A Bat in the Belfry (16 page)

D
ylan was still driving the old red Saab 900 sedan that he’d had in Boston, its tan cloth seats and the brown leather steering wheel cover as homey and familiar-feeling to Lizzie Snow as the inside of her own apartment.

Ex-apartment, rather. As they headed through the rain out of town in the Saab, she still had no clear idea what he wanted from her, only that he wanted something. But that wasn’t why she was in the Saab with him now. She was there because she wanted something from him, just as he did from her.

Even so, when with a small inward sigh she glanced sideways at him, she caught him doing the same, then smiling a little. So he felt it, too, the weight of a thousand memories, many of them made right here in the Saab.

“Remember New Hampshire?” he asked, slowing for a pickup truck heaped high with split firewood, then passing it.

There was almost no one else on the road, though back in town the grocery store’s parking lot had been jammed. Everyone getting ready, she guessed, for heavy weather.

“Yeah,” she said. They’d meant to stay only for a weekend, but the Saab’s catalytic converter had gone on the fritz. So they’d been stuck at the Mount Washington Hotel for three days.

It had rained hard for all of them. They’d stayed mostly in their room. She’d never wanted to leave.

“Yeah, I remember.”
And now I wish I didn’t
. “What’re you up to, anyway, Dylan? I mean, now you’ve got some kind of a boss’s job, something supervisory?”

Which, as she’d realized earlier, would mean no cases of his own, and he wouldn’t like that. Dylan on a case was like a dog with a meaty bone; he just kept at it till the marrow was gone, meanwhile enjoying the hell out of it.

They reached the Route 1 intersection: huge old evergreen trees looming on three sides, an out-of-business gas station and convenience store on the fourth. A log truck roared by on the wet road, huge tires spewing.

He turned north, past a small white rural post office and over a wide tidal inlet thick with cattails and roiling with an inward-rushing current.

“Yeah. Supervisor,” he replied sourly. “That’s where they put you if you light a fire under the wrong boss’s butt.”

“I see.” She could’ve guessed as much. That same dog-with-a-bone quality made him stubborn in work politics, too, especially if he thought someone was, as he put it, too dumb to live. The trouble being that Dylan would say he thought so right to the person’s face.

“Doesn’t matter what the beef was,” he told her before she could ask. “Guy I had it with had favors he could pull in with a top boss, and he got mad enough, so he pulled ’em. Got me back but good.”

He turned left, into the unpaved parking lot of a low, red-painted roadside restaurant. The sign said that it was the New Friendly—she wondered where the old one was, maybe fallen into the tidal inlet?—and the number of cars in the lot said that it might even be halfway decent.

For around here, anyway. He parked the Saab, and by the time she had her seatbelt undone he was out and had her door open for her, leaning in over her with an umbrella raised.

Swinging her legs around, she looked up incautiously and was hit full force with his smile. He put his arm out but she refused the physical contact, knowing too well what it might lead to.

If he even wants that
, she cautioned herself. But then,
Don’t be silly, of course he does
, she realized.
He always wants that
.

He just wants something else first
. And learning more about what it was meant coming out for a meal with him, playing along. After all, she did need what he had: cop access, instead of the make-it-up-as-you-go-along method of getting information out of police officers she might manage to cultivate on her own.

And good luck on that one, anyway, after the ass you made of yourself with that young local cop last night …

The bottom line being that Dylan was a straight shot in to where somebody might really know something about where Nicki was.
Some small fact that nobody else thought was important
 …

If there was something like that, Dylan could find out, and he would tell her—if she played all her cards right. Deftly he lowered the umbrella and ushered her into the restaurant ahead of him.

“Thank you,” she murmured, knowing he’d be surprised that she’d returned his courtesy with no sarcastic comment.

And knowing, too, that whatever game Dylan was playing, on her side at least it was about to get much more difficult. Because common sense and rational decisions were one thing, but physical reactions were entirely another; all it took as she passed by him was a whiff of that shampoo he’d always used, the woodsy scent of it more evocative than anything so far, to convince her of that.

They went in. The New Friendly featured a long counter with round, red leatherette stools, some tables at the center, a pass-through to a kitchen where a white-aproned cook labored. Booths lined the walls, and a trio of waitresses whisked trays around, avoiding collisions with one another as if by radar.

He allowed her to slide ahead of him into a booth by a big front window looking out onto the rain-swept parking lot. Once they were settled, she leaned forward across the Formica table.

“So, Dylan,” she began, “let’s dispense with the sentimental stuff for the moment, shall we? Tell me what you want.”

Almost surely what he sought was any inside info she could get out of the Tiptree woman, something he could use to break a case whose investigation he was supposed to be only observing. No doubt he thought that way maybe he could get back into active duty. In other words, he wanted to use Lizzie, and after all, she told herself bitterly, there was nothing new about that.

But as her knee brushed his under the table, she had her own ideas about how their arrangement should go.

Because when it comes down to being the used or the user
, she thought,
guess which one I intend to choose this time?

O
n the bluffs overlooking the bay’s dark gray, racing waves, Wade took charge of Hank Hansen again, once Bob Arnold had relieved Hansen of his gun. Wade strode back to his pickup truck with Hansen in tow, speaking consolingly to him, and Ellie and I got back into Bob’s squad car; not much later Bob dropped us off at my house.

“Yeeks,” I said, looking up at the old place.

Not that it was a shambles, exactly. Over the summer, the white clapboards had been freshly painted and the dark green wooden shutters repaired and rehung. Also, the roof got patched, new pipe was laid from the municipal water line in the street to the house itself, and the front porch railings had been replaced.

And yet … “I guess a couple of those wind gusts got pretty lively,” said Ellie inadequately.

“Yeah,” I replied. With two of those green shutters hanging askew, a gutter dangling, and a whole patch of shingles flapping on the roof I’d thought was all set for the winter, the old house was already looking the worse for wear, before the big storm had even arrived.

“Yeah, too bad my bank balance isn’t as vigorous as what’s still on the way, weather-wise.” What we’d had so far was just the preview.

“In fact, after all I spent on the house this past summer, if I buy much more than a pack of gum it’s the checks I try writing that’ll be bouncy,” I said.

I was a rich woman back when I managed money for some of the biggest crooks on Wall Street. But after fifteen-plus years of keeping an antique house upright, my older parent provided for, and a son fed, clothed, and educated to the point where he could do those things for himself, I was about as prosperous as most people in Eastport.

Which is to say not very. And then an even worse thought hit me. “Ellie,” I began as the sky darkened suddenly and another downpour opened up, fresh gusts lifting a corner of tin flashing from around one of the red–brick chimneys.

Two bad thoughts, actually. A strip of flashing tore off and flew away. “Ellie,” I repeated. “Remember when we were up in the bell tower yesterday and we noticed all that …”

We weren’t even supposed to go up there. All I’d said was that we’d look around a little, make a list of repairs that a pot of grant money could be used for: replacement windows, leak fixing, possibly new wiring if the old knob-and-tube electrical connections looked dangerous enough. But what we’d found was so much worse than I’d been expecting—a new foundation and floor were just the beginning of that old building’s to-do list—that I had decided to come back to document everything, with a camera.

And that should’ve been that. But Ellie had never been up in a two-hundred-year-old church tower before—neither had I, actually, but that was all right with me—so before we left, her curiosity sent her scrambling up four flights of stairs plus a ladder and into the belfry itself, with me grousing and complaining behind. And that was where we’d seen the—

“Sawdust,” I said. Old-house repair causes plenty of it, so when I’d spotted the powdery heaps of it in the belfry of the All Faith Chapel, I didn’t think much of it. I was used to the stuff.

But now it occurred to me that my own house had gotten lots of structure-bolstering attention over the years … and the old church hadn’t. And
that
meant the sawdust in the belfry wasn’t the by-product of carpenters. Instead—

Instead it was almost certainly from carpenter ants: wood-munching, building-devouring insects as hungrily destructive as termites, and hardier in cold climates. Carpenter ants
eat
wood, and they especially enjoy big structural beams; they hollow them out and live inside, enlarging their dwellings by the power of their appetites, the sawdust piles they make merely crumbs that have fallen from their constantly chewing mouth parts.

Constantly
chewing. As in right now, and we had gale-force winds coming; meanwhile and as far as I knew, no repair work had even been scheduled on the old church.

On top of which it was still a crime scene, and no cop in the world was going to let a carpentry crew in to work until each and every scrap of potential evidence had been photographed, gathered up, bagged, tagged, recorded in an evidence log, and carried away.

All of this I hurriedly explained to Ellie while she made coffee and rummaged in the refrigerator for lunch stuff—today was Monday, so Bella was upstairs scrubbing the bathroom faucet handles with a toothbrush and bleach, wiping down every surface with antiseptic spray cleaner, and generally making the place so clean you could do organ transplants in it—and I tried finding the church caretaker’s number in the phone book.

“… Mahan, Mahaney, Mahoney …” I slammed the book shut. No number for the caretaker was listed. Probably it was on a Twitter page or a Facebook page or his website.

Or whatever, I could Google for it, if I had all the time in the world and even a tiny bit of patience for that kind of thing. Ellie was the Web-guru one of us; with an eight-year-old at home she was required to be, just to stay ahead of the kid.

So while I corralled and assembled what she had plucked out of the refrigerator—Swiss cheese, dark rye bread, a tomato, and a container of Bella’s homemade hummus, this enriched with enough garlic from Ellie’s garden to ward off every possible vampire on Moose Island—she used her Google-fu, and then I used the phone.

Ten minutes later I’d finished trying to convince a church caretaker who hadn’t actually been up in the belfry for at least ten years that it was about to fall down.

“He says he’ll have a look at it after the police get out of there,” I reported through a mouthful of garlic and rye. Ellie’s fresh coffee washed it down nicely.

“Did you tell him that if he waits too long, he’ll be able to inspect it without going up into it?”

Because it would be on the ground, Ellie meant. Probably in several, to put it mildly, pieces. “Yeah. Orville Morgan isn’t the easiest guy to alarm, though.”

Also to put it mildly. If a bomb went off under Orville’s chair, he might consider getting up. But then he’d think better of it and stay, as he’d put it, “where the good Lord flang him.”

While we were eating, Bella came down and sat with us after putting together her own lunch of about a tablespoon of rice left over from dinner the night before, plus half a macaroon.

I privately suspected her of downing cans of Ensure when I wasn’t around; with that angular face, those bulging green eyes, and those big every-which-a-way teeth of hers, Bella was no beauty contest winner, but she was among the most vigorous late-sixtyish (she wouldn’t tell her age) persons I’d ever known.

Vigorous in her opinions, too: “Orville Morgan,” she said, swallowing a tiny bite of half-macaroon, “is a perfect example of a man who thinks he’s way too good for his job—”

Another tiny bite, another swallow. “—and is mistaken,” she finished, clicking her cup down into its saucer for emphasis.

Well, I didn’t agree. Orville swept, dusted, and mopped the place for free, and took the trash out after events in the church basement, too, hauling it upstairs to the curb without complaint even though he was eighty-five (Orville did tell his age, often and to anyone who would listen).

But in this case, I needed a person with some authority to act, someone who would understand that something needed to be done over there, pronto, and someone who wasn’t already involved somehow in last night’s ghastly event. Which ruled out Orville. And it also eliminated just about everyone else on the island who was ambulatory and had a pulse, since finding a murderer was at the top of a lot of to-do lists around here today.

And the looming storm occupied everybody else. So finally I called Ava Wilmot, the town dogcatcher, whose husband was a roofer, so he wouldn’t be working at that today, and he didn’t own a boat, either, so ditto.

Once I’d explained, she put him on the phone and he agreed to go over there and tell the cops that the City Manager had sent him, and if they didn’t let him in to inspect the belfry right now, it might fall down on them.

All of which was true except for the City Manager part, and I thought I could probably fix that later; as an ex–money whiz, I’d been able to show him some perfectly legal tax strategies that had saved Eastport a lot of cash.