A Bat in the Belfry (7 page)

God, what kind of a life was this? Beat up by one bunch of cretins or bossed around by another even stupider bunch. Meanwhile, the school’s anti-bullying program kept yammering about how they should all just be
nicer
to one another.

Yeah,
nicer
, like that was going to—

“Dweeb.”

Suddenly Bogie Kopmeier’s thick, stubby-fingered hand was at David’s throat, choking him while pinning his head back against a century-old carved granite angel’s unyielding wing.

“Freakin’ fag,” Bogie spat. “Why’d you run away, huh?”

His breath stank of cigarettes and unbrushed teeth. David jerked his head to the side. “Didn’t,” he gagged out past Bogie’s merciless stranglehold. “You
told
me to …”

But there was no reasoning with Bogie. He gave David’s throat a sharp shove, slamming David’s head against one of the angel wing’s pointy-ended stone feathers. If it had pierced his skull and killed him, he’d have been glad at that moment just to let everything end. He was tired, so tired of being scared.

But
better days are coming
, his father always told him; David remembered the phrase now, found in it the strength somehow to squirm free of Bogie’s grasp and speak, croaking out the only thing he could think of to defuse his companion’s unpredictable energy.

He didn’t want it, didn’t like it, felt his gut roil already in anticipatory disgust. But:

“Gimme a cigarette,” David said.

  
3

M
y name is Jacobia Tiptree—Jake, to my friends—and when I first came to Eastport, Maine, I thought that moving here would solve all my problems.

At the time, though, I also had a young teenaged son; a Very Old House™ whose state of repair suggested tenancy by the Addams Family; and an awful ex-husband—his name, appropriately enough, was Victor—whose quirks only intensified after he’d followed me here so he could go on torturing me.

So much for the geographic cure. And then I started getting involved in murders. Not Victor’s, although the idea was incredibly tempting. He was such a notorious cheater that the nurses at the hospital where he worked—Victor was a brain surgeon, which was perfect for him since he interacted best with unconscious persons—used to send out mass emails to the nursing school graduates every year, to warn them about him. But instead, after I divorced him, snatched our son Sam out of a drug haze, and got the hell out of Dodge, it was other people’s untimely demises that I wound up concerning myself with:

Eastport’s town ne’er-do-well, hung upside down from the cemetery gate, for instance. Or the local butcher, whose parts were found wrapped and labeled in his own freezer. For a while, it seemed that just crossing the causeway onto Moose Island could earn you a place either among the wanted posters or in a grave.

And I am sorry to report that I found it all fascinating, and so did Ellie White, my best friend here in Eastport and the other half of what became a sort of unofficial sleuthing duo. But eventually, after chasing a murderer and instead nearly becoming a murderee one too many times, I decided to give snooping a rest. Firmly, I told Ellie that from now on whatever time I didn’t spend fixing up my big old house would be devoted to gardening, dog walking, and perhaps knitting tiny garments for those few of our friends who had not yet negotiated the hell-on-earth known as child-rearing.

Well, in my case it was hellish, at any rate. But then, I was perhaps the most unlikely mother in history, possessing no instinct for it and having myself been raised by people who were only a little more civilized than feral cats. By the time Sam was five, he could work the microwave and figure out which of the packages in the icebox was a TV dinner and which was frozen margaritas, which I’d told him was “applesauce for grown-ups.”

Perhaps unsurprisingly, not much later my son began opting for the applesauce, and soon after that he stopped bothering to hide his marijuana from me. Next, while his father and I fought World War III over a succession of girlfriends so trampy that I wanted to install a decontamination chamber outside our bedroom door, Sam went on adding illegal substances to his intake regimen until the list of what he consumed each day looked like the class notes of some incredibly ambitious toxicology student.

But that was then. Nowadays, fifteen years after we’d first moved here, Sam was thrillingly, delightfully sober, and my long-lost father (the only nonferal of my direct forebears still living; I was three when my mother was murdered) had been found and persuaded to live with me. His wife, Bella Diamond, insisted on keeping us all clean, well fed, and dressed in fresh clothes that felt soft and smelled wonderfully of sunshine and bleach.

And finally, I had a new husband. Wade Sorenson was a hardworking, plainspoken man, well thought of around town as a good fellow to have with you in a pinch. Also he was funny, smart, and gorgeous—when he put his arms around me, I tended to drop whatever I happened to be holding—the kind of guy who had a shotgun racked in his pickup truck and a book open on his bedside table.

In short: life was sweet. And when the whole terrible thing about Sam’s friend Chip began, I wanted to keep it that way.

Too bad somebody had other plans.

O
n the November night when it all started, Sam had an old friend staying with us: Chip Hahn, his childhood pal from back in the city. In those days, Chip and his catcher’s mitt were about the only wholesome items in Sam’s life. Meanwhile, as a boy Chip himself was so lonely that he’d have dragged Sam out to the park if need be. But something about Chip’s entreaties had cut through the fug of pot smoke and vodka fumes clouding up Sam’s room and his head.

Nowadays, it was Chip who needed his head cleared. He was in the process of reevaluating for the umpteenth time his romance with a young woman named Carolyn: smart, talented, ungodly pretty, and the most self-centered, spoiled, moody, and generally maddening person I’d ever met in my life.

Well, except maybe for Victor. But hey, it was Chip’s heart, and if he wanted it broken at regular intervals, it was none of my concern, or at any rate none of my business.

So that night when I’d found the boys (both in their mid-twenties, but still boys to me; I’d been a
very
young mother) at the dining room table with a map of Maine spread open between them, I let them alone. A fire sputtered in the fireplace, and the cranberry lamps on the side tables sent warm yellow light up onto the old gold-medallion wallpaper.

The windows were dark; from the CD player in the parlor came the muted sound of Stéphane Grappelli, wringing the pure, authentic essence of what it’s like to be madly in love out of some jazz violin tune or another, I didn’t stop to identify which one. It was, as I had reason to recall later, just past ten o’clock.

Yawning hugely, I closed the draperies against the rising wind outside. As part of the ongoing rehab of my old house (it’s like a battleship; long before you get done painting one end, it’s time to start scraping again at the other), I’d spent the day pulling carpet tacks out of the front hall stairs, filling the resulting holes with wood filler, and sanding down the result, which might not sound like much.

But there were fifteen steps plus a landing in that flight of stairs, and each step had approximately four hundred million separate tack holes it, so I was exhausted.

Leaning over the table, Sam pointed out the dirt road they intended to take in the morning to Borden’s Brook. “See, we put the kayaks in right here”—he ran the tip of his marina penlight confidently over the map—“and get to about here by lunch—”

I was going around checking the thermostat and making sure both dogs were settled and so on. But I paused to admire the two young men with their heads—Sam’s dark and curly, Chip’s light thatch already beginning to recede—bent over their plans.

The kayaks were tied in the truck bed, and their backpacks stood ready by the door. “—and come out down here at Portman’s Bay in time to get home for supper,” Sam finished.

It crossed my mind again that if not for Chip, Sam might not be here at all, since any one of those long-ago days they’d spent in the park playing ball together might otherwise have been the day Sam overdosed or got himself stabbed or shot.

Or got knocked off the top of a subway car he was riding for thrills, that being the kind of crew he’d been running with when he wasn’t hanging out with Chip. A burst of gratitude flooded me, followed by a twinge of premonition.

But that, I told myself, was silly. They had life jackets, and Sam was scrupulous about wearing his, while Chip after some experience he’d never wanted to tell me about would barely walk out onto a dock without his own flotation device securely belted.

“Are you guys turning in soon?” I asked, not expecting anything else. In Eastport in November, the phrase “night life” is an oxymoron unless you’re a raccoon.

Sam nodded, tucking his penlight away. “Yeah. Early start tomorrow.” But Chip shook his head.

“Guess I’m not tired yet.” He glanced around the dining room with its olive brocade curtains draped at the old wavery-glassed windows and the ornate carved mantel over the dying fire on the tiled hearth. There was a roll of brass weatherstripping, a tin snips, and a hammer on one of the small bookcases that stood under the windows, all in readiness for a draft-proofing job on the lower sashes, once that stairway was done.

But Chip wasn’t noticing that, or imagining the work I’d put into the house since I’d bought the old place: miles of wallpaper stripped, woodwork sanded, doorknobs repaired, and plumbing parts replaced, not to mention contracted-out jobs like roof repair. Despite the fact that I am pretty sure my blood now flows best when it is thinned out considerably with varnish fumes, and I hardly recognize my own reflection in a mirror if I’m not gripping a few wood screws or possibly a paint stirring stick between my teeth, all Chip knew was the result, and I could see him thinking that this was what he wanted to have with Carolyn, this warm safety.

This routine peace, which was for him proving so elusive. So I was unsurprised when an hour later, unable to sleep myself, I returned to the kitchen for an aspirin and found Chip in the back hall, pulling on a light jacket.

He looked up guiltily. “It’s okay, Chip,” I said, though the pain on his face in the instant before he knew I was there broke my heart. “I won’t send you to bed before you’re ready.”

I got a glass down from the cupboard, poured skim milk and washed my pill down with it. “So, d’you want to talk about it?”

He shrugged, laughing a little. To keep from crying in front of me, I guessed. “Think it’d help? I’ve tried everything else.”

Chip and Carolyn had started simply as business partners, she a writer of popular true-crime accounts, he a researcher whose ability to winkle out the pertinent fact meshed perfectly with her knack for unraveling a tragedy’s emotional truth.

But now things had gotten complicated. “I knew that she’d be difficult,” he allowed.

A minute ago he’d been ready to burst into tears, but in his own way Chip Hahn was a tough little nut. “Just,” he added, “not so—”

Mercurial. Flighty. Available one minute, icy the next. She was a piece of work, our Carolyn, and if I’d had her there, I’d have tried talking some kind of sense into her.

She wrote about crime, the kind of ghastliness that can arise from madness, and often from the madness of thwarted love. Still, she couldn’t seem to see when she was inflicting that pain herself, and on someone who least deserved it.

Or maybe she didn’t care. “I guess I’m just a poor little rich kid, huh?” Chip said with another laugh, this one bitter. He was the product of wealth, the kind of boy who got packed off to a grim, posh boarding school while still practically gripping a plastic rattle in his fist.

Although in his case, the rattle had probably been platinum. His dad had been the kind of guy for whom the phrase “captain of industry” was invented. Also, the phrase “son of a bitch.”

“I wasn’t thinking that, exactly,” I replied, although I had been. Chip’s early life had been a shower of material goods, but a desert where anything resembling emotion was concerned. “I guess I’m just wishing you hadn’t gotten so …”