A Bat in the Belfry (25 page)

Much less enthusiastic, actually, than I’d thought. “Ayuh,” said Lonnie. “Other work’s not the whole trouble, though. It’s them cops.”
Cawps
, the Maine way of pronouncing it. “Don’t matter what I say to ’em. Ain’t goin’ to let me in there.”

They-ah
. Just then Sam came downstairs, dressed in jeans, jacket, and boots; with the long striped scarf looped around his neck, he looked just like a Harvard man.

What’s up?
I mouthed at him, but he only waved, grabbed an apple from the bowl on the kitchen table, and headed out, looking determined and as if, wherever he was going, when he got there he wasn’t planning to take no for an answer.

Me either. “Lonnie,” I said, “if you tell them the steeple could actually
fall
, that it might not even be there for them to collect evidence out of unless they let you inspect it—”

“Won’t matter.”
Mattah
. “Them cops is thick as mud. I told ’em, I said, you guys is gonna get your heads knocked off.”

You-ah
. “But they didn’t care. They just looked at me like I was a dumb ol’ Eastporter.”

Eastpawtah
. “So I says, okay, then. Don’t come cryin’ to me, that there tower flies off in that big wind, next thing you know you’ll all be investigatin’ it down the bay in Lubec!”

Thet they-ah towah
. “Okay, Lonnie,” I said. “You tried, and that’s all you can do, I guess.”

I peered out the dining room window, just to make sure that Mother Nature hadn’t moved the investigation to Lubec already. At this distance I couldn’t see the whole steeple, but the copper weathervane in the shape of an arrow still juddered in the stiff breeze up there, pointing due north.

So we were still okay for now. “I mean to go back, take the Eastport zoning guy with me. Maybe he can talk sense into ’em. Way that shaky steeple’s creakin’, maybe they’ll get smart.”

Smaht
. “I appreciate it, Lonnie,” I said, and hung up to confront something else that was shaky: my own house. A patch of shingles approximately the size of Texas had torn off in the storm, or it looked that big anyway when I’d gone out front to try estimating how much tar paper to buy.

Also I’d need shingles and roofing nails, and while I was at it the chimney flashing looked iffy. And I’d need somebody to do it all, too, since the idea of me going up a ladder to reroof a house was about as likely as me going up one to visit the moon.

The one in the church tower had been bad enough, and that one had only been about one-fourth as tall as the distance up to my shingling project. Maybe when Lonnie was free again, I’d ask him. Meanwhile, the resulting roof leak had brought down a small patch of plaster in the guest room; luckily, I had half a can of Spackle left over from yesterday’s pipe explosion. So while I worried about Chip being in jail, Sam being jobless, Lizzie Snow finding or not finding her niece, and the church steeple blowing down onto the town’s citizens—including
moi
—I would at least keep busy.

Or I could have if fat, wood-stained water droplets weren’t still seeping through what was left of the guest room ceiling. Upstairs, I watched them ooze, each drop forming and quivering awhile before falling with a plop into the pail I’d set beneath, thinking that what I really needed was a blowtorch.

With it I could either dry out the area above the wet spot or burn the house down. At the moment both options seemed equally acceptable; very-old-house repair is satisfying, it’s confidence-building, it’s even tranquilizing sometimes.

But other times, it’s a pain in the behind. Still, with more rain forecast I’d be better off waiting; no sense doing the job twice. So finally I went back downstairs to smooth out my state of mind with coffee and one of Bella’s freshly made blueberry scones, and that’s where I was when the phone rang and I learned that the murdered girl’s dad, Hank Hansen, was missing once more.

He’d slipped out of his house again, reported Wade, who’d been with the bereaved man. But this time, he didn’t have a .22 pistol so old and bunged up that—according to Wade, who’d examined the weapon after confiscating it—you could hold it to your forehead and pull the trigger and still not be sure of hitting anything.

He’d have sworn, Wade said, that Hansen didn’t have any more firearms handy. He and George Valentine had questioned Hansen very closely and looked through the house as well as they could.

Nevertheless, from the sales slips and customer literature that Wade had found scattered around the place after Hansen came up missing for the second time, it looked as if on this trip he’d taken along a box of cartridges and a Marlin 336 rifle with a telescopic sight on it.

•  •  •

H
ank Hansen drove carefully out Route 190, past the bank and the Mobil station and around the long curve at the edge of town. He didn’t want to get pulled over by any of the cops swarming all over the island, investigating his daughter’s murder.

Not that it needed any investigation; not anymore. Hank knew the suspect was already in custody. Bob Arnold had said so while he’d tried calming Hank down, the day before out on the bluffs.

City guy, Bob had said. State boys had him in a locked room down at the county courthouse in Machias. Right next door to the jail, Bob had informed Hank soothingly, while Hank slumped in the police chief’s embrace and tried hard to get hold of himself.

Tried to stop weeping, shaking, all but screaming, which was what he’d really wanted to do. Screaming to be allowed to go back to when Karen was alive, to when she’d still been sassing him and defying him, and he’d still had a chance to do right by her.

But now he never would. His chance to turn it all around—not today, not tomorrow, but someday—had been stolen from him. Floating around the periphery of his mind was the truth: that it was the murdering of his fantasy—a dream that he
could
change, that anything would
ever
be any different between him and his only child—that truly enraged him.

He couldn’t look straight at it, though.
All my hopes, all my dreams
 … That the operative word in all his pain was
me
, that it was about
him
and how
he
felt—didn’t penetrate. Only
his
loss, mostly of his ability to go on fooling himself, sank in.

But his anguish … well, that was real, certainly. Jesus, how had it come to this? Wondering, he clutched the steering wheel, fighting the impulse to drive straight into a tree or a maybe a loaded log truck barreling down Route 1 like an oh-so-convenient engine of destruction, trailing the smell of pine sap in its turbulent wake.

But that wouldn’t help Karen, would it? Karen was past and gone, like everything else in his life that was ever any good.

Because he’d ruined it all. A sob escaped him; he swallowed it down as a cop car came over the hill at him in the opposite lane, heading toward Eastport. He straightened behind the wheel, did his best to look normal, ordinary.

Not-crazy. Which for him was a stretch, he knew. Stringy hair, broken nose, lips like liver slabs … he was no oil painting, and the look in his eye under the best of circumstances suggested a recent encounter with a booze-fueled hallucination or two.

And on most days, that suggestion was accurate. He summoned what presence of mind he could, his hair drenching with sweat from the effort of looking as if he weren’t making any effort at all, and was rewarded by nary a glance as the cop sped by.

Phew
. He let his breath out. He’d borrowed this car from the shed he’d rented to one of the summer people in Eastport. Key was in it, full tank of gas … and the best part was, nobody was going to miss the vehicle, since no one knew it was there. He had simply driven it away, right under the nosy nose of that damned Mr. Big-Shot do-gooder, Wade Sorenson.

Like
he
had an idea what Hank was going through. “You aren’t gonna do anything stupid, are you, Hank?” he’d asked, out on the bluffs yesterday.

Even crazed with grief as he was, Hank had nearly laughed in Sorenson’s face.
Who, me?
he’d wanted to giggle.

Giggle forever, giggle himself right into a freaking grave.
The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out …

Oh, Jesus. Don’t think about that
. About Karen, his sweet baby girl, lying on an autopsy table with her throat …

Stop
, his mind instructed itself sharply, but it was too late. The bloody vision of his child, violated beyond all human reason,
taken
from him …

So now, his mind cut in and instructed him calmly, now he would take back; easy-peasy, simple as that. The Marlin hunting rifle in the back seat had belonged to his father and was one of the very few items of any value Hank owned that he hadn’t lost, sold, or ruined somehow; he’d even hung on to the box it came in and the instructions and safety literature that had come with it. Because it ejected to the right instead of out the top, he’d been able to mount the scope he’d bought for it himself.

Over the years, in season and out, with and without the help of a dashboard-mounted jacklight, he’d shot deer numbering in the hundreds with his dad’s Marlin. Dragged them home, hung them from a tree to bleed and age them, then dressed the carcasses out, cut the venison in pieces and wrapped them for the freezer.

Ate them, too. Venison sausage was Karen’s favorite, doused in ketchup with fried potatoes and eggs for breakfast. Or for a late-night snack, even, the two of them sitting up watching old movies until the wee hours. At least, they had on nights when he hadn’t drunk himself into a stupor by nine …

An axe blade of anxiety chopped the thought off as the cop he’d passed going the opposite direction now came up on him from behind. Suddenly the rifle in the back seat—out of sight under a blanket, but still—glowed radioactive green in his head.

Pulsing its presence, neon flashes of
gun! gun! gun!
flared through the car’s trunk and out the rear end, into the cop’s mind. Or so Hank felt certain; glancing into the rearview mirror, he was met by the twin mirrored lenses of cop sunglasses, and by the cop’s flat expressionless face.

Reflexively he let up on the gas, but that was a wrong move, too; the car slowed suddenly, the cop roaring up practically onto Hank’s bumper now. Another glance; the cop’s head tipped sideways a little, one hand reaching out for …

Lights. Siren. Damn, he’s pulling me …
Hurriedly Hank tried to come up with some reason for having a concealed rifle in the back seat. A
loaded
concealed rifle …

The sudden high-low howl from behind drilled through his head, bloodying his eardrums, though part of that might have been his awful hangover. The squad car’s red light strobed mercilessly, lobbing his eyeballs around like bloodshot Ping-Pong balls.

Then, with a roar of its big V-8, the squad car surged past him, the cop staring straight ahead, one hand on a dashboard knob and the other barely touching the wheel. As he passed, he didn’t even seem to know Hank and his Marlin existed, so intent was he on whatever sudden errand had arisen.

Hank huffed another breath out, the sudden absence of that awful siren like an intense vacuum, sucking the air out of him. Relief thudded in his chest as sudden rain spritzed thinly out of the low clouds racing overhead, dull gunmetal gray.

Trees went by, long swathes of them on both sides of the road. Here and there small houses sagged in discouragement at the ends of long, rutted-mud driveways. His tires sang over a bridge, crunched through graveled sections, flung bits of tarry hot-top material up into the car’s underside.

Twenty miles still to go, and then fifteen; the road wound over a saltwater inlet where geese rested among cattails, logs rotted to pitchy blackness, and the edge of an abandoned apple orchard sprawled, the autumn fruit all gone up as high as a deer on its hind legs could reach.

On the passenger seat sat the box of .35 Remmies. With it: a pair of sunglasses, in case the forecast was wrong and no second part of the storm materialized. If there was sun, he wanted to be sure he could see well enough in any glare to make his shot good.

Also: a night-vision scope. He’d used this often enough on darkness deer expeditions—completely illegal, but who the hell cared?—to be able to exchange the sighting scopes on the Marlin without difficulty. So he was set for day or night.

He’d brought supplies, too, assembled in the dawn hours long before Sorenson or anyone else showed up. Coffee in a jar, bologna on Wonder Bread, cheap but filling, and a sack of mixed off-brand candy left over from Halloween, the gaudy wrappers thin and stained with the imitation chocolate liquefying inside them. He had a bottle of Bushmills, too, as well as an empty jumbo soda bottle for comfort purposes, since once he got to his destination he did not intend to leave the car for any reason.

The wheels turned, and the tires hummed beneath him with a singing tone.
Ten more miles, nine miles, eight miles and then …

The words rang in his ears, urging him on with their promise of a sure destination and a happy arrival. Hank had a feeling it was going to be something else entirely, that in the actual event things wouldn’t be so cheerful.

That there would be blood and screaming. But for the moment, he let imagination take precedence over reality; over the fact, for instance, of his little girl’s murdered body lying right now on a morgue table somewhere, cold and alone.

No, better not think of that
. Instead he gazed ahead as he crossed bridges over streams flowing down out of Orange Lake and Gardner Lake, then wound through a series of hairpin turns. A sharp left led out to Cutler and Little Bay, where a boat trip to see the puffins had long been on Karen’s wish list.

But he’d never taken her. Ignoring the turn, he continued across a long causeway, its summer throng of vegetable stands, fish sellers, and Maine-made trinket hawkers thinned now to only a few desperate used-furniture and craft-item merchants. A few blocks later, past the old railroad station, Helen’s Restaurant—
Try Our Famous Pies!—
and EBS with its sweet smell of recently milled pine, he turned onto Court Street.