A Bat in the Belfry

by Sarah Graves

  But she was only fourteen, and she lived in Eastport, Maine, which was about as far from the streets of Manhattan as a person could get and still remain on the planet. And here was the result, Bob thought as he gazed sadly at the volume in his hand:

  She’d based her plan to run away, to move to the big city and get hired as a model, on a thirty-year-old library book. Even her preliminary scheme, which from the notebook sheet he guessed included living at the Bangor YWCA, was heartbreakingly outdated; there hadn’t been a room for rent at the Y in Bangor in who knew how long. Hell, Bob didn’t even know if there ever had been such a thing there.

  Never, maybe. In the bigger cities, possibly, but not there. He laid the book back in the suitcase, looked around again at the pristine space Karen Hansen had created for herself. A dorm-room-sized refrigerator served as her bedside table. On a bench made of two milk crates and a two-by-six board, she’d set up a hot plate and microwave, both with $1 tags from the thrift shop on Water Street still stuck to them.

  A little collection of utensils plus a plate, cup, and glass stood under the board. Bob left the room, made his way to the only bathroom in the place, and found it, like Karen’s own living chamber, utterly spotless.

  Worth it, he supposed, cleaning up after the old man if she could also have it clean for herself. Catching his own reflection in the medicine-chest mirror, he wondered what she’d seen there to make her think modeling was in her future.

  From what he recalled from seeing her around town, she’d been a gap-toothed, messy-haired child, awkward the way they all were at her age. Nothing to make anyone think twice about her.

  Not until someone murdered her. Turning to find Max grinning in the bathroom doorway with the bone clutched in his jaws, Bob realized what he hadn’t seen in this hideous little hovel:

  Money. Because it was one thing for Karen to have planned, however unrealistically, to find a job in Bangor. But first she’d needed to get there, and live somehow meanwhile. And from the look of her room, she’d have planned for that, too: for a roof over her head, and food, and a way to stay clean and warm.

  Those things were important to her. Meanwhile, from what the rest of this place looked and smelled like, Hank Hansen had no cash. And even if he had and his daughter had taken it to use for her getaway …

  Bob strode back quickly to the neat little bedroom, rifled through the suitcase, turned out the drawers and the tiny closet while Max stood in the doorway looking puzzled. But … nothing.

  No cash anywhere. Still, she’d had a plan, and it must have included a few dollars to survive on, at least.

  So … where had she been planning to get it?

  Standing in silence behind a shelf loaded with plumbing parts and equipment in Wadsworth’s hardware store, Lizzie Snow debated between two models of coffeemaker. She’d toned down her makeup and costume today, and on the way here from the motel had felt a little less like a sore thumb on account of it.

  Today’s outfit of slim jeans, white sneakers, and a black down-filled vest over a turtleneck were a far cry from the more stylish things she usually wore, and she still preferred her leather jacket and heeled leather boots. But the looks she’d been getting in them weren’t worth it.

  The cash register’s briing! brought her mind back to her task. She’d come in here for the coffeemaker—in addition to hardware store staples, Wadsworth’s also carried everything from stationery supplies to Maine-themed souvenirs, snow globes with lighthouses in them and so on—because the one at the motel had broken. And she might as well have her own; she wouldn’t be staying at the motel forever.

  But when the cash register’s ring had faded, she heard a voice she recognized. “… seen that skinny bitch in the tight pants this morning?”

  “Come on, Paulie,” the store clerk began, “that’s not a nice thing to be saying about …”

  She didn’t catch the rest, which she knew was directed at the young cop she’d tangled with two nights ago; he must have come in while she was back here in the household goods aisle. And why the hell was everyone so concerned about her pants, anyway?

  She grabbed a package of filters to go with the basic Mr. Coffee she’d chosen and prepared to march to the front of the store, summoning a few pointed phrases in case they’d be needed. But before she could turn, a hand came down lightly on her shoulder.

  She spun on her heel, one arm automatically pulling back to punch with. “Get your freaking paw off my …”

  “Hey, hey.” Dylan Hudson backed away, laughing. “Don’t hurt me, I’m a wounded man already.”

  She almost dropped the coffeemaker; he took it from her with his good hand. The other one hung inside his jacket, in a sling.

  He looked like hell. “Dylan … what are you doing here? You were supposed to be …”

  The information desk at the hospital had told her—after she’d lied, saying she was a cop investigating the accident he’d been in—that he’d be a patient for at least another full day.

  But obviously not. “Why’d they let you out?”

  He grinned as well as he could with that fat lip. It had clearly met up with the steering wheel despite his seatbelt.

  She could relate; she’d been wearing hers, too, and her neck still felt twisted, the livid bruise on it barely covered by the high neckline of her sweater.

  “They didn’t let me. But I just couldn’t stay away from you,” he added only half jokingly.

  He put his arm around her; she shrugged it off. “You’re an idiot, you know that, right?”

  Bruised face, tired eyes, his neck beneath his open collar even more seatbelt-torn than her own … “You look wonderful,” he said. “But are you okay?”

  “I’m fine.” She snapped her body away from his and headed down the wood-floored store aisle, between the faucets and pipe-thread tape, drain traps and washing machine hook-up hoses.

  At the counter, the clutch of men gathered there chatting backed away. She could feel them avidly cataloging her clothes, hair, and makeup for later discussion. And they say women are gossips.

  She set her things next to the register, not acknowledging the men. The store clerk’s eyes were curious but kind, unlike the others’ flat assessments.

  “Have a nice day,” he said gently as he returned her change, and in his tone she heard apology for the others, especially the young cop whose stare was anything but friendly.

  “Thanks,” she said, just wanting out of there.

  But as she passed him, the young cop made a spitting-on-the-floor motion with his lips; in response she felt a strong urge to smack the snotty look off his face.

  Instead, she stopped. Turning, she motioned Dylan to stay out of it. And spoke: “I’m sorry we got off on the wrong foot the other night. But do you have another problem with me?”

  The surprise on his face was naked, that she’d confronted him. He opened his mouth but she cut him off:

  “Because if not, I wouldn’t think a skinny bitch like me would worry you so much,” she said, and added a smile, playing it to the peanut gallery of men.

  They ate it up, nudging one another. The clerk turned away, too, hiding his own smile. Aha, she thought; so our boy Paulie is maybe not the most popular kid in town. Otherwise these guys wouldn’t like it so much, seeing him get taken down a peg.

  “Can’t even run very fast in these tight pants of mine,” she added, swaying a little to emphasize the way they fit; hey, she hadn’t given up looking good entirely.

  Laughter now, from the audience; she’d gotten them on her side. And she could run in the pants, all right.

  She could run just fine. Dylan scrutinized his shoes, trying not to laugh. He knew she’d apprehended men twice Paulie’s weight and three times her own. They didn’t see you coming when you were smaller, and quick. And that was key, because no amount of skill or practice beat muscle mass unless you had another advantage.

  Like brains, for instance. And a pinch of don’t-give-a-good-goddamn; a big pinch. “Don�
�t worry, Paulie,” she said softly to him while his face got redder. “I’m not going to hurt you.”

  She took her coffeemaker off the counter, then stepped up so close to the tall cop their shoes nearly touched. “Not unless you make me,” she added softly, and got out the door before the laughter stopped.

  Dylan followed. “Lizzie, someday somebody’s going to knock your block off. You know that, right? You know they’ll—”

  She spun on him. All the anger that she’d held down boiled to the surface. “Hey, Dylan, mind your own beeswax, okay?”

  She had her own bone to pick with him, but not out here. She stalked up the street ahead of him, toward the motel. A pickup truck dragging its muffler chugged by, its bed loaded with wire lobster traps. Sparks spat from the truck’s muffler-on-pavement action, jumped into the puddles that spread everywhere from the recent rainstorms, and fizzled out.

  The driver grinned at her, his whiskery face creased with appreciation, around the chewed-looking cigar stuck in his mouth. “Lookin’ good,” he called, as sweetly as if he were at church saying good morning to the minister’s wife.

  The truck belched exhaust, pulling away. Lizzie shook her head tiredly; the driver had meant no harm, and it was better, she supposed, than being thought ugly. It got old, was all.

  “So tell me,” she said over her shoulder to Dylan, “when you walk away from somebody, is it always your ass they watch? And if you’re approaching, do they stare at your chest?”

  The hill felt good on her calves; it struck her that she’d had no real exercise since leaving Boston. “It’s one thing to compliment someone,” she went on at Dylan’s puzzled expression. “It’s something else to look at them as if they’re an ice cream you’re thinking of licking.”

  Or, she added mentally, to identify them as “that skinny bitch.” Dylan nodded as if he understood, but he didn’t and she didn’t care. “Oh, forget it,” she said, “I might as well complain about the sky being blue.”

  Which it mostly was at the moment, but not for long. At the corner in front of the red-brick library, she stopped, sucking in big breaths of the fresh salt air. One good thing about this place, you couldn’t beat the smell; it made just breathing into a bracing tonic. Not bad scenery, either: to her left the bay spread choppy gray-blue with whitecaps racing atop it and the tide surging in, while to her south a wall of clouds rose from the horizon, the distant bridge spanning the water there like an ink sketch on the looming weather.

  Dylan kept pace with her, crossing the street. On the motel parking lot, wide puddles reflected clouds scudding across the unsettled sky. He followed her to the door of her room.

  “Look, Lizzie, there’s something I need to tell you, and …”

  His jacket hung open on the sling-arm side, exposing what looked like the manila envelope that Nicki’s photo—my niece. My sister’s baby, my only family in this world—had come to him in.

  If it had. And if it was even Nicki. Giving the door a shove open with her foot, she clasped the coffeemaker and filters in one arm and grabbed his good arm with her other hand, and yanked.

  Inside: clothes everywhere, makeup on the dresser, a bra on the bedpost … oh, the hell with it, she thought impatiently. He’d seen her underwear before, and Holly Homemaker she wasn’t.

  “Sit down while I make coffee,” she ordered him, clearing a place on a chair by removing her leather jacket, a few sheets of motel notepaper, and an almost-empty Cheetos bag.

  “Don’t talk to me,” she cut him off when, as she unpacked the machine, rinsed it and loaded it with water and a packet of coffee from the motel kitchenette’s supply, he tried again.

  Her not thinking of the postmark detail was bad enough, but that he hadn’t thought of it was … well. If he hadn’t.

  That being her big question now. And she didn’t want him confusing her with his smooth line of chatter until she asked it. She sat across from him at the room’s small table, reached across to pluck the envelope from his pocket, and slapped it down. Beside it she put the one she had gotten, the postmarks on both envelopes clearly visible. The faked postmarks.

  “Lizzie,” he began, “what I need to say is—”

  “Shut up. I’m talking now. Because it turns out we’ve got a little problem,” she said, and watched as his expression turned wary. As, she thought, it most certainly damned well should.

  Then, with a sudden, sharp bringg! that startled her, the motel room’s telephone rang.

  Harvey Spratt was approximately the last person Sam Tiptree wanted to talk to, ever again. For one thing, he reminded Sam of his old life, much of which was mercifully hazy and Sam preferred it that way.

  But Spratt was also a bully, the kind of guy five minutes of whose toxic personality could sour a whole day, Sam reflected as he strode past the big old clapboard houses of Key Street toward downtown.

  Why anyone who wasn’t buying substances from Spratt would want to be around him, Sam couldn’t fathom. But somehow Spratt always managed to attract other boys into a sort of posse, its members always younger than he was, since for one thing, no one his own age would take his crap.

  To audition guys for his group, Spratt liked to see how many supposedly friendly shoulder punches they’d put up with. That was the main test; besides being craven little sociopaths with hardly any reasoning skills and fewer social ones, the other rule was that they couldn’t hit back. If after plenty of provocation they never did, just sucked up for even more abuse, they were in.

  Thinking about this as he turned onto Water Street, Sam noted the choppy bay, still ragged from last night’s storm. Work boats hustled busily, getting the fish food, antibiotics, and supplements out to the underwater cages of salmon farms. The sky was blue, but now the racing clouds of earlier had coalesced into a milky look that made the sunlight tentative.

  Spratt and his crew had a few places they liked to hang, and these were Sam’s destinations. On the corner by the post office, where they’d been last night, was one, but in broad daylight they wouldn’t be there; too visible. The breakwater was another, at a picnic table on the platform over the boat basin; not as exposed to the town’s comings and goings but from there they could still see a cop car or somebody’s parent in time to tuck away a beer or a baggie of forbidden smoking materials.

  The breakwater’s proximity to Rosie’s hot dog stand was a plus, too; some of those smoking materials could make a person thirsty, Sam happened to know. But the boys weren’t there today, when the stiff breeze off the bay made any exposed location too uncomfortable; Sam zipped his jacket.

  So it would have to be the beach behind the seaweed factory, as it was called; a boarded-up warehouse built on a wharf over the water a quarter mile from downtown. Sam quickened his step, a pang of anxiety hurrying him along as he thought of Chip, still in Machias and still apparently being questioned about—and actually suspected of, to Sam’s continuing shock—a local girl’s murder.

  Past the breakwater, where men in boots and sweatshirts ran up and down the metal gangs, adding lines and bumpers to boats already so trussed up that the floating piers looked spiderwebbed with lengths of rope, Sam spotted a car he recognized. Carol’s car, the red Miata, zipped from a side street and turned, but not in the direction he was headed.

  Watching it go, he let his breath out in relief. If she saw him, she’d start teasing him to take a ride with her, or go to a house party. Just something, she’d beg; something fun, something lively.

  But Chip’s predicament got worse by the minute; as long as no one else was being investigated, he’d look better and better as a suspect. So Sam had to help, somehow, and anyway if Maggie should happen to come by and see Sam and Carol together …

  Well, that didn’t bear thinking about, and anyway he was too busy for either of them now. Stepping quickly past the ice cream store and the tattoo shop, he patted his pocket to make sure that his penlight pen and the small spiral notebook he’d grabbed off his desk before leaving were still there.

>   In general, he was not a note-taking kind of guy; dyslexia, which in his case manifested itself as a tendency to spell “dog” as g-o-d and vice versa, among other things, caused writing in general not to work out so well for him. But in this instance he figured he might really want to remember something, and later he could get Maggie or his mother to help him transcribe what he’d written into normal, non-dyslexically spelled English, he hoped.

  And if not, then at least he’d tried. Meanwhile, the Spratt crew might be on the beach, or in one of the caves in the cliffs that rose up from it, out of sight from any passersby. He’d try there, he decided, and if he found them he’d feel them out, see if they’d heard anything useful about the dead girl.

  Not that he really thought that bunch would have. Why would a little girl like Karen Hansen have anything to do with them, anyway? Even Carol, who knew Spratt at least to talk to—she had a lot of sketchy friends around town—said Harvey was creepy. But Sam knew she still bought pot from him occasionally anyway; heck, maybe Karen Hansen had, too, it occurred to him suddenly.

  So he might as well try. A couple of blocks uphill from the breakwater, he crossed the street, jogged down a short dead-end lane, and picked his way among old bricks, rotted driftwood, and slimy patches of rockweed tossed up here by last night’s storm until he reached the beach. To his left loomed the warehouse on the old wharf, its thirty-foot pilings crusted with barnacles and swathed in draperies of dripping seaweed. To the right, a stony beach meandered between the waterline and a set of granite cliffs rising up suddenly, slabs of rock slanting massively this way and that. Watching his step among the rockweed patches, he made his way toward the caves.

  Fifty yards down, he was out of sight of everyone but the boats out on the water. Above, the cliff tops jutted out, hiding the beach from anyone up there; ahead and behind, thrusting boulders and sand ridges blocked the view.

  He didn’t like it, suddenly. Too isolated, too … something. He wasn’t sure, only that it gave him pause. But knowing Chip was stuck in an even worse place kept him moving on the wet sand, the raw breeze stinging his eyes and his feet trying not to slip.