A Bat in the Belfry (5 page)

Bob sighed, contemplating his own bare feet, which he wanted very badly to tuck right back in under the toasty-warm covers. His little girl, Annie, had been up all the night before with an asthma attack, and both he and Clarissa were exhausted.

From Annie’s room came the tinkling of a sweet, lively tune from her new favorite musician, an artist with the (to Bob) unlikely name of Caspar Babypants. It had taken him a while, but now Bob thought he was beginning to get Caspar’s message, which boiled down to “Everything’s okay.”

He wished he could stay here and appreciate the music a bit longer. Perhaps the okay-ness had further levels, he thought; more to appreciate. But that ringing church bell needed investigating.

Also, it needed stopping. If he knew Eastport, half the town was on the phone with the other half by now, all mad about it. He pulled his pants on.

A
few blocks away at the Eastport Boarding Hostel, Tiffany Whitmore put down the romance novel she was reading at a desk in the front hall. The Boarding Hostel was not a nursing home—Eastport already had one of those—but at night, the desk served as a nursing station because nighttime was when residents needed nursing.

Or some of them did, anyway. On a nearby mantel a portable radio tuned to the local station, WQDY, played what it called classic rock and Tiffany just called oldies; the tunes, after all, were from way back in the seventies, their artists now nearly as geriatric as Tiff’s patients.

Meanwhile, in Tiffany’s novel the heroine was learning that the hero was not a mild-mannered nursery school teacher as she had believed, but an international spy whose real name was Trace Savage. Trace had just swept the heroine, Maggie DeLorean, into his muscled arms and was preparing to ravish her in, Tiffany supposed, an appropriately savage way when the church bell’s loud
bong
rattled the wheeled medications cart across from the desk. The vibration sent eight small fluted paper cups full of sleeping pills and antacid doses shivering to the cart’s metal edge and over it, scattering the pills across the green linoleum floor.

As Tiffany, who was not a small person, bent heavily to try capturing the pills as they rolled away from her, the first loud cries of fear and consternation began emerging from residents’ rooms. And soon, so did the residents, alarmed by the clangor of a bell they had last heard when they themselves were of an age to be ravished or ravishing, or possibly both.

Residents who were ambulatory came tottering on walkers or canes to find out what was happening. The ones who weren’t ambulatory yelled for Tiffany.

Tiffany wanted to know what was going on, too. But when she straightened with an effort to peer out the hostel’s bay window—at one time it had been a sea captain’s mansion, its formal gardens now paved over for the employee parking lot—she saw only the twin churches of Two Church Lane.

Each enormous white clapboard building squatted massively on no more than a quarter acre of grass, its tower and spire rising into the night sky, which had been clear but was now beginning to thicken with fog. From where she stood looking out, Tiff could only see the whole of the closest one, the All Faith Chapel. Near its lofty top was the square, slatted belfry with the clock just below, its huge face ghostly-appearing, and above the belfry a spire capped by an elaborate brass weathervane shaped like a fat, feathered arrow.

The big bell rang on, monstrously loud, as Tiffany squinted through the fog now beginning to gather in the streets. Nothing moved. No one had yet arrived to investigate the disturbance. In Eastport, with a population of only twelve hundred or so now that the summer folk had mostly gone home, there wasn’t enough money in the city budget to keep a police officer on patrol all night.

And mostly, there wasn’t a need. Except sometimes, like now.

“I’m coming,” Tiffany called as the racket of demands from behind her rose in number and volume.

The bell’s sound, by contrast, stayed the same, so loud she felt it vibrating through her, maybe even into the marrow of her bones.
Bong, bong …
Could a bell that loud cause brain damage? Even cancer?

Just then the only aide on the night shift, Jannalyn Rand, popped out of the staff room, blinking sleepily. “What’s all the commotion?”

In Tiffany’s opinion, Jannalyn was as dumb as a box of clamshells, and lazy to boot. Smelling of cigarette smoke, hairspray, and Juicy Fruit, she had a talent for vanishing into the staff room for a nap whenever she didn’t have a specific task assigned.

But Jannalyn was strong enough to lift a person up off the floor and back into bed whether or not that person wanted to go, or to muscle a man who believed he was General Westmoreland down the hall and into his room for the umpteenth time in a night. And in the Boarding Hostel, that counted for something.

“Hey.” Jannalyn joined Tiffany at the window. From the reek coming off her, it was clear she hadn’t bothered to go outside for her smoke, as the rules required. But that wasn’t important now. The important thing was the indistinct shape creeping stealthily out the back door of the church.

Jannalyn snorted knowingly. “Can you believe that? Some damn kid must’ve snuck in there and got that old bell ringing.”

The shape slipped into the bushes and trees massed behind the church and vanished, just as a squad car pulled up out front. Bob Arnold, Tiffany realized as the driver got out. Hadn’t taken him long, either.

Tiffany shivered. Back in the residents’ rooms, somebody was banging a bedpan against a nightstand,
bang-bang-bang
, not quite in time with the bell’s bonging. Someone else moaned monotonously:
helphelphelp
.

That would be Mrs. Brannigan, who in daylight was as sharp as a sewing needle. She read Shakespeare, played a mean game of bridge, managed an online stock portfolio profitably, and was the recording secretary for the Eastport chapter of the national Poetry Society.

“Yeah,” said Tiffany, trying to agree with Jannalyn that what they’d glimpsed had been just a kid. But she couldn’t quite shake off her chill. In
daylight
, she thought with a shiver of unease, a lot of people were as sane as anyone.

But now it was night. And that shape had been weird.

“Some kid,” she repeated, hoping to convince herself.

B
ob Arnold put on the hearing protectors that his wife, Clarissa, had insisted he bring along. The plastic earmuffs were unwieldy, bulky, and uncomfortable. But at least now the old bell wasn’t slamming his eardrums halfway to his eyeballs every time it rang.

Why
was it ringing? That was his big question. One hand resting on his gun, he pulled the heavy old church door open with the other and peered inside.

The door had not been locked. “Police! Anyone in here?”

Not that they’d be able to hear him. Entering with caution, he drew his flashlight from his duty belt. As the beam stabbed the darkness, the shapes of wooden pews jumped out of the gloom.

But nothing else did. He made out the stone baptismal font and a rack of church literature. A little farther in, he found the bank of light switches in the vestibule and snapped them all on. Overhead, the bell continued its horrendous tolling.

Everything in the vestibule and the sanctuary and on the pulpit were all as they should be. To the left of the pulpit was the sacristy; Bob peered in, found the vestments on their hangers just inside the door. A little office area held a desk, a small file cabinet, and a bulletin board with notes and phone numbers on bits of paper thumb-tacked to it.

Bong, bong
 … Jesus Christ, Bob thought, wouldn’t somebody please turn off that fricking … But then he stopped, because of course he shouldn’t be taking that name in vain here.

Still, he had to get the thing silenced somehow. Though the sound was well muffled by his ear protectors, he could feel it in his teeth, loosening his fillings and shooting a rhythmic stab of anguish into the root canal he’d just had finished last week.

And even if he couldn’t get it turned off, he had to go up and find out why it was ringing in the first place, because the bell hadn’t started up all by itself, that was for sure.

No, somebody had started it: maybe by accident, more likely for a prank. And when Bob found out who it was, which he would because in Eastport there were a very limited number of possible suspects for anything, and Bob knew all of them—

Well, then. He would have the culprit’s butt. And he would kick it, too, if the culprit gave him even the slightest excuse.

Kick it hard, Bob decided balefully, because his kid was sick, his wife was worried, he was so short of sleep he felt like a mad scientist’s experiment, and there were things on his mind; life-changing things he didn’t want to think about right now.

And on top of it all, that damned bell was trying to beat his brains out.
Shut up, shut up
, he thought, striding angrily down the center aisle of the old church. He’d have to get outside, call Jeb Harmon, the custodian, and ask Jeb to get down here as quickly as possible. Because this had to be,
needed
to be—

The thought cut itself off as he reached the stone baptismal font at the rear of the church. Because his ears might be plugged so no sounds but the bell’s muffled thunder reached them, but his eyes still worked, and so did his nose.

And his gut worked. It told him now that more was wrong here than a screwed-up bell. Behind and to the left of the baptismal font, a door stood open. Beyond, he could see the first few steps of the stairway leading up to the bell tower.

And on the first one—yep, he thought, feeling his heart sink, that was a pool of blood, all right. As he stared at it, a fat, dark droplet plopped down into it from somewhere above, and then another.

“Oh, Jesus.”
He said it aloud, not fearing any blasphemy this time, feeling his shoulders sag with sadness and the weight of a dead person up there somewhere; nobody lost that much blood and lived.

He drew out his duty weapon and, with its heft steadying his hand, approached the stairway’s door. The narrow wooden steps led away up into the darkness. Groping, he found another switch and flipped it. A bare bulb lit up.

In its dim glow he could see dark smears on the old plaster wall, once painted cream but now a sad sort of brownish-yellow, and on the stair treads with the brittle shreds of rubberized material still clinging to them, held on by rusty carpet tacks.

The carpet tacks, some of them, had wet, red heads and dark stains spreading around them in the aging gray wood. Someone had stepped in blood, gotten it on their hands, too, which meant that there might be a fingerprint or footprint. Bigger, indistinct brushlike marks on the wall might’ve come from someone’s sleeve.

Bob kept his own arms close to his sides and his hands off the metal rail that was bolted as a banister through the stairwell’s plaster and into the framing behind it, because, please God, there would indeed be prints. He’d have just gone straight outside, not risked confusing this scene with his own physical presence at all, if he’d been
sure
that the owner of all that blood was dead.

Medically sure, that is: cold and pulseless. But he wasn’t, so he began climbing the stairs, being very careful where he put his feet. The blood kept leaking down the wall beside him, first on his right side for a flight of stairs, then on his left for the next flight, flowing freely in the light of the twenty-five-watt bulbs screwed into ceramic fixtures set head-high on each landing.

Just as he reached the top one and found the wooden ladder leading up through the tower’s trapdoor, two things happened. First, the bell stopped ringing, a sudden silence opening up all around him, a vast, stunned-feeling void like a universe so empty it might just suck itself inside out.

And second, a woman’s body half-fell down through the open trapdoor, first her long hair and then her shoulders, her flannel-sleeved arms flopping bonelessly and her bloodstained fingers dangling. Startled, he staggered back, one foot finding only the thin air of the stairwell before he righted himself.

Then, as he stood trying to catch his breath, the body began sliding the rest of the way down the old ladder. The skinny blue-jeaned thighs followed the upper body out of the hatchway, then the knees and at last two sneakered feet. The ladder’s splintery rails caught the body’s clothing, slowing its descent; the rungs pulled the jeans down slightly, exposing pale hipbones that looked bird-fragile; a girl’s bones, he realized.

Not even a grown woman. A child. Filled with horror and pity, he reached out to slow her fall, not caring anymore about what he might do to any evidence. He just couldn’t …

He couldn’t let her fall. Seizing her thin shoulders, he eased her body over the rungs, its weight a mere nothing, like an infant’s weight, or a leaf’s, until at last it reached the floor and puddled there, pathetically limp. By the time he released her, he was shaking.

Jesus
, he thought. Twenty years a cop, he’d seen everything, or he’d thought he had. Shootings and stabbings, beatings and car crashes, drownings and hangings and smotherings, carbon monoxide poisonings and wrist slittings.

Everything. But nothing like this. Gingerly, with an index finger that still trembled, he hooked her collar down a little. The wound was a meaty smile. He snatched his hand away, looked up through the trapdoor.

Dark up there. “Police!” he yelled, then yanked his cell phone out, speed-dialed Jenny Margolin in the dispatcher’s office. He didn’t want this out on the radio.

“Washington County 911.” The phone rang in Jenny’s kitchen, on the Shore Road overlooking the Cherry Island lighthouse. By now it was one in the morning, but as always, Jenny sounded wide awake. “What is your emergency?”

“Jenny, this is Bob.” He kept his weapon trained on the trapdoor opening. “I’m in the All Faith Chapel on Two Church Lane in Eastport. There’s a girl’s body here.”

“Oh, Lord. Do you know who it is?”

Jenny’s kitchen radio was tuned to the Eastport high school station, WSHD. Bob knew it because it was the only radio station in Maine where you could hear Tibetan throat singing at one in the morning—or at almost any other time, really—and that was what they were playing now.