A Bat in the Belfry (37 page)

Not ten feet away from me yawned the opening of a cave in the cliffs rising up from the beach. The opening was as high as a standard interior house door and about twice as wide; I aimed the penlight into it, but just past the entrance the floor fell away fast so I couldn’t see much, only a short stretch of its roof.

At the top of the beach where the bay didn’t reach except at very high tide, ordinarily the cave was probably fairly dry, but it was flooded now from waves driven in by the storm. And the penlight had been lying submerged right in front of the opening …

“Lizzie,” I said slowly, “d’you remember when you mentioned a cave in front of Harvey Spratt and he looked funny about it?”

I turned but couldn’t find her in the darkness, then spotted her just to one side of the opening, stripping her boots off. Two minds with but a single thought and all that, I guessed.

“Hey,” I yelled, but she didn’t even look at me, just tossed the second boot aside, then spread her hands helplessly as if to say it was a cop thing and I wouldn’t understand.

The wind yowled a banshee chorus as she plunged in.

A
cross town at the chapel whose steeple had been rendered so vulnerable by carpenter ants, Lonnie Porter was hearing the wind, too, and not liking it a bit, especially since while he heard it he was rising up into it, in the freight crane’s sky bucket.

To steady himself, he recalled that this wasn’t nearly as bad as the Groundhog Day Gale. That one took out all the downtown wharfs bing-bang-boom like dominoes falling. It was the biggest blow of his lifetime; he remembered the wild, almost apocalyptic-seeming storm meaning time off from school for him and his pals.

He remembered, too, being at the time still young enough to trust in the adults to take care of everything. And now it was his turn to be the adult; that was how it went here in Eastport.

He didn’t know about anywhere else. Meanwhile, the crane here went on lifting him. He clamped his hands around the black rubber safety grips again, hearing the high, hydraulic whine of the crane’s motor through the shriek of the wind, still buffeting the bucket: not quite catastrophically, but ferociously.

Oh, sweet mother of Jesus
. Because ferocious was bad enough. As the bucket rose, the church’s steeple slid by on one side, the wind-whipped branches of the white pines lining the churchyard dropping away on the other. Soon he could see the breakwater at the downtown end of the island, the dock lights running off the generators in the Coast Guard station shedding silver cones of rain-reflected illumination, and the freight terminal itself at the other end, its piers, warehouses, truck yards, and the vessels in its pair of massive berths all bathed in their own generator-fueled pinkish-yellow sodium glow.

Another massive gust made the sky bucket shudder; he caught his breath and clutched the safety handles so hard, he thought they might snap off. But instead the crane kept lifting him, the cable didn’t snap, and the bucket did not flip upside down like a car on a thrill ride that he’d never buy a ticket for on purpose, not in a million years.

Now the church clock appeared, so close he could’ve reached out to touch it. Its pale white face leered immensely at him, its hands thrusting out from a center stem as thick as a small tree trunk and its numerals fastened on by bolts as big as his fists.

Finally came the spire, a narrowing cone atop which perched the weathervane itself. It looked much bigger from up here, with its arrowhead aimed away from him and its thick metal-feathered fletching vibrating only a few feet from his head. As the lift howled beneath him and the bucket juddered upward some more, he could feel sweat balls the size of atom bombs popping out of his forehead; then the bucket lurched and the centerpin began turning the boom slowly to his left.

Closer, closer … the boom halted. Now all that was left was to drop the cable’s noose over the arrow-shaped ornament, then signal Terrel when to lower the cable.

Which Lonnie did, mentally prying his hands from the grips long enough to wave at Terrel. Then, working the cable controls expertly with both his big ham hands, Terrel lowered the noose as if it were a grappling hook that he was about to grab cargo with.

Down, down … that’s it
, Lonnie thought.
Now a hair to the left … more …

A-a-nd done. Yes
, Lonnie thought, exultant. At the base of the weathervane’s stem were four eyebolts, holding the housing to the spire. Once the cable’s noose was looped below them, Terrel would tighten it up hydraulically from below, and—

A stray gust hit the weathervane and turned it slightly just as the noose made its final approach. Half the noose fell down over the arrow end, just as planned.

But the other half … oh, the other half.

The other half stuck, resting on the metal fletching. And when Terrel tried to raise it again with the hydraulic lift …

Lonnie grabbed the safety grips again, trying not to hear Terrel’s shout from the cab of the crane, far below.

“Hey, Lonnie! Climb out there a bit, wouldja? Just hang on to one a them grips—don’t worry, you got your safety belt on. And just give that cable a tug!”

Oh, is that all?
Lonnie looked upward, but no help from heaven was forthcoming as far as he could see. Only the storm was up there, dark clouds rolling and wind rumbling wickedly at him. The bucket shivered, and the boom lifting it shook like the stem of an old man’s pipe, with a quick palsied quiver.

“Lonnie!” Terrel shouted. “Jeez, you wanna be up there all night?”

No, thought Lonnie, he most certainly didn’t. In fact, Lonnie put that idea at the top of the list of things that he wanted to quit doing, pretty much instantly. But first …

The sad truth hit him: first, he was going to have to go out and settle that damned cable. Get one foot out on the bucket’s step-in, reach out and lift the cable off the weathervane’s metal fletching so it could drop down below the bolts on the housing.

Just do that. Afterwards Terrel would bring the bucket down and Lonnie would step out onto the good earth, bearing a story he could tell for the rest of his life, one people might tell about him even after he was dead. But first—

He stood up, his bones feeling rubbery and his gut clenched, and opened the bucket’s door. He gripped the bucket’s body, which was conveniently equipped with a bar for this very purpose, with his right hand, then put his left foot onto the corrugated steel step-in and settled it firmly there.

Finally with his left hand he reached out for the cable loop that needed settling, perhaps three feet away. It wasn’t easy but it wasn’t worth asking Terrel to shift the boom, either. It was—
Just do it. Just reach the hell out there and get it done. Because you are a man, and this here is Eastport, and stuff like this has to be handled here, sometimes
.

And you are who handles it
.

He was looking at the blinking red safety light on the end of the crane’s boom and thinking this when his foot slipped.

“S
am?”

They’d scooted back as far as they could, still tethered to the cave’s iron bar with the plastic lines tied tightly around their wrists. But there wasn’t anywhere else to go, and now the water was up to their chins.

He sucked in a breath. “Yeah?”

“I’m sorry.”

He shrugged. “ ’S’okay. Nothing to be sorry for.”

“Why’d they do this, do you know?”

Harvey Spratt and his pals, she meant. “Something I said. You just showed up at the wrong time.”

Silence from Carol, until: “Dark in here,” she sighed.

The hopelessness in her voice broke his heart. Then … Carol shrieked, and he nearly did, too, pulling his legs back reflexively as something brushed against his feet.

“Gah!”
he managed, recoiling in horror.

There was something
in
the water with them.

B
ob Arnold didn’t know what it was about the big storm that was making the wildlife think getting out of the woods was a good idea; the fact that the wind seemed to be bringing it down around them branch by snapped-off enormous branch, maybe.

As a result, by the time he reached Machias in the squad car the score in this round of roadkill derby was two skunks, a raccoon, and a near miss on a black bear bumbling down the highway, straddling the center line.

In the rearview, the animal still ambled along unfazed; Bob thought Mr. Bear was fated very soon to become a blanket, a hat, and two pairs of enormously black-clawed slippers. But he couldn’t do anything about it.

Crossing the causeway in Machias, he tapped the gas pedal again, driving as fast as he dared and hoping he was wrong, but knowing he wasn’t. Hank Hansen was sitting right now somewhere very near the courthouse, waiting for Chip Hahn to be brought out.

Knowing he would be. All Hank had to do was stay watchful and then shoot, which Hank, a longtime poacher of anything with fur or feathers, was also well able to accomplish.

Bob started up Court Street through yet another storm squall, with his car nearly lifting off its tires in the rainy onslaught. Halfway to the top of the hill, he spotted a state police van and the flashlight of a transport officer clearing the street.

So they must be getting ready to bring Chip Hahn outside, to take him to—

Without warning, a huge limb on one of the ancient maples lining the street gave way with an enormous snap-
crack!
and came down massively right in front of him, bouncing as it landed and missing the squad car’s front bumper by inches. Right away, though, a couple of guys coming the other way in a pickup truck stopped, and pretty soon the three of them had the street cleared.

Drenched, Bob got back in and hit the gas again. But there was no way to hurry very much here as cars and people around the official buildings trundled along, trying despite the storm to deal with whatever unhappy business had brought them. He made his way slowly through them, meanwhile scanning the vehicles parked along the street: their windshields, their passenger windows, the people waiting behind the wheel as if in hopes of a possible fast getaway. Because in one of those vehicles …

There
. A cracked-open driver’s-side window facing the front steps of the courthouse drew his attention. In the rain, he could not see much inside the vehicle. But why would it be open at all?

At the same time, he took in the movement in the courthouse just beyond the brightly lit glass front doors. Officers, he saw, a whole group of them and in the center of the group was—

The driver’s-side window of the car he’d been watching slid down a little more.
No!
Bob thought, but he was still half a block distant, not close enough to do anything about it, and the squad car’s radio still wasn’t working.

The big courthouse doors opened. The transport officers came through, one signaling the van’s driver, the other looking back over his shoulder. A cluster of pedestrians, blinded by their own umbrellas and battling the rain and wind, stepped out in front of Bob, forcing him to slam the brakes on.

No, no, no …
One hand on the horn, he drove slowly forward again, but now just as he considered jumping out of the car and running, he spotted something—no,
someone
—else.

It was Dylan Hudson, the state cop supervisor who’d come out with the investigating team working on the Hansen girl’s murder. He was getting out of an Eastport squad car that Bob had last seen parked out in front of the police station back in town. And then—

Then, judging by the look of horror that appeared on his face, Hudson seemed to see the same thing Bob did: a gun barrel sliding out of the rolled-down car window a dozen yards away from him. A single look toward where the gun was pointing must’ve told him the rest.

“Gun!” Hudson shouted, and in the next instant was in firing position, feet planted, weapon double-handed out in front of him.

“Put down the weapon!” he shouted.

Bob kept driving. Fifty yards, twenty … in a trick gleam of streetlight he caught a glimpse of Hansen’s face behind the car’s windshield, eyes wide and teeth bared in desperate ferocity. The gun barrel in the car window slid minutely in Hudson’s direction.

In the next very few fractions of a second, Hudson was going to kill or be killed. There was no other answer possible. Bob hit the gas, heard the engine cough, glanced at the dashboard gauges.

Empty, read the one with the gas icon next to it.
Oh, holy mother of … come on, baby
, he entreated the fuel-starved vehicle. And when against all odds it responded—

Bam
. He punched the accelerator. The car shot forward. He pounded the horn hard and he aimed the car straight into where the crossfire would be, if any occurred.

With Hansen to his left, Hudson to his right, and up on the courthouse steps all those transport officers now scrambling in confusion, not knowing against what, Bob felt his heart pounding crazily in his chest and thought of that storm-addled bear, whose mind-set he now felt he understood much more clearly. And as all this happened, he kept driving, waiting until he was almost upon both Hudson and the car Hank Hansen waited in. And then—

Then he yanked the steering wheel
hard
.

•  •  •

S
he came up in a stale air pocket, pitch dark and reeking of terror. A
small
air pocket … “Police. I’m here to help.”

No sense wasting words. Sam Tiptree sat tied and tethered. The girl with him wept.

“Okay. Sit tight. I’m going to cut you loose.”

The water around them rose higher. Lizzie cursed mentally, but there was no point clueing these folks in to the fact that she was a little nervous herself, was there?

“Once I do get you freed, you’re both going to have to go underwater.”

The girl made a sound of despair, but Lizzie wasn’t having any of that. What little air remained in here was getting staler by the minute. “Stop. I mean it. You’re doing great, okay?”