by Sarah Graves
Carol Stedman, Lizzie meant, and it was what I thought, too. He could have run into her while he was out walking that night; it was why he might’ve wanted to hide where he’d been, and if anyone could lure someone into a car and seduce them, it was that little …
Well. She was an attractive young woman, is all I’m saying.
“Yeah. I think so, too,” I told Lizzie. “But if he’d said so …”
I tipped my head toward the parlor. “Chip and Sam have been friends for a long time,” I finished.
She nodded, understanding. “Right. Well, wish me luck.”
With that, she went down the front steps, hopped into her car, and drove away, and it wasn’t until her CRV’s taillights disappeared that I realized: I’d forgotten to thank her.
But then, she probably wouldn’t have wanted me to.
I went inside and turned out the porch light.
Lizzie saw the blinking red light on the top of the church tower as she bundled her bags into her car. The motel’s parking lot was dark; she didn’t notice Dylan until she’d reached the car again.
“Hey.” She hadn’t spoken with him since the night he’d nearly shot Hank Hansen across from the courthouse in Machias, just before Bob Arnold ran his squad car into Hansen’s vehicle.
Now she stopped at the driver’s-side door of her CRV, key in hand. “Hey, yourself. What’re you doing here?”
He shrugged. “I’d stopped in to see Bob Arnold. He said you were leaving town. Just wanted to say so long.”
“Oh. Well, so long, then.” It looked like his shoulder was healed, or at least he wasn’t wearing a sling anymore. She got in and settled behind the wheel.
What she’d felt for him was like another country, too far off now to visit casually. He crouched at the car window. “Funny about that other kid.”
“Who, David Thompson?” The kid in the athletic jacket, Dylan meant, that Bogie Kopmeir had nearly beaten to death.
The kid was still recovering in the hospital. “I get why the kid hung out with Bogie,” Dylan went on.
When he woke up, the victim had explained about the bullying he’d endured, and that Bogie Kopmeir had protected him. “But why would Bogie do anything to help a kid like David?”
“Isn’t it obvious?” Lizzie answered. “Bogie wanted to be like Harvey Spratt, and Harvey had followers. I’m guessing that Bogie was starting to put together a crew of his own.”
Dylan nodded thoughtfully. “Yeah, you could be right.” Then: “Long drive tonight.”
His turn to be right. “Five hours, maybe.” To Fort Kent, up in what Mainers called the state’s rooftop, nearly in Canada. She wondered what the hell she would do when she got there.
Because hiring a stranger who didn’t know the territory for deputy work just didn’t make sense. The sheriff up there had some other plan he wanted her to be a part of, she felt certain; he just hadn’t told anyone what it was yet.
Not even Lizzie. But she supposed she’d find out, and Nicki might be there, so—
Oh, the hell with it. She wanted an answer: “How’d you get that kid’s confession so messed up, Dylan?”
Because after she’d left them at the accident scene, Dylan had somehow gotten Harvey Spratt to say he’d killed the girl, that he had slit her poor throat with a hunting knife that Bogie Kopmeir stole. But the confession Harvey Spratt had made wasn’t true, and what Lizzie wanted to know was …
Dylan shrugged again. “Told him he was dying. That I’d seen it dozens of times, guy walks away from an accident, feels okay, then he checks out from internal bleeding.”
Ohh, she thought, understanding washing over her.
“Kid had a Saint Christopher medal on a chain, I figured maybe his family was religious and he might have remnants of it, too, in that hideous little psyche of his,” he said.
“Uh-huh.” You could lie to them while questioning them, she knew. She’d never done it, but it was legal.
Harsh, though. Risky, too, as they’d found out. “And?”
“And after I told him his nosebleed was the first sign of a ruptured heart artery, and did he want to die with the girl’s death on his conscience, he started blubbering, begging for a doctor and a priest in that order, the chickenshit little prick.”
“I see.” She kept her voice neutral; hey, it could’ve worked and it might have, if Harvey had been guilty. Instead he’d broken down and said whatever his questioner wanted to hear, because as it turned out Harvey Spratt hadn’t been exactly psychologically sturdy: surprise, surprise.
“So sue me,” Dylan finished unworriedly. “Truth came out in the wash anyway, once he really started talking.”
Confessions convinced people, but they weren’t always true. Hard to believe, especially for juries, but there it was.
“And then you hopped in a car, drove to Machias because—”
Dylan made a face, as if this part must be obvious. “All the comms were out, remember? No phones, no radio, so I grabbed the keys to one of the squad cars from a desk drawer at the police station—”
Where Bob Arnold’s office was, he meant, and God, were there really still places where the motor pool keys weren’t all locked up and you had to practically sign your life away to get hold of them?
Apparently there were. “—so I could tell ’em that Hahn kid didn’t do it. Or that peeping thing, either, by the way; turns out the charge on that got dismissed. Bogus accusation. This guy Hahn was writing a crime book about got ticked off; Hahn wasn’t even in New Hampshire when it supposedly happened, which in court the guy finally admitted that it didn’t. Happen, I mean.”
Sheesh, thought Lizzie; for something that was supposed to help people, the system sure had plenty of ways to screw you.
“I mean, what the hell, no sense him getting jammed up even more, right?” Dylan finished.
Yeah, right. Besides, getting Chip Hahn off the hook might earn him a few brownie points with her, Lizzie thought acutely. Still, Dylan had done it: a certifiable good deed.
“And therein,” he frowned, “lies another tale.”
“No kidding.” Because if Bob Arnold hadn’t shown up when he did, Dylan would have blown Hank Hansen’s fool head off; that, or the other way around. After that, Hansen might have shot the Hahn kid, maybe other people, too.
But instead none of that had occurred. And, luckily, Bob hadn’t suffered any injuries in the car crash he’d had to have in order to prevent it. Lucky for everyone, but …
A new thought struck her. “What made the church bell ring? Jake Tiptree told me it did, back when this all started. But does anyone know why?”
Dylan laughed without humor. “Tower was collapsing, is why. Bob Arnold says now that it’s stabilized they’ve found so much rot and insect damage it’s a wonder it didn’t fall years ago.”
“So … you mean it shifted? Like, enough to—”
He nodded, gazing uphill to where the crane’s red light blinked rhythmically. “Can’t see it with the naked eye, but one whole side of that belfry is nearly a foot lower than the other. When it sank, it put the bell off-balance, started it ringing.”
He leaned down to the window opening. “Guy who finally got the crane hooked to it’s got a hell of a story to tell down at the diner, though, I’ll say that much. I heard his foot slipped while he was up there that night and he nearly …”
A new thought appeared to strike him. “Have you had dinner?”
“Yes. And anyway I wouldn’t be having it with—”
He tipped his head persuasively, his smile so charming and guile-free, she could almost believe he was harmless.
Almost. “Listen, if it weren’t for me, you wouldn’t be hot on the trail again after all this time, and I can still help you find Nicki, you know.”
She hesitated. He was right: he had gotten her here. And he could help; for one thing, knowing someone with the state cops wouldn’t hurt her a bit, she guessed, once she got all the way up to Allagash, where she knew no one.
The truth was that she didn’t really know what the truth was now. A place like this, all water and sky with the island a small hard rock in the middle of it, could make you wonder which of the things you’d thought you knew were really true, and which were just the ones other people had told you.
And right this minute might be as good a time as any to start finding out. The red light atop the distant church spire pulsed on-off-on again, regular as a heartbeat.
“Get in,” she said.
BY SARAH GRAVES
The Dead Cat Bounce
Triple Witch
Wicked Fix
Repair to Her Grave
Wreck the Halls
Unhinged
Mallets Aforethought
Tool & Die
Nail Biter
Trap Door
The Book of Old Houses
A Face at the Window
Crawlspace
Knockdown
Dead Level
A Bat in the Belfry
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
SARAH GRAVES lives with her husband in Eastport, Maine, in the 1823 Federal-style house that helped inspire her books. This series and the author’s real-life experience have been featured in House & Garden and USA Today. She is currently at work on Winter at the Door, the first novel in her new mystery series, to be published by Bantam.