A Bat in the Belfry (12 page)

None of which seemed very important right now. “Jake,” Ellie said troubledly, “if we didn’t lock it, that means …”

Yeah. I’d already thought of it: that if we’d left that door open, we’d as good as let the victim
and
her murderer inside. “I wish I remembered for sure,” Ellie said.

But we didn’t, and there was no help for it. “What’d you tell Lizzie?” Ellie asked. She’d left Lizzie and me alone in the kitchen for the final few minutes of our visit.

“I said we’d help her if she’d help us,” I replied. “I mean, if any of us got the chance.”

Lizzie planned to go around Eastport asking questions about her own family, not about Chip. Still, she might come up with something, and I’d run the photos of her niece and sister through the scanner built into Wade’s copier so I could make more or even email them if need be.

“And what about the knife?” asked Ellie.

“I don’t know,” I replied, thinking,
Dear God, the knife
. Because Wade was definitely missing one that matched the description of the murder weapon. And you could explain being in one place when you’d said you were in another, I supposed.

So maybe Chip still could finesse that, somehow. But explaining the presence at a crime scene of a big, sharp knife that everyone knew had come from the house where you were staying,
after
you’d lied about where you were …

Ellie took some copies of Lizzie’s pictures, slid them into her bag. “The thing is, though …,” she began.

“Right,” I replied, catching her thought: that even if we had forgotten to lock that church door, how could anyone
know
we had?

Outside the windows, the sky darkened suddenly. Sleet began tapping the panes, then dissolved to fat raindrops slapping.

“No one would know that door was open unless they’d been watching us,” I said. “And who’d do that just on the chance they might see us forget to lock it?”

I put the kettle on. “It doesn’t make sense. And the worst thing is, we might never know for sure.”

Not that our consciences were the important victims in this situation, but still. “Meanwhile, maybe we’d better start getting ready for whatever
that
is,” Ellie said with a worried nod at the rain-slashed windows. “It’s starting to look nasty.”

“Gettin’ wild,” agreed Bella, coming in with a dust rag and a can of Pledge in her hands. “Gale flags are flying, I heard on the radio. It’s a real old-fashioned nor’easter.”

So she got busy fetching candles from the butler’s pantry and gathering up our kerosene lamps, flashlights, and batteries, while Ellie and I decided to head downtown to see if we could do anything for Chip, while it was still possible to go out at all.

Maybe that would distract me from my lingering reaction to Lizzie Snow: that I didn’t like her or trust her. For one thing, she’d put our friend Chip in a jam. True, he’d helped her do it with his own inexplicable deceptiveness on the subject of where he’d been last night. But that didn’t change the fact that she was hiding something, too, I’d have bet my new claw hammer on it.

And on top of that was the undeniable pang of envy I felt, meeting a woman as smart and stylish as I’d been, once upon a time. Not that I didn’t love my life, but still: back then I could hike fast from Times Square to SoHo in three-inch heels, not even breaking a sweat. Nowadays I couldn’t take two steps in the kind of high-stacked boots Lizzie was wearing; was there such a thing as
too
comfortable? I found myself wondering.

So yeah, maybe a walk in the weather would clear my head, I thought as I confronted the shiny makeup-free zone that was my face in the hall mirror. Nothing snazzy had magically appeared in the closet, so I pulled on an old denim jacket of Sam’s, thinking it would at least keep me warm and—I hoped—reasonably dry. I mean, the weather couldn’t have gotten that much worse in the short time we’d been indoors, could it?

Wrong: as soon as we stepped out into the rising storm, I knew we’d made a mistake.

But hey, at least I wasn’t worrying about how I looked.

H
alf-frozen rain pellets hit my face like a barrage of icy bullets. All the way down Key Street, the wind buffeted us first one way, then shoved us the other.

“We should’ve taken the car!” Elllie shouted, but driving in this wouldn’t have been any picnic, either. On Water Street, spray surged up over the rocky riprap lining the harbor, rain hammered the plate glass windows of the stores, and wind howled like a wild animal demanding to be let out of a cage.

Staggering, we let ourselves be blown toward Bob Arnold’s new office in the old A&P grocery store building, across from the massive granite post office structure. Fighting to keep the glass door from tearing off its hinges when she hauled it open, Ellie shoved me inside, hurled herself in after me, and muscled the big door closed again with both hands.

Bob Arnold saw us from his desk, in his new headquarters’ large open-plan office area. Scowling, he heaved himself up out of his new office chair and came from behind his new desk. Pausing to sneeze twice—the place smelled like fresh drywall compound—he advanced upon us.

“What’re you two doing out?” Pink and plump, with a few hair strands slicked back from a domed forehead, Bob had a round face, light blond lashes around light eyes, and a pink rosebud mouth that didn’t look at all as if it belonged on a police officer.

His harmless appearance served him well, however, since on account of it many guys didn’t put up a fight early, and by the time they realized their mistake he’d already snapped the handcuffs on them. And even if they did fight, they learned pretty swiftly that looks can be deceiving, which I hoped they were now because Bob looked mad as the dickens.

“What,” he demanded again, “do you think you’re—”

He stopped in frustration. Past him in the office area were six identical desks, each with a phone, a laptop computer, a chair, and a wastebasket. On one wall hung a classroom-sized whiteboard, a large calendar, and a big white-faced clock.

The opposite wall, on the street side, had been the front of the old A&P where the weekly specials on pot roasts, paper goods, and sweet corn had been postered. Now white venetian blinds covered the windows, their louvered slats almost shutting out the rattle of rain mixed with sleet outside.

“Ugh,” I said, pulling off wet outerwear. After the walk down here, I already felt like somebody had been hitting me with one of my own hammers, and this place wasn’t helping any. Besides the drywall compound, it smelled like latex paint, chemicals from the whiteboard markers, and glue from the indoor-outdoor carpeting, recently installed.

Bob hated it in here, though, and I didn’t blame him. All this new, supposedly better location needed was a spray-textured ceiling with glitter in it to make the ticky-tacky look complete.

But that’s not what was eating him now. “I’ve got a dead girl. I’ve got her
father
. I’ve got the state cops, the medical examiner, the DA, and the
Bangor Daily News
all crawlin’ up my rosy red—”

I cut him off. “Bob, have you got Chip? The kid who’s staying at my house, that you picked up just a little while ago on Key Street?”

I’d already seen copies of Lizzie Snow’s photographs on the office corkboard; Bob must’ve made them when she was here introducing herself. But what I didn’t see, back there among the new desks and chairs all lined up like an ad for Office Depot, was my houseguest. I had a mental picture of Chip Hahn being whisked off for a brief courtroom appearance, followed by a long sojourn in prison while a case against him was meticulously assembled.

And putting Chip into a prison population was going to work out about as well as dropping a tame mouse into a room full of hungry cats. His only hope would be trading that rabbit’s foot of his for a tommy gun, somehow.

Bob didn’t answer. Instead, he yanked his slicker and sou’wester from the doorway area’s carved wooden coat-tree, the only item he had managed to salvage from the old cop shop.

“Bob,” I pressed him, “I really need to—”

He turned on me. “No, you don’t, Jake.”

He stomped his feet into rubber shoe covers. “There are people in this situation who need things. You’re not one of them.”

His tone was as harsh as a slap, betraying, I supposed, the pressure he felt.

He shoved the heavy door open, then relented. “But I guess you won’t give up until you get what you’ve come for, will you?”

He squinted up into the thinning rain, and when he did I saw that some of the drops running down his face were tears.

Shock kept me silent. I’d known Bob for a long time; he was a friend. I’d never seen him this way before.

“Come on,” he ordered gruffly. “I’m going to take a ride around town, make sure no other catastrophes have hit while I’ve been busy with all this—”

His own daughter Annie, I realized, would be a teenager in a few years, like the girl he’d found in the church. “If you want to hear what I’ve got to say meanwhile,” he added as we followed him through the chilly drizzle across the parking lot, “you can.”

I climbed into the squad car’s back seat, grateful as I was sure Chip also had been for Bob’s habit of wiping the seat and door panels with spray cleaner regularly; Ellie got in the front.

“You can hear it,” he repeated as we belted ourselves in and he started the car, twisting his thick neck to peer past me as he backed it out. “But you’re not going to like it.”

“H
ey,
Dweeb
!” The shout came from somewhere down the hallway where the guys on the Shead High School basketball team gathered each morning right before first period.

“Dweeb! Hey, Dweebles!”
Shoving his geometry book back into his locker, David ignored their taunts. It was the morning after the late-night stolen bicycle escapade, and his throat still felt sore and bruised from where Bogie had squeezed it.

More catcalls followed him as he slammed his locker door and merged with the jostling, chattering mass of kids headed for the gymnasium, where a schoolwide assembly had been called. The guys weren’t trying to be friendly; far from it. Instead, by using the nickname that Bogie had given him, they were reminding him that if not for his association with the thuggish little freshman, David would be dead meat. As if he needed reminding …

In the gym, which still smelled of popcorn and grilled hot dogs from the refreshments sold at last night’s basketball game, the mood seemed oddly subdued. Clusters of girls huddled in their usual cliques, their faces shocked and their eyes, he noted with puzzlement, red from crying. Teachers came over and patted them on their shoulders; David hadn’t seen any TV yet today or been on his computer, and he wondered if there’d been a big terrorist attack somewhere. Or maybe the president had been assassinated.

He found a spot on the bleachers and sat, positioning himself between the area customarily reserved for teachers and the nearest exit as he noted that Bogie wasn’t here today. Not that Bogie’s presence was necessarily required to ensure David’s safety—Bogie found out everything that happened in school, sooner or later, and he carried a grudge—but David didn’t see any sense in letting himself get trapped, just in case.

The first-period warning buzzer sounded as the principal made her way to the center of the floor. Bogie, David imagined enviously, was still asleep in bed, having blown off school again. They’d parted last night at the cemetery gates, David to hustle on home, where he’d sneaked back in holding his breath, mindful of his parents both snoring at the top of the stairs, and Bogie to head down to the breakwater, probably, where Harvey Spratt and the rest of his crew would still be hanging out even that late at night.

The principal, a white-haired, gravel-voiced woman named Mrs. Krause who also taught math and whose sharp-eyed gaze missed nothing, gestured once for silence and got it. David thought that if she called down a lightning bolt to strike them all dead, she would probably get that, too; she was that kind of teacher.

“Today,” she intoned, “is a sad and terrible day in the life of our school.”

A sob from somewhere high in the bleachers interrupted her; she glanced up impatiently, then went on. “We have lost an important member of our community, a young person whose life had barely begun.”

Some in the audience, mostly the girls, seemed to know this already. Others didn’t, and looked either frightened or bored.

“Jeez, cut to the chase, will you, you old hag?” one of the basketball players muttered, loudly enough for her to hear. His pals elbowed him appreciatively, but the flicker of her answering glance made David glad he hadn’t been the one who said it.

She went on: “Last night, sometime around midnight—”

Home
, David thought automatically.
When whatever it was happened, I was still—

“… Karen Hansen, a beloved member of our freshman class and valued citizen of our school community …”

A cold feeling came over David. That must’ve been what the sirens last night were all about, he realized. Around him the sounds of weeping intensified, and even some of the boys looked troubled.

“… murdered …”

At the word, loud sobbing broke out somewhere behind him. A girl got up and ran from the gym. The first-period late buzzer sounded, loud and obnoxious as an alarm in a nuclear power plant, he imagined, but nobody seemed to hear it.

Sitting there, silent and still amid what felt like utter chaos, David struggled to make sense of it all.
Karen Hansen?
A girl he knew slightly, funny-faced, faded clothes, just someone he’d brushed past in the hall sometimes—

Karen Hansen got killed last night? Murdered?

“Christ,” breathed one of the basketball guys, whose name was Bub Wilson, and his buddies looked stunned as well. David felt a mean pulse of grim satisfaction at this evidence that the guys had feelings, that they could be made unhappy, too, even if it took a murder to do it.

Mostly, though, he kept circling around the other thing Mrs. Krause had said:
“… sometime around midnight …”