A Bat in the Belfry

by Sarah Graves

  “Sorry about this.” After waiting half an hour for their escort without result, the plainclothes cop named Osbourne had finally returned Chip to the interrogation room and left him.

  When he came back, he set a steaming paper cup in front of Chip on the metal table. “Turns out the deputies are all jammed up working calls in the storm. And I can’t take you out of here without them, so …”

  Chip looked up at Osbourne. “It’s okay, I’ll go upstairs. The people waiting up there, I’ll face them.”

  He summoned a deep breath. “I don’t have anything to …” But then he stopped. Hide, he’d been about to finish.

  Only he did, and Osbourne knew it, Chip could see it in the cop’s face. Osbourne knew there was something Chip would rather die—or even go to prison—than tell.

  He just didn’t know what.

  And I’m keeping it that way, Chip thought stubbornly. Being here, so miserable and desolate, only reminded him of what his life would be like without Sam Tiptree and his family in it.

  And he wasn’t risking it; he just wasn’t, and nobody could make him. End, he thought grimly, of story.

  The coffee was so bitter that it made his eyes water. Holding the cup in both cuffed hands, Chip swallowed some despite this. During his long wait at the rear entrance of the courthouse, through a reinforced-glass window in the door he’d watched the storm whipping itself together outside.

  Trash tumbling, branches flying, people battling their way across the parking lot, gripping their jackets and hanging on to their hats: despite their discomfort, Chip had envied them.

  And watching them had at least been something to do. In here there was nothing, only the buzz of the overhead fluorescents and the efforts of Osbourne, still trying to get Chip’s confession.

  And if Chip were somebody else, Osbourne might have. Gotten him to talk, that is. If, for instance, Chip thought with a quick, hot burst of resilient steeliness, he had actually done what they all accused him of doing.

  Instead of something else, something that wasn’t murder. Or not of a human being, anyway.

  But something that in Chip’s own eyes was nearly as bad. He took another sip of the bitter coffee and sat back to wait some more.

  Outside the red-brick Washington County courthouse on Upper Court Street in Machias, Maine, Hank Hansen leaned back in the car he’d borrowed, biding his time. Full dark now, and the rain thundering, thumping the car’s roof and sluicing down the front and rear windows, the wind slamming and banging things around out there.

  But sitting there with the long gun across his lap and the radio on, Hank liked it all right, considering. He had plenty to eat and drink, enough smokes for the duration, and the heater was running now and again, too, just enough to take the chill off.

  Like hunting, this was, sitting out in a blind waiting for a moose or a deer to stroll by. Waiting a long while sometimes, but in the end it was usually worth it, and this time he was certain that it would be. Because sooner or later, they’d have to bring that girl-murdering little bastard out of there, wouldn’t they? On his way, Hank supposed they all must be thinking, to a cell in a state prison.

  That is, unless they flat-out released him, which was what the guy must be hoping for. But prison wasn’t the worst thing that could happen to a person, Hank knew; a man could get his teeth fixed behind bars, have whatever medicine he needed given to him. Eat a meal, take a shower, sleep in a bed.

  Meanwhile, each day that guy enjoyed would be another one in which Hank’s daughter’s body rotted some more, and the more he pulled on the bottle of Bushmills, the clearer he saw his little Karen: bits falling off, eyes liquefying. Hank let the ghastly details dance in his mind, strengthening his resolve, his holy intention, to blow off the head of the son of a bitch who’d killed his girl. Who’d slit her throat like an animal’s …

  Movement caught his eye, people gathering on the courthouse steps across the street. Hank sat up with one hand on the long gun and the other on the window crank. Once the whole thing got started, it would go fast, he knew, like in the woods when the animal finally appeared and it was all just sight and shoot, no time for anything else.

  Hank swiveled sideways with one hand under the gun barrel, propping its end on the door panel while he rolled the driver’s-side window the rest of the way down. Rain drove in, slapping his face with its bracing cold, bringing smells of wind-thrashed pine and the salt tang of nearby Machias Bay.

  He couldn’t have sat here in broad daylight with a gun, but as it was, no one noticed when he stuck the rifle’s barrel out, its blued steel blending with reflections on puddles, headlights’ glare flaring on wet surfaces, the street’s slick neon-ish sheen.

  The clutch of people on the steps parted to reveal a lady on crutches exiting the building. A helper hustled along holding an umbrella just as a van pulled up, blocking the view briefly. When the van pulled away, the steps were empty again. There hadn’t been time enough for anyone else to come out … had there?

  Hank thought not. A couple of Bangor TV stations’ news vans still sat in the darkened parking lot, too, which let him know that something newsworthy was yet meant to happen here tonight.

  Something like a local girl’s killer being led out of there, for instance. Hank lowered the gun and settled back to wait some more. He had time.

  All the time in the world, until the camera crews could get their live shots. Yeah, he’d give them live shots, all right.

  One in the head, one in the heart. And after that—

  Well, after that Hank didn’t really care what happened. He’d already absorbed his one in the heart, or felt like it, anyway. And it would take a minute or so for the cops to figure out he’d shot their prisoner to death.

  In that brief interval, he expected he could self-administer his one in the head, as well.

  What the hell, save them the trouble.

  13

  “… asked him and asked him not to go out and stay out like this, not even telling me where he was going …”

  Fuming aloud to keep my anxiety at bay, I drove down Water Street with Ellie beside me in the passenger seat. We’d been all over the island twice, looking for Sam, past uprooted trees and swathes of shingles and tattered tar paper and shredded sections of vinyl siding that the wind had torn off and scattered around.

  And the storm wasn’t really even here yet. We’d checked the forecast, locating on the computer screen the low-pressure system in the Gulf of Maine, and found we were on the edge of it, which meant hours to go, still, of winds, rain, and tides rivaling even the 1976 Groundhog Day storm, which shoved a twenty-foot surge up the Penobscot River as far as Bangor, flooding the downtown.

  “Where’s Wade?” asked Ellie, peering out into the murk.

  “At the freighter terminal.” Two ships were headed in here, both trying to get sheltered before the worst hit. “Fortunately, there wasn’t time before the weather boom lowered to get a harbor pilot out there,” I said.

  Ordinarily, ships headed in to Eastport get guided in by a local pilot who knows the area’s hazards and features; Wade had qualified for the job long before I met him. But tonight was too wild to get him out there, so the guidance was by satellite radio, which he was helping to supervise.

  So Wade wasn’t my worry now; Sam was. “Where is he?” I repeated, slowing for another trash can rolling in the street.

  He wasn’t at the boatyard or on the breakwater, or at his friend Maggie’s, or—I’d called, just before the phones went out—at the jail in Machias, trying to see Chip. And now I couldn’t call anyone else, and it was pitch dark and pouring, so an answer to my question wasn’t looking likely anytime soon.

  A huge crash, followed by the collapse of a massive tree across the street in my rearview mirror, emphasized the “we should go home” thought that I knew Ellie was having, too.

  “Okay,” I said, turning left onto Clark Street. “We’ll go up to Route 190 and back that way. Unless you’d like me to—”

>   Take you home first, I meant to finish, but she knew that; we’d been friends a long time. “No. George’ll be out with one of the crews,” she said resignedly.

  Her husband’s part-time job with the city meant handling the worst tasks in the worst weather, and especially any emergencies. “And Lee’s with her great-aunt in Orono.”

  They had family all over the state. “So I’d just be there all—”

  Alone. “Yeah, okay,” I said, and then, “Hey. What’s—”

  “… that?” I hit the brakes, skidding over onto the gravel shoulder. Just ahead at the side of the road, a small car sat with its flashers blinking slowly, as if the battery was running down. But that wasn’t what made me stop.

  In the nearby field, a fire burned merrily. That was strange, because there was no reason for any fire to be burning there, now or ever, and besides, it was raining like hell, which should’ve—

  “Uh-oh,” said Ellie, and then I spotted them, too: a set of tire tracks running off the road into the field, two mucky ruts.

  We jumped out of the car and scrambled down through a ditch and across the field, slogging in thick, viscous mud. The burning vehicle lay on its side, slime-coated and demolished, but by the flickering light of flames leaping around it, I recognized it, and when I did my legs went as watery as the falling rain.

  It was Carol Stedman’s red Miata, the black cloth top torn nearly off and the red paint skinned from it. Sam, I thought, but I couldn’t make my voice work, so I didn’t say it aloud.

  And anyway, Ellie knew. Hurling ourselves toward the car, we checked frantically through the open top for victims still inside the vehicle and found none; then came a voice nearby, faintly:

  “No.” With the word, grated out harshly as if by someone in pain, came scuffling noises.

  “Give it to me, you—”

  “Hey!” I charged at the sounds. Someone was choking someone.

  “Hey, cut it out!”

  Beyond the car, in the flames’ leaping glow—gasoline, I realized as the stink hit me, that’s what was burning—a pair of figures struggled. The bottom one I couldn’t see, only its long red nails flashing. Then one of those red-nailed fists connected.

  The top one rolled back as if smacked by a two-by-four, its jaw slack with shock, and fell sprawlingly face-up. Bloodied nose and mud-smeared features hid his identity at first, but then …

  “Harvey Spratt,” snapped Ellie, coming up fast behind me. “You get up and start talking to us right this minute!”

  She marched up to him, grabbed his hair, and gave it a yank that lifted Harvey as if by magic. “Owww!” he complained, but not from the hair pulling; a bone end stuck jaggedly through the hole in his pants, and he’d just noticed it.

  “Ow, ow, ow …” Shock does funny things, I guess. But now that he’d seen his compound fracture, it held his attention.

  Lizzie Snow hauled herself up irritably, shaking out the fist she’d just used as a battering ram against Harvey’s jaw. “I didn’t need those knuckles anyway,” she groused, wincing.

  She noticed Harvey. “Listen, you little—”

  What she called him next made even his eyes widen. “Why’re you out on a night like this, anyway?” she went on. “Guy like you should be holed up in a cave with the other snakes.”

  At the word “cave,” his eyes widened anxiously. Seeing this, she stepped up to him, seized his shirtfront, and spoke straight into his face. “How’d you get that car? Where’s its owner? Huh? You think your leg hurts now? How about if I—”

  She drew her own booted foot back menacingly, like a kicker in a particularly nasty game of soccer. But just then a man I didn’t recognize came jogging across the field at us; “tall, dark, and handsome” would’ve described him if he hadn’t also looked ill and injured. Split lip, one arm in a sling …

  “Okay, cops’re coming, and an ambulance too,” he said, a bit out of breath.

  In fact, from what I could see of his face in the streaming darkness, he could’ve used an ambulance himself: ghost white, lips tightly clamped in what looked a lot like pain, a trickle of blood leaking from his nose. He swiped carelessly at it, just as a cop car screamed up the road and skidded to a halt behind mine.

  Paulie Waters started across the muddy field toward us. “Ow,” Harvey moaned again, and when he realized Paulie was there: “She hit me,” he began whining. “She started it, I was only—”

  “Shut up, Harvey,” said Paulie with about as much concern as if Harvey had a hangnail.

  I didn’t want him to shut up, though. He knew where Sam was, I could practically feel it coming off him in poisonous waves, a secret that had somehow compelled him to steal the car, to race down a dark, wet road in it, to—

  Paulie turned to Lizzie. “You haul him out?”

  Of the burning vehicle, he meant. She shook her head. “No. The gas tank blew, the bang knocked me down. And when I came to, this ugly little critter was already on top of me, going through my jacket.”

  Harvey scowled, hearing himself called “critter.”

  “But she clobbered him,” Ellie put in admiringly.

  “Yeah, well.” Brushing this off, Lizzie glanced over at the smoldering wreck. “I guess we need a wrecker, some transport to custody for this creepster here, and I suppose he ought to get a look by a doctor, too.”

  She stopped short. “But you know all that, don’t you? I’m kind of making a fool of myself trying to tell you how to do your job. So I should probably shut up.”

  Paulie looked at Lizzie, down at Harvey’s now-subdued form, and over at the car’s wreckage again. He stood thinking a moment, possibly about the fact that she’d meant to haul Harvey from the burning vehicle, if he was in it; that’s why she’d approached it.

  Harvey just hadn’t been, was all. “Nah, don’t shut up,” Paulie said. “You might turn out to be worth listening to after all. You’ll want to get that eye looked at, though.”

  He waved his flashlight at her; from the purple lump forming over her left eyebrow, Harvey must’ve clocked her a good one. She touched it curiously, winced, then turned to Ellie and me.

  “What’re you two doing out?” she wanted to know.

  By then I could hardly contain myself. The whole thing burst out of me, including the part about this being Carol’s car, and Carol being Sam’s friend, and us not having seen Sam lately and being worried about him.

  And how sure I was now that Harvey had something to do with it. But all the while, I knew they weren’t going to do anything to Harvey to get the truth out of him: they couldn’t. They were cops, I realized as I poured the rest of the story out; they had to obey the law. But I didn’t, and by the end of it, I couldn’t contain myself:

  “You know, don’t you? You know where he is.” In reply Harvey just smirked at me, a look so snottily defiant, it tipped me over the edge. The others weren’t expecting it, so when I hurled myself at him no one stopped me at first, not even Harvey himself.

  But what I did next shocked even me. I slammed into him, smelling his sweat and blood. Grabbing his hair in my two fists, I shook his head so that his eyes rolled.

  And then I headbutted him, so angry and scared when I did it that it didn’t even hurt. “You know where Sam is. Carol, too, you took that car from her to get away from whatever you did to—”

  My hands were around his throat. “Tell me!”

  A keening sound was coming from him, high and breathy like the air escaping from a punctured inner tube. Around me, people kept shouting and grabbing at me, but I didn’t care. “Tell me, you—”

  Paulie dragged me off, finally, by seizing my shoulders and hauling me backwards while Harvey staggered and was grabbed by Lizzie again. Her captive sniffled resentfully while she spoke.

  “You know, Paulie, I think I’ll ride with these two ladies,” she said, turning and giving Harvey a shove. Paulie caught him.

  “Unless,” she added, “you want to leave our pal here with me for a few minutes.” She touch
ed the knuckles of her punching hand with the fingertips of the other. “My fist’s not broken … yet.”

  Because on her face in the glow of Paulie’s flashlight I saw the same notion I was worrying: Harvey Spratt had gotten Carol’s car somehow and I couldn’t imagine Carol letting it go willingly.

  Harvey looked nervous for a moment, but he knew Lizzie’s threat was empty. His upper lip, even bloody and swollen as it was, curled triumphantly at me.

  “Meanwhile, Dylan needs to see a doctor,” she added sternly. “Make sure he does, please.” Dylan, apparently, did not have a vote in this; Paulie either.

  “Aye, aye, sir,” the young cop said, yanking Harvey along by his collar.

  After that, Lizzie strode with Ellie and me over the dark, muddy field, through the streaming ditch, and between the spruces whose boughs thrashed wildly in the rising gale. At the road she ducked into her car to turn the flashers off and hurried to mine.

  “Okay, now let’s go find your kid,” she said.

  But only Harvey Spratt knew where Sam was, and Harvey wasn’t talking, so I didn’t really see how we could.

  “Sam,” said Carol.

  She’d been crying, but now she’d stopped.

  Sort of. “Sam, we’re not going to make it, are we?”

  “Cut it out. Of course we’re going to make it.”

  Of course they were. He just had no idea how. Or even how long they’d been here, tied up in a beachfront cave with a storm howling outside and the tide rising.

  “Just let me catch my breath a little, and I’ll go down and try it again.”

  Try untying the knot binding her arms together, he meant. To do so, he was using his teeth, clamping them onto whatever part of the line he could get at, then worrying and tugging at it like a dog playing with a rope. The trouble was, doing it underwater was difficult.

  Because the tide kept rising, and each time a wave broke over the sand ridge at the front of the cave, more water slopped in; now the place where they sat was three feet deep in ice-cold, intensely salty and gritty seawater. He had to put his face under it to get at the knot securing Carol’s wrists, and of course he couldn’t hold his nose because his own hands were also tied; thus the task was an exercise in gag-reflex suppression plus not panicking while also feeling that he was drowning.