A Bat in the Belfry (28 page)

Which it mostly was at the moment, but not for long. At the corner in front of the red-brick library, she stopped, sucking in big breaths of the fresh salt air. One good thing about this place, you couldn’t beat the smell; it made just breathing into a bracing tonic. Not bad scenery, either: to her left the bay spread choppy gray-blue with whitecaps racing atop it and the tide surging in, while to her south a wall of clouds rose from the horizon, the distant bridge spanning the water there like an ink sketch on the looming weather.

Dylan kept pace with her, crossing the street. On the motel parking lot, wide puddles reflected clouds scudding across the unsettled sky. He followed her to the door of her room.

“Look, Lizzie, there’s something I need to tell you, and …”

His jacket hung open on the sling-arm side, exposing what looked like the manila envelope that Nicki’s photo
—my niece. My sister’s baby, my only family in this world
—had come to him in.

If it had. And if it was even Nicki. Giving the door a shove open with her foot, she clasped the coffeemaker and filters in one arm and grabbed his good arm with her other hand, and yanked.

Inside: clothes everywhere, makeup on the dresser, a bra on the bedpost … oh, the hell with it, she thought impatiently. He’d seen her underwear before, and Holly Homemaker she wasn’t.

“Sit down while I make coffee,” she ordered him, clearing a place on a chair by removing her leather jacket, a few sheets of motel notepaper, and an almost-empty Cheetos bag.

“Don’t talk to me,” she cut him off when, as she unpacked the machine, rinsed it and loaded it with water and a packet of coffee from the motel kitchenette’s supply, he tried again.

Her not thinking of the postmark detail was bad enough, but that he hadn’t thought of it was … well. If he hadn’t.

That being her big question now. And she didn’t want him confusing her with his smooth line of chatter until she asked it. She sat across from him at the room’s small table, reached across to pluck the envelope from his pocket, and slapped it down. Beside it she put the one she had gotten, the postmarks on both envelopes clearly visible. The
faked
postmarks.

“Lizzie,” he began, “what I need to say is—”

“Shut up. I’m talking now. Because it turns out we’ve got a little problem,” she said, and watched as his expression turned wary.
As
, she thought,
it most certainly damned well should
.

Then, with a sudden, sharp
bringg!
that startled her, the motel room’s telephone rang.

H
arvey Spratt was approximately the last person Sam Tiptree wanted to talk to, ever again. For one thing, he reminded Sam of his old life, much of which was mercifully hazy and Sam preferred it that way.

But Spratt was also a bully, the kind of guy five minutes of whose toxic personality could sour a whole day, Sam reflected as he strode past the big old clapboard houses of Key Street toward downtown.

Why anyone who wasn’t buying substances from Spratt would want to be around him, Sam couldn’t fathom. But somehow Spratt always managed to attract other boys into a sort of posse, its members always younger than he was, since for one thing, no one his own age would take his crap.

To audition guys for his group, Spratt liked to see how many supposedly friendly shoulder punches they’d put up with. That was the main test; besides being craven little sociopaths with hardly any reasoning skills and fewer social ones, the other rule was that they couldn’t hit back. If after plenty of provocation they never did, just sucked up for even more abuse, they were in.

Thinking about this as he turned onto Water Street, Sam noted the choppy bay, still ragged from last night’s storm. Work boats hustled busily, getting the fish food, antibiotics, and supplements out to the underwater cages of salmon farms. The sky was blue, but now the racing clouds of earlier had coalesced into a milky look that made the sunlight tentative.

Spratt and his crew had a few places they liked to hang, and these were Sam’s destinations. On the corner by the post office, where they’d been last night, was one, but in broad daylight they wouldn’t be there; too visible. The breakwater was another, at a picnic table on the platform over the boat basin; not as exposed to the town’s comings and goings but from there they could still see a cop car or somebody’s parent in time to tuck away a beer or a baggie of forbidden smoking materials.

The breakwater’s proximity to Rosie’s hot dog stand was a plus, too; some of those smoking materials could make a person thirsty, Sam happened to know. But the boys weren’t there today, when the stiff breeze off the bay made any exposed location too uncomfortable; Sam zipped his jacket.

So it would have to be the beach behind the seaweed factory, as it was called; a boarded-up warehouse built on a wharf over the water a quarter mile from downtown. Sam quickened his step, a pang of anxiety hurrying him along as he thought of Chip, still in Machias and still apparently being questioned about—and actually suspected of, to Sam’s continuing shock—a local girl’s murder.

Past the breakwater, where men in boots and sweatshirts ran up and down the metal gangs, adding lines and bumpers to boats already so trussed up that the floating piers looked spiderwebbed with lengths of rope, Sam spotted a car he recognized. Carol’s car, the red Miata, zipped from a side street and turned, but not in the direction he was headed.

Watching it go, he let his breath out in relief. If she saw him, she’d start teasing him to take a ride with her, or go to a house party. Just something, she’d beg; something fun, something lively.

But Chip’s predicament got worse by the minute; as long as no one else was being investigated, he’d look better and better as a suspect. So Sam had to help, somehow, and anyway if Maggie should happen to come by and see Sam and Carol together …

Well, that didn’t bear thinking about, and anyway he was too busy for either of them now. Stepping quickly past the ice cream store and the tattoo shop, he patted his pocket to make sure that his penlight pen and the small spiral notebook he’d grabbed off his desk before leaving were still there.

In general, he was not a note-taking kind of guy; dyslexia, which in his case manifested itself as a tendency to spell “dog” as g-o-d and vice versa, among other things, caused writing in general not to work out so well for him. But in this instance he figured he might really want to remember something, and later he could get Maggie or his mother to help him transcribe what he’d written into normal, non-dyslexically spelled English, he hoped.

And if not, then at least he’d tried. Meanwhile, the Spratt crew might be on the beach, or in one of the caves in the cliffs that rose up from it, out of sight from any passersby. He’d try there, he decided, and if he found them he’d feel them out, see if they’d heard anything useful about the dead girl.

Not that he really thought that bunch would have. Why would a little girl like Karen Hansen have anything to do with them, anyway? Even Carol, who knew Spratt at least to talk to—she had a lot of sketchy friends around town—said Harvey was creepy. But Sam knew she still bought pot from him occasionally anyway; heck, maybe Karen Hansen had, too, it occurred to him suddenly.

So he might as well try. A couple of blocks uphill from the breakwater, he crossed the street, jogged down a short dead-end lane, and picked his way among old bricks, rotted driftwood, and slimy patches of rockweed tossed up here by last night’s storm until he reached the beach. To his left loomed the warehouse on the old wharf, its thirty-foot pilings crusted with barnacles and swathed in draperies of dripping seaweed. To the right, a stony beach meandered between the waterline and a set of granite cliffs rising up suddenly, slabs of rock slanting massively this way and that. Watching his step among the rockweed patches, he made his way toward the caves.

Fifty yards down, he was out of sight of everyone but the boats out on the water. Above, the cliff tops jutted out, hiding the beach from anyone up there; ahead and behind, thrusting boulders and sand ridges blocked the view.

He didn’t like it, suddenly. Too isolated, too … something. He wasn’t sure, only that it gave him pause. But knowing Chip was stuck in an even worse place kept him moving on the wet sand, the raw breeze stinging his eyes and his feet trying not to slip.

He’d forgotten this stretch of shoreline was so desolate, and the crying of gulls as they wheeled overhead didn’t help, not even a little bit. Good place for a hideout, though, and now even in the wind he smelled cigarettes. A few more steps and he’d found the bowl-shaped depression that led into an open-mouthed cave about the size of a one-car garage.

The five young men hunkered around a sputtery driftwood fire in it looked up, eyeing him with heavy-lidded hostility. One lumbered to his feet.

“The hell you want?” Harvey Spratt demanded, flicking away his smoke. The medal on a chain around his neck glinted evilly. A Saint Christopher, Sam thought; what a joke. Harvey looked stoned as usual, only on him it didn’t translate to mellowness.

“Got a question for you.”

Behind Harvey, who wore his usual outfit of skinny black jeans, black sweatshirt, a pair of black pointy-toed boots, and a denim jacket whose sleeves didn’t quite reach his gangly wrists, the other four scowled.

Or rather, three of them did. The fourth, a slender youth in chinos and a warm-up jacket with a Red Sox logo on the sleeve, wore a look on his pale face that suggested he’d wandered in among these guys somehow and didn’t know how to get out.

“We ain’t answerin’ no effin’ questions, man,” one of the others declared belligerently. Sam recognized that one.

Harvey’s head snapped around quick as a snake’s toward his mouthy pal. “Shut up, Bogie.”

Harvey looked at Sam again, red-rimmed eyes narrowed sulkily. “Yeah? Like what, how to—” The activity he mentioned was not only disgusting, it was anatomically impossible.

Sam took a few more steps toward the cave. When dealing with guys like this, it was important to show that you were not afraid of them. Although he was, a little; anyone would be.

The fourth kid, the civilized-looking one, hung back, but the trio of tough guys stubbed out a cigarette apiece in the damp sand before advancing, glowering menacingly.

“No, Harvey,” said Sam, ignoring them. Wally Belknap, Todd Verdun, and Bogie Kopmeir were only the latest in a long line of Harvey Spratt wannabes. But unlike their hero, they were all too dull and lazy to start any trouble on their own, and too scared of Spratt’s unpredictable temper.

Well, all but Bogie, Sam realized. The Kopmeir kid had some possibilities of his own as a dangerous little dude: nastier than Harvey’s usual follower, for one thing, and smarter for another. A wild, unpleasant grin twisted the kid’s lips.

The kid in the Sox jacket looked worried and as if he still wanted to get away, but then a grimly determined expression filled his face. “Bogie,” he said warningly to the Kopmeir kid. “You don’t want things to get out of hand, do you? So maybe you should calm down a little and—”

Bogie spun hard at the same time as his fist shot out fast, stopping the kid’s mouth with a solid punch that broke the kid’s two front teeth. His other fist swung around, knocking the kid’s head sideways; Bogie punched it back the other direction, one-two one-two, finishing with an uppercut that lifted the now-woozy kid off his feet and sent him flying backwards.

His head hit the rocky overhang of the cave’s mouth with a wet-sounding
crunch
that turned Sam’s stomach. “Jesus,” he said to Harvey, “put a leash on that thing, will you?”

He reached for his cell phone. “You guys want to get out of here, that’s fine, but I’m calling an—”

Ambulance
, he would have finished, but by then Harvey was advancing purposefully on him.

“Hey, look, all I wanted was to ask you about Karen Hansen,” Sam began, trying to wave Harvey away, possibly even defuse this situation, which, he was just now beginning to realize, was more fraught than he had at first understood.

“I mean, if you knew any—” Then Bogie was on him, the kid’s surprisingly strong arms wrapping around his shoulders and hauling him downward. His feet slipped on the weed-slimed rocks; in the next moment, Bogie knelt on his chest, gripping his throat in tough little hands that stank of nicotine.

And of something else. Bogie’s eyes were spark-spitting pin-wheels; too late, Sam realized that more than cigarettes were being smoked in the cave.
More than pot, too
.

“Whatta you wanna know about her for? We dunno nuthin’ about that, whatta you want? You try’na get us in trouble? Huh?”

Bogie’s hot breath stank. His fingers tightened their grip. Sam heaved his body but couldn’t break free.

“No! Jesus, Spratt, get him off me, what the freak is the matter with—”

Bogie drove a kneecap into Sam’s solar plexus. “Shut up!” he grated out, spit spraying from his lips. Without warning, he reared back, clenched a fist tight, high in the air, and punched Sam in the side of the head with it.

Everything went gray. Sam’s body felt floaty, as if he might just rise right up off the stony beach here and sail, cloudlike, into the sky. If only he could remember what direction
up
was …

Somebody kicked sand at him, his eyes painfully blinded all at once. One of the other boys protested. “Hey, come on, Bogie, don’t get us all in—”

Bogie released Sam suddenly and jumped up, pulling something from his belt. Sam couldn’t see what happened next but the other kid’s voice rose in a shout that thinned to a short, sharp cry, half shriek and half horrifyingly wet gargle.

Cursing foully, Spratt grabbed Sam by his hair, hauling him up, then kicked him hard in the chest with his pointy boots.

Once with each boot. Sam gagged, dropped back to his hands and knees, and swayed there, trying to summon something.

Anything … “Hey, what’s going on? Stop it, you … damn, let go of me! Get your … 
stop
it—”

It was Carol’s voice and it sounded like she was in trouble. But he couldn’t do anything about it.