A Bat in the Belfry (24 page)

She took my envelope from me, studied it in the dim glow of the dashboard lights. Ellie’s entire return address was on it, as was the postmark it had received.

It wasn’t marked “Eastport,” though. It couldn’t be; we’d stopped processing our own mail years ago. It all went to Bangor for sorting, and was postmarked “Eastern Maine” before proceeding to its destination.

Even if that meant it got sent right back here again for delivery, as my card had been. “So there’s no such thing as …”

“Right,” I said. “I don’t know what your friend’s envelope looked like. But I think someone faked the postmark on the one you got.”

She sat silent a moment. Then: “So someone
wanted
me to come here? But—”

She turned to me, some enlightenment she didn’t want to talk about dawning on her face. “You know what?” She laughed ruefully, a little “hah” at the unwelcome conclusion she’d come to. “I don’t know what it looked like, either. The envelope, I didn’t even ask … Oh, God,” she finished, shaking her head. “I’m an idiot.”

Outside, the rain pounded down and the wind made a sound like the hounds of hell had escaped. “You’re not sure it’s her, either, are you?” I asked. “The newer picture of the little girl, you don’t know for a fact that it’s your sister’s—”

She bit her lip, perhaps thinking that she’d given up her life for a prank. Or worse, a trap.

“I don’t see how anyone else but Sissy’s daughter could look so much like her. But no, I don’t know it for sure.”

“And how do you get your mail? A post office box, or—”

She pressed her red-tipped fingers together. “I live … that is, I did live, I’ve given up my apartment … in a very secure building. The doorman gets the mail and lays it out every day on a table in the lobby, all sorted by apartment number.”

She looked up at me. No doubt the arrangement had seemed okay at the time. “There’s never been any problem.”

I got it. Living in a building so exclusive that you don’t even need a locked mailbox must’ve felt very special; back in the bad old days in Manhattan when I lived in a penthouse with a view of Central Park, I’d enjoyed that feeling, too.

Also, the doormen I have known have been lovely individuals. But exposing them to temptation is, in my opinion, neither kind nor wise; as I discovered while managing money for men who on the outside looked rich as Croesus, you never know what financial pressures someone else may be under.

Or not, speaking of which: “A doorman building, huh? On a cop salary?” Hey, she’d have asked me. I mean, really?

“Yeah, well. My partner who died? He left me some money.” A flash of sudden pain crossed her face; I watched her stomp it out mentally, like putting out a little grass fire.

“He left me an insurance policy,” said Lizzie. “And since I’d never be able to get a great place like that on my own … I mean, a real home, you know? That I could stay in a long time.”

Put so simply, it was perfectly understandable; if she’d been my client I’d have told her that a quality-of-life purchase that would also appreciate was a great place for the money.

But at the moment, that was neither here nor there. I took the envelope back. “See, what I’m wondering is if somebody got into your building’s lobby and put that envelope in your mail pile, or got your doorman to do it.”

She nodded, still thinking more than she was saying. “Here I quit my job, put the condo up for sale, everything I’d worked for given up just to come on a wild-goose chase all the way up here to this … this …”

“Godforsaken chunk of granite in the middle of nowhere?” I suggested gently. “More moose per square mile than people?”

She managed another laugh, but it wasn’t really funny. Back in Boston, I guessed, police work was at least interesting, maybe even exciting sometimes. But if Lizzie Snow really did mean to take up Bob’s job as Eastport’s top cop, she was facing a rough transition.

And considering what I’d heard in the hardware store, a rude one in some quarters: women did almost all kinds of work around here just as they did in the city. But those jerks making their jokes represented an attitude that wasn’t so rare, either, that a woman who took a man’s job and a man’s paycheck …

Well, from some people, at least, she could expect a ration of crap, is what I’m saying. A few minutes later when I got out of the car, the pavement was a running river, the yellow glow under the streetlamps hazy with rain. From inside the house, I watched her drive off in water so deep, her tires formed a foaming wake.

Then I closed the door and leaned against it, listening to the storm pounding and screaming out there and thinking of Chip, wondering where he was right now and if he was listening, too, or if in the past few hours he’d been arrested for murder, and was already locked away in some cell where he couldn’t hear it.

  
9

“S
he’s not doing you any good, you know.”

By morning, the first part of the storm had moved out over Nova Scotia and was heading for the Atlantic.

“She’s bad for you. Also, she’s
mean
.”

Not heading harmlessly, as the forecasters all tended to say of these violent, ocean-bound weather behemoths; if you were on a freighter, say, or a scientific research vessel, or God forbid a sailboat, you probably thought those gale-force winds, torrential downpours, and sixty-foot waves were very harmful indeed.

Sam lay on his bed with the phone pressed to his ear, snapping his penlight mechanically on and off while Maggie—his
real
girlfriend, his possible-future-with-her girlfriend—went on with her litany of Carol-criticisms.

“I mean, you keep saying it’s okay to drink alcohol in front of somebody who doesn’t drink,” Maggie said.

Which was true. He’d quit, but he didn’t see why anyone else should have to just on his account. It was his job, not theirs, to make sure he avoided whatever he needed to.

“Come on, Mags, I’ve explained and
explained
it to you—”

Outside, wind still rattled the gutters. But the rain had at least stopped, this brief relative calm a welcome breather before the second half of the gale roared in.

“—but it
isn’t
okay to taunt someone with it,” Maggie went on, not listening. “And don’t tell me she doesn’t taunt you. I’ve seen her practically pouring it down your throat.”

He sighed; Maggie was right. Carol made no secret of her wish for him to drink with her. “Oh, come on,” she’d wheedle, her look kittenish. “What can it hurt?”

He wondered what she’d say if he told her: the binges, the rage. One time a few years ago, Bob Arnold had actually had to throw a net over him to bring him home.

He tried changing the subject. “Listen, I’m going out soon, see if I can find Harvey Spratt.”

But that wasn’t a safe topic, either; he could practically see Maggie frowning doubtfully. “That kid? What d’you want with a little gangster like him?”

Sam sat up, leaning his back against the headboard of his narrow pine bed. He liked the bed, with its faded plaid bedspread and carved wooden bedposts. Homely and plain, it felt normal to him, and all he wanted nowadays was normal. Except sometimes …

Oh, those sometimes. “I’m not sure,” he answered Maggie’s unhappy question. “But he might know something about all the trouble my friend Chip’s in. So I’m just going to ask Harvey.”

“Uh-huh,” said Maggie, her tone cautioning. “He sells Oxys, you know. Not just pot and booze.”

Sam had known, actually. Irritation seized him, that she’d thought he was ignorant and that he needed the warning.

And that she was the one to give it, like she was his mom or something. “Yeah, well, I’m not going to buy any pills from him, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

He stuck his pen in his pocket, swung his legs down off the edge of the bed. “Look, I’ve got to go.”

Silence. Maggie was a babe—a smart, talented, crazy-in-love-with-him babe, and he loved her, too, most of the time—but she was impossible to talk to when she got like this. Finally:

“All right,” she gave in. “Do what you want. You will anyway, I know that much about you. But this is how it happens.”

He pulled his boots on. “How what happens?”

Not that he needed an answer. “First hanging out with party girls. Then socializing with druggies. Next thing you know—”

“Maggie, I’m not
socializing
with him. I’m just going to ask him a few questions.”

“Like what?” she snapped back. “Have you planned this? Do you even know what you’re going to say?”

He finished tying his second bootlace, wondering if maybe she thought she should be doing that for him, too.
And wipe my nose for me, maybe. And my …

“No. I don’t, okay? I have no freaking idea. All I know is, my friend is in trouble. And if Harvey Spratt’s going to talk to anyone, he’ll talk to—”

Me
, he’d been about to finish. But that way lay disaster, because Maggie didn’t know the half of what trouble Sam had been in himself before he got sober. Bad enough to need a cop’s net thrown over his squirming body while half the town looked on, bad enough to need an AA meeting (or two, or in the early weeks even three) every day for a year.

Bad enough, at the bitter end there when he really could’ve used hospitalization, to be buying prescription painkillers from Harvey Spratt. But no one knew that, or needed to.

“He’ll talk to another young guy like me,” Sam said.

A silence. Then: “Sam. I’m sorry I sounded pushy. But—”

“Aw, Mags.” He knew what she was about to say.

“… but the way things are between us, you need to make some decisions, because … because I’ve made mine.”

She sounded definite.
No
, he thought.
Don’t
. But even as he thought this he continued pulling his jacket on and flinging his long scarf, the navy striped one that she’d knitted for him, saying that it made him look like a Harvard man, around his neck.

A Harvard man. Yeah, that’s a hot one. I can’t even keep a boatyard job
. “Maggie—”

“Don’t call me,” she interrupted. Not harshly, but that only made it worse. “And don’t come over here, all right?”

His heart cracked. A vision of his future, full of wild, glassy-eyed girls like Carol and sullen thugs like Harvey Spratt, opened up before him, bleakly compelling.

He wanted a drink. “Listen, I’m sorry, okay? I’ve been a big jerk about all this, but—”

“No,” she repeated. Not angrily; not anything, really. Just the one word.

Vodka, he thought. Or Jack Daniel’s, tall glass, no ice.
Down the hatch
. If he started now, he could be loaded by noon. Maybe he should call Carol, give her the thrill (the
triumph
, his mind corrected him accurately,
a win for her team
) she’d longed for.

He turned his mind from the thought, from the warm, blurry-visioned comfort it promised, with the ease of long practice. But it was still there, lurking just out of sight, deeply imprinted.

It always was. Maggie went on: “You know how I feel about you, so you decide what you want, me or her. A happy life, or all this … all this
racketing around
that you don’t seem to be able to give up.”

“Maggie …” Outside, the sky lightened briefly, darkening again as more clouds scudded by overhead.

“But, Sam?” In the background at Maggie’s he heard music, a chamber trio, he thought, and a volley of barks as her brindle cur, Roscoe, spotted a squirrel through the window.

“Don’t take too long, Sam, okay? ’Cause I love you, I do.”

The barking stopped. The music did, too. He stood there, no words coming to his mind that would fix this.

“But even I have my limits, Sam,” said Maggie. Then:

Click
. She’d hung up.

“T
his is Jake Tiptree.” I’d been waiting for Sam to get off the phone, but it rang again before I could pick it up.

And the news wasn’t good. “Yes, Lonnie,” I said, “I know you’ve got other work waiting.”

Lonnie Porter was the local roofer whose wife I’d called, to ask him to visit the church steeple, now unfortunately a crime scene, in hopes of keeping it from falling down on all our heads. But Lonnie was, to put it mildly, not enthusiastic about this.