A Bat in the Belfry

by Sarah Graves

  She hoped it was steam. She pulled her cell phone out. No signal …

  Yet another charming fact about downeast Maine: crappy cell reception, or at least it was with the phone she had. Fifty yards away, though, house lights glowed through the trees.

  “Get out.” He obeyed while she yanked her own seatbelt off, swung the car door open, and jumped out into rain pouring down in a nearly solid stream. Cursing, he headed for the house up behind the line of evergreens while she slogged into the field where the little red sports car lay on its side, wheels still spinning.

  Nothing else moved there but the steamy spew of whatever was rising, smokelike, from the hood area of the crashed vehicle. A lot like smoke …

  The rain on the road’s pavement sounded like bullets. Lizzie forced her way through a thicket of some kind of thornbush, then into a ditch full of cold muck. Hauling herself out, she slipped and fell, clambered up again and forced herself on. Slogging into the field, she scanned the wreck for any sign of life.

  And if I see any, it’d better have its hands in the air the very instant I say so, or …

  But she didn’t see any. The stink of antifreeze mingled with a sharp, familiar smell that sent a pang through her: gasoline. And even though the rain would douse any fire outside the car …

  Then, through the vehicle’s torn canvas top, she saw flames flickering. Tiny at first, they lapped up briefly and then with a bright floof! they were everywhere.

  And so was the screaming.

  What happened next was a confusion to her, then and later: shouts. A stabbing anguish in her hands, sounds of rain sizzling on a hot surface, a blood-slick gripping on her arm. Then she was staggering, half urging and half carrying someone.

  There was the smell of sweat and blood, but it was okay, she was getting somewhere, she thought. Hauling someone out of a car fire, alive, until something hit the side of her head very hard; then came the taste of blood, sickening her, and stars flaring behind her eyes.

  Somebody grabbing her again, dragging her away. The rain in dizzying circles … falling again.

  Falling and falling.

  Bob Arnold thought that if anyone in Eastport knew where the murdered girl, Karen Hansen, had been planning to get enough cash to run away on, it was probably local bad boy Harvey Spratt. He knew everything about anything bad that anyone was ever planning; it was a talent of his, that and taking advantage of whoever was planning it.

  Harvey was bad, and dangerous to know, and sooner or later Bob intended to catch him at something serious, a plan that Harvey with his animal-like cunning had so far thwarted.

  Bob also knew that foul weather rarely kept Harvey from his haunts: the picnic tables on the breakwater, the old scaffolding under the defunct canning factory, or the storefront doorstep at the corner of Water and Washington Streets, where he could stand under the brick archway and see everyone coming and going.

  Especially cop cars, so Bob left his squad car at the Mobil station and borrowed one of the station’s junky loaner vehicles. By now it was past dusk, the clouds heavy overhead and the wind-driven rain coming down in earnest again. Down at the breakwater, men in slickers waved baton lights to herd the last freight trucks away from the big vessel tied to the massive pilings. Deck lights on the ship shed a silver-white glow onto angular cranes hovering mantis-like over the cargo holds; most of the fishing boats and other vessels in the boat basin were lit up, too, their owners unwilling to leave them with more ugly weather imminent.

  As Bob passed the breakwater’s entrance he ran a practiced eye down the row of pickup trucks parked on the dock, thinking about whose wives might be home alone tonight with kids and need help if later on the storm got extra nasty. Then he was at the corner where he’d expected to find Harvey.

  But he didn’t. Instead, Bogie Kopmeir loitered in the arched doorway of the brick storefront, smoking a cigarette and peering around as if waiting for someone.

  Bogie was a short, solidly built kid with a round baby face; his porkpie hat and leather jacket were no doubt intended to make him look older. Instead he resembled a large, oddly dressed baby, and this pretty much required him to be good with his fists and any other fighting tools he could get his hands on.

  Also, Bogie was kind of nuts. Pulling up alongside the boy, Bob rolled down the loaner’s window. “C’mere.”

  Bogie sauntered up to the car, flicking away his smoke.

  “Where’s Harvey?” Usually Bob chatted with youngsters for a moment or two before hitting them with questions; there was no sense in creating unnecessary hard feelings. But he avoided small talk with Bogie and his thuggish cohorts.

  Give them an inch of familiarity, they’d take a mile and you wouldn’t like the result, Bob knew from unhappy experience.

  Bogie tried looking sly, but on his smooth, round face the result was the expression of an infant with colic.

  “Get in the car, Bogie.”

  Colic vanished, replaced by peevishness. “Whaffor? Din’t do nothing, why’re you always—”

  Bob grabbed Bogie’s sodden jacket front. “You can tell me where Harvey is, or I can take you home and hand you over to your old man. I hear he’s been in a bad mood lately.”

  Bogie’s eyes widened; he twisted away. “Awright, jeez, you don’t hafta—”

  Bogie’s mother was long out of the picture. His father was a locksmith who’d worked for the mill in Woodland, a town forty miles to the north, which left Bogie on his own most of the time. But the mill was on shutdown until the lumber market picked up again, so the old man was out of work and drinking heavily lately as a result, and he was even quicker with his fists than Bogie.

  Bogie backed sullenly into the doorway. “Took off in that chick’s little car,” he said dismissively, pulling out another cigarette.

  “What car?” Bob demanded, thinking Aw, hell. Harvey behind the wheel was even worse news than Harvey just walking around on two legs.

  “The little red car, you know the one? But I dunno where he went. Just took off,” Bogie said in the same wondering tones he’d have used if Harvey Spratt had vanished into thin air.

  Yeah, vanished like a magician’s trick, Bob thought sourly. He knew the car Bogie meant, though. “How long ago was that?”

  Bogie pretended to think: that colic expression again. Then he brightened. “Uh, twenny minutes?”

  He squinted to see if this answer would get him off the hook, and Bob off his case, meanwhile lighting the new smoke.

  “He have anybody with him? The girl?” Although what a girl like Carol Stedman would want with Harvey Spratt, Bob didn’t know.

  Bogie puffed. “Nah. She gave him the keys, though. He, like, didn’t steal the car or nothin’.”

  “Uh-huh.” In Bob’s experience, people gave Harvey things when Harvey made them do it, one way or another. But there was no sense trying to parse that out with Bogie, whose thoughts about people rarely extended beyond their immediate usefulness (or lack thereof) to him. To Bogie, defending Harvey wasn’t so much an act of friendship as an effort to escape a beating from him, should Harvey ever learn of this conversation.

  But Bogie still looked shifty. “What else?” said Bob, then repeated himself when Bogie toed the wet sidewalk evasively.

  And when Bogie continued silent: “Hey.” Bob got out of the car, never mind the rain. Bogie stood his ground, knowing that he could run but not hide.

  Not in Eastport, anyway. Bob seized his collar, snapping the cigarette from Bogie’s lips with a flick of his index finger. “So what’s this?”

  He brushed Bogie’s jacket back to reveal the leather knife scabbard on his belt. Empty, though. “Where’s your knife?”

  Bogie always carried one, small but wicked looking. The boy scowled. “Lost it.”

  “Uh-huh. You know anything about a kid getting stabbed in the neck today? And another one, younger kid, beat to within an inch of his life?”

  The stabbed kid dead, the other one clinging to life in the hospital, as if Bob
needed any more mayhem today. Bob eyed the kid in front of him, who sure as hell looked guilty about something. But Bogie wouldn’t be going far; he was the kind of little punk who thought he could tough-and-bluff his way out of anything. And it was Harvey that Bob needed to talk to now.

  “So how come Harvey wanted the car?”

  “Dunno,” began Bogie in aggrieved tones, “how should I know what he—” but Bob cut in.

  “Your dad’s home, isn’t he?” And before Bogie could reply he went on: “I think maybe I ought to take you there. Drag you right in and drop you there in front of him, like the little sack of—”

  “No!” For the first time, real fear showed on Bogie’s face; even sober, which at this hour of the early evening was unlikely anyway, his dad was worse than Bob Arnold.

  Way worse. “He just wanteda get away,” Bogie jabbered. “He wanteda take that car outta Mr. Hansen’s garage, nobody ever uses it. But he sent me over there and it ain’t there, so …”

  “What?” Bob gripped Bogie’s jacket front, hauled the young man up close to him despite the kid’s stinky nicotine breath. “What car out of Hansen’s garage?”

  Hansen’s shed, the kid meant, and there hadn’t been any car in it when Bob was there. The only vehicle on the place had been the junker sitting on flats. But …

  An awful idea began blooming in Bob’s head, one that had nothing to do with Bogie or his unsavory pal, Harvey Spratt. It was the idea that he himself had missed something, and now that something was about to bite him in the behind.

  A car, he thought, sitting in Hank Hansen’s shed. But now that car was missing, and so was—

  He let go of Bogie’s jacket just as a huge gust of wind howled down the street, rattling signs and vibrating behind the sheets of plywood nailed up over the storefront windows. Bogie staggered back into the relative protection of the arched doorway while Bob flung himself back into his loaner again. As he started it up, Paulie Waters’s squad car shot down Washington Street at him, its tires throwing up a foot-high spray of water at the bottom of the hill.

  “Hey. No comms,” said Paulie, waving his radio handset. “The wind musta took out one of the towers on the mainland, I think. No phones, no radio … we are in-freaking-communicado, boss, and I don’t know when it’s comin’ back.”

  Bob nodded—yet another of the benefits of island living, he thought sourly, was the dependency on mainland communications arrangements—as Paulie went on:

  “But before it went kablooie, I got a poke from dispatch. Accident on outer Clark Street, one of those state-cop dopes came across it and called it in from a residence? Says maybe there’s injuries. I’ve got our EMTs on their way.”

  “Great. Handle it all, will you, Paulie?” Bob glanced at Bogie, who was listening wide-eyed. Bogie still looked sneaky about something, some shenanigans he hadn’t revealed. But Bob didn’t have time to find out what.

  He turned back to Paulie. “I gotta go to Machias.”

  Paulie made a What?!? face; a less opportune time for a trip to the county seat thirty miles to the south could hardly be found, his expression said.

  But Bob didn’t have time for that, either. “Listen to me now, if the radio doesn’t come back right away and you can’t get dispatch to relay a message—” Because Paulie was right: heaven knew what had gone wrong or how long it might last.

  “—then I want you keep trying, however long you’ve got to. Try to let ’em know not to let that kid out of their sight.”

  He sucked in a breath. “That Chip Hahn kid, the one they got for the girl up to the church last night. I mean it, Paulie, he’s got to stay indoors, locked up, no one gets at him. Got that?”

  Paulie still looked puzzled, but he didn’t argue. “Got it, boss. I’ll keep at it. And listen, one more thing.”

  Bob felt so impatient, he thought the top of his head might just pop right off, spewing steam like one of the characters in his little girl’s picture books.

  “I don’t care, Paulie, don’t you understand? I’ve got to—”

  Hank Hansen has another vehicle, and it—probably with Hank behind the wheel—is missing.

  And betting that they’d actually managed to find all Hank Hansen’s weapons was purely foolish.

  “Up at the church there, they got a problem,” said Paulie. “That steeple is leaning, Bob. This wind, it’s just—”

  “Yeah. Whatever.” A pang of urgency shot through him. How long has Hank Hansen been gone, anyway? And what else does he have besides a car no one knew about? A gun? Bomb materials?

  “I don’t care if that church sails away, Paulie, all right? I don’t care if it blows the freak down. Get it safe if you can. I’ll sign for any money you spend. But I can’t help you with it.”

  On shoring up the structure, he meant, not that Paulie was likely to get anyone around here to do that on a night like this.

  “ ’Cause I’ve got to go now,” Bob finished, and sped away.

  Headed up Washington Street, his car trailed a wake like a speedboat’s; out Route 190, rain thundered down onto the roadway ahead of him. Hank must’ve rented out the shed, Bob realized. To a summer person, maybe, for a few bucks a month which of course Hank would’ve jumped at, and how the hell had Bob missed thinking of that? Back in the day, he’d known everything about everyone in town. But now …

  Never mind. Water under the bridge. At the Mobil station, he traded the loaner back in for his squad car again and got back on the road; if he reached Machias in time it wouldn’t matter what Hank Hansen had or didn’t have or what he intended doing with it.

  If.

  My hands are tied, my hands are …

  Tied. Sam’s hands were tied tightly together behind him. He’d tried to wriggle out of his bonds, but no luck.

  He’d tried hard. “S-Sam?” Carol’s voice quavered with cold and fear.

  “What?” His did, too, but on the inside. No sense scaring her even more than she was.

  “I’m s-sorry.” She sniffled miserably. God, it was cold. “Not your fault.”

  Harvey Spratt had taken her purse and car keys from her, and her cell phone was in her purse. Not that it would’ve worked in here anyway. My hands are …

  Tied. And what, Sam wondered a little desperately—well, it was more than a little, really—was he going to do about that?

  It was dark in the cave, the only light coming now from the penlight still glowing on the ledge behind them. Outside, the last of the daylight hadn’t quite vanished; falling rain caught the pearly gray illumination of evening, making the cave’s mouth resemble a snowy TV screen.

  The hissing sound was the same, too, but beyond that another noise crept nearer: the rush-and-thunder of waves rolling in with the rising tide. “Can you lean over at all?” he asked Carol.

  Her hands were tied, too, with the same thick orange line that held his wrists and ankles tight. The lines’ long loose ends were square-knotted behind both of them, around an iron bar someone had driven into the granite ledge long ago.

  What the bar had been for back then, Sam didn’t know; to tie a skiff to, maybe, or anchor a floating dock. Now it kept the orange lines taut, imprisoning him and Carol at the rear of the cave, in the glow of the small penlight.

  “Could you pull a knot apart with your teeth?” he asked. But instead of answering, her voice rose in a shriek, and then he felt it, too. Something moving …

  Moving and cold; snake, he thought at first; though that was impossible he stifled a yell of his own. But then he realized the truth and his moment of fear was replaced by a deeper fright.

  Icy, implacable. “Shh, it’s okay,” he told Carol. “It’s just water.” Creeping in, pulling back …

  He leaned against her, trying to send some of his own fake courage into her. “Just a little wave, that’s all. You’ll just get wet, a little.”

  Fake, because the truth was so much worse than that. From the mouth of the cave to back here where they hunkered was only a distance of about twelve feet
, but the downslope was acute, so that where they sat was a good eight feet lower than sea level at least, he estimated.

  In other words, at high tide the cave was filled with water; completely filled. “Carol. Inch forward, can you? Drag with your feet and scoot on your butt if you can, as much as you can.”

  “What?” She was weeping now. But she did as he said, and he did likewise, inching along on the wet shale.

  When they’d reached the end of the orange line that tethered them to the iron bar, they rested. Cold, tired, scared … the words didn’t begin to cover how he felt, and it was amazing what that kind of emotion took out of you, he was noticing.

  But it didn’t take as much as being drowned would. Drowned slowly, one wave at a time until …

  “Okay. Now roll on your side with your back toward me.”

  Shivering, she obeyed him again. But: “Sam,” she complained, “it’s wetter up here! The waves are coming in, why did you—”

  “Lean forward.” He didn’t have time to argue with her, and anyway, he didn’t want to have to tell her the truth:

  That, yes, it would stay dryer for longer, farther back in the cave. But when it did start filling up, it would happen fast and from the rear. “Just stay still.”

  He angled his body sideways, then let himself fall onto his side with his mouth against her tied wrists. Working the line’s tightly plied nylon strands furiously with his teeth, he found the knot.

  Here’s hoping, he thought as he began pulling at it with his front teeth. Another wave came in, foaming around them and giving him a sudden mouthful of cold, sandy seawater.

  Choking, ignoring Carol’s unhappy cries, he went to work on the knot again as soon as he could breathe. It was tied tightly, but as a boat guy, Sam knew a knot’s tightness was not the only measure of its security. More important was the kind of knot and how well it was tied.

  Another wave, another intensely salty mouthful.

  Here’s hoping our pal Harvey Spratt wasn’t ever a boat guy himself. Or …

  More seawater. Sam held his breath, spat. Then back to work. Or a Boy Scout.