A Bat in the Belfry by Sarah Graves Read Free Book Online Page A

want her talking to anyone before he got to her. When people in Eastport started gabbing, what started out as an unusually dressed tourist snapping vacation snapshots at one end of the island would be a squad of terrorists taking surveillance photos in preparation for an imminent invasion by the time the story got to the other end.
    He descended the stairs, careful as before not to step in any of the blood pools or touch the smeared walls. Outside in the Vic, Tiffany Whitmore sat in the front passenger seat smoking a cigarette and poking at her cell phone.
    Tiffany wore a blue scrub suit, white sneakers, and a zipped navy hoodie. Her peroxide-orange hair was skinned back in a ponytail held by a fabric scrunchy. She was a nice woman and a hard worker, and those cigarettes were the worst of her habits, but she had a big mouth and on top of that the car was going to smell like an ashtray.
    At least she had the door open. “Hey!” Bob yelled. “Put the phone away, Tiff, would you? And get out of the car if you gotta smoke.”
    She scowled, but grudgingly did as he asked. On top of not wanting her to tell anyone else her story before she told it to him, he didn’t need half the town here standing around gawking at everything, which he would have if Tiffany got yapping.
    Would anyway before long, he realized glumly, turning to Waters. “What do you think you found?” he asked, imagining a gum wrapper or a cigarette butt.
    Waters aimed his flashlight into the evergreen shrubbery by the church steps. Crammed up between the dark, gnarly twists of the box-hedge roots lay a wad of tissue, a faded Hershey bar wrapper, a plastic bag from the IGA, and—
    “Huh,” said Bob. The thing Waters had spotted had a taped wooden handle, an index finger groove for improved grip, a short row of rip teeth near the guard that divided the blade from the handle. And a trailing swage point, wickedly tipped.
    All of which made it a professional-grade hunting knife, its blade stained thickly with …
    Blood. Lab tests would say for sure, of course, but to Bob’s eye there was no question about it. And he knew who owned this large, very distinctive-looking knife, too, because he’d seen it before.
    Oh, hell , he thought as an approaching Maine State Police cruiser’s distinctive high-low siren howled eerily.
    “Don’t touch it. Let the state guys deal with it,” Bob told Waters, then left the young officer standing over the weapon while he went to talk with Tiffany Whitmore, before the presence of her cell phone became just too much of a temptation for her.
    “S o are you coming, Dweeby, or are you gonna sit there like a scared little kid?”
    Flicking away his cigarette, Bogie Kopmeir hopped onto the bike he had just stolen out of a garage on Evans Lane and pedaled it in a circle, his oddly babyish face gleaming greasily under the streetlamp.
    “Put it back, Bogie.” David Thompson sat hunched on the front steps of the house that the garage belonged to, wishing he’d stayed home. Across town, church bells were ringing and the sound of police sirens rose eerily in the thickening fog.
    David wished he was in bed under the covers, unable to hear them. He hated these late-night outings with Bogie, hated being jolted awake by stones tossed against his bedroom window, hated the way his heart thumped anxiously from the time he slipped out until the moment, always way too much later, when he sneaked back in again.
    And he hated being called Dweeb. In fact, there wasn’t much about hanging out with Bogie—crude, cunning in an animal way, and possessed of a temper that could explode into spitting rage for no reason at all—that David didn’t hate. But what choice did he have?
    It was that or get the crap beaten out of him every morning at school, where David was a sophomore on the honors track and Bogie, despite being sixteen and a year older than David, was still a freshman. Slight, bookish boys like David were fresh meat for the guys who