A Bat in the Belfry (8 page)

Injured
, I’d been about to say. Back in the city, it had been my job to manage money for people like Chip’s dad: wealthy, well connected, and so deeply evil it was a wonder they didn’t burst into flames and vanish into puffs of foul smoke, like the devils they resembled at heart.

“Too bad I got so twisted?” Chip took up my sentence for me. “Bent out of shape past recognition, past …”

“Now, that
really
wasn’t what I meant,” I began, but Chip only shook his head. I hadn’t seen until now just how near the breaking point he was; he was too good a guest.

He looked up, his eyes darkly circled by the hallway’s harsh overhead light. “Did you ever know, all that time I was out there tossing a baseball with Sam—”

Back in the city, he meant, when Sam was eleven and Chip was fifteen, though he’d looked maybe twelve—

“—that it was because I didn’t want to go home?”

Oh, for heaven’s sake, of course I had. Chip’s mom had taken off years earlier to a commune for wealthy, wackily disaffected persons, in the desert Southwest. His father was away a great deal; Chip’s home, a fifteen-room, four-story, private-elevatored apartment, housed only himself and a housekeeper who spoke Russian exclusively, and who seemed to dislike him.

Chip zipped his jacket. “Guess I’m the perfect guy to be researching deadly obsessions, though, right?”

Gathering my robe around me, I stepped out onto the porch with him. Under the yellowish porch light, the chill night smelled of woodsmoke, salt spray, and winter not too far in the future.

But before that, rain. A foghorn moaned distantly and I thought about the nasty weather report I’d heard, and hoped that Chip would get his chance to be outdoors tomorrow.

Then it occurred to me that he might not feel that way about it. “Do you want me to tell Sam anything?”

Like, I meant, that Chip had gone out late and might be too tired or even too hung over—one bar was still open in town at this hour and this late in the season, and Sam was adamant that his own strict sobriety not affect anyone else’s behavior—to go out for a twenty-mile trip on a wilderness river.

Chip understood, and laughed. “Oh, no. Hey, I’m up for just about anything. I mean, why not?”

Which wasn’t quite the answer I’d hoped for. But before I could say more, he descended the steps and strode off into the fog now beginning to creep stealthily in the late-night streets.

When he’d been gone for a minute, I walked out the short sidewalk to the street myself and looked up at the house looming ghostly in the glow of the mist-shrouded streetlamps like some white-clapboarded ship shouldering heavily out of the gloom.

With three full floors plus an attic, three tall red brick chimneys, and forty-eight old double-hung windows each with a pair of dark green shutters, the house had captured me on sight when I first arrived here in Eastport. Built in 1823, it required more maintenance than your average space shuttle, and when the furnace malfunctioned, as it did at least once a winter, it sounded like the whole place might take off like a shuttle launch, too.

But tonight everything was quiet, raw, and damp, the kind of night that could bring all your demons creeping up out of the murkiness at you. And whatever was going on with Chip, I thought it was more than a brisk walk could cure.

But he was a survivor, so even then, and even a half hour later when the long-silent church bell a few streets over began ringing and wouldn’t stop—

Even then, I don’t think I was really worried about him.

Not yet.

W
hen I went back inside, the fire on the dining room hearth had fallen to feathery embers; I checked to see that the screen was up securely in front of them and the damper open a crack, and turned out the lamps.

Upstairs in their apartment on the third floor of the old house, my father and my mother-in-law, Bella Diamond, slept. Wade was asleep, too, in our room’s massive antique four-poster, and in the kitchen I’d seen the two dogs, Monday the old black Lab and Prill the Doberman, dead to the world in their dog beds.

A burglar, I thought, could have a field day in here and those two wouldn’t stir. But in Eastport the odds were still very much against it: anyway, burglars who want home-repair tools and materials are not so prevalent, here or anywhere, and those were the majority of my belongings nowadays.

So I dismissed the thought and went upstairs, where Wade lay with an arm flung out. Easing in beside him, I listened for last sounds that might mean I’d have to get up again—the furnace running despite my turning it down, a dog needing to be let outside one more time, or my own personal nightmare, a freak fireplace spark jumping the hearth screen to create an inferno, unstoppable unless I heard it early.

But there was nothing except that foghorn. I drifted off, only to snap awake when the church bell began ringing.

And ringing some more.

P
iloting her old Honda CRV one-handed and very fast through the streaming darkness of an unfamiliar rural road in the rain, Lizzie Snow turned the heat up and the defroster fan to high, swigged from the thermos of bourbon-spiked coffee on the car’s console, and cranked the volume on Steely Dan’s “Black Friday” up yet another notch. At the speed she was traveling, and under these conditions, she probably should’ve kept both hands on the wheel. But …

Screw it. Just screw it
, she thought as she drove through the rainy night on an empty road in the middle of Who-the-Hell-Knew-Where, Maine, while the Honda’s wipers slapped out a flat, back-and-forth rhythm:
I quit my job, I quit my …

“Shit.” Two glowing eyes in the murk ahead made her touch the brakes lightly and put the thermos down without looking at it. Two more pairs; she braked harder, her high beams coalescing around several large shapes in the road, wet leaves spiraling down around them.

Deer. She slowed nearly to a stop on the shiny ribbon of wet asphalt. The animals peered incuriously at her, then continued their casual progress across the road, disappearing like ghosts in the tall weeds on the other side.

She muted the CD player and lowered the car window, feeling her heart pounding in her chest. Rain pattered, loud in the late-night silence; ninety miles out of Bangor and she might as well have been nine hundred. Breathing in the cool, acid-wet smell of the last autumn leaves plastered to the blacktop and the whiff of salt in the night air, she was suddenly sure she’d made a mistake. Then the final deer, the very smallest one that she’d known somehow would be still be there, poked its nose from between two old cedar fence posts. Delicately he stepped in front of the car, pausing once to turn and look at her with his huge, dark eyes.

His two fuzzy forehead bumps, she supposed, were nubbins of antlers. Only when he’d vanished into the brush at the far side of the road with the rest of his kin did she let her breath out.
Just a baby
.

But that thought sent her hand out past the thermos in the center console to the photograph on the passenger seat, slipping it from beneath the .38 automatic that she had used to weigh the sheet of eight-by-ten photo cardstock down.

The dashboard’s glow lit the photo of a young teenage girl, her thin, freckled face laughing into the camera. The baby in the girl’s arms was only a few days old back then, wrapped in a pink blanket and wearing a pink crocheted cap.

The baby’s mother had just turned sixteen, and of course had no idea what was coming, so terribly soon.
Oh, honey …

Cecily had sent emails for a while, to let her big sister Lizzie know how happy she was in Maine, how free she felt. That was when Cecily still had a computer and access to the Internet.

But after that, there’d been a job in a bar and then one as night clerk at a so-called motel, and those things had taken their toll. Besides, booze and drugs were effective pain meds, at least in the short run, and Cecily had been in a lot of pain once the baby’s dad took off and left her alone.

A couple of months later, Cecily had called to say that she was broke, and could Lizzie send her some money?

Which of course Lizzie had. She’d been up to her eyebrows in work at the time, though, trying to finish a combination master’s and bachelor’s degree, so she couldn’t just drop everything and leave to help Sissy, as she had always called her younger sister.

Besides, Sissy hadn’t wanted her to come. “Wait till I’ve gotten myself situated for guests,” Sissy had insisted, so Lizzie had, secretly relieved not to be disrupting her own life just when her goals were so close, they’d seemed practically in her hands.

And for a little while, that seemed like the right decision.

Emails from Sissy grew happier, and the pictures of her baby showed a healthy, much-loved infant. Maine, Sissy had said, was a good place for a kid, not like back in Springfield, where she and Lizzie had grown up, in a neighborhood where creeps lurked on the corners and even the air was dirty.

Nicolette was the baby’s name, Nicki for short, and by the time Lizzie got her degrees, it seemed that Sissy was doing well as a single mom. Drugs no longer seemed to be in the mix, and Sissy never drunk-dialed Lizzie anymore, or sent any emails that read as if they’d been drunk-typed, either.

She still didn’t want visitors, promising instead to bring Nicky to Boston “soon.” Maybe that should have alerted Lizzie, but instead she’d let it go, concluding that the bad patch in her sister’s life was over, that love and responsibility for the baby had straightened her out when nothing else could. And that they would see one another soon; after the Christmas holidays, maybe. Or in the spring, when the roads weren’t so bad …

Recalling this, Lizzie put the driver’s-side window back up and started off again, through the now steadily falling rain.

I should have come. No matter how well she seemed, I should have come up here and checked on her anyway, and met the baby
.

When I still could
.

Because suddenly, there’d been silence from Sissy. After a week of it, Lizzie had taken personal time and driven up here
—after it was too late
, she accused herself, meeting her own gaze in the rearview mirror and glancing away guiltily.

Still, she had at least done that much. She’d come here and initiated a serious, by-the-book search: every lead, any scrap of information or rumor that might lead to their whereabouts. If for any reason Sissy didn’t want to be found, Lizzie had told everyone she talked to, that would be fine. Lizzie only wanted to make sure mother and daughter were all right.

But she learned nothing useful. And they weren’t all right. Ten days after Lizzie had arrived in downeast Maine, Sissy’s body had floated in on a lunar high tide. A wave flung it up onto some rocks just south of a place called Shackford Head State Park.

There’d been no sign of Nicki, by then almost a year old. Nor had there been any clue to the child’s location among Sissy’s pathetic personal effects, in a trailer home that was older and in much worse repair than Sissy had let on.

And there never had been any sign of the little girl, ever since.
Until now
. Lizzie reached for the other photograph lying on the car seat, glancing at it once more even though she’d long memorized its every detail: this one showed a little girl maybe nine years old or so, with cornsilk hair and pale eyes staring at the camera.

Eyes just like Sissy’s; hair, too. Both photographs had been sealed in a plain brown envelope that bore no return address. They had shown up in Lizzie’s mail at her apartment in Boston a week earlier; no note, no explanation.

And with their arrival, Lizzie’s dead sister and missing niece weren’t just old wounds anymore, guilty sorrows that could be put out of her mind if she applied enough work, enough intense physical exercise, and—
let’s face it
—enough alcohol so that she could sleep.

Now another wave of anxiety washed over Lizzie as she recalled what had happened next, after the photographs dropped from a tan envelope, exploding her world.
I quit my …

Job. Just quit it and then boogied, as her old partner Liam O’Donnell would have put it.
Boogied on out of there, and I’ll probably regret it
. Still, she’d had no choice: sending the photos—one of Sissy cradling an infant Nicki, and with it a photograph of some other child, the implication being that this was Lizzie’s niece now—could’ve been someone’s idea of a joke, she supposed.

But if so, it was a cruel one, and even that was far-fetched; who would do such a thing? Bottom line, Lizzie only knew that Nicki had been born nine years ago, and Sissy had been dead for eight. And that now, somebody wanted Lizzie to remember them.

As if I could forget
. Someone wanted it badly enough to go to some trouble, reminding her. Suggesting that Nicki was still alive.

So—
why?
Lizzie had no idea about that, either. But she did know that no baby girl’s body had ever been found. And if Nicki’s bones weren’t in a shallow grave somewhere, or in the ocean—

If
they weren’t, Sissy’s little girl would be Lizzie’s only living kin, as well as her only link to the sister she’d let down so terribly and, in the end, she feared, fatally.

She opened the thermos again and took a long drink from it. Cold, but the caffeine still packed a jolt and the bourbon was a sweet relief after the long, dark drive up Route 9 with the log trucks and the eighteen-wheelers thundering on both sides.

Beginning to think that she should’ve reached the turnoff toward Eastport by now, she dragged the back of her hand over her mouth and peered with renewed intensity through the Honda’s dark windshield. Only more wet road showed ahead, and a glance in the rearview mirror showed nothing but her own reflection.

Like a poster for a horror movie
, she thought, her hair spiky and eyes darkly hollowed, her lips a slash of red, blackish in the gloom. Then behind her reflection she spotted a flashing red light coming up fast.

Very
fast. She hit the hazard lights and pumped the brakes rhythmically. Pulling over as far as she dared onto the road’s soft shoulder, she prayed that the driver of the car flying up behind her in the dark would have time to react.