A Bat in the Belfry (36 page)

Just take him out. Out of this world, which would be better and a whole lot less complicated on account of the deed. But then as the deluge eased off and the tires caught traction, the ditch and the collision-inviting trees faded back into Bob’s peripheral vision, and reason returned.

Because that’s not for me to decide, is it? And I don’t want it to be, either. Just—find him. Stop him, damn it—

Stop him because I swore to. Because—

He sighed, alone behind the wheel of the squad car, racing through a storm-torn night because …

He didn’t know whether to be relieved or sorry.
Because it’s my damned job
.

L
onnie Porter stood alone in the sheeting downpour outside the All Faith Chapel on Two Church Lane, smoking a cigarette under his umbrella and watching yellow crime-scene tape fly around the lawn in the wind.

He was waiting for a truck to arrive. Up here against the church’s big front door, the wind wasn’t so bad, but if the truck didn’t come soon he was going the hell home and to hell with the stupid steeple, he thought. Just then the truck finally did show up, though, all eighteen wheels’ worth of it, barely making its way around the corner. On it was a crane, not a little bucket truck phone and cable companies used, either, but a monster of a full-sized industrial contraption.

With a wheezy shriek of its air brakes and a final exhaust-spewing rumble of its diesel engine, the truck came to a halt and a skinny man in rolled-down boots and a yellow slicker hopped out of the cab, pulling his ball cap’s brim down sharply and peering from beneath it as he strode toward Lonnie.

The man’s name was Terrel Carson. He owned the truck and the equipment on the flatbed that it was hauling. “Hope you know what you’re doing!” he said.

“Ayuh. Me too.” The wind snatched Lonnie’s words away as he and Terrel squinted up at the church steeple.

“Can you get ’er up there?” Lonnie asked as a gust nearly knocked both men off their feet.

Terrel spat. “Ayuh.”

He strode back to the big rig. Moments later the flatbed’s rear tires were digging muddy ruts in the lawn, and moments after that, two enormous track-and-roller mechanisms were juddering down the flatbed’s ramp.

Lonnie lit another smoke. He’d told Jake Tiptree he would try securing that steeple against the gale, so he was going to. But now that the machinery he’d summoned was here, he felt …

Well, he told himself, at least Terrel didn’t seem nervous about it. He watched Terrel climb into the cab of the machine that had come off the flatbed and begin fiddling with the levers and knobs bristling from its dashboard. Taking a drag, he waited as Terrell maneuvered his machine right up alongside the chapel.

That way, the crane’s long, hydraulically controlled arm could send the sky bucket up between the building and the row of white pines, fifty feet tall if they were an inch, along the lot line twenty yards distant.

Jeez, I’m glad I don’t have to go up in that thing
, Lonnie thought, eyeing the sky bucket, which basically really was just a bucket big enough for one man to climb into.

“Okay!” Terrel yelled from the crane’s cab, waving at a cable that ended in the metal-stranded equivalent of a noose. You looped the noose end over whatever it was you wanted to pull on, tightened it via another hydraulic system from inside the cab.

“Okay, what?” Lonnie yelled back, unsure why Terrel hadn’t come back down from his seat.

Terrel waved again, a
get-going
gesture with more than a little dose of impatience in it. If not for this chore, Terrel would no doubt be at home, drinking a beer.

Me too
, thought Lonnie, not sure why Terrel wanted him over by the sky bucket anyway. Shouldn’t he be in the crane’s cab by now, learning how to work the machinery?

But he slogged obediently through the mud to where Terrel’s wave indicated, right by the three metal steps leading up to the bucket’s doorway hatch.

Up!
Terrel gestured sharply. Lonnie could see Terrel’s hands on the controls now, too, and in the machine’s dim-lit cab could see the intent look on Terrel’s face.

Aw, no
, Lonnie thought, wishing hard for another cigarette. But when his hand went reflexively to his pocket, he was out.

Me?
He pointed at his chest. Terrel nodded, up and down very hard in a way that conveyed just what a fool Terrel thought Lonnie was being. Then Terrel yelled out the cab door.

“Christ, Lonnie, you coulda been down by now! Git yer ass in gear, will ya?”

Lonnie swallowed hard. It was clear what needed doing: that cable noose needed to get dropped down around the big weathervane mounted atop the steeple. Right over the tippy-top, it needed to go, and then fall down around the weathervane’s base where it was fastened to the spire’s peak with iron bolts. Lonnie had simply misunderstood who was going to do what, but now he did know.

Me
, he thought very unhappily. Way up there in the sky with the wind, rain, and … He felt his shoulders sag. If he went, he would die, either by falling out of the sky bucket or just from sheer fright. But if he
didn’t
go …

As if giving him a sign, the wind slackened off a bit. Not a lot, but enough to keep this from being a suicide mission. Up in the cab, Terrel tapped his wristwatch meaningfully.
Let’s get this show on the road
. Lonnie imagined the ribbing he would take if he wussied out.
The condemned man
, he thought bleakly as he patted his pocket once more,
didn’t even get a last smoke
.

No doubt if anyone knew what he and Terrel were up to, this crazy-ass rescue mission would have the kibosh put on it. But no one else did know, and meanwhile, this was the church that his mother and dad had been married in and buried out of. A whole lot of other people in town felt the way he did about it, too, he was willing to bet.

That it belonged here. That
this is ours
.

That it should stay. But those people weren’t here, and he was, was the long and short of it.

Resignedly, he climbed into the crane’s sky bucket.

“I
don’t get it,” said Lizzie as we raced through the storm toward Water Street. “What makes you think—”

“You don’t get it because you’re new here,” I told her, “so you don’t know Harvey Spratt. But if you
did
know him—”

I stopped talking; I needed all my wits to steer around the large hole that had just opened up directly in front of me. Water had apparently excavated a cavern beneath the pavement, and then the pavement had collapsed into it.

Hoping very sincerely that more wouldn’t collapse right this minute, I got past it, then hit the gas and we swung around onto Water Street, which at the moment seemed aptly named. The few other cars out plowed through foot-deep waves, wipers flapping.

“Harvey Spratt is a pretty well known junior bad guy around here,” Ellie explained. “Taking a car isn’t that big a deal for him.”

“Yeah, so I gathered.” Lizzie said. “But what’s that got to do with—”

“Well, what if the reason he ran when he saw you wasn’t the car he was driving?” I said. “What if it was something else he’d done lately?”

“Something he’d
just
done,” Ellie added clarifyingly. “Like maybe to Carol and Sam.” The boat basin looked as if somebody was stirring it up with an eggbeater; big choppy waves were tossing boats around and spewing foam up onto the Coast Guard’s dock. We sped uphill, then sharply to the right until we reached the old cannery building, its dark windows like rows of unseeing eyes.

“Yeah.” Lizzie squinted out toward the bay and the whitecaps racing. “This is where the red Miata was when I first saw it.”

I pulled over. “Oh, man. So now what?” I didn’t know what Harvey might’ve had against Carol or Sam. All I knew was, he’d had her car, and—

“Okay, how about this?” said Lizzie. “Ellie, you go door to door to any houses nearby, see if anyone saw anything earlier.”

There were half a dozen houses on this part of Water Street where people might’ve been looking out their windows. Ellie nodded as Lizzie went on:

“Ask if they saw Harvey and his crew, or Carol and Sam together. Or any one of them individually, any time since early this afternoon.”

We got out of the car, hunching against the weather. “And Jake and I will go down there,” Lizzie finished.

She pointed at the cannery, and the heaving water beyond. Down on the beach, waves rolled up and hit the rocks with a sound like bombs going off distantly, hissing as they slid away for another onslaught.

“Okay!” Ellie shouted, turning away; then Lizzie and I began staggering together toward the empty cannery, whose roof was in the process of being stripped off.

“So why are we coming down here?” I yelled over the wind.

At low tide, the sheltered space beneath the wharf building offered a meeting spot for local kids, out of sight from parents, police, and other snoopy anti-teenager types. Now at nearly high tide, though, the beach under the wharf was flooded to a depth of fifteen or so feet.

“Just want to get a look, is all!” she yelled back.

Which I supposed we might as well. Who knew if Sam had even been here, or Carol either; it was only a guess on my part that had brought us here in the first place.

But if they had been, maybe some evidence of their presence would still be in the sand or in one of the caves above the rock-strewn waterline, blown there, maybe, or flung up by a big wave. There was another, much grimmer possibility, too, of course, but I didn’t let myself think about that as we picked our way down the weedy trail leading to the wharf.

Once on the beach, we slogged along until we got to a granite outcropping that thrust out into the sea, blocking our way. We’d seen nothing that suggested Sam or Carol had been here.

Lizzie shouted over the wind’s shrieking: “He could still be inside somewhere, too, you know, just waiting this out!”

I nodded, turning back toward the cannery’s huge, dark shape outlined against the breakwater’s lights in the distance. She was right, Sam could be holed up waiting for the storm to slacken.

But he wouldn’t be. He wasn’t working; he knew Wade would be out and that his grandfather wasn’t in great shape. He knew that without him, Bella and I might be alone with whatever the storm hurled at us.

He’d been a wild kid, a troubled teen, and a terrifyingly addicted young adult. But he was different now; he wouldn’t have left me alone if he could help it. I had to believe that about him, that he’d changed; I had to, and I did.

Lizzie turned back toward the cannery building and the dock lights through the blowing rain behind it. I trudged behind her, trying hard not to let discouragement overwhelm me.

Anything could have happened to Sam, an accident, or Harvey Spratt could’ve done something to him after all, or—

Lizzie kept looking back, as if she didn’t quite want to go. Then her hand came down hard on my arm. “Look.”

She waved back toward the granite outcropping. I peered into the streaming murk. “What? I don’t—”

But then I did see. Just this side of the outcropping, the beach slanted sharply upward for a few feet, and through that up-slanting of sand the tide had washed a channel.

And in that channel, winking faintly but undeniably, was a tiny light. We hadn’t seen it before because we were looking from the wrong angle.

But from here … we ran toward it, and when we reached it I thrust my hand down into the cold water and grabbed it.

“Oh,” I said, clutching it.

It was Sam’s Eastport Sailyard penlight.

  
14

W
ith Sam’s penlight clutched in my cold, wet hand, I scanned the dark, storm-scoured beach for another sign of my missing son, just as another big wave rolled up and then out again, sucking the sand suddenly from beneath my shoes.

I staggered, caught my balance briefly, then went down hard. “Oof,” I said, spitting sand and seaweed.

And then: “Hey, Lizzie?” Whispering, not quite yet believing what I’d seen. But there was no escaping it: