A Bat in the Belfry (38 page)

Sam said something. “What?” Lizzie demanded. Thinking,
We’re wasting time
.

“Get Carol out first,” he gasped raggedly again.

“Ah, no. You first, without me. I’m going to help her. Don’t argue, just when you feel the rope slack off at all, you go.”

She pulled out her jackknife, the one Liam had given her because you never know, he’d said, you might need one someday. Plunging her hands into the ice-cold water, she found the thick plastic line wrapped around Sam’s wrists and began sawing at it.

And sawing some more.

“C
omms are back up!” someone yelled from one of the offices upstairs in the courthouse. “Phones, radio, computers, all working again!”

A muted cheer went up. Chip looked around from the cast-iron-grated counter where he’d been about to sign a receipt for his belongings, which were handed to him in a large brown manila envelope. He’d just finished sorting hurriedly through the things and popped the ballpoint the pleasant gray-haired woman behind the counter lent him when the shout came. Now as he looked back down to complete his signature, he realized what he hadn’t seen.

Or rather, whom: Osbourne was gone. The state cop who’d questioned him, sat with him, brought him drinks and a sandwich … he’d told Chip that Chip was free to go, that someone else was in custody now for the crime Chip had been suspected of doing.

And now Chip didn’t see Osbourne anywhere. Not only that, but in the hour or so it had taken to get Chip’s release processed and accomplished, all of the other state cops had departed, too.

“Thanks,” he told the clerk in the window, hoping his voice didn’t sound as tremulous as it felt. The courthouse was closing, people only now locking their offices and leaving for home even though it was way past five.

A lot of people had stayed late tonight, probably on account of him. Now that was all over, though; he still couldn’t quite believe it. He turned back to the window.

“Um, is there, I don’t know, a taxi service I can call or something?”

The clerk looked up kindly at him. “Oh, my. Not in this bad storm, dear.”

Then from behind him a familiar voice spoke. “I’ll take you anywhere you want to go, Chip.”

Carolyn …
He turned, disbelieving. But there she stood, her long dark hair wet and windblown, her slender figure wrapped in a navy pea coat of his, miles too big for her.

In the next moment, she was in his arms. “Carolyn …” Her hair smelled of chamomile, her skin of some exotically scented lotion or other. He held her away from him, scrutinizing her.

Thin, pale … but all right. Not sick, or wasted away from a diet of whatever it was she ate—or didn’t eat—when he wasn’t around. “But … how did you get here? How did you even …?”

Her huge blue eyes, heavily outlined and lash-thickened, regarded him gravely. And—were those tears sparkling in them?

“I’m a neurotic, Chip, not an invalid. And when you stopped calling me every twenty minutes to check up on me—”

He bowed his head, embarrassed. She was right.

“—I got worried, and called Jake Tiptree’s house. And her housekeeper told me about you. So—”

She smiled winsomely. “I got in the car, and here I am.”

He couldn’t speak, only smile. Over Carolyn’s shoulder, the clerk smiled, too.

The lights in the courtroom offices began to go out. There had been some kind of commotion outside earlier, but he didn’t know what. And at the moment, he didn’t care.

She was parked just across the street; they ran through a downpour to get to her car.

“Why’d they let you go, anyway?” she wanted to know as, still wondering if he should pinch himself, he settled behind the wheel; she’d been driving long enough.

“I’m not sure. Maybe someone else confessed? They said some other suspect was in custody, but I don’t know any more about it than that, only that they dropped me like a hot rock.”

The storm was slacking off, but the streets were full of debris: branches, shingles, strips of vinyl and aluminum siding, God knew what else. He steered carefully around the stuff.

“Really.” She turned eagerly to him, her huge blue eyes full of speculative interest. “Someone confessed, huh? So d’you think there’s a book in it?”

He laughed in spite of himself, thinking of the long, dark road between here and Eastport. “If there is, somebody else will have to write it. Living it’s been enough.”

She sat back. “Huh. You’re no fun at all.” But her voice was affectionate; if he hadn’t been driving, he’d have hugged her again.

Then: “Chip?”

“Yeah.” Across Route 1 was a pleasant-looking motel with a parking lot in front of it. The motel’s Vacancy sign was lit, and so were the lights in Helen’s Restaurant, right next door.

“I’m glad you’re okay,” said Carol. “I missed you. Truth is, I just don’t do very well without you,” she said.

“Me either. Without you, I mean.” Thinking,
I’m never going to tell her what I did. Not her or anyone else
.

“You ever call Maury Cahill?” The lawyer she’d told him she wanted to talk to, he meant; though the conversation was only forty-eight hours ago, it felt like years.

Carolyn nodded. “Yes. A friend of Siobhan’s needed him.”

Of her editor’s, she meant. She turned to him. “I called him again just before I left the city, too, to tell him about what was going on and that we might be needing him.”

“Uh-huh,” he said, thinking.
She’d cared!
And not only that, he realized, but she had
done something useful about it!
Maybe she wasn’t as helpless as he’d thought she was.

Or maybe not helpless at all. “Funny thing was, he already knew, and he was getting ready to come up here himself. Because he tried calling you back, but of course you weren’t there and instead he talked to the same housekeeper I did.”

Good old Bella, thought Chip affectionately, imagining what the proper old Manhattan attorney Maury Cahill and Bella Diamond must’ve sounded like, having a conversation. He hoped Maury was not still trying to make it here through the storm.

But no; if he knew Maury, the lawyer was tucked up in a good hotel in Boston or Providence, having a martini and a good steak very rare, while he waited out the weather.

“We’ll call him again, then,” Chip said. “And the Tiptrees in Eastport, too. We’ll tell them all everything’s all right.”

Which it was; completely all right, he thought with an inward sigh so deep, he thought briefly that he might just burst into tears. But then the traffic cleared and he crossed Route 1, instead, into the parking lot that served the motel and eatery.

When she realized his intention, Carolyn nodded approval and angled her head toward the back seat. “I brought clothes for you. Shaving stuff and so on. Just in case. I mean, I didn’t know what might be happening, so—”

Which to him was the most unexpected thing, that she had thought so much ahead about all of it. She wasn’t very much of a planner, and not for other people, especially.

But maybe she still had surprises for him, he thought, just as he’d had in the last few days for himself. Through the car’s barely open window, a whiff of some delicious cooking aroma from the restaurant reached him. He was starving, he realized.

A decent meal, a hot shower, and a soft, warm bed—he could call Eastport from there, he thought, let them know he was all right. And he could find out tomorrow just what all had gone on to get him un-accused, freed from the charge of bloody murder.

Tomorrow. It would be okay—even more than okay, now that Carolyn was here—and it would be soon enough.

“Come on,” he told her, noticing her sniffing with interest at the good smells now, too. “Come on, let’s go in.”

F
irst Carol emerged, and then Sam’s wet head popped up out of the flooded cavern. In the next instant, he was slogging across the rocks toward us, his face slack with shock, a tail of orange buoy-line trailing from his right wrist.

When he reached us, he dropped to a patch of sand and lay there, gasping and gagging, trying to get his breath.

“Ellie!” I yelled, but she was already on it, sprinting away toward where there would be a phone, people, some kind of …

“Help,” Carol whispered, looking back fearfully. “Someone, somebody’s got to help her, she’s—”

From the water there, a hand thrust up. Red-tipped nails, fingers clutching … reaching.

Then the hand went limp, falling back. “Stuck,” Carol wept, “the rope was all tangled in there, I think she might be—”

“Stay here.” I sprinted to the cavern’s submerged opening, reached in, and found Lizzie Snow’s hand. It clamped hard around mine, but I could feel it spasming. Weakening …

Sam was already crawling to me. On all fours, his head with its dark curly hair moving slowly from side to side like a sick animal’s. When he got to me, Lizzie’s hand had begun loosening.

“Get away.” He shoved me aside, his face twisted with fury. Whatever had happened, he was not going to let it end like this.

He just wasn’t. “When I kick, you’re going to pull me. You got that?”

He snarled it at me, and the next thing I knew, the whole top half of his body was underwater again. His right leg kicked a demand at me; I seized his foot, and then the other one, braced my feet on a granite outcropping and pulled. With the effort a yell burst out of me, a shriek.

A
howl
. But nothing happened. He kicked again: no result, though I hauled on him with every muscle I had. Then suddenly he was flying out of there, hurtling backwards at me, Lizzie’s hands clutched in his own.

I flew backwards, too, hit my head on something hard, and saw high above me in the clouds and rain a whole skyful of whirling stars, plus one red one winking steadily from what looked like, but of course could not possibly be, the lofty tip of the arrow-shaped weathervane atop the All Faith Chapel, all the way across town on Two Church Lane.

I
t took me a week to get out of the hospital; turns out a granite boulder is even harder than my head. By that time, Chip and Carolyn had gone home to Manhattan. Carol Stedman, too, had packed up her belongings and lit out for parts unknown, driving a new car that nobody around here knew how she’d managed to buy.

But then, no one really knew much about Carol. “So, just let me get this straight,” said my husband, Wade Sorenson.

We sat outside on the porch swing; it was a freakishly warm evening, for late November.

“This girl, Karen Hansen, was down on the breakwater with Harvey Spratt, trying to get money from him. And while she was with him, she found out he’d been selling—”

“Right. Heroin. Like downeast Maine needs more hard drugs,” I said in disgust. “And for Harvey that’d be a big deal.”

Because he’d already been through drug court once, it turned out. And now that he wasn’t a juvenile anymore, a big-boy-sized prison term for selling hard drugs was almost a certainty for him if he got caught.

“So he made a bet with her, that she couldn’t go up into the belfry and shine a light out of it. If she did, she’d get cash.”

“Right again,” I replied. “That’s what he told her, that he would finance her getaway out of Eastport.”

“But what Spratt really wanted was to get her alone in a place where he thought her body wouldn’t be found?” Wade asked. “Or not for a long time, anyway?”

With us on the porch was Lizzie Snow, looking chipper after recovering from her near drowning. “Um, not exactly,” she said. “He sent Bogie to find him a knife, one that no one would connect with him or any of his gang.”

Wade had been working at the freight terminal nearly nonstop for the past two weeks, helping to clean up after the havoc the storm had wreaked on shipping all along the eastern seaboard.

So he needed updating. “Meanwhile, Bogie’s dad—”

Wade nodded. “Was in my shop that day,” he finished for her. Up in the ell of our old house, he meant, where he repaired guns, including the one Bogie’s dad used for deer hunting.

“Where he must’ve seen my big knife,” Wade added. “And said something about it to Bogie?”

“More like threatened him with it,” Lizzie said. “I gather Mr. Kopmeir was big on threatening his son.”

She sipped her coffee. Bella had cooked an amazing dinner of fried bay shrimp, fish chowder, and a salad of mixed greens out of Ellie’s cold frame.

“Bogie says his dad told him he knew just where to get a great big one to use on him if Bogie screwed up again. And to make the threat believable, he said where the knife was.”

“So that’s how Bogie knew. But … he broke into my shop? And I didn’t realize it?” Wade sounded skeptical.

“Yeah. Turns out he can pick locks, among his other stellar talents. Kid’s got a great future,” Lizzie said. “If by ‘future’ you mean in a federal prison.”

Bogie, it turned out after Bob Arnold had questioned him thoroughly, was behind a string of burglaries so expert, most of the victims didn’t even know they’d been hit until Bob told them, while he was in the process returning whatever stolen goods Bogie hadn’t already ruined or sold.

“The thing is,” Lizzie added, “there’s been a twist in the tale. Because Harvey confessed to the murder, but …”

“Uh-huh.” Wade nodded again, slowly. “But Bogie would do anything for him. And I’ll bet the twist is that Bogie did, isn’t it?” He looked at Lizzie for confirmation of his hunch. “Got the knife for Harvey, but when the time came, Harvey sent Bogie to do the chore, instead. To … what? Scare her with it?”

“Um. Not exactly.” Lizzie said it quietly. “Harvey sent Bogie to scare Karen, that’s for sure. And told him to take the knife. But it was never in Harvey’s plan that Bogie would kill her.”

“Then why did he?” Wade wanted to know. “If he didn’t have to, why do something so over-the-top that it would be sure to—”

“Get him in terrible trouble if he was caught?” Lizzie nodded. “When he could’ve just threatened her, waved the knife at her and told her to keep her mouth shut, knowing that with a young girl like her it would be enough?”

“Right,” Wade responded, “and it seems as if she was getting out of town soon anyway, so she wouldn’t even be around to—”