworthy, but law enforcement was probably just as territorial here as the cops were at home.

  Meanwhile, Dylan was already an insider, wasn’t he? And he’d thought of that, of the need she would have for someone like him.

  “What would I have to do?” she asked him dully. Because her own feelings were one thing, but his were another, and probably quite different; he’d seen her and thought of a way he could use her to his advantage, that was all.

  Nothing more. “Easy. My insider-ness with the Maine cops,” he said, “traded for yours with the woman that guy’s staying with on Key Street, the guy Bob Arnold picked up. Just information.”

  “Who, you mean Jake Tiptree? It’s her name,” Lizzie added at his mystified expression. “The woman who owns the house. If it isn’t even your case, though, why would you want to know what she says about anything?”

  But then …

  Not his case, she thought. That didn’t mean he couldn’t end up a hero by solving it, though, did it? A hero, back on active duty, with his own cases again—

  … then she understood.

  “Come on, let’s go get something to eat,” Dylan said, and this time she followed him.

  “Mark my words,” Bob Arnold said sourly, peering through the squad car’s rain-streaked windshield. “This thing’s bad enough now, but before it’s done it’s going to get evil.”

  We’d started out near the breakwater, where men in pickup trucks were arriving to secure their boats against the coming storm. Down on the floating docks, those who had already arrived were throwing extra lines onto their vessels, checking bumpers on the pier’s massive wooden pilings, and grabbing any loose items that had been lying around on the decks, to stow them below.

  “The storm or the …?” Ellie hesitated. We didn’t yet know what to call what had happened in the church last night. “Death,” she finished inadequately.

  Bob shot a dark sideways glance at her. “Both. And there’s n
o need to be delicate about it, it’s all over town now. Karen Hansen was murdered.”

  He drew a plump finger across his throat; the crudeness of the gesture was unlike him. That more than anything else told me how deeply upset he was. “In all of my career, I have not seen anything like it. And I don’t want to ever again.”

  He turned up Sullivan Street past the marine-supply store, which to judge by what the men coming out carried was doing a big business in bilge pumps and coils of rope. A fisherman before a storm could never have too much of the latter, but if that didn’t work you’d need the former, and fast.

  Then what Bob had said hit me. “What do you mean? You’re not really thinking of quitting, are you?”

  There’d already been rumors. His wife, Clarissa, and their little girl had been spending a lot of time in Arizona; the child was asthmatic, and the air in the desert agreed with her. And I knew Bob had thought of moving; lucky for us, though, he’d always reconsidered.

  Now as he drove he kept slowly swiveling his head from left to right, matching what he saw of the houses and parked cars with what he’d seen last time, noting the people he saw and what they were doing, and with whom. Looking, in other words, for anything out of place, which he always said was 99 percent of small-town police work. But it was the other 1 percent that was bothering him now.

  “What, me worry?” He answered my question with a quip. But there wasn’t any humor in it, or any real answer, either.

  Nor was there any amusement in his eyes when he glanced at me again in the squad car’s rearview mirror. “So, d’you know your little pal has a criminal record?”

  Chip, he meant. “Oh, Bob, he does—” Not, I’d intended to finish. But then I stopped, because Bob wasn’t asking.

  He was telling. Ellie shot me an incredulous look. “What kind of record?” she asked as he turned onto High Street, then down Washington Street back toward downtown.

  “Kid’s a peeper.” Bob’s inspection took in Spinney’s Garage, the enormous old white-clapboarded Baptist church, now home to the Eastport Arts Center, and the apartment building just uphill from the post office, where a work crew hurried to put a lot of new lumber and other construction materials for the building’s rehab under blue tarps. “I mean, the kind who peeps in windows.”