A Bat in the Belfry (23 page)

“Bogie,”
David pleaded as a car hissed by in the rainy street outside, its headlights briefly strafing the ruined living room. He wasn’t even sure how they’d gotten here, only that Bogie had lured him with the promise of something cool, and the next thing he knew—

“… here, kitty. Here, kitty, kitty …”

David’s blood turned to icy slush as an orange cat crept out from behind an overturned phone table with Bogie right behind it, thick hands outstretched. Spotting David, the cat froze.

No!
David thought as Bogie pounced on the animal, and then a lot of things happened at once: the cat squirmed and scratched Bogie on the face. Bogie yelled, flinging the cat away.

And a key turned, loudly and unexpectedly, in the lock of the front door. Instantly Bogie was gone, out through the kitchen and the back door, down the steps and into the dark night, with David sprinting behind, leaving the squalling cat in the trashed house full of breakage and the stink of burning letters.

“Yah!”
Bogie shouted triumphantly as they ran, but David barely heard him, small bare branches slapping his face as they hurtled through the backyards, over fences, and between sheds.

How?
he wondered as he sprinted along, unable to believe he had just been part of a behavior so … so
bad
.

Ahead, Bogie laughed crazily, his squat, powerful figure troll-like in the streaming rain. “Oh, man, wait’ll Harvey hears about
this
!” Bogie crowed.

But David didn’t care about what Harvey Spratt thought of this escapade, this … this
crime
. All he knew was that the next time Bogie started something like this, David had to act.

He didn’t know how. He didn’t know if he could. But his dad’s advice and his dad’s hands-off attitude—
just ignore them and they’ll get bored
—had been no good. And there were more weapons where Bub Wilson’s BB pistol had come from. Bigger ones, probably, too, not to mention Bub’s fists and those of his pals.

So David still needed Bogie, but he couldn’t be part of this awful stuff, he just couldn’t.

Which meant that somehow, when Bogie got insane like this again—and he would, that was obvious from the whacked-out dance Bogie was doing now atop a backyard picnic table, whirling and thudding like some kind of crazy man in the pouring rain—

“Yah! Yah!”
Bogie bellowed, heedless of lights coming on in the houses nearby.

—when
that
happened, David would have to stop him.

•  •  •

B
ack on Key Street, Lizzie pulled over in front of our house and Sam got out, slamming the car door and dashing across to the porch without a word.

Lizzie watched him go. “Sorry if I upset him.”

Upstairs, his bedroom light went on, which meant he hadn’t even stopped to talk with his grandfather or Bella. “Chip’s been a good friend. Sam’s worried about him, and so am I.”

Her face was unreadable in the dashboard’s glow. “I wish I could be encouraging. What he needs is an alibi, you know? He needs to tell the truth about whatever it was that he was doing when …”

“Uh-huh. I guess he’s still not saying, though.”

Or maybe he’d be back by now
. Which he wasn’t; the guest room window was dark. “Are you going to follow up on those boys?”

She shrugged. “If I can. But I have no authority, Jake. I’m not a cop anymore, I’m just a private citizen here, and I don’t need a harassment charge.”

Or to get tarred with a reputation for browbeating people, either, if she wanted help with her own search. And if she wanted to be accepted as Eastport’s police chief later …

But before I could ask her about that, she went on: “Those guys probably know Sam, though. He might be able to get something useful out of them.”

“Maybe,” I said doubtfully. I understood Sam’s impulse to want to spend all his time helping his friend. But Sam had a job, after all, or I hoped he still would once he asked for it back.

It was a move I meant to encourage. And the thought of him approaching Eastport’s punk brigade wasn’t a welcome one, either. I changed the subject: “Had any luck on the other thing?”

Finding her sister’s child, I meant. She looked down at her hands, which I understood to mean no. Outside the car, the wind flung everything it could find, gutters and downspouts crumpled like huge drinking straws tumbling down the wet pavement.

“Actually, I was hoping maybe you’d had news.” Something big and black unreeled itself in the street; after a moment, I identified it as a roll of tar paper, unfurling itself as it went.

“Sorry,” I said. The photographs of her sister’s child were being circulated; Ellie was emailing them around to everyone she knew. “Nothing yet. Ellie’s going to keep trying, but …”

But I don’t know quite how or what good it’ll do
, I thought. I didn’t say it, though. I didn’t quite have the heart to.

And anyway, from the look on Lizzie’s face in the dark car that stormy night, I didn’t need to.

E
ven as miserable, scared, and ashamed as he was, Chip Hahn still treasured Sam Tiptree’s good opinion. Sam was his friend, the oldest and best he’d ever had, and if Sam ever found out what Chip had done …

Well, it didn’t bear thinking about. Having the clerk come down with the message from Jake Tiptree, asking if he needed anything, had buoyed him immensely; more, maybe, than was good for him. Because being able to come here to Maine, to stay in the Tiptrees’ cozy, old-fashioned guest room and be treated like a member of the family—the only normal-seeming family he’d ever known—seemed more than ever unbearably precious to him now.

Now when he’d nearly lost it all, and through his own stupid selfishness, too. If Sam ever found out …

So he won’t
, Chip resolved as he sat waiting for his state police interrogator to return.
He just won’t, no matter what
.

They hadn’t arrested him; not yet. But they’d put him here and left him, after several lengthy questioning sessions that made him feel so filthy, so thoroughly
guilty
, that he didn’t know how he’d ever be able to look anyone in the eye ever again.

He wasn’t sure what might come next. He’d have asked to call a lawyer but he felt that would only increase the suspicion the police felt about him. He still hoped they’d figure out their mistake soon. Meanwhile, though, his questioners kept ratcheting up his discomfort without ever actively doing anything to him.

Charles, they’d called him, for instance. Not Chip, which threw him off; no one but his father had ever called him by his full name, and the Old Man had never said it without contempt that Chip could remember. Then, once they had him off-balance, they’d peppered him with questions he had at first not even been able to understand.

Because they were horrible. Did he like little girls? Boys? Dirty pictures? They’d actually called them that, leering as if Chip were some heavy-breathing fourteen-year-old, salivating over the centerfolds in
Playboy
.

And after that it only got worse. Did he know Karen Hansen? This girl? They’d shown him a snapshot of a skinny child with masses of freckles, and a Band-Aid on her knee. A Band-Aid—for God’s sake, she’d probably gotten it falling off her bike.

No, he’d told them politely. That was when he still had the strength, the inner wherewithal, to keep his replies civil. He’d never seen her, never met her, never spoken with her, never made a date with her or lured her to any church, or anywhere else.

Never, never. No, he hadn’t killed her. Hadn’t seen her, or touched her, or … what kind of a monster did they think he was?

Then he’d felt his mouth snap closed like a trap before he could say more and incriminate himself somehow. Because that, of course, was exactly what they did think:
monster
. He knew for sure as soon as they started asking about his online browsing habits.

At once he’d realized they must’ve learned somehow about his visits to the snuff-film sites and the hideous chat rooms he had discovered while researching background for Carolyn’s next book, the websites devoted to the exploits of supposed “thrill killers,” with pictures and text that made his skin crawl.

He’d thought that if he just put up with their interrogation for long enough, they’d let him go. After all, they didn’t—they couldn’t—have any real evidence against him. And eventually, he knew, even the DA would say enough was enough, that they had to either arrest him or cut him loose.

His Web history, though, had pushed that possibility farther out into the future, made them even more reluctant to let go of him. Meanwhile, he didn’t want to demand to be either released or arrested, since they might choose the latter option even without a strong case against him, and once he was in the system it would just take that much longer to get out of it. Besides, the truth was that he was afraid of going to jail, even for a little while.

And deep in his heart he feared that it wouldn’t be just a little while, that it would end up being much longer. Hey, it happened. People got wrongly convicted. It could happen to him. Better to wait, he decided; to answer their questions patiently.

To cooperate as best he could without revealing his secret; yet another reason he didn’t want a lawyer involved quite yet. A lawyer, after all, would wind up being just another person trying to pry it out of him.

Thinking this, he put his face in his hands, his elbows propped on the metal table bolted to the floor of the small cinder-block room in the basement of the combination courthouse and jail, thirty miles south of Eastport. He’d been ushered in with a cop on each side, so fast his feet barely touched the floor. Down a flight of stairs, through a short tunnel with no one else in sight … they had brought him in a back way, he realized with shock, in case some citizen tried delivering a dose of frontier justice.

Because they think I hurt—
murdered
—a girl
. Which was ridiculous; part of the reason that he’d been able to keep his resolve steady was that he still couldn’t get his brain around it. But it was starting to sink in now, because he was here, wasn’t he? Alone, friendless, and despised; with their lacerating glares, some of the cops he’d seen on his way in here might almost have cut his throat using their eyes alone.

An entirely unwanted mental picture of throat-cutting came forcefully to him as he thought this; to banish it, he focused on his surroundings. The walls were painted a harsh, institutional yellow, the linoleum tiled floor was dark green. One locked door, one large window, mirrored.

And that was it. Just him, and the distant sounds of office activities: phones, footsteps. He was, he knew, being watched from the other side of that mirror glass, both during questioning and now, while he sat with his face in his hands and waited. They’d confiscated his cell phone when they took the rest of his valuables; with his permission, but still.

So he couldn’t call Carolyn; by now she’d be wondering about him; worrying, maybe. Or not; he didn’t know which to wish for, her not noticing or her fretting, wondering where he was and what he was doing.
The way I do over her, day in and day out …

But there was no joy in that line of thought, either, so he abandoned it. A chair stood pulled out from the opposite side of the table from where he sat. Soon one or another of his interrogators would return, start in with the questions again.

Where’d you meet her? Did you know she was only fourteen?
And despite his denials,
How’d you get her to go with you into the church? Oh, you didn’t? Then which of you got there first?

All wrong, all beyond the realm of any possible reality—

Then from another angle:
Come on, man, don’t you just get angry with them sometimes? Women? Hey, we understand, we’re guys, too. So don’t you just get so pissed off once in a while, could just grab a knife and—

Worst of all, though, was the jackpot question, the one he absolutely couldn’t answer. Over and over, in every combination: straight out, sideways, up front, or as an afterthought: Where was he last night? Where had he gone, and if as he insisted he hadn’t been killing a girl in a church tower, what had he been doing?

It was the thing he refused to say: not to a lawyer, not to anyone. He didn’t even dare think about it, for fear the pressure of interrogation would force the truth from between his lips: the thing he wouldn’t,
couldn’t
tell.

No matter what.

“S
o how is he?” I asked. After Sam had gone in, I’d lingered in Lizzie Snow’s Honda CRV for a while. I had something to tell her and she wasn’t going to like it.

“Your cop friend from the car accident, I mean,” I added.

It had been on the evening news, that he was airlifted to Bangor after being assessed at the hospital in nearby Calais. Lizzie looked up gratefully, confirming the sense I’d had when she first mentioned him that “friend” might be understating it.

“Better,” she said. “Broken collarbone, he needed surgery. But okay now.”

“That’s good.” Oh, she wasn’t going to like it a bit.

“Listen,” I said. Outside, the rain poured down. “About that envelope you got.”

With the photographs in it, I meant. I’d finally remembered what I’d been trying to recall, in front of the post office.

Now I dug in my bag, rooting around there among newspaper clippings, an old issue of
Working Waterfront
, and a delivery slip from the fuel oil company, detailing how many more millions of dollars I owed them after the most recent fill-up.

There was an envelope in there, too, from a Halloween card Ellie’s daughter had made and sent me a few weeks earlier.

“I’ve been thinking about what you told me,” I said. “You came here because the postmark on your envelope said ‘Eastport.’ ”

Lizzie nodded.

“And forgive me,” I went on. “I know you’re an experienced cop and I’m not. But you’re missing a big thing.”

Her face went still. “What do you mean?”