building toward the front. Walker and Stillman followed as far as the front corner, staying close to the wall to avoid straying into the lights from Main Street. Walker waited a few seconds, but found waiting unbearable. He stepped around the corner and saw her leaning hard to push open the heavy front door, and hurried across the facade and up the steps with Stillman’s breaths huffing in his ear. When they were inside and the big door closed behind them, it was too dark to see anything.
Mary whispered, “I’ve still got the little flashlight.”
“It’ll show through the windows,” said Stillman. “Let your eyes get used to the dark.” His voice told Walker he was slowly edging toward the doorway of the cloak room.
Walker took Mary’s hand. “Come away from the entrance.” They found the wall and the doorway by touch. When they were in the cloak room, she slipped her hand out of his. “This isn’t a great hiding place.”
Walker said, “The steeple is above us, and there’s a belfry at the top. We’ve been up there.” He lifted her hand and set it on one of the varnished slats attached to the wall. “This is the ladder.”
She was silent for a few seconds. “I think I see it. That square way up there?”
Walker asked, “Are you afraid of heights?”
“Of course I’m afraid of heights,” she snapped.
“Stillman can go up first, and then you,” said Walker. “I’ll be under you, and if anything . . . happens, I’ll catch you.”
Stillman’s voice came out of the dark. “He’s easily dumb enough to do it, you know.” Stillman set his toe on the lowest wooden slat and began to climb.
Mary said to him, “If you fall, don’t expect me to catch you.”
“I’ll use extra caution.” He kept climbing, and soon they heard him lift the cover off the hatch. Their eyes had adjusted to the darkness, so they saw his legs grow shorter and disappear into the deeper darkness above.
Walker started to guide Mary to the ladder, but she shrugged his hand off. “I see it,” she said. She reached to the highest rung she could and climbed. Walker watched from below, trying to discern the exact position and attitude of her body in the dim light so he could judge her trajectory if she slipped and fell backward. She kept her head up and climbed like a person who hated it and was determined to get it finished before she had time to think. In a minute only her legs were visible. She suddenly rose out of sight as Stillman took her hands and lifted her up.
Walker climbed quickly too, then carefully replaced the hatch cover and looked around him to find the others. The open square on the third level above them seemed brighter than the second level, even at night, but he could see little. He heard a shuffle of feet and moved toward it. He whispered, “I’m up.”
Mary said, “Good for you. I’ll go first this time, and you can both catch me.” She was already climbing. Her body momentarily blocked the light in the opening above, then disappeared again, and Stillman began to climb. Walker waited until he was up before he climbed too.
He reached the upper level to find Stillman standing at the western side of the belfry, staring out between the slats, and Mary, at the eastern side, looking at him. “This isn’t as bad as I expected.”
“It’s not the sort of place where somebody will just happen by and stumble on us,” Walker agreed.
Stillman said, “They’re moving.” Walker and Mary stepped close to Stillman and looked down. The cars had spread out along Washington Street, and now they were taking positions at each of the streets that ran up from the river into the heart of the town. At some signal that Walker could not see, they began to cruise up all of the streets at once. On each street there was a lead car with its high-beam headlights on. Behind it at least a hundred feet was a second car with its headlights off.
Stillman said, “See what they’re doing? The first car comes along, trying to light everything up. If it goes by you, and you’re an optimist, you think you’re in the clear. You break cover and move. Only you’re not in the clear because there’s another one coming along that you didn’t see.”
“I hope those two guys are optimists,” said Walker.
“Come here,” said Stillman. “When the cars coming up Main get right below us and close to the street lamps, see if you can make out a license plate.”
Walker knelt on the floor and put his face close to a louvered opening. He could see the two cars coming slowly up the brightly lit commercial street. Both of the cars on Main had their high-beam headlights on. Each time the lead car reached a corner, it would pause briefly while the driver looked up the cross street and the car behind caught up. Then the lead car would move forward again. The lead driver seemed to be trying to stay abreast of the cars on the other streets.
As Walker stared at the white license plate, a suspicion formed in his mind. The print on it seemed to be green. He squinted and leaned forward as the car approached the block where the church was, trying to screen out the glare of the headlights and keep his eyes on the plate. It passed the church and stopped at the corner. As the car behind it came closer, its bright headlights made the reflective surface of the rear license plate glow more and more brightly. “It’s not New Hampshire,” said Walker. He could see that the green numbers were outlined in orange. “The first plate looks like . . . Florida!”
Stillman nodded. “That’s what I was afraid of. When the first one crossed the bridge, I thought that’s what the plate looked like. But I figured you had seen a lot more of them lately than I have. It explains why they’re all new. They’re rental cars.”
Walker said, “The second one is something else. Maybe Georgia.”
“What does that mean?” asked Mary.
Stillman said quietly, “It means we came to the right place. It looks like everybody involved in those murders is turning up here at once.”
“It seems that would make it the wrong place,” she said. “I wonder why they’re all here now.”
Stillman answered, “This afternoon, before we saw those two guys, we were in the Old Mill. Waiters were setting up for a party of thirty or forty. We couldn’t figure out why. It must have been for them. They’ve been away—down in Florida, where the hurricane was—stealing more money. It was going to be a welcome-home party. I guess the two we saw this afternoon were just the first ones to arrive.”
“They must all live here,” said Walker. “It wasn’t just Scully and Bowles.”
“So nobody down there is searching for those two killers, right?” said Mary. “They’re searching for us.”
Stillman nodded. “I think the cops figured that as soon as they told us the two killers were gone, we’d leave. Only when we didn’t leave, the plan had to change. They decided to wait until after dark, when these guys got here and they’d have the manpower to find us. By then the rest of the town would be asleep, most of the strangers would be gone—”
“Those tourists,” Mary interrupted. “The ones in the restaurant.”
Stillman said, “I think they were supposed to be gone, back to wherever they were staying, before those guys got here. They weren’t. They couldn’t be allowed to see forty men show up, get guns from the police, and search the town. The cops will probably keep them in a holding cell overnight, where they won’t see or hear anything. In the morning they’ll tell them it was a case of mistaken identity, apologize, and let them go.”
Mary was quiet for a few seconds. “How are we going to get out of here?”
Stillman said, “If we look closely enough, we’ll see an opportunity.”
“To do what—shoot our way out?”
“Those men down there appear to be prepared for that sort of thing,” said Stillman. “We, on the other hand, are not.”
“We’re not?”
“No guns,” said Walker.
Her eyes widened. “You came here looking for killers, and you didn’t even think to bring a gun?”
“We weren’t looking for killers,” said Walker. “We were looking for a dead man’s house.” When she remained rigid, he added, “We were just doing research.”
She glared at him, then at Stillman, and folded her arms across her chest. Then she turned to face the slatted panel beside her, clearly only because it was a way to end the conversation. After a moment, her arms unfolded and she grasped one of the louvers as she brought her face close to it. “Uh-oh.”
Walker stepped to her side and looked. Some of the cars had reached the spot at the east end of town where the streets ended and a long fence separated the town from a vast, grassy expanse of field. The cars were moving toward Main Street. “They’ve come to the end,” he said. “What’s wrong?”
“Not the cars,” Mary said. “Down this street. The houses.”
