A Bat in the Belfry

by Sarah Graves

  Ahead, Bogie laughed crazily, his squat, powerful figure troll-like in the streaming rain. “Oh, man, wait’ll Harvey hears about this!” Bogie crowed.

  But David didn’t care about what Harvey Spratt thought of this escapade, this … this crime. All he knew was that the next time Bogie started something like this, David had to act.

  He didn’t know how. He didn’t know if he could. But his dad’s advice and his dad’s hands-off attitude—just ignore them and they’ll get bored—had been no good. And there were more weapons where Bub Wilson’s BB pistol had come from. Bigger ones, probably, too, not to mention Bub’s fists and those of his pals.

  So David still needed Bogie, but he couldn’t be part of this awful stuff, he just couldn’t.

  Which meant that somehow, when Bogie got insane like this again—and he would, that was obvious from the whacked-out dance Bogie was doing now atop a backyard picnic table, whirling and thudding like some kind of crazy man in the pouring rain—

  “Yah! Yah!” Bogie bellowed, heedless of lights coming on in the houses nearby.

  —when that happened, David would have to stop him.

  • • •

  Back on Key Street, Lizzie pulled over in front of our house and Sam got out, slamming the car door and dashing across to the porch without a word.

  Lizzie watched him go. “Sorry if I upset him.”

  Upstairs, his bedroom light went on, which meant he hadn’t even stopped to talk with his grandfather or Bella. “Chip’s been a good friend. Sam’s worried about him, and so am I.”

  Her face was unreadable in the dashboard’s glow. “I wish I could be encouraging. What he needs is an alibi, you know? He needs to tell the truth about whatever it was that he was doing when …”

  “Uh-huh. I guess he’s still not saying, though.”

  Or maybe he’d be back by now. Which he wasn’t; the guest room window was dark. “Are you going to follow up on those boys?”

  She shrugged. “If I can. But I have no authority, Jake. I’m not a cop anymore, I’m just a private citizen here, and I don’t need a harassment charge.”

  Or to get tarred with a reputation for browbeating people, either, if she wanted help with her own search. And if she wanted to be accepted as Eastport’s police chief later …

  But before I could ask her about that, she went on: “Those guys probably know Sam, though. He might be able to get something useful out of them.”

  “Maybe,” I said doubtfully. I understood Sam’s impulse to want to spend all his time helping his friend. But Sam had a job, after all, or I hoped he still would once he asked for it back.

  It was a move I meant to encourage. And the thought of him approaching Eastport’s punk brigade wasn’t a welcome one, either. I changed the subject: “Had any luck on the other thing?”

  Finding her sister’s child, I meant. She looked down at her hands, which I understood to mean no. Outside the car, the wind flung everything it could find, gutters and downspouts crumpled like huge drinking straws tumbling down the wet pavement.

  “Actually, I was hoping maybe you’d had news.” Something big and black unreeled itself in the street; after a moment, I identified it as a roll of tar paper, unfurling itself as it went.

  “Sorry,” I said. The photographs of her sister’s child were being circulated; Ellie was emailing them around to everyone she knew. “Nothing yet. Ellie’s going to keep trying, but …”

  But I don’t know quite how or what good it’ll do, I thought. I didn’t say it, though. I didn’t quite have the heart to.

  And anyway, from the look on Lizzie’s face in the dark car that stormy night, I didn’t need to.

  Even as miserable, scared, and ashamed as he was, Chip Hahn still treasured Sam Tiptree’s good opinion. Sam was his friend, the oldest and best he’d ever had, and if Sam ever found out what Chip had done …

  Well, it didn’t bear thinking about. Having the clerk come down with the message from Jake Tiptree, asking if he needed anything, had buoyed him immensely; more, maybe, than was good for him. Because being able to come here to Maine, to stay in the Tiptrees’ cozy, old-fashioned guest room and be treated like a member of the family—the only normal-seeming family he’d ever known—seemed more than ever unbearably precious to him now.

  Now when he’d nearly lost it all, and through his own stupid selfishness, too. If Sam ever found out …

  So he won’t, Chip resolved as he sat waiting for his state police interrogator to return. He just won’t, no matter what.

  They hadn’t arrested him; not yet. But they’d put him here and left him, after several lengthy questioning sessions that made him feel so filthy, so thoroughly guilty, that he didn’t know how he’d ever be able to look anyone in the eye ever again.

  He wasn’t sure what might come next. He’d have asked to call a lawyer but he felt that would only increase the suspicion the police felt about him. He still hoped they’d figure out their mistake soon. Meanwhile, though, his questioners kept ratcheting up his discomfort without ever actively doing anything to him.

  Charles, they’d called him, for instance. Not Chip, which threw him off; no one but his father had ever called him by his full name, and the Old Man had never said it without contempt that Chip could remember. Then, once they had him off-balance, they’d peppered him with questions he had at first not even been able to understand.

  Because they were horrible. Did he like little girls? Boys? Dirty pictures? They’d actually called them that, leering as if Chip were some heavy-breathing fourteen-year-old, salivating over the centerfolds in Playboy.

  And after that it only got worse. Did he know Karen Hansen? This girl? They’d shown him a snapshot of a skinny child with masses of freckles, and a Band-Aid on her knee. A Band-Aid—for God’s sake, she’d probably gotten it falling off her bike.

  No, he’d told them politely. That was when he still had the strength, the inner wherewithal, to keep his replies civil. He’d never seen her, never met her, never spoken with her, never made a date with her or lured her to any church, or anywhere else.

  Never, never. No, he hadn’t killed her. Hadn’t seen her, or touched her, or … what kind of a monster did they think he was?

  Then he’d felt his mouth snap closed like a trap before he could say more and incriminate himself somehow. Because that, of course, was exactly what they did think: monster. He knew for sure as soon as they started asking about his online browsing habits.

  At once he’d realized they must’ve learned somehow about his visits to the snuff-film sites and the hideous chat rooms he had discovered while researching background for Carolyn’s next book, the websites devoted to the exploits of supposed “thrill killers,” with pictures and text that made his skin crawl.

  He’d thought that if he just put up with their interrogation for long enough, they’d let him go. After all, they didn’t—they couldn’t—have any real evidence against him. And eventually, he knew, even the DA would say enough was enough, that they had to either arrest him or cut him loose.

  His Web history, though, had pushed that possibility farther out into the future, made them even more reluctant to let go of him. Meanwhile, he didn’t want to demand to be either released or arrested, since they might choose the latter option even without a strong case against him, and once he was in the system it would just take that much longer to get out of it. Besides, the truth was that he was afraid of going to jail, even for a little while.

  And deep in his heart he feared that it wouldn’t be just a little while, that it would end up being much longer. Hey, it happened. People got wrongly convicted. It could happen to him. Better to wait, he decided; to answer their questions patiently.

  To cooperate as best he could without revealing his secret; yet another reason he didn’t want a lawyer involved quite yet. A lawyer, after all, would wind up being just another person trying to pry it out of him.

  Thinking this, he put his face in his hands, his elbows propped on the met
al table bolted to the floor of the small cinder-block room in the basement of the combination courthouse and jail, thirty miles south of Eastport. He’d been ushered in with a cop on each side, so fast his feet barely touched the floor. Down a flight of stairs, through a short tunnel with no one else in sight … they had brought him in a back way, he realized with shock, in case some citizen tried delivering a dose of frontier justice.

  Because they think I hurt—murdered—a girl. Which was ridiculous; part of the reason that he’d been able to keep his resolve steady was that he still couldn’t get his brain around it. But it was starting to sink in now, because he was here, wasn’t he? Alone, friendless, and despised; with their lacerating glares, some of the cops he’d seen on his way in here might almost have cut his throat using their eyes alone.

  An entirely unwanted mental picture of throat-cutting came forcefully to him as he thought this; to banish it, he focused on his surroundings. The walls were painted a harsh, institutional yellow, the linoleum tiled floor was dark green. One locked door, one large window, mirrored.

  And that was it. Just him, and the distant sounds of office activities: phones, footsteps. He was, he knew, being watched from the other side of that mirror glass, both during questioning and now, while he sat with his face in his hands and waited. They’d confiscated his cell phone when they took the rest of his valuables; with his permission, but still.

  So he couldn’t call Carolyn; by now she’d be wondering about him; worrying, maybe. Or not; he didn’t know which to wish for, her not noticing or her fretting, wondering where he was and what he was doing. The way I do over her, day in and day out …

  But there was no joy in that line of thought, either, so he abandoned it. A chair stood pulled out from the opposite side of the table from where he sat. Soon one or another of his interrogators would return, start in with the questions again.

  Where’d you meet her? Did you know she was only fourteen? And despite his denials, How’d you get her to go with you into the church? Oh, you didn’t? Then which of you got there first?

  All wrong, all beyond the realm of any possible reality—

  Then from another angle: Come on, man, don’t you just get angry with them sometimes? Women? Hey, we understand, we’re guys, too. So don’t you just get so pissed off once in a while, could just grab a knife and—

  Worst of all, though, was the jackpot question, the one he absolutely couldn’t answer. Over and over, in every combination: straight out, sideways, up front, or as an afterthought: Where was he last night? Where had he gone, and if as he insisted he hadn’t been killing a girl in a church tower, what had he been doing?

  It was the thing he refused to say: not to a lawyer, not to anyone. He didn’t even dare think about it, for fear the pressure of interrogation would force the truth from between his lips: the thing he wouldn’t, couldn’t tell.

  No matter what.

  “So how is he?” I asked. After Sam had gone in, I’d lingered in Lizzie Snow’s Honda CRV for a while. I had something to tell her and she wasn’t going to like it.

  “Your cop friend from the car accident, I mean,” I added.

  It had been on the evening news, that he was airlifted to Bangor after being assessed at the hospital in nearby Calais. Lizzie looked up gratefully, confirming the sense I’d had when she first mentioned him that “friend” might be understating it.

  “Better,” she said. “Broken collarbone, he needed surgery. But okay now.”

  “That’s good.” Oh, she wasn’t going to like it a bit.

  “Listen,” I said. Outside, the rain poured down. “About that envelope you got.”

  With the photographs in it, I meant. I’d finally remembered what I’d been trying to recall, in front of the post office.

  Now I dug in my bag, rooting around there among newspaper clippings, an old issue of Working Waterfront, and a delivery slip from the fuel oil company, detailing how many more millions of dollars I owed them after the most recent fill-up.

  There was an envelope in there, too, from a Halloween card Ellie’s daughter had made and sent me a few weeks earlier.

  “I’ve been thinking about what you told me,” I said. “You came here because the postmark on your envelope said ‘Eastport.’ ”

  Lizzie nodded.

  “And forgive me,” I went on. “I know you’re an experienced cop and I’m not. But you’re missing a big thing.”

  Her face went still. “What do you mean?”

  She took my envelope from me, studied it in the dim glow of the dashboard lights. Ellie’s entire return address was on it, as was the postmark it had received.

  It wasn’t marked “Eastport,” though. It couldn’t be; we’d stopped processing our own mail years ago. It all went to Bangor for sorting, and was postmarked “Eastern Maine” before proceeding to its destination.

  Even if that meant it got sent right back here again for delivery, as my card had been. “So there’s no such thing as …”

  “Right,” I said. “I don’t know what your friend’s envelope looked like. But I think someone faked the postmark on the one you got.”

  She sat silent a moment. Then: “So someone wanted me to come here? But—”

  She turned to me, some enlightenment she didn’t want to talk about dawning on her face. “You know what?” She laughed ruefully, a little “hah” at the unwelcome conclusion she’d come to. “I don’t know what it looked like, either. The envelope, I didn’t even ask … Oh, God,” she finished, shaking her head. “I’m an idiot.”

  Outside, the rain pounded down and the wind made a sound like the hounds of hell had escaped. “You’re not sure it’s her, either, are you?” I asked. “The newer picture of the little girl, you don’t know for a fact that it’s your sister’s—”

  She bit her lip, perhaps thinking that she’d given up her life for a prank. Or worse, a trap.

  “I don’t see how anyone else but Sissy’s daughter could look so much like her. But no, I don’t know it for sure.”

  “And how do you get your mail? A post office box, or—”

  She pressed her red-tipped fingers together. “I live … that is, I did live, I’ve given up my apartment … in a very secure building. The doorman gets the mail and lays it out every day on a table in the lobby, all sorted by apartment number.”

  She looked up at me. No doubt the arrangement had seemed okay at the time. “There’s never been any problem.”

  I got it. Living in a building so exclusive that you don’t even need a locked mailbox must’ve felt very special; back in the bad old days in Manhattan when I lived in a penthouse with a view of Central Park, I’d enjoyed that feeling, too.

  Also, the doormen I have known have been lovely individuals. But exposing them to temptation is, in my opinion, neither kind nor wise; as I discovered while managing money for men who on the outside looked rich as Croesus, you never know what financial pressures someone else may be under.

  Or not, speaking of which: “A doorman building, huh? On a cop salary?” Hey, she’d have asked me. I mean, really?

  “Yeah, well. My partner who died? He left me some money.” A flash of sudden pain crossed her face; I watched her stomp it out mentally, like putting out a little grass fire.

  “He left me an insurance policy,” said Lizzie. “And since I’d never be able to get a great place like that on my own … I mean, a real home, you know? That I could stay in a long time.”

  Put so simply, it was perfectly understandable; if she’d been my client I’d have told her that a quality-of-life purchase that would also appreciate was a great place for the money.

  But at the moment, that was neither here nor there. I took the envelope back. “See, what I’m wondering is if somebody got into your building’s lobby and put that envelope in your mail pile, or got your doorman to do it.”

  She nodded, still thinking more than she was saying. “Here I quit my job, put the condo up for sale, everything I’d worked for given up just to c
ome on a wild-goose chase all the way up here to this … this …”

  “Godforsaken chunk of granite in the middle of nowhere?” I suggested gently. “More moose per square mile than people?”

  She managed another laugh, but it wasn’t really funny. Back in Boston, I guessed, police work was at least interesting, maybe even exciting sometimes. But if Lizzie Snow really did mean to take up Bob’s job as Eastport’s top cop, she was facing a rough transition.

  And considering what I’d heard in the hardware store, a rude one in some quarters: women did almost all kinds of work around here just as they did in the city. But those jerks making their jokes represented an attitude that wasn’t so rare, either, that a woman who took a man’s job and a man’s paycheck …

  Well, from some people, at least, she could expect a ration of crap, is what I’m saying. A few minutes later when I got out of the car, the pavement was a running river, the yellow glow under the streetlamps hazy with rain. From inside the house, I watched her drive off in water so deep, her tires formed a foaming wake.

  Then I closed the door and leaned against it, listening to the storm pounding and screaming out there and thinking of Chip, wondering where he was right now and if he was listening, too, or if in the past few hours he’d been arrested for murder, and was already locked away in some cell where he couldn’t hear it.

  9

  “She’s not doing you any good, you know.”

  By morning, the first part of the storm had moved out over Nova Scotia and was heading for the Atlantic.

  “She’s bad for you. Also, she’s mean.”

  Not heading harmlessly, as the forecasters all tended to say of these violent, ocean-bound weather behemoths; if you were on a freighter, say, or a scientific research vessel, or God forbid a sailboat, you probably thought those gale-force winds, torrential downpours, and sixty-foot waves were very harmful indeed.

  Sam lay on his bed with the phone pressed to his ear, snapping his penlight mechanically on and off while Maggie—his real girlfriend, his possible-future-with-her girlfriend—went on with her litany of Carol-criticisms.