A Bat in the Belfry

by Sarah Graves

  I was a rich woman back when I managed money for some of the biggest crooks on Wall Street. But after fifteen-plus years of keeping an antique house upright, my older parent provided for, and a son fed, clothed, and educated to the point where he could do those things for himself, I was about as prosperous as most people in Eastport.

  Which is to say not very. And then an even worse thought hit me. “Ellie,” I began as the sky darkened suddenly and another downpour opened up, fresh gusts lifting a corner of tin flashing from around one of the red–brick chimneys.

  Two bad thoughts, actually. A strip of flashing tore off and flew away. “Ellie,” I repeated. “Remember when we were up in the bell tower yesterday and we noticed all that …”

  We weren’t even supposed to go up there. All I’d said was that we’d look around a little, make a list of repairs that a pot of grant money could be used for: replacement windows, leak fixing, possibly new wiring if the old knob-and-tube electrical connections looked dangerous enough. But what we’d found was so much worse than I’d been expecting—a new foundation and floor were just the beginning of that old building’s to-do list—that I had decided to come back to document everything, with a camera.

  And that should’ve been that. But Ellie had never been up in a two-hundred-year-old church tower before—neither had I, actually, but that was all right with me—so before we left, her curiosity sent her scrambling up four flights of stairs plus a ladder and into the belfry itself, with me grousing and complaining behind. And that was where we’d seen the—

  “Sawdust,” I said. Old-house repair causes plenty of it, so when I’d spotted the powdery heaps of it in the belfry of the All Faith Chapel, I didn’t think much of it. I was used to the stuff.

  But now it occurred to me that my own house had gotten lots of structure-bolstering attention over the years … and the old church hadn’t. And that meant the sawdust in the belfry wasn’t the by-product of carpenters. Instead—

  Instead it was almost certainly from carpenter ants: wood-munching, building-devouring insects as hungrily destructive as termites, and hardier in cold climates. Carpenter ants eat wood, and they especially enjoy big structural beams; they hollow them out and live inside, enlarging their dwellings by the power of their appetites, the sawdust piles they make merely crumbs that have fallen from their constantly chewing mouth parts.

  Constantly chewing. As in right now, and we had gale-force winds coming; meanwhile and as far as I knew, no repair work had even been scheduled on the old church.

  On top of which it was still a crime scene, and no cop in the world was going to let a carpentry crew in to work until each and every scrap of potential evidence had been photographed, gathered up, bagged, tagged, recorded in an evidence log, and carried away.

  All of this I hurriedly explained to Ellie while she made coffee and rummaged in the refrigerator for lunch stuff—today was Monday, so Bella was upstairs scrubbing the bathroom faucet handles with a toothbrush and bleach, wiping down every surface with antiseptic spray cleaner, and generally making the place so clean you could do organ transplants in it—and I tried finding the church caretaker’s number in the phone book.

  “… Mahan, Mahaney, Mahoney …” I slammed the book shut. No number for the caretaker was listed. Probably it was on a Twitter page or a Facebook page or his website.

  Or whatever, I could Google for it, if I had all the time in the world and even a tiny bit of patience for that kind of thing. Ellie was the Web-guru one of us; with an eight-year-old at home she was required to be, just to stay ahead of the kid.

  So while I corralled and assembled what she had plucked out of the refrigerator—Swiss cheese, dark rye bread, a tomato, and a container of Bella’s homemade hummus, this enriched with enough garlic from Ellie’s garden to ward off every possible vampire on Moose Island—she used her Google-fu, and then I used the phone.

  Ten minutes later I’d finished trying to convince a church caretaker who hadn’t actually been up in the belfry for at least ten years that it was about to fall down.

  “He says he’ll have a look at it after the police get out of there,” I reported through a mouthful of garlic and rye. Ellie’s fresh coffee washed it down nicely.

  “Did you tell him that if he waits too long, he’ll be able to inspect it without going up into it?”

  Because it would be on the ground, Ellie meant. Probably in several, to put it mildly, pieces. “Yeah. Orville Morgan isn’t the easiest guy to alarm, though.”

  Also to put it mildly. If a bomb went off under Orville’s chair, he might consider getting up. But then he’d think better of it and stay, as he’d put it, “where the good Lord flang him.”

  While we were eating, Bella came down and sat with us after putting together her own lunch of about a tablespoon of rice left over from dinner the night before, plus half a macaroon.

  I privately suspected her of downing cans of Ensure when I wasn’t around; with that angular face, those bulging green eyes, and those big every-which-a-way teeth of hers, Bella was no beauty contest winner, but she was among the most vigorous late-sixtyish (she wouldn’t tell her age) persons I’d ever known.

  Vigorous in her opinions, too: “Orville Morgan,” she said, swallowing a tiny bite of half-macaroon, “is a perfect example of a man who thinks he’s way too good for his job—”

  Another tiny bite, another swallow. “—and is mistaken,” she finished, clicking her cup down into its saucer for emphasis.

  Well, I didn’t agree. Orville swept, dusted, and mopped the place for free, and took the trash out after events in the church basement, too, hauling it upstairs to the curb without complaint even though he was eighty-five (Orville did tell his age, often and to anyone who would listen).

  But in this case, I needed a person with some authority to act, someone who would understand that something needed to be done over there, pronto, and someone who wasn’t already involved somehow in last night’s ghastly event. Which ruled out Orville. And it also eliminated just about everyone else on the island who was ambulatory and had a pulse, since finding a murderer was at the top of a lot of to-do lists around here today.

  And the looming storm occupied everybody else. So finally I called Ava Wilmot, the town dogcatcher, whose husband was a roofer, so he wouldn’t be working at that today, and he didn’t own a boat, either, so ditto.

  Once I’d explained, she put him on the phone and he agreed to go over there and tell the cops that the City Manager had sent him, and if they didn’t let him in to inspect the belfry right now, it might fall down on them.

  All of which was true except for the City Manager part, and I thought I could probably fix that later; as an ex–money whiz, I’d been able to show him some perfectly legal tax strategies that had saved Eastport a lot of cash.

  So he owed me one. “Great,” said Ellie when I’d hung up.

  Now I just hoped we’d thought of the carpenter ants in time, since outside the kitchen windows the wind had given up blowing intermittently and was now howling steadily, whipping the last of the autumn leaves across the yard and blowing snapped-off twigs against the antique glass panes. If we hadn’t been in time, I expected to see that belfry sailing across the sky, soon, too, possibly with the dogcatcher’s husband clinging to it.

  “But …,” Ellie added, not looking quite as pleased as I’d expected. “There is still the other thing …”

  Right. Chip Hahn. “Okay, next project,” I said, and reached again for the phone book. “We’ve got to get Chip a decent lawyer, and get ourselves in to see him, and—”

  “Nope,” pronounced Bella flatly, meanwhile washing her rice dish and spoon with soap, then pouring boiling water from the teakettle over it.

  She was, as I may have mentioned earlier, a big believer in hygiene. “Why not?” I asked.

  Bella wiped her hands on a pristine dish towel. “Because he’s got a lawyer already. He called here while you two were out, said Chip had called him—the lawyer, I mean�
��earlier this morning.”

  She named a top-flight New York criminal attorney, Maury Cahill, a guy I knew; in fact, I’d once had his firm on retainer for a client whose teenager was handsome, smart, and a complete sociopath.

  “But—” I began. This could be bad. This could be very bad. Because how would Chip Hahn know he needed a lawyer so early in the morning, when Bob Arnold hadn’t scooped Chip up and taken him in for questioning yet?

  “And,” Bella went on, carefully brushing macaroon crumbs, if any, off the red-checked tablecloth, “you won’t get in to see him anytime soon, either. They follow the rules down in Machias.”

  The town forty miles to our south that was the county seat, she meant, where the county jail and the courthouse were located. “Yeah,” I conceded, “you’re probably right.”

  Before she came to work for me, Bella had been married to a man who got hauled in so often on drunk-and-disorderlies that the squad car in their town used to cruise down his street a couple of times each night just to see if he’d gotten around to starting that evening’s fight yet.

  They’d never let her in, either; not until she’d signed up to be a visitor and gotten herself cleared. I could only imagine the security around a homicide suspect would be even more rigid.

  “So we won’t even be able to ask Chip what’s going on. What did you tell the lawyer?” I asked Bella, who by now was polishing the cut-glass knobs on the kitchen’s old beadboard cabinets.

  “Who picked Chip up, what they think he did, where they took him, and the name of the lead investigator on the task force that is working on the case,” she replied, rubbing off a particularly stubborn streak from one of a knob’s crisply cut glass facets.

  I just stared. “I heard it all in the IGA,” she explained, “while I was buying a can of scouring powder.”

  Preparatory, of course, to cleaning that upstairs bathroom so thoroughly that light bouncing off the porcelain was probably blazing out through the bathroom window right now, blinding any unwary passersby.

  “And,” she went on after satisfying me that Chip Hahn’s new lawyer was at least as well informed as your average Eastport IGA shopper, “I heard something else.”

  She paused with a wet paper towel poised over the handle on the refrigerator door. “I heard Bob Arnold is quitting.”

  Ellie shook her head. “Bella, you must’ve got that wrong. Why, Bob’s been the police chief here forever! His wife’s working at the community college in that new pre-law program they have, and his little girl is in kindergarten here, and …”

  But she didn’t sound convinced and finally her voice trailed off entirely. “Forever,” she repeated softly.

  “He’s been gaining weight lately,” I said into the silence in the kitchen. Because really, why shouldn’t he leave?

  People did. “He always eats when things aren’t going well for him,” I added. For Bob, the phrase “comfort food” didn’t even need the word “food” in it; it was a given.

  “And his little girl’s asthma isn’t getting any better,” Ellie reluctantly conceded. “A couple of doctors at least have told him that Arizona would be better for her.”

  Or somewhere else dry; here, when we use the word, we mean not actually raining, snowing, sleeting, misting, drizzling, fogging, or otherwise precipitating. Speaking of which, at the moment it was raining so hard and so sideways that little water jets were squirting in between the storm window and its frame.

  “And now this,” said Bella quietly.

  Murder, she meant, and all its difficulties, from strange cops and other investigative personnel to the inevitable special city council meeting later, at which Bob would have to justify doing whatever he’d done and defend not doing whatever he hadn’t.

  “I wouldn’t take the job for a million bucks,” I said. Not that Bob got paid a twentieth of that. And—

  “How long has he been chief, anyway?” I asked Ellie. He’d already had the top Eastport cop position when I arrived here, a little over fifteen years earlier.

  She thought about it, while Bella began taking down and wiping each jar, vial, and bottle on the kitchen mantel.

  “Twenty-five years,” said Ellie at last, wonderingly. “He started so young … why, he’s probably eligible for a pension.”

  Bella ran a wet paper towel over the kitchen counter, in case it might’ve had a crumb on it. Then she crouched to run the paper towel along the baseboards, where yet another crumb might possibly have fallen.

  Finally she followed the baseboard right out of the kitchen and down the hall, wiping as she went. When she had gone, Ellie spoke again. “So how come you don’t like Lizzie Snow?”

  I glanced at her in surprise. “It showed?”

  “Well, kind of. The same way the spines on a porcupine show. Or the stink on a skunk. No more than that, though.”

  “The stink on a skunk doesn’t show,” I retorted, but then I gave up. “I just get the sense that there’s something she’s not telling us, that’s all.”

  Outside, it was still raining hard, but Ellie’s little girl was due home from school any minute, so I offered to drive her home, and in the car with the wipers flapping madly, she continued.

  “That’s not the only reason, though, is it?” she asked. “That you don’t like her.”

  The windshield looked as if a firehose had opened up on it. Squinting through it, I turned onto Water Street, where the wind off the bay abruptly ratcheted up to gale strength.

  “No,” I admitted. A massive gust hit the car, rocking it on its wheels briefly. A cardboard box tumbled end over end across the street; signs hung on lengths of chain outside the shops flew violently, threatening decapitation or a skull fracture to anyone walking below at the wrong moment.

  “I just … Ellie, she’s everything I used to be. Great hair, great makeup, lots of pizzazz …”

  Fortunately, there were no pedestrians out. Except for a few cars parked in the angled spaces outside Wadsworth’s hardware store, Water Street was deserted, and at just past noon the sky was already so dark that the streetlamps had gone on.

  “And on top of all that, as if it weren’t enough that she reminds me of everything I left behind in the city …”

  “Are you sorry?” Ellie asked acutely. “That you did leave, that you came here and—”

  Found a new home, a new love, and saved my son’s life in the bargain, she could have finished, because that’s what happened.

  “No, of course not.” We rolled through a hubcap-deep puddle.

  “I just—”

  In the boat basin beyond the breakwater, fishing vessels were getting tossed around like bathtub toys. Half-million-dollar bathtub toys, many of them; the gear and electronics even a modest fishing boat needs nowadays would stun Daddy Warbucks.

  “She reminds me, that’s all,” I said, inadequately. “And she is lying about something, by omission at least. Something about her just doesn’t add up. And that makes me nervous.”

  Also, it made me mad. But right now I had enough to worry about just driving the car in what was shaping up to be a real gullywhumper, as the guys around here would’ve put it.

  So far, nothing down in the basin had broken loose, the work boats rafted together so tightly you could walk across them, from shore to the breakwater. Beyond the massive concrete dock’s twenty-foot pilings, though, the bay was nearly black, huge foam-topped waves chugging along it like cars on a freight train.

  “If this keeps up,” Ellie began unhappily. Roaring into the breakwater, the waves slugged the pilings and exploded up onto the deck, sending great gouts flying over the automated weather station, the Port Authority’s little red security hut, and the picnic tables on the observation pier built out over the water.

  “Uh-huh,” I said distractedly, absorbed in the tricky task of staying in the proper lane. But it was a worrisome sight, that boat basin: if there was a boat in it that was paid for, I didn’t know about it, and as for repairs, I could count on no hands the number
of fully insured fishermen in Eastport.

  Making our way on outer Water Street, we passed between small houses with vinyl siding strips peeling away, trash cans rolling down driveways, and here and there loose chimney bricks already fallen. Also, a fractured limb from an enormous old oak swung dangerously over a power line, right next door to Ellie’s house.

  I pulled in as near to her front door as I could get, past her old Ford pickup truck, which at the moment was sitting up on concrete blocks. Her husband, George Valentine, was the man you called here in town if you needed something done, stat: a skunk trapped or an old shed taken down, for instance. But doing nonpaying work just wasn’t economically feasible for him right now, so the truck, which needed its fuel tank replaced to pass annual inspection, had been on blocks since Easter and would likely be frozen solid to them at Christmas.

  “All right, then,” said Ellie, contemplating the short run through her dooryard to her house. Outside, the wind positively shrieked, blowing cabbage leaves and eggshells out of her compost heap and yanking at the plastic sheets George had found time to nail up around their bungalow’s foundation. “Let me see if I’ve got today’s news straight. Chip lied about where he was. He had access to the weapon. He apparently has a record of peeking in windows, which doesn’t sound good.”

  “No, it doesn’t. And yes, you’ve got it straight,” I said unhappily. It sure didn’t sound good to me, anyway, and to the police it must sound even worse.

  “And,” Ellie went on thoughtfully, “can we reasonably assume that a man with one previously unknown, unpleasant fact in his past might have another?”

  She glanced at my face, which probably looked defensive on Chip’s behalf. “Emphasis on ‘might,’ of course, but still,” she added.

  “Yeah,” I agreed reluctantly. “Yeah, I guess we’d better factor in the idea that this could get worse, although I don’t see how.”

  O ye of little imagination. “All right, then, so here’s our plan,” said Ellie. “First, we’ll …”

  I felt a sudden spasm of guilt at getting her into this. What she would do first once she got inside, I happened to know, was make a good home-from-school snack for her daughter, Lee. She’d supervise homework: drawing letters and numbers, practicing a simple song—“I’m a Little Teapot” was what they were working on now, if I remembered correctly—and learning to spell “cat.”