A Bat in the Belfry

by Sarah Graves

  It was why he was resting now, just for another minute.

  Or two. “Carol. What did you want from Harvey Spratt?”

  Sam let his head loll back, hoping it might allow more air into his windpipe. He felt her shrugging beside him.

  “Just … a little taste,” she answered reluctantly. “Mostly he’s had pills. Pot’s too tame for him nowadays. But—”

  “Taste? Of what?” But then he realized: “Heroin? Are you telling me you’ve been injecting, that Harvey’s been selling …”

  Shock silenced him. The pills were bad enough, but at least you knew what you were getting. But with heroin, it might be a hit of euphoria or a shot of cyanide, and you’d never know until it was too late.

  “Don’t be mad at me, Sam. I just wanted … I don’t know. To feel better. I mean, I never got hooked or anything.”

  “Yeah.” He understood. He’d said the same thing to himself many a time. “Yeah, okay.”

  She wasn’t telling him everything, he knew from her voice. Another icy wave sloshed in, deepening the cold water they sat in by another half inch. He wondered once more what could possibly be so bad that she still had to hide it from him, then gave up on the thought.

  Because it didn’t matter, did it? Nothing did except getting free of these ropes, getting out of here before water filled this cave and they—

  Drowned. Inch by inch, breath by gasping, struggling breath, until it rose up over their …

  No. He took a deep breath of his own—while you still can, a voice in his head whispered thinly—then plunged his head down into the briny water again, resuming his fight to get out of this mess by, quite literally, the skin of his teeth.

  But when his head was fully submerged, he heard something, a crackle-and-whoosh sound transmitted clearly through the water to his eardrums. Thrusting his head up, he blinked away the stinging salt water, hoping he was wrong.

  He felt it, too, though, the dark, chilly liquid around him rising very suddenly, from his waist all the way to the middle of his chest in a single swoosh.

  “Sam!” Carol cried. “What’s happening?”

  The tide must’ve washed the sand ridge out from in front of the cave, he realized, so now water could get in much faster. He told Carol this, that it was worse than they’d thought. That they didn’t have hours in which to escape, as they had believed.

  Half an hour, maybe. “At least we’re not sitting here in the dark,” he added, trying to find some good news to give her.

  The penlight was still on, shining from where Harvey Spratt had tossed it onto the cave’s highest rear ledge. Thank God it’s waterproof, he thought; just the air in here was so damp a person could practically swim in it. And it seemed securely perched on that ledge …

  But even as Sam thought this, a faint rattle sounded from back there, just the tiniest click-click.

  No, he thought, but as the waves thundered nearer, slamming the beach, their vibration made the penlight perched on the edge of the ledge shiver. Shiver and … Sam turned in time to see the penlight start to roll. Clickclickclick …

  “What’s that?” Carol whispered.

  But before she could finish her question, the penlight fell, hit the water with a final-sounding plop! and sank, still shining all the way to the cave’s submerged floor, where it lay still.

  In its own reflected glow it resembled a tiny submarine, one lit-up porthole gleaming. But in the next moment another, larger wave rolled in and claimed it, washing it out toward the cave’s mouth. Successive waves tugged it farther, each time rolling it a few inches back in toward them but then out again a little more, until at last its feeble glow thinned, dissolved, and in an awful moment vanished entirely, leaving them in the dark.

  With Lizzie Snow and Ellie in the car, I drove cautiously up Key Street. Even as we neared home, all I could think of was getting back out again to find Sam, but Ellie looked blue with cold and Lizzie’s teeth chattered, though she tried to hide it.

  Through the downpours, my big old house looked like a ship on a wild sea. There were lights in only a few windows, and even those were unusually dim.

  Now what? I thought, realizing that the houses all along our route home had been in similar shape. But once inside I caught on swiftly: of course the power was out. With the wind howling and the power lines along the causeway no doubt getting the brunt of it, it was a wonder we’d had electricity for this long.

  We stripped wet clothes off and put on all the warm, dry sweatshirts and jeans that I could find, including sneakers for me and Ellie. Lizzie’s feet, amazingly, were dry in her knee-high boots; what I’d been taking for expensive leather turned out to be amazingly good-looking and practical neoprene.

  Wade was still out, said Bella, who pressed cups of hot, creamy-sweet coffee into our hands, while on the woodstove the kettle simmered and lanterns burned pleasantly on the fireplace mantel.

  Bella asked no questions, but her big green eyes fixed me with a look of concern. Sam wasn’t back. And she knew I couldn’t stay home, not with him still out there somewhere in a gale.

  And with, as no one else seemed quite to be realizing quite as clearly as I did, a murderer still on the loose. When we were warm enough to think straight again, Lizzie spoke:

  “So you’ve called all around looking for him?”

  I nodded.

  “And the little red car we found wrecked belonged to a girl he’s been seeing?” she followed up.

  At my second nod, she looked thoughtful. “I first spotted the car on Water Street. It wasn’t speeding at first but when the kid saw me behind him …”

  “Maybe Harvey had just grabbed it?” Ellie suggested. Her wavy red hair had begun drying to ringlets around her face, which had gotten a bit of its color back.

  Lizzie nodded slowly. “Maybe. Hadn’t put the pedal to the metal yet,” she mused aloud. “Just got behind the wheel, still checking it out …”

  She looked up. “So where around there d’you think the Spratt kid might’ve run into her? And Sam, too, if he was with her?”

  But I didn’t answer, being already halfway out the door with Ellie right behind me, and Lizzie, too.

  Bob Arnold drove just as fast as he dared out Route 190 and across the causeway, gripping the wheel against storm-driven wind and noting the dangling power lines being flung about, writhing like angry snakes. At Route 1 he swung left onto the two-lane blacktop headed south, the road past his slapping wiper blades a black gleaming surface, as treacherous as hell.

  No one else on the road, though. That was good luck, at least. He tried the radio again, finding only hissing static.

  Still no comms, then, he realized, so not only could he not warn the Machias people about Hank Hansen, he couldn’t even try to find out what kind of car Hansen was driving, or a possible plate number.

  So he was screwed. Blued and tattooed, his mind added automatically. Nothing he could do but keep driving, buddy. Once he got to the courthouse, he would find Hank Hansen if he was able to, and stop him from doing whatever it was that he intended to do to Chip Hahn, Hank’s daughter’s accused murderer.

  Also if he was able to. Bob let a blip of how he would feel if it had been his little girl slip in under his mental radar, saw his own hands clenching around the steering wheel.

  But then as his squad car sped through Pembroke and over the Dennys River bridge, he calmed himself down. Take it easy.

  Just get there. Find him, and stop him. Because …

  But as the dark sky let loose with yet another terrifying downpour, flooding the roadway and his vision at the same scary time, he found for an awful instant that his heart was flooded, too, with brain-paralyzing rage. In that moment, while the tires hydroplaned slightly and the squad car drifted toward the ditch and the trees beyond, he found himself unable to come up with any reason why Hank Hansen shouldn’t be allowed to kill Chip Hahn.

  Just take him out. Out of this world, which would be better and a whole lot less complicated on account of
the deed. But then as the deluge eased off and the tires caught traction, the ditch and the collision-inviting trees faded back into Bob’s peripheral vision, and reason returned.

  Because that’s not for me to decide, is it? And I don’t want it to be, either. Just—find him. Stop him, damn it—

  Stop him because I swore to. Because—

  He sighed, alone behind the wheel of the squad car, racing through a storm-torn night because …

  He didn’t know whether to be relieved or sorry. Because it’s my damned job.

  Lonnie Porter stood alone in the sheeting downpour outside the All Faith Chapel on Two Church Lane, smoking a cigarette under his umbrella and watching yellow crime-scene tape fly around the lawn in the wind.

  He was waiting for a truck to arrive. Up here against the church’s big front door, the wind wasn’t so bad, but if the truck didn’t come soon he was going the hell home and to hell with the stupid steeple, he thought. Just then the truck finally did show up, though, all eighteen wheels’ worth of it, barely making its way around the corner. On it was a crane, not a little bucket truck phone and cable companies used, either, but a monster of a full-sized industrial contraption.

  With a wheezy shriek of its air brakes and a final exhaust-spewing rumble of its diesel engine, the truck came to a halt and a skinny man in rolled-down boots and a yellow slicker hopped out of the cab, pulling his ball cap’s brim down sharply and peering from beneath it as he strode toward Lonnie.

  The man’s name was Terrel Carson. He owned the truck and the equipment on the flatbed that it was hauling. “Hope you know what you’re doing!” he said.

  “Ayuh. Me too.” The wind snatched Lonnie’s words away as he and Terrel squinted up at the church steeple.

  “Can you get ’er up there?” Lonnie asked as a gust nearly knocked both men off their feet.

  Terrel spat. “Ayuh.”

  He strode back to the big rig. Moments later the flatbed’s rear tires were digging muddy ruts in the lawn, and moments after that, two enormous track-and-roller mechanisms were juddering down the flatbed’s ramp.

  Lonnie lit another smoke. He’d told Jake Tiptree he would try securing that steeple against the gale, so he was going to. But now that the machinery he’d summoned was here, he felt …

  Well, he told himself, at least Terrel didn’t seem nervous about it. He watched Terrel climb into the cab of the machine that had come off the flatbed and begin fiddling with the levers and knobs bristling from its dashboard. Taking a drag, he waited as Terrell maneuvered his machine right up alongside the chapel.

  That way, the crane’s long, hydraulically controlled arm could send the sky bucket up between the building and the row of white pines, fifty feet tall if they were an inch, along the lot line twenty yards distant.

  Jeez, I’m glad I don’t have to go up in that thing, Lonnie thought, eyeing the sky bucket, which basically really was just a bucket big enough for one man to climb into.

  “Okay!” Terrel yelled from the crane’s cab, waving at a cable that ended in the metal-stranded equivalent of a noose. You looped the noose end over whatever it was you wanted to pull on, tightened it via another hydraulic system from inside the cab.

  “Okay, what?” Lonnie yelled back, unsure why Terrel hadn’t come back down from his seat.

  Terrel waved again, a get-going gesture with more than a little dose of impatience in it. If not for this chore, Terrel would no doubt be at home, drinking a beer.

  Me too, thought Lonnie, not sure why Terrel wanted him over by the sky bucket anyway. Shouldn’t he be in the crane’s cab by now, learning how to work the machinery?

  But he slogged obediently through the mud to where Terrel’s wave indicated, right by the three metal steps leading up to the bucket’s doorway hatch.

  Up! Terrel gestured sharply. Lonnie could see Terrel’s hands on the controls now, too, and in the machine’s dim-lit cab could see the intent look on Terrel’s face.

  Aw, no, Lonnie thought, wishing hard for another cigarette. But when his hand went reflexively to his pocket, he was out.

  Me? He pointed at his chest. Terrel nodded, up and down very hard in a way that conveyed just what a fool Terrel thought Lonnie was being. Then Terrel yelled out the cab door.

  “Christ, Lonnie, you coulda been down by now! Git yer ass in gear, will ya?”

  Lonnie swallowed hard. It was clear what needed doing: that cable noose needed to get dropped down around the big weathervane mounted atop the steeple. Right over the tippy-top, it needed to go, and then fall down around the weathervane’s base where it was fastened to the spire’s peak with iron bolts. Lonnie had simply misunderstood who was going to do what, but now he did know.

  Me, he thought very unhappily. Way up there in the sky with the wind, rain, and … He felt his shoulders sag. If he went, he would die, either by falling out of the sky bucket or just from sheer fright. But if he didn’t go …

  As if giving him a sign, the wind slackened off a bit. Not a lot, but enough to keep this from being a suicide mission. Up in the cab, Terrel tapped his wristwatch meaningfully. Let’s get this show on the road. Lonnie imagined the ribbing he would take if he wussied out. The condemned man, he thought bleakly as he patted his pocket once more, didn’t even get a last smoke.

  No doubt if anyone knew what he and Terrel were up to, this crazy-ass rescue mission would have the kibosh put on it. But no one else did know, and meanwhile, this was the church that his mother and dad had been married in and buried out of. A whole lot of other people in town felt the way he did about it, too, he was willing to bet.

  That it belonged here. That this is ours.

  That it should stay. But those people weren’t here, and he was, was the long and short of it.

  Resignedly, he climbed into the crane’s sky bucket.

  “I don’t get it,” said Lizzie as we raced through the storm toward Water Street. “What makes you think—”

  “You don’t get it because you’re new here,” I told her, “so you don’t know Harvey Spratt. But if you did know him—”

  I stopped talking; I needed all my wits to steer around the large hole that had just opened up directly in front of me. Water had apparently excavated a cavern beneath the pavement, and then the pavement had collapsed into it.

  Hoping very sincerely that more wouldn’t collapse right this minute, I got past it, then hit the gas and we swung around onto Water Street, which at the moment seemed aptly named. The few other cars out plowed through foot-deep waves, wipers flapping.

  “Harvey Spratt is a pretty well known junior bad guy around here,” Ellie explained. “Taking a car isn’t that big a deal for him.”

  “Yeah, so I gathered.” Lizzie said. “But what’s that got to do with—”

  “Well, what if the reason he ran when he saw you wasn’t the car he was driving?” I said. “What if it was something else he’d done lately?”

  “Something he’d just done,” Ellie added clarifyingly. “Like maybe to Carol and Sam.” The boat basin looked as if somebody was stirring it up with an eggbeater; big choppy waves were tossing boats around and spewing foam up onto the Coast Guard’s dock. We sped uphill, then sharply to the right until we reached the old cannery building, its dark windows like rows of unseeing eyes.

  “Yeah.” Lizzie squinted out toward the bay and the whitecaps racing. “This is where the red Miata was when I first saw it.”

  I pulled over. “Oh, man. So now what?” I didn’t know what Harvey might’ve had against Carol or Sam. All I knew was, he’d had her car, and—

  “Okay, how about this?” said Lizzie. “Ellie, you go door to door to any houses nearby, see if anyone saw anything earlier.”

  There were half a dozen houses on this part of Water Street where people might’ve been looking out their windows. Ellie nodded as Lizzie went on:

  “Ask if they saw Harvey and his crew, or Carol and Sam together. Or any one of them individually, any time since early this afternoon.”

>   We got out of the car, hunching against the weather. “And Jake and I will go down there,” Lizzie finished.

  She pointed at the cannery, and the heaving water beyond. Down on the beach, waves rolled up and hit the rocks with a sound like bombs going off distantly, hissing as they slid away for another onslaught.

  “Okay!” Ellie shouted, turning away; then Lizzie and I began staggering together toward the empty cannery, whose roof was in the process of being stripped off.

  “So why are we coming down here?” I yelled over the wind.

  At low tide, the sheltered space beneath the wharf building offered a meeting spot for local kids, out of sight from parents, police, and other snoopy anti-teenager types. Now at nearly high tide, though, the beach under the wharf was flooded to a depth of fifteen or so feet.

  “Just want to get a look, is all!” she yelled back.

  Which I supposed we might as well. Who knew if Sam had even been here, or Carol either; it was only a guess on my part that had brought us here in the first place.

  But if they had been, maybe some evidence of their presence would still be in the sand or in one of the caves above the rock-strewn waterline, blown there, maybe, or flung up by a big wave. There was another, much grimmer possibility, too, of course, but I didn’t let myself think about that as we picked our way down the weedy trail leading to the wharf.

  Once on the beach, we slogged along until we got to a granite outcropping that thrust out into the sea, blocking our way. We’d seen nothing that suggested Sam or Carol had been here.

  Lizzie shouted over the wind’s shrieking: “He could still be inside somewhere, too, you know, just waiting this out!”

  I nodded, turning back toward the cannery’s huge, dark shape outlined against the breakwater’s lights in the distance. She was right, Sam could be holed up waiting for the storm to slacken.

  But he wouldn’t be. He wasn’t working; he knew Wade would be out and that his grandfather wasn’t in great shape. He knew that without him, Bella and I might be alone with whatever the storm hurled at us.