A Bat in the Belfry

A Bat in the Belfry
is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2013 by Sarah Graves

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Bantam Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

B
ANTAM
B
OOKS
and the rooster colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Graves, Sarah.
A bat in the belfry : a home repair is homicide mystery / Sarah Graves.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-345-53858-1
1. Tiptree, Jacobia (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Women detectives—Fiction. 3. Beauty contestants—Crimes against—Fiction. 4. Dwellings—Maintenance and repair—Fiction. 5. Eastport (Me.)—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3557.R2897B38 2013
813′.54—dc23     2012026134

www.bantamdell.com

Jacket design: Jamie S. Warren
Jacket image: VisionsofAmerica/Joe Sohm/ Getty Images

v3.1

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Urgent Weather Message

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Urgent Weather Message

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Urgent Weather Message

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Other Books by This Author

About the Author

URGENT WEATHER MESSAGE
WEATHER SERVICE CARIBOU MAINE

FOR INTERIOR HANCOCK-COASTAL HANCOCK-CENTRAL WASHINGTON-COASTAL WASHINGTON-INCLUDING THE CITIES OF … EASTPORT … PERRY … PEMBROKE … CALAIS … LUBEC … MACHIAS

 … WEATHER ADVISORY IN EFFECT UNTIL MIDNIGHT EDT TOMORROW NIGHT …

THE WEATHER SERVICE IN CARIBOU HAS ISSUED A WEATHER ADVISORY FOR HEAVY RAIN AND POSSIBLE GALE FORCE WINDS.

* PRECIPITATION TYPE … RAIN HEAVY AT TIMES. LOCALLY AS MUCH AS 1 INCH PER HOUR.

* ACCUMULATIONS … RAIN 3 TO 5 INCHES TOTAL EXCEPT WHERE DOWNPOURS FREQUENT.

* TIMING … TODAY INTO TOMORROW NIGHT.

* TEMPERATURES … IN THE LOWER 40S.

* WINDS … NORTHEAST 35-65 MPH. WITH POSSIBLE HIGHER GUSTS ESPECIALLY COASTAL.

* IMPACTS … EXPECT SOME TRAVEL DIFFICULTIES. WIND DAMAGE POSSIBLE. POWER OUTAGES POSSIBLE. LOCAL FLOODING LIKELY.

PRECAUTIONARY/PREPAREDNESS ACTIONS …

TRAVEL DELAYS MAY OCCUR. PLAN EXTRA TIME TO REACH YOUR DESTINATION. SECURE LOOSE OBJECTS. POSTPONE TRAVEL AT HEIGHT OF STORM IF POSSIBLE. DO NOT DRIVE THROUGH FLOODED AREAS.

THIS IS PRIMARILY A COASTAL STORM. WIND EFFECTS WILL BE STRONGEST ON ISLANDS AND ALONG THE SHORE. INLAND AREAS NEAR TIDAL RIVERS AND STREAMS MAY SEE FLOODING AT TIME OF HIGH TIDES. HIGH WINDS MAY IMPACT COMMUNICATIONS TOWERS. EXPECT OUTAGES.

  
1

“C
arolyn, if you’re going to lie to me, you could at least make it a good one,” Chip Hahn said sorrowfully into the phone.

He sat by the window in the upstairs front guest room of the big old house on Key Street, looking out at a late-night view of Eastport, Maine. Through the wavery antique panes in the elderly wooden windows, the full moon seemed to wobble liquidly.

Or maybe that was because he was seeing it through tears. Angrily he swiped them away, then closed his hand reflexively on the rabbit’s foot hanging from a thin chain on his belt loop.

Not, he realized miserably, that the talisman he’d carried around for years was going to give him any good luck tonight. How could it? After all, it wasn’t as if he hadn’t known what he was getting into, becoming involved with Carolyn.

In the blue-white moonlight downhill beyond the houses of town, Passamaquoddy Bay was a pewter-colored disk. Above, a plane’s contrail streaked thinly northeast through the indigo night, the aircraft itself already racing out over the Atlantic.

“Carolyn?” Two miles distant across the bay on the Canadian island of Campobello, a car’s headlights appeared, then vanished.

“Carolyn, are you still there?”

She said something in reply, but he couldn’t make out what. He’d forgotten how poorly his cell phone worked here in remote downeast Maine; his city phone plan was wrong for the area. But he hadn’t wanted to use the landline. Someone in the house might pick up an extension and overhear this conversation.

Its tone, especially: the ragged pain in his own voice, which he tried to hide, and the carelessness in hers, which she didn’t. The CD player on his laptop played the Roche sisters’ first album, nearly as old as he was but in its wry lyrics and harmonies the perfect background music for him now.

“I had dinner and then a few drinks with Siobhan,” Carolyn went on unconvincingly. “It got late, she let me sleep on her couch. End of story, okay?”

Through the window, he watched clouds begin streaming in gauzy tatters over the moon. Something ugly was coming, according to the weather forecast he’d heard earlier. Something …

“Chip?” The leafless branches of the ancient maples lining Key Street were elongated fingers, reaching out for something they could never have.
Like me
, he thought miserably, still clutching the rabbit’s foot.

“Yeah,” he said. “End of story.” But of course it wasn’t.

Silence from Carolyn, who after two days of not answering her cell or responding to his messages had at last taken his call. Now he imagined her sitting cross-legged in the oversized leather easy chair he’d bought for their apartment in Manhattan, a year ago when they’d first moved in together.

Her slim frame clad in a black leotard and a smock dress—the purple corduroy one, maybe, now that it was November and getting chilly—and her glossy dark hair falling in waves over her shoulders, she would be tapping her long nails impatiently on the chair’s soft leather arm. Her high-heeled boots would be on the thick Persian rug nearby, probably, flung where she’d shed them.

“Have you eaten lately? I mean today?” he asked. She wasn’t lazy, and she could be very well organized. But Carolyn had never learned to take care of herself.

She had him for that. “No,” she said guiltily. “But I will. Chicken and corn, maybe. And a baked potato.”

Yeah, right. The idea of her cooking a meal for herself in his absence, let alone a decent one, was beyond far-fetched. More likely she was subsisting on takeout until he got back.

If she was even eating that. But he didn’t press it. “Sounds good,” he told her instead, not wanting to start a quarrel. “Drink some fruit juice with it,” he advised, knowing she wouldn’t do that, either. In her simple obduracy Carolyn was like a stone, impenetrable unless you wanted to crush it, or break it.

And he’d never wanted to. After nearly three years’ working together, he as the researcher and she the writer of a string of best-selling true-crime books, they’d become a couple, and Chip had briefly thought his life was complete. Even before they began sharing the same address he’d imagined them curled together in the leather chair, large enough to hold them both comfortably.

Just how comfortably, he had also pictured in considerable detail. But once it was delivered, Carolyn had claimed the chair as her own, her pointy knees and sharply jutting elbows fencing it off from him silently but definitively.

“Chip? You believe me, right? About last night?”

His hand felt cramped. Tucking the phone awkwardly in the crook of his neck, he heard the signature opening fanfare of
The Tonight Show with Jay Leno
coming on in the background at her end.

Good old Carolyn, the original multitasker. “Sure,” Chip said, absently worrying the cuticle on his right thumb. “Like you said, you were at Siobhan’s.”

This too was improbable, however. Siobhan was Carolyn’s editor, and in that role had proven to be an honorable, reliable friend. But she was about as likely to have a writer sleeping on the sofa in her elegant apartment overlooking Gramercy Park as she was to have bedbugs infesting it.

“I believe you,” he said, since what good would it do to say otherwise? Carolyn was in Manhattan, over five hundred miles away, and he was here visiting his old friend Sam Tiptree in a place so different from the city, it felt like some other planet.

“Good.” He heard relief in Carolyn’s voice. It was this faint whiff of her caring that he clung to, knowing she depended on him not to give up on her or forsake her. He’d never done that either, even when he’d known her only as his employer, the writer of crime literature.