Free A Bat in the Belfry by Sarah Graves

exploding her world. I quit my …
    Job. Just quit it and then boogied, as her old partner Liam O’Donnell would have put it. Boogied on out of there, and I’ll probably regret it . Still, she’d had no choice: sending the photos—one of Sissy cradling an infant Nicki, and with it a photograph of some other child, the implication being that this was Lizzie’s niece now—could’ve been someone’s idea of a joke, she supposed.
    But if so, it was a cruel one, and even that was far-fetched; who would do such a thing? Bottom line, Lizzie only knew that Nicki had been born nine years ago, and Sissy had been dead for eight. And that now, somebody wanted Lizzie to remember them.
    As if I could forget . Someone wanted it badly enough to go to some trouble, reminding her. Suggesting that Nicki was still alive.
    So— why? Lizzie had no idea about that, either. But she did know that no baby girl’s body had ever been found. And if Nicki’s bones weren’t in a shallow grave somewhere, or in the ocean—
    If they weren’t, Sissy’s little girl would be Lizzie’s only living kin, as well as her only link to the sister she’d let down so terribly and, in the end, she feared, fatally.
    She opened the thermos again and took a long drink from it. Cold, but the caffeine still packed a jolt and the bourbon was a sweet relief after the long, dark drive up Route 9 with the log trucks and the eighteen-wheelers thundering on both sides.
    Beginning to think that she should’ve reached the turnoff toward Eastport by now, she dragged the back of her hand over her mouth and peered with renewed intensity through the Honda’s dark windshield. Only more wet road showed ahead, and a glance in the rearview mirror showed nothing but her own reflection.
    Like a poster for a horror movie , she thought, her hair spiky and eyes darkly hollowed, her lips a slash of red, blackish in the gloom. Then behind her reflection she spotted a flashing red light coming up fast.
    Very fast. She hit the hazard lights and pumped the brakes rhythmically. Pulling over as far as she dared onto the road’s soft shoulder, she prayed that the driver of the car flying up behind her in the dark would have time to react.
    The overtaking vehicle’s roof bar flashed on, strobing the night with yellow. A single whoop-whoop from the car’s siren confirmed what she had already figured out: cops. And from the way they roared by, swerving expertly to the left and then back in again before their taillights vanished around a sharp curve, they were on their way to something.
    A crime scene, she thought. Or a bad accident, something hot and fresh. The last reflected glow of departing taillights paled and died, leaving her there in the dark with her heart pounding again.
    Thirty minutes later she was cruising over a long, curving causeway toward the island town of Eastport. The dashboard clock said one in the morning. Back in Boston, headlights and neon would still be ablaze, but here it seemed no one was on the road. She slid the window down again, smelling salt water and wet sand. In the distance, foghorns moaned guttural warnings to any sailors foolish or unlucky enough to be out on a night like this; nearer by, a bell buoy clanked monotonously.
    The sky ahead, though, glowed red. Some natural phenomenon, the northern lights, maybe, she thought, or a house fire. But then she recognized the glow’s deep hue: the same cherry-beacon flaring that she’d seen on the dark road half an hour ago.
    I quit my job, I quit my job . The words went on thudding in her head. But they didn’t matter, she realized suddenly.
    That color on the sky, as if the clouds had been pumped full of blood … just the sight of it set her heart racing again, her mind fizzing with gritty anticipation.
    Cop-car red. Crime-scene red. A lot of cop cars …
    Murder red.

URGENT WEATHER MESSAGE
WEATHER SERVICE CARIBOU MAINE
FOR INTERIOR HANCOCK-COASTAL HANCOCK-CENTRAL WASHINGTON-COASTAL