A Bat in the Belfry Read online

The boys were hanging out on the breakwater, downhill and only a few blocks away from the church, waiting for her signal. Laughing, Harvey had promised her fifty dollars, betting she couldn’t accomplish the task he’d set her.

  A thin, pimpled high school senior, Harvey had been selling pot and pints of Bushmills to his equally mangy buddies since he was in sixth grade. Now he was into the harder stuff, too, Oxys and other pills, and worse. Karen had learned this two nights earlier when sixteen-year-old Bogie Kopmeir, an awful little thief and Harvey’s ever-present sidekick since the school year started, had shoved her hard just to show Harvey how eager a sidekick he really was, and she had stumbled right into Harvey.

  As she clutched at him to keep from falling, nearly pulling the Saint Christopher medal on the chain from his neck, a baggie of foil packets had tumbled from his pocket onto the damp concrete breakwater. His murderous look at her as he grabbed them back up told her that he was selling them, even if she hadn’t guessed.

  So she knew he had money. And he would pay her, even though he wouldn’t want to, because Karen might be poor, what the people around here called mackerel-eating poor, and get her clothes from the thrift shop and school supplies from teachers who took pity on her, knowing who her father was and that he would rather spend money on beer than on pens and notebook paper.

  But Karen had a way about her, she wasn’t sure what it was, exactly, but it made the other girls at school like her, and want to be friends. Harvey knew it, too, that if he wanted those girls to like him—which why any of them would, Karen had no idea, but if he did—well, then, he’d better not piss off Karen.

  Reminding herself of this, she paused on the next landing for a deep, self-encouraging breath. The smells were different here: two centuries’ worth of old candle smoke, and the sweetish scent of lead-paint dust. Here, too, were more tools: a T square, a screwdriver with bits of rotted wood stuck to the blade, a string with the nut from a big steel bolt tied onto one end of it.

  Also on the landing lay a small spiral notebook with a lot of measurements written into it in pencil. And somehow, it was the definiteness of these that reenergized her, rejuvenating her courage. Two flights to go; not four, or six.

  Specifically: two. And with that her whole future, started off by the fifty dollars that Harvey would have to pay her, rose up wonderfully before her. First a hitchhike to Perry Corners, a five-minute ride off the island over the Broad Cove causeway to the mainland. She’d have no trouble getting a lift; everyone knew her, yet another of the reasons she wanted so desperately to get away. Making up a reason for the trip would be easy, too.

  A friend’s mother was meeting her, she would say, or her father would be picking her up. The sweet, obedient girl that she was known to be wouldn’t lie.

  So no one would suspect. After that: the bus to Bangor and a room at the YWCA, and a job. Dishwashing, yard work, Karen didn’t care. With winter coming soon, it could even be shoveling snow. All she needed was enough to get to New York and to a modeling agency, and then … well, she wasn’t entirely clear on the details of what her life in the big city would be.

  But it would be fabulous, she knew. After all, she was tall, thin, and young; that she wasn’t quite pretty didn’t matter, since neither were the girls whose pictures she saw in the glossy fashion magazines. Instead, they had a look she recognized:

  Direct. Dead-eyed, as if they’d gone way inside somewhere, no visible remains of what they thought or felt left on their faces at all. When Karen saw these girls in the print ads she pored over at the public library on Water Street, she found no more feeling in their expressions than in the clothing they wore or the accessories they displayed.

  It was the same look she saw every day in the mirror, so she knew she was the type wanted by the men—even at fourteen, she knew they would have to be men—who took the photographs and would pay her for them. Karen felt confident that she could do whatever those girls had done to get where they were. All she had to do was try.

  How hard could it be? Like now, for instance. Above, the last flight of steps angled sharply upward. At the top, the wavering beam of her flashlight picked out the bottom rungs of a ladder. Sighing at the sight of this last challenge, she took one step up toward it.

  But then she froze, hearing a sound again in the stairwell below and behind her. “Hello?”

  Silly. There’s no one here. But …

  Not a scuffing sound, though that would’ve been bad enough. No, it sounded like someone breathing.

  And then suddenly it didn’t. Karen held her own breath and waited, but the dark mouth of the stairwell as it curved down and away remained silent. Even the fluttery skittering of mice in the walls ceased.

  She poked the flashlight’s faint beam one more time into the black maw yawning below, then turned sharply from it and climbed the rest of the steps. Dumbass. If she kept getting spooked like this, claiming her fifty dollars could take all night.

  So let’s get to it. Grimly she tucked the flashlight under her arm and put a foot on the ladder’s bottom rung. Above her, the top rungs disappeared into the gloom inside the tower’s bell chamber. But beyond that, a faint glimmer hovered, the pale, silvery moonlight from outside coming through the tower’s wooden slats.

  Up, up … she poked her head through the square, wood-framed trapdoor’s aperture. Around her, moonlight fell in bars on the dusty old floor. The huge, hulking shapes of the clockworks set into the walls loomed enormously, notched iron wheels and angled ratchets and massive pulley lines like the rigging on ships.

  Karen had a sudden, bad thought that the mechanisms might start moving all by themselves in a nightmare meshing of gears, one that might seize her and grind her up. Fright made her hands loosen on the ladder’s rungs briefly, just for an instant.

  But that was enough. The flashlight slipped from under her arm, its lens popping out and the bulb shattering as it smashed to the wooden landing below. It bounced clattering away down the stairs, leaving her in near darkness. Still clinging to the top rung of the ladder, she froze in horror, unable to believe what had just happened, trying to take it back, that careless moment.

  Knowing she couldn’t. All this way, she’d come all this way, only to … but then a new thought struck her: the lighter. Her cigarette lighter would work, wouldn’t it?

  Not in daylight. But now, in only the moonglow, its tiny flare was enough to be seen for two blocks, surely? Now, in the dead of night?

  Well, it would have to be, was all. Just as she’d planned to do with the flashlight, she would creep over the dusty floor of the bell tower, stick the cigarette lighter out through the slats in the wall, and send a signal: SOS.

  Get me out of here. Away, to a place where no one knew her as the charity case, poor drunk Hank Hansen’s daughter. Then she would be mysterious, exotic … free.

  Oh, it would be elegant … Abruptly, the ladder shook and rattled as, shockingly, someone unseen scuttled rapidly up it. A hand clamped roughly onto her shoulder. A breathy shriek came out of her mouth before another hand clapped over it, cruelly.

  Then, before she could fully comprehend what was happening, somebody shoved her upward, through the trapdoor’s small opening into the bell chamber. In darkness she staggered and fell, and her head hit the floor hard. Hands seized her legs and she heard the rich sound of thick tape ripping.

  Swiftly, her ankles were shoved together and tied, tape was slapped over her mouth, and some rough, smelly cloth was tied over her eyes. Her hands were grabbed firmly and bound.

  “Please …” It came out a gagging “mmmph.” But she swallowed back even that as another sound, this one very familiar, began. A bright, metallic ringing sound, over and over …

  Not the church bell, which Karen had never heard. She willed it to ring now, prayed for the iron clapper to smack the bell’s massive side with a sound so explosive, it killed her on the spot and took her from the world this very instant.

  Because one of the few things her father was good at,
that he could do no matter how drunk he was, was game hunting. Moose, deer, bear, partridge, in or out of season, when he went hunting there was meat to eat. Steak, chops, stew in an iron pot …

  But for all those animals to be turned into food, they first had to get dressed out: bled, skinned and gutted, then cut into pieces that got wrapped in butcher paper with labels written on in a black crayon kept specially for the purpose. Karen’s dad knew how to do all that, too, commandeering the whole kitchen for his bloody work.

  And before he began, he always sharpened his knife. Zip, zop, the blade slid ringingly down the specially roughened surface of the sharpening steel, until with a narrowed eye he examined the glinting edge he had produced and pronounced it good.

  Zip, zop … The sound now was of a smaller steel, pocket-sized, and the blade it moved on was shorter, too, she could tell from the sound. But she still recognized it. And the sound scared her into remembering that even with her wrists bound, her fingers were still free. So she could get the cigarette lighter out of her vest pocket.

  Seizing it between her thumbs, pulling it out, then letting it slide down between her shaking palms, she found the friction wheel. Tears leaked down her cheeks, her throat aching with suppressed weeping, but if she let herself sob she knew she would choke, so she didn’t.

  Instead, she waited for a hand to try to do something to her. When it did, she would thrust up the cigarette lighter, at the same time pulling her thumbs down over the friction wheel. The sudden flame would hurt someone, maybe even set them on fire, send them blazing down the stairs away from her …

  Gulping back tears, she gripped the lighter with her thumbs poised tremblingly over the wheel. There would be a warning, some sound from her attacker, and she would be ready.

  She held her breath, waiting until a tiny movement very near her face told her someone was there, right in front of her. Then, snapping the lighter and feeling the flare of heat as she thrust it up, she was rewarded by a yell of pain, followed by an angry curse.

  Ha, she thought grimly, but then a sudden sharp blow to both her wrists knocked the lighter from her hands. As it clattered to the floor the rest of the attack came from behind, her hair gripped tightly and her head yanked painfully back to expose her throat.

  After that there were more sounds, but they didn’t last long, and for most of the time that they went on, fourteen-year-old Karen Hansen was not even fully aware that she was the one making them.

  It was a chilly night in November, and all over Eastport windows were closed against a breeze with a salt-sharp edge on it. So not everyone heard the church bell at first. On most of Moose Island, where Eastport was located—at the north end, looking toward New Brunswick, Canada, or the south, with its view of the town of Lubec and the International Bridge that linked it to Campobello—the sound was merely a far-off tolling that could have been a bell buoy bobbing on the dark bay.

  But Eastport police chief Bob Arnold’s small two-story house on Clement Street stood only a few blocks from Two Church Lane. He had just put his head down on his pillow when the bell bonged for the first time, vibrating the glass in his closed bedroom window.

  His wife, Clarissa, swung her feet out of bed; a strange sound in the night—strange anything, night or day—was her husband’s business until proven otherwise. “I’ll make coffee,” she said.

  Bob sighed, contemplating his own bare feet, which he wanted very badly to tuck right back in under the toasty-warm covers. His little girl, Annie, had been up all the night before with an asthma attack, and both he and Clarissa were exhausted.

  From Annie’s room came the tinkling of a sweet, lively tune from her new favorite musician, an artist with the (to Bob) unlikely name of Caspar Babypants. It had taken him a while, but now Bob thought he was beginning to get Caspar’s message, which boiled down to “Everything’s okay.”

  He wished he could stay here and appreciate the music a bit longer. Perhaps the okay-ness had further levels, he thought; more to appreciate. But that ringing church bell needed investigating.

  Also, it needed stopping. If he knew Eastport, half the town was on the phone with the other half by now, all mad about it. He pulled his pants on.

  A few blocks away at the Eastport Boarding Hostel, Tiffany Whitmore put down the romance novel she was reading at a desk in the front hall. The Boarding Hostel was not a nursing home—Eastport already had one of those—but at night, the desk served as a nursing station because nighttime was when residents needed nursing.

  Or some of them did, anyway. On a nearby mantel a portable radio tuned to the local station, WQDY, played what it called classic rock and Tiffany just called oldies; the tunes, after all, were from way back in the seventies, their artists now nearly as geriatric as Tiff’s patients.

  Meanwhile, in Tiffany’s novel the heroine was learning that the hero was not a mild-mannered nursery school teacher as she had believed, but an international spy whose real name was Trace Savage. Trace had just swept the heroine, Maggie DeLorean, into his muscled arms and was preparing to ravish her in, Tiffany supposed, an appropriately savage way when the church bell’s loud bong rattled the wheeled medications cart across from the desk. The vibration sent eight small fluted paper cups full of sleeping pills and antacid doses shivering to the cart’s metal edge and over it, scattering the pills across the green linoleum floor.

  As Tiffany, who was not a small person, bent heavily to try capturing the pills as they rolled away from her, the first loud cries of fear and consternation began emerging from residents’ rooms. And soon, so did the residents, alarmed by the clangor of a bell they had last heard when they themselves were of an age to be ravished or ravishing, or possibly both.

  Residents who were ambulatory came tottering on walkers or canes to find out what was happening. The ones who weren’t ambulatory yelled for Tiffany.

  Tiffany wanted to know what was going on, too. But when she straightened with an effort to peer out the hostel’s bay window—at one time it had been a sea captain’s mansion, its formal gardens now paved over for the employee parking lot—she saw only the twin churches of Two Church Lane.

  Each enormous white clapboard building squatted massively on no more than a quarter acre of grass, its tower and spire rising into the night sky, which had been clear but was now beginning to thicken with fog. From where she stood looking out, Tiff could only see the whole of the closest one, the All Faith Chapel. Near its lofty top was the square, slatted belfry with the clock just below, its huge face ghostly-appearing, and above the belfry a spire capped by an elaborate brass weathervane shaped like a fat, feathered arrow.

  The big bell rang on, monstrously loud, as Tiffany squinted through the fog now beginning to gather in the streets. Nothing moved. No one had yet arrived to investigate the disturbance. In Eastport, with a population of only twelve hundred or so now that the summer folk had mostly gone home, there wasn’t enough money in the city budget to keep a police officer on patrol all night.

  And mostly, there wasn’t a need. Except sometimes, like now.

  “I’m coming,” Tiffany called as the racket of demands from behind her rose in number and volume.

  The bell’s sound, by contrast, stayed the same, so loud she felt it vibrating through her, maybe even into the marrow of her bones. Bong, bong … Could a bell that loud cause brain damage? Even cancer?

  Just then the only aide on the night shift, Jannalyn Rand, popped out of the staff room, blinking sleepily. “What’s all the commotion?”

  In Tiffany’s opinion, Jannalyn was as dumb as a box of clamshells, and lazy to boot. Smelling of cigarette smoke, hairspray, and Juicy Fruit, she had a talent for vanishing into the staff room for a nap whenever she didn’t have a specific task assigned.

  But Jannalyn was strong enough to lift a person up off the floor and back into bed whether or not that person wanted to go, or to muscle a man who believed he was General Westmoreland down the hall and into his room for the umpteenth time in a night. And in the B
oarding Hostel, that counted for something.

  “Hey.” Jannalyn joined Tiffany at the window. From the reek coming off her, it was clear she hadn’t bothered to go outside for her smoke, as the rules required. But that wasn’t important now. The important thing was the indistinct shape creeping stealthily out the back door of the church.

  Jannalyn snorted knowingly. “Can you believe that? Some damn kid must’ve snuck in there and got that old bell ringing.”

  The shape slipped into the bushes and trees massed behind the church and vanished, just as a squad car pulled up out front. Bob Arnold, Tiffany realized as the driver got out. Hadn’t taken him long, either.

  Tiffany shivered. Back in the residents’ rooms, somebody was banging a bedpan against a nightstand, bang-bang-bang, not quite in time with the bell’s bonging. Someone else moaned monotonously: helphelphelp.

  That would be Mrs. Brannigan, who in daylight was as sharp as a sewing needle. She read Shakespeare, played a mean game of bridge, managed an online stock portfolio profitably, and was the recording secretary for the Eastport chapter of the national Poetry Society.

  “Yeah,” said Tiffany, trying to agree with Jannalyn that what they’d glimpsed had been just a kid. But she couldn’t quite shake off her chill. In daylight, she thought with a shiver of unease, a lot of people were as sane as anyone.

  But now it was night. And that shape had been weird.

  “Some kid,” she repeated, hoping to convince herself.

  Bob Arnold put on the hearing protectors that his wife, Clarissa, had insisted he bring along. The plastic earmuffs were unwieldy, bulky, and uncomfortable. But at least now the old bell wasn’t slamming his eardrums halfway to his eyeballs every time it rang.

  Why was it ringing? That was his big question. One hand resting on his gun, he pulled the heavy old church door open with the other and peered inside.

  The door had not been locked. “Police! Anyone in here?”

  Not that they’d be able to hear him. Entering with caution, he drew his flashlight from his duty belt. As the beam stabbed the darkness, the shapes of wooden pews jumped out of the gloom.