room at the side with only one small window. Above the coat racks rose a series of varnished wooden slats attached to the wall. Walker’s eyes followed them to the ceiling, where there was a recessed square that had to be an access hatch.
Walker stared at it skeptically. “This was my idea, wasn’t it?” He sighed. “Maybe you’d better stay down here and try to break my fall if it gives way.”
“Deal,” said Stillman.
Walker climbed the first few feet easily, but as he rose higher, the reasons why this was not a practical idea began to enter his mind insistently. Climbing the bell tower of somebody else’s church seemed to him to go beyond the level of merely presumptuous tourist behavior. It had the feeling of blasphemous intrusion. But climbing the first few rungs of a ladder in front of Stillman had a quality of irreversibility. Without some compelling reason, it was difficult to simply stop and begin feeling for lower rungs with his toes. He kept his eyes on the ceiling and climbed.
When he came to the top, he pushed up on the wooden hatch cover, half-hoping the compelling reason would come in the form of a cover nailed in place. But the cover rose smoothly. He lifted it aside and stuck his head through the opening. The atmosphere smelled of years of dust. It was dim, but not completely dark, so he could make out some shapes. The floor on this level was the same plain hardwood as the floor below, but it had been left rough-cut, not sanded or varnished. The walls were bare wood with studs and crosspieces showing. As his eyes adjusted, he saw that there was another set of rungs nailed between two studs, leading upward. He pulled himself up onto the floor, looked down, and beckoned to Stillman.
He waited until he saw Stillman’s face and shoulders ascending toward him, then stepped out of the way. Stillman had to shrug to squeeze his shoulders through the opening, then raised his arms and lifted himself the rest of the way. Walker set the hatch cover back over the opening.
Stillman looked around until he saw the ladder, then said, “Going up?”
Walker repeated his climb to the next level. There was no hatch covering the opening above him, and he could see that the hatchway and a small hole near it were the source of the light. The walls above seemed to be golden with glowing horizontal stripes. When his head rose through the opening, he understood. The top level was the belfry. In the center was a heavy, tarnished brass bell suspended from a steel rod. The small speck of light he had seen from below was the hole for the bellpull. He could not recall seeing a hole in the ceiling in the foyer of the church, but he supposed there must have once been one.
The four walls of the belfry had panels of louvers, probably to keep the bell’s peal from being muffled. Most of the light was coming from the louvered opening on the western side, where the late-afternoon sun was moving lower. The louvers were an arrangement he liked instantly: the level he had just left had been oppressively hot, but up here he could feel a cool, steady breeze. He moved close to the south wall to peer down through the louvers, and found that the church roof blocked the foreground but he could see the streets beyond.
“This is perfect.” It was Stillman’s voice behind him. Stillman pulled himself up and stood on the east side of the belfry, raising and lowering his head to look between different slats of the louver. “You can see most of the town from here.” He turned to look at Walker. “Whatever you do, don’t bump into that bell.”
Walker bent and looked upward under the rim of the bell. “The clapper’s gone. They must have taken it out when they stopped using it.”
Stillman sidestepped from one panel to the next, moving around the belfry, peering out at the sights below. When he stopped, he said urgently, “There!”
Walker stepped away from the bell and moved his face to the opening. He could see the flat squares that were roofs of the old buildings along Main Street, the tops of big trees just below the belfry. Beyond were the pitched roofs of houses in neat rows on either side of each gray strip of concrete. To the west he could see the winding course of the tan riverbed, with the black ribbon of water in the middle. “What is it I’m looking at?”
“They’re on this side now,” said Stillman.
Walker moved to the next panel, where Stillman was. He could see the tops of black-and-white police cars. There were four of them, slowly scuttling along the grooves below the treetops that were the streets west of the police station. When a car reached the end of a residential street at New Hampshire, it would turn west for a block and go up the next one until it reached Coulter, then turn west and go down another block. “At least they’re not giving up,” said Walker.
Stillman was already shading his eyes with both hands and staring into the distance to the west. “Damn. You can’t see the old covered bridge from here, because the woods are in the way. Probably too far anyway. If they had only gone down there and blocked it off when I told them to, this would already be over.”
“Why do you suppose they didn’t?” asked Walker.
“Inconvenience. That’s what it always is.”
“It doesn’t look that hard.”
“Not to do it,” Stillman said. “To take the heat for having done it. People who want to drive to the next town to rent a movie have to wait an extra minute while a cop stares into their back seat.”
Walker watched him for a moment as he stepped from that panel to the next, always looking down. “Is that what made you quit the police force—local politics?”
“What makes anybody not quit?” said Stillman. “The job stinks. Low pay, long hours, and now and then you get to have a wrestling match with a mean drunk.”
“Did something happen?”
Stillman glanced at him. “Yeah, a lot happened. What did you have in mind?”
“The captain in Miami seemed to think maybe there was something you did that didn’t get made public.”
Stillman shook his head. “No, there wasn’t anything like that. It was wrong for my temperament, so I made a career change.”
“Not much of one.”
Stillman shrugged. “I was thirty years old. What I had learned was how to fire a sidearm, come out of a street fight better off than the other guy, and drive a car fast. What was I going to be—secretary of state? I had a little practical experience in tickling the law-enforcement establishment to get them to do what I wanted, and had made a few acquaintances who had other useful skills.”
“What’s the difference? Is it just money?”
Stillman shook his head. “No. The difference is, if the phone rings and somebody wants me to do something, I can say no and hang up.” He stared at Walker for a moment. “And if somebody asks a question I don’t want to answer, I don’t.” He turned away again and looked out between the slats.
Walker moved away from him to the northwest corner. He shaded his eyes and squinted to the west along Main Street, past the river and across the open fields to the woods that hid the covered bridge, and to the row of hills beyond. The sun was low now and had a blinding glare, like a fire that burned brightest yellow just as it was consuming the last of its fuel. That was the direction where the two men had almost certainly gone, and was probably the direction from which they would return. But after a time, the low angle of the sun made it too painful to look to the west, and he turned to the north.
He stared down at the quiet residential streets on the other side of Main. He picked out Birch Street, where James Scully had lived, then the block, and, finally, from his memory of the morning when he had searched for it, the very house. The old trees threw long shadows and made the green of the lawns deep and soothing to his eyes, so he devoted himself to Birch Street, staring closely into each of the yards, trying to detect the policemen who had been assigned to watch Scully’s house. He moved on, but kept returning to that block during the next hours. He did not see any uniformed men crouching there, or any movement or change that would have signaled their presence. He looked at the plain rectangular box of New Mill Systems, and tried to pick out each car in the lot on the unlikely chance that the two men had parked their rental car among the herd and gone to wait in the woods.
Stillman had lapsed into a long silence, still moving from panel to panel according to an unpredictable schedule. He would spend fifteen minutes at one, then just a minute at another. When he spoke, his voice was calm and quiet. “What do you see?”
“Not a whole lot,” Walker answered. “There doesn’t seem to be much going on anymore. How about you?”
“They did a pretty good sweep for an hour or so after we got up here. Since then, it’s been a lot more subtle. They’ve got three patrol cars on the road instead of the usual two, but there seem to be a few cops walking around in plain clothes trying to look inconspicuous.” He pointed at the louvered panel in front of him. “See? There’s
