A Bat in the Belfry (11 page)

“You and Ellie were in there yesterday, weren’t you?” Sam asked. Yet another question that hadn’t been designed to pluck my worry-strings, but did.

“Yeah,” I said unhappily. “Right up there in the belfry, we were looking for rehab and repair chores that might need doing.”

The Chamber of Commerce was going to write grant proposals, and if the church wanted in on this there’d need to be a list of specific tasks lined up for funding. And on the simple principle that it was good to do something civic-minded occasionally, Ellie and I had said we’d see if anything obvious like a roof leak or a case of dry rot jumped out at us, just on preliminary inspection.

But the place had turned out to be in a lot worse repair than we’d thought, so we hadn’t gotten finished. We’d even left our tools and notebooks up there, thinking we’d be back.

That wasn’t my problem now, though. My problem now was not recalling whether, on our way out, we’d locked the church door. If we hadn’t, I was afraid that was how the murdered girl got in.

And her murderer, too; outside, the sky spat cold rain. Between vintage tunes like “Purple People Eater” and “Hand Jive,” radio station WQDY advised mariners to stay in port.

I gathered that the kayak trip was also canceled. “You were out last night, Chip, right?” Sam asked. “Did you see anything?”

Sam drank down a cup of coffee, got halfway up for another, and was met by Bella, already wielding a fresh pot. Meanwhile I thought Chip’s hand with the bacon slice in it paused on its reluctant way to his mouth.

“Um,” he said, chewing manfully. And when he had swallowed: “No.” He frowned at his eggs. “No, I walked out Deep Cove Road and back, came home in the other direction from the church.”

He glanced at me. “I had some thinking to do,” he said.

I poured my own coffee while Bella put a bowl of fruit salad on the table, sliced pears and the last frozen blackberries. “So,” I said carefully, “I guess you must’ve slept very well after all that fresh air and exercise.”

“Yeah,” Chip replied unconvincingly, “I slept great.” He got up, scraped his plate, and took it to the old soapstone sink to rinse it. “So, Sam, what’s on our agenda instead of kayaking?” he asked, running the water a little too hard.

To cover, maybe, the quaver in his voice. “You can come to the boatyard with me,” Sam offered. “I mean, since we’re not going anywhere, I guess I might as well put the hours in.” He got up. “You could hang out, bring your laptop, and do some work if you want. There’s wi-fi,” he added.

He stacked his breakfast dishes in the sink without rinsing them, this being the way that Bella preferred, and if you knew what was good for you around here, you tried hard to do things the way she liked them.

“But we gotta get going,” Sam finished, and with that the two of them hustled from the room, headed upstairs.

“How come the boy lied, d’you suppose?” Bella said, scowling into the dishpan when they had gone.

I turned down the radio. Rawboned, henna-haired, and with a face like a hatchet that has been used to chop concrete blocks, Bella was fond of Chip Hahn, too.

But she wasn’t fond of falsehoods. “I don’t know,” I replied as the two young men thundered back downstairs and out the door together, calling their goodbyes.

“I heard him come in.” Bella scrubbed at a stubborn bit of egg residue. “Last night, after everyone else was in bed.”

She rinsed the plate in water so hot, you could’ve poached another egg in it. “I was looking south over toward the churches on Two Church Lane from the high upstairs window …”

From the third floor, she meant, where she and my dad lived in the apartment Wade and I had built for them up there. From its lofty windows, you could look out over half the town and the bay beyond.

“And I saw that boy walking. Came right up Key Street, the opposite way from what he just said.”

She rinsed a sudsy juice glass in the barely liquefied steam issuing from the faucet. “Way he came, he couldn’t have missed the commotion down there. A dead man,” she emphasized, “couldn’t have missed it.”

A sudden, stiff breeze tore the last autumn maple leaf off a branch, and it slapped wetly flat up against the kitchen window, splayed out like a bloody handprint. At the same moment, the back door flew open and Ellie White rushed in, her red-gold hair breeze-tangled and her green eyes anxious.

The chill outside had put pink roses in her freckled cheeks, but the rest of her face was pale. “Jake? Is Sam in some kind of trouble?”

I hadn’t thought she’d be able to trump the question I was about to ask her, but that did it. “No, not that I …”

It struck me suddenly that after I’d heard Sam’s car doors slam outside, I hadn’t heard what should’ve come next: an old engine roaring to life with a chug-and-rumble, parts reluctantly shuddering into motion, then the
pow! pow!
of an engine firing off random explosions before settling to the regular
bam-bam-bam-
ing that on Sam’s car we called idling.

No start-up at all, in fact, and none of the desperate
err-err-ERR
sounds of it not starting up, either. I hurried outside and out the front walk, where a squad car was pulling away. Through its rear window I could make out the shape of someone in the back seat.

Then I spotted Sam on the sidewalk with a woman. Tall and ramrod straight, she had a lot of short, spiky black hair, and a lot of attitude in the way she faced Sam while he yelled at her.

“What the heck did you just do? What did
he
do? Who the heck
are
you, anyway?”

He turned as I hurried toward them. “Mom, Bob Arnold just took Chip away. To
question
him! Because she—”

He stopped. The woman was walking away, briskly but not at all hurriedly. “Hey, wait a minute! You can’t just—”

She looked back over her shoulder. “I’m sorry about your friend, but he was there last night. At the crime scene. When I got asked about it, I said I’d seen him, that’s all.”

She kept walking. Gesturing at Sam to stay where he was—by now he was practically foaming at the mouth—I caught up to her, and when she glanced back again at my approach, I could see how pretty she was: dark, wing-shaped eyebrows and dark lashes, high cheekbones, a heart-shaped face.

“Excuse me, but would you mind telling me how you knew it was our friend that you’d seen?”

While I spoke, my mind went on racking up the details: exquisite skin, huge blue eyes, lovely makeup. She wore a pair of black jeans that fit her so perfectly, they appeared to have been tailored, and high, black stack-heeled boots.

Her black leather jacket looked soft as butter and had a red-wine-colored silk lining. “Rabbit’s foot,” she said simply.

My heart sank, even as the hairs on the back of my neck went on bristling with instant mistrust. To cover it, I stuck my hand out and introduced myself, and she did the same.

“Lizzie Snow,” she said. Her grip was cool and surprisingly gentle. She didn’t need to emphasize anything, obviously.

Meanwhile, Chip was in trouble. I still didn’t know what kind, exactly, but I did know he had a rabbit’s foot key chain that he carried obsessively.

“The young man you saw last night is my houseguest,” I told Lizzie Snow. “I feel responsible for him, his welfare, and so on, you know? So could you tell me a little more about what you saw?”

I gestured across the street at my big old house: white clapboards, forest-green shutters. Towering over us with its old-fashioned respectability and its clear need for chronic TLC, it fairly trumpeted my own solid good citizenship. After all, with a house like that, how would I have the energy for anything else?

“Why don’t you come in?” I coaxed. “I’ve just made coffee.”

Which was a lie. But Bella could do it fast, and I was still putting things together in my head about Lizzie Snow: a no-nonsense woman, new in town or I’d have heard about her already, who looked … well, she looked like just about everything I’d left behind when I turned my back on the city in favor of Maine:

Good haircut, expensive makeup carefully applied, clothes that had been chosen, not just thrown on because they were clean. Even more striking was a sense of purpose she radiated so clearly that it practically came off her in waves.

Not a happy sense, necessarily. More like a
probing
sense, the way she took in my face, the house, Sam’s unhappy expression. When a car approached on the street, her glance went from the license plate to the windshield sticker and then to the driver’s face, bing-bing-bing …

A
hunting
sense. It didn’t make me like her any better, but it gave me a hunch.

“Come on in,” I repeated, because what the
heck
was she up to, anyway? “You never know, I might have information that you’re looking for, too. Or I’ll know someone who does.”

Bingo.

B
ack in the city where I was a financial advisor, I used to have to finagle people’s money stories out of them: the size of their alimony payments, amount of their delinquent income taxes, what they owed to loan sharks, bookies, and the purveyors of the substances they used to help them forget all the other money they owed.

So I wasn’t expecting Lizzie Snow to be much of a challenge, spilled-guts-wise. I brought her inside, Ellie came with us, and half an hour later, as we three sipped fresh coffee by the kitchen woodstove, I had an astonishing story out of her: a possibly murdered sister, a missing child, photos with no return address but in an envelope with an Eastport postmark.

But it wasn’t the
whole
story; I got the feeling that there was way more to this stranger than she was telling, even though what she did say rang true: The sister’s body, I now recalled, had indeed been found in Eastport.

“So I decided to come up here,” Lizzie explained. She sat in the bentwood rocker pulled up to the stove. “Because someone who knows something sent me the pictures from here. I just don’t know why.”

I hadn’t forgotten about Chip. But when you’re trying to get something from someone, it’s just good manners to pay attention to what they want, first.

Also, it’s good strategy. “Someone,” said Ellie to Lizzie Snow, “who knows what happened back then, maybe. And thinks that something still needs to happen about it now?”

Lizzie looked appreciative. “Exactly. Or maybe some new thing has happened, even after all this time. It would have to be someone who knew who and where I was, too, of course. But—”

“But why not just go to the police?” Ellie asked. “If you have information about an old murder, or about a missing child, that would be your first move, ordinarily, wouldn’t it?”

Lizzie looked down at her coffee mug. “Mmm. But I don’t have information, do I? And no one else thinks it was a murder.”

She took a sip of her coffee. “Anyway,” she went on, “that’s not really what I’m here for, my sister’s death. I came to find Nicki, if I can. That’s the long and short of it.”

“Really” was all I could say for a moment. “After all this time, you …”

“Yeah.” Her rueful smile said she understood. “Wild-goose chase, huh? Maybe so,” she allowed.

Then she looked around my big old kitchen with its antique built-in cabinets, tall bare windows, and pine wainscoting. Bright rag rugs warmed the hardwood floor, and the stove radiated cozily. “Nice place,” said Lizzie, changing the subject.

Or I thought she was, at first. But on the kitchen shelf, snapshots of my family and Ellie’s smiled from among Sam’s boat school diplomas and the various ribbons and mugs he had won in sailing contests out on the bay.

“Nice family, it looks like, too,” she added.

Then I got the point: Nicki was her family. Maybe all of it, and she wanted it. It didn’t make me like her any more or trust her any better, but I thought that part of her story at least was true.

“So if you find your niece,” I asked, “you’ll try to take her back to Boston with you? Raise her?”

At that she looked uncomfortable. “I’m not sure. I want to know if she’s alive, first of all …”

In other words, she had no idea. My turn. “So what did you tell Bob Arnold about Chip?”

She shrugged. “Not much. I stopped in to see your police chief just to introduce myself. I said I knew he had a lot on his plate, and no time for my problems. But I figured I’d better let him know what I’m doing here in town, since I doubt it’ll take long for rumors to start.”

She had that right. In Eastport if you sneeze at one end of town, they’ll be getting out the aspirin and hot lemonade for you at the other end in ten seconds flat.

“One of his officers saw me near the commotion at the church last night,” she went on, “and I’d mentioned then that I saw your friend. Although I didn’t know then that he
was
your friend.”

“So that’s why Bob wanted to talk to Chip?” Ellie’s tone was doubtful. “Because you saw him walking by?”

The rabbit’s foot dangling from his belt loop had identified him, of course. Bob Arnold had stopped in to see Wade a few days earlier, on the morning when Chip arrived, and commented on it as a way of making conversation while he was meeting Chip.

Bob had said he could use one, too, and so of course later remembered the thing. It wasn’t like Chip, though, ignoring a crime scene; he was, after all, a crime-book researcher.

Or lying about it afterwards, either. Just then Sam rushed back in. “Mom! Chip’s been arrested!”

Then Wade came in, looking even more unhappy than Sam. “Jake, did you by any chance take a knife out of my workshop? A big one, with a black taped handle?”

“E
llie, did we lock that church door yesterday?” I asked as soon as Lizzie Snow had gone.

I hadn’t taken Wade’s knife, of course. Ellie’s face fell. “… I think we did. Don’t you remember doing it?”

I didn’t. I might have locked it; we’d been in a hurry, her to get home before her daughter, Lee, returned from school, and me to try to get in a few work hours on my own house, after half a day of assessing what repairs were needed inside the church.

As to why our offer to do this had been accepted, all I can say is that something about keeping your own house from falling down seems to make people think you can do it for other antique structures, too. Next thing I knew, I was marking dry-rot patches and measuring for new support beams and trying to figure out why the plaster in the belfry stairwell was cracked diagonally in one direction on one side, and the other way on the other.