Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 30, No. 13, Mid-December 1985

Case #5423: The Second Fire by Stephanie Kay Bendel

On Monday, July 23, at eleven thirty-seven P.M., in the Chelsea district of Boston, Number 17 Porter Street exploded. Within seconds, flames shot through the roof and part of the north wall.

Between the official reports and the initial statements of the survivors and witnesses, Inspector Blaine Kesey of the Arson Squad had no trouble constructing a mental picture of the events just prior to the blast.

Number 17 was a three decker in a lower-middleclass neighborhood. On the first floor lived the owners and landlords, Mr. and Mrs. Edward Werner, a couple in their sixties. Mrs. Werner had gone to bed about a half hour earlier and was sleeping soundly when the blast occurred. Mr. Werner had been sitting in the living room in his undershirt, drinking beer and watching Johnny Carson on television.

On the second floor lived Mrs. Leona Silver, a middle-aged widow and her fourteen-year-old son, Peter. Mrs. Silver, too, had been sleeping at the time of the blast. Peter had gone down to the basement where each of the tenants had a storage area. He’d been looking for a chemistry set he’d gotten the Christmas before.

The third floor was occupied officially by Cranston Howard, 37, and unofficially by his nineteen-year-old girlfriend, Brenda Vine, and their infant son, Joshua. The baby had been sleeping in his crib in the living room. Brenda and Cranston had been in the kitchen, arguing.

Next door, at Number 15, eighty-year-old Alfred Mehan was dying. Father Gerald Thomas had just finished hearing his confession.

And on the sidewalk approaching Number 17, Frank Olson, a retired dock worker, was walking his aged springer spaniel, Sadie. Immediately after the blast, Olson ran to the front of the house. Peering through the pane of glass in the door, he saw flames shooting up the staircase. Fearing that opening the door would only fan the fire, he ran around to the side of the house where he heard screams.

A birdlike gray-haired woman in an old fashioned nightgown leaned out of a second story window. “Peter!” she cried. “My boy! I can’t find him!”

“Jump!” Olson pleaded. “I’ll catch you.”

She shook her head. “I’ve got to find him!” And she disappeared back into the house.

A young woman called from a third floor window. She held a blanketed bundle. “Please!” she called to Olson. “Catch my baby!” Olson had barely time to nod when she dropped the bundle down to him. His heart in his throat, the man caught the child who, after a startled silence, began to cry. Olson laid the baby on a small patch of grass well away from the burning house. His dog licked the child’s face. The man returned to the side of the house. He wondered whether anyone had called the fire department.

“And now you!” he called to the young woman. “Jump!” He held out his arms.

Brenda Vine clambered onto the sill and teetered a moment. Olson saw with misgivings that she was a large, sturdily built girl. He himself was sixty-three, and though he was in good shape for his age, he knew he was not going to be able to break her fall completely.

He saw her arms and legs outflung as she hurtled down at him. He braced himself. The impact knocked him down. As he got up, he stared at Brenda’s legs, twisted outward at horrible angles, fragments of bone protruding from the flesh. “Oh, my God!” he murmured.

He grabbed Brenda under the arms and tried to pull her away from the burning building. She screamed with the movement and Olson, tears in his eyes, said over and over, “I’m sorry! I’m sorry!”

Several things seemed to happen at once now. From somewhere in the distance, a siren wailed. Above, in the window from which the girl had jumped, Cranston Howard appeared, his arms full of bed-sheets. From the back of the house, Edward Werner staggered forward. His undershirt was smoke-stained, his face sooty. “My wife!” he panted. “Olive! I can’t get her out!”

Olson left the moaning girl and ran toward Werner. “Where?” The soot-covered man motioned toward the back door. Smoke and flames poured out. Olson pulled the man back. “You can’t go in there. I’m sorry.” He recoiled at the look of realization in Werner’s face. Olson tried to comfort him. “The firemen are nearly here. Hear the sirens? They have masks and special suits. They can get in. Maybe it isn’t too late.”

Werner started to cry.

By this time Cranston Howard had lowered himself out the window using the bedsheets. He was shouting to Mrs. Silver, who had reappeared. He tried to tell her to go into the next room, from the window of which she could reach his bedsheets and lower herself to the ground. The tiny woman didn’t hear him. “Please help me! My boy! I can’t find him!”

“Stay by the window!” Howard shouted. “Don’t go back into the smoke! I’ll see if I can get in another way!” He ran to the front of the house.

Olson, still trying to pull Edward Werner away from the back of the house, now saw Mrs. Silver but not the bedsheet. “Jump!” he called. “We’ll catch you!”

Werner seemed to come out of his daze. “Yeah, Mrs. Silver, Jump!”

The woman shrank and shook her head. Werner continued to plead with her. Olson thought he heard the fire engine coming up the street. He turned to look and found himself facing a priest. The cleric was a slightly built man in his middle fifties. He had thinning gray hair and wore metal-rimmed glasses. Olson motioned toward Brenda Vine, who had painfully inched her way to her baby’s side and was attempting to comfort the child. “Father,” Olson suggested, “maybe you could help this woman.”

But the priest didn’t respond. He stood trembling, eyes wide, perspiration trickling down his face, oblivious to Olson’s words.

As the fire engine pulled up, Cranston Howard reappeared, carrying Peter Silver. “I pulled him out the basement window,” Cranston said as he laid the frail-looking boy on the grass near Brenda. “He’s hurt.”

Mrs. Silver saw her son and climbed up on the sill, screaming. Now Olson begged her not to jump. “The firemen are here. They have ladders! Wait!” But Mrs. Silver would have none of it. She plunged out the window and Frank Olson caught yet another person. Fortunately, the woman weighed only ninety-eight pounds and was jumping from ten feet lower than Brenda Vine had. Peter’s mother escaped unharmed.

A second engine drew up. Werner grabbed a fireman and pulled him toward the back door, gesturing and crying. Another fireman, unwinding a hose, motioned for Father Thomas to step back. But the priest stood fast, frozen in horror. The fireman had to move him forcibly. As he did so, he heard the priest murmur, “It’s just like before! Exactly like before!”

On Wednesday morning, Inspector Blaine Kesey sat at his desk and stared at the reports before him. The investigation after the fire showed that the initial blast had been caused by a crude homemade bomb with an alarm clock-controlled detonator. The bomb had been in the basement, beneath the stairs. The remnants of a five-gallon gas can had also turned up there. Kesey knew that the likelihood of being able to trace any of the materials was small.

Number 17 had had only one interior staircase. There had been the mandatory fire escape at the back of the building, but two days before the fire, it had been taken down for replacement.

The blast had blown young Peter Silver across the basement. Luckily, he hadn’t lost consciousness and had managed to get to the window farthest from the flames. But he couldn’t climb out. He was hampered by the lack of anything sturdy to stand on and the fact that he had been badly burned. Then Howard had spotted him and pulled him out. The boy had a concussion and second degree burns over twenty percent of his body. He would recover, but there was a great deal of pain in store for him. His mother had been treated for shock and smoke inhalation and released.

Olive Werner had died in the fire. Her body had been found in the hall outside her bedroom. (The Werners apparently slept in separate rooms.) According to her husband, he had been unable to rouse her after the blast. “I shook her and yelled at the top of my lungs,” the large man had sobbed. “But she wouldn’t wake up! Then I tried to drag her out, but the heat and the smoke — I couldn’t breathe!”

According to the reports, Mrs. Werner had weighed a good two hundred and fifty pounds. Even a man in good shape would have had trouble getting her out of a savagely burning house, Kesey reflected. And Ed Werner had gone flabby a long time ago.

But why hadn’t Olive Werner awakened? The medical examiner would have to answer that one.

Brenda Vine had two badly shattered legs. The doctors said she had a fifty-fifty chance of walking again, but she’d have a pronounced limp at best. They’d had to remove part of the bone from one leg. Her baby was unharmed, as was her boyfriend.

Kesey sighed. So where was the motive? Who in hell benefited from a nightmare like that?

He tagged his best man. “Background, McCarthy! I want everything you can find out about everyone in this case!” He paused a moment, then added, “That means the priest, too. I want to know what he meant when he said it was like before.”

By late that afternoon, Kesey had learned that Ed and Olive Werner didn’t get along. They’d fought often and loudly, much to the annoyance of tenants and neighbors. Furthermore, the insurance on Number 17 had recently been increased by thirty thousand dollars.

But that didn’t get them much further, Kesey reflected. The building had been underinsured, and increasing the coverage had been the insurance agent’s idea.

And then there was Olive Werner’s overly sound sleep. It seemed fishy, but what did it prove? She might have been drugged, but why? So she wouldn’t get out of the fire? Werner might have hated her enough to kill her, but he wasn’t likely to do it by blowing up a house with several other people in it, himself included. Besides, it appeared he’d made a valiant effort to save her. And his grief certainly seemed genuine.

Kesey shook his head. No, the answer wasn’t there.

On his way home, Kesey paid a visit to the parish where Father Thomas lived. St. Dismas rectory was a large Victorian building. It gave the impression of being well cared for, with a minimum of money expended. The door was answered by the pastor, Monsignor Reilly. He was a tall hawk-nosed man with a fringe of white hair.

“Father Thomas isn’t here. He’s in the hospital.”

“Oh? Is he ill?”

“Quite. But it isn’t what you think. He’s had a nervous breakdown, inspector.” The monsignor ushered Kesey into a shabby but homey-looking study where the two men sat down.

“Does Father Thomas’s — um, condition — have anything to do with the fire last Monday night?” Kesey asked.

“I’m afraid it does. He’s an extremely sensitive man, you know. And fire — well, he has a phobia. Quite understandable.”

“How’s that?”

“When he was ten years old, his home caught fire in the middle of the night. Although he wasn’t injured, his mother died. Fire has haunted him ever since. He’s had quite a lot of psychiatric treatment for it, and sometimes he manages nicely. At other times, however, he suffers a great deal. Why, I’ve seen him say Mass in near hysteria because of the candles on the altar,” Monsignor Reilly finished sadly.

Kesey frowned. “Do you know any of the details of that childhood fire?”

“Only that it took place in South Boston and that the Thomases lived on the third floor. Gerald had to jump out the window. A passerby caught him.”

Before he went to the office Thursday morning, Kesey stopped at the hospital. He was told that Brenda Vine was in surgery again, so he asked for Peter Silver’s room. He found the boy asleep with Mrs. Silver at his bedside. She looked tired.

When she saw him, her eyes filled with tears and she said defiantly, “It isn’t true!”

“What isn’t?”

“Your men seem to think Peter had something to do with the fire!”

Kesey paused. “Let’s find another place to talk.”

He found a private corner in the solarium and they sat down. “Tell me about it,” he said.

“Two of your men were here already this morning. They kept asking me why Peter was in the basement so late at night. They acted as if he did something wrong, just going downstairs to look for his chemistry set.”

“Is your son in the habit of staying up alone late at night?” Kesey asked gently.

“Oh, yes! Youngsters have so much more energy than we do, don’t they? Peter never seems to need sleep. But he’s a good boy! He stays up to read or study. He’s a straight-A student, you know.”

“Just why did he want his chemistry set at eleven thirty at night?”

Mrs. Silver looked wounded. “That’s what your men wanted to know. Peter’s studying chemistry. He’s taking a summer course in it. He says he wanted to check something the book said. Why shouldn’t he? What difference does it make what time it was?” She looked at Kesey squarely. “Peter’s a good boy,” she said again.

Kesey reflected that he had heard of more than one good boy who had done some pretty bad things. A fourteen-year-old straight-A student certainly had the intelligence to put together a crude bomb and timber, hadn’t he?

But where was the motive?

Back in his office, Kesey was greeted with new information.

“It’s that Howard fellow, inspector,” McCarthy said as Kesey took off his jacket and draped it over the back of his chair. “The guy on the third floor. It seems he was an antiwar protester in the late sixties and early seventies. He was convicted of firebombing a university chancellor’s office. No one was injured and he got away with only thirty days in jail.”

“What’s he been doing lately?”

“He works for a consumer protection group. His politics are still a bit to the left, but as far as anyone knows, he doesn’t advocate violence any more.”

Interesting, Kesey thought. But why on earth would Howard blow up a building when he was on the third floor of it?

Unless the bomb went off by mistake.

He poured himself a cup of coffee and reread the article that had appeared in Tuesday’s paper. The article was on page eight. There was no mention of a bomb, of course. They hadn’t released that information. The paper said “undetermined origin.” A small photo of Frank Olson accompanied the article. The caption beneath it began, “Saves three.” Kesey reflected that Olson looked unhappy.

The autopsy report on Mrs. Werner came in. She had taken (or was given) a moderate overdose of sedative. The medical examiner had attached a note.

McCarthy had sent someone to the library to find the old newspaper accounts of the Thomases’ fire. Kesey found a written report on his desk after lunch. The fire had occurred in June of 1941. Father Gerald Thomas’s family lived on the third floor of a triple decker in Dorchester. The explosion, apparently from a leaking gas line, had knocked out the staircase wall, trapping the occupants of the upper two floors. There had been no fire escape. The blast had occurred at four thirty in the morning. A milkman who’d been making deliveries in the neighborhood had rescued all but one of the occupants of the two upper floors by catching them or breaking their falls enough to prevent injuries. The first floor tenants had been able to escape by themselves. Mrs. Thomas had died, interestingly enough, because of heart failure, apparently triggered by the explosion. It was known that she had had previous heart problems.

The similarities were striking. Three family house. Explosion in the middle of the night, knocking out the lone staircase. A passerby catching people as they jumped from the windows. One woman dead in each case. But in 1941 there hadn’t been the horrible injuries like those suffered by Brenda and Peter — unless you counted the psychic damage done to the young Gerald Thomas. So the two cases weren’t quite the same.

But there were enough similarities to open a long-closed door in the recesses of Father Thomas’s mind. And whoever had planted the bomb on Porter Street had claimed another victim.

Or maybe two. Late that afternoon, Kesey paid a visit to Frank Olson. McCarthy had already contacted Olson’s former employer, who’d said that the man had been one of the best workers he’d ever had. Conscientious, seldom out sick. A bit of a loner, but got along with everyone. Also, according to McCarthy’s report, Olson had lived at his present address for the past fourteen years. Before that he’d spent eight years working in an electronics plant. Now he lived on Social Security and a small pension.

Kesey found Frank Olson home alone in his small apartment. The man moved awkwardly and apologized for it as he showed the inspector in. “Pulled some muscles in my back and shoulders the other night.”

Olson’s eyes looked as though he’d been crying, Kesey realized.

“But you’ll be all right, won’t you?” he asked.

Olson nodded. “Oh, yeah. A few weeks, that’s all. Doctor said I’ll be fine.”

So what was wrong? Kesey wondered. It wasn’t until he noticed the empty dog dish by the kitchen sink that he realized the old springer spaniel was nowhere to be seen.

To his question, the man said, “It happened last night. She was old and the vet said her time was coming, but you never realize...”

Kesey said he was sorry. He had a dog himself and he knew what the man was feeling.

“It isn’t only that,” Olson went on dispiritedly. “That fire the other night — every time I close my eyes, I see the girl — her legs all smashed up...”

“Don’t take it personally,” Kesey said gently. “After all, if it weren’t for you, it might have been worse.”

The man shook his head. “No. That’s the worst part. I keep thinking that if I hadn’t been there, the young fellow — the one who tied the bedsheets together — he would have gotten her out and she wouldn’t have been hurt at all.”

Olson’s body shook with a silent sob. “A man goes on day after day,” he said softly, “knowing nobody thinks much of him. But he keeps telling himself he’s worth something. Then the time comes when he’s got to prove it and he finds out everyone would have been better off if he hadn’t been there.” The man looked up at Kesey with pain in his eyes.

As he left, Kesey resolved to call Kathleen Donovan over at the senior citizen center and suggest she invite Olson to some of their activities soon. There were times when a man should not be left alone with his thoughts.

The whole damned case was full of victims.

Kesey stopped by the hospital during evening visiting hours. He found Brenda Vine still sedated but conscious. He knew that even though she’d already had extensive surgery on both legs, she faced several more operations.

She seemed shrunken into the pillow. Her long dark hair made a limp frame for her too-pale face.

Kesey introduced himself. “Miss Vine, could you answer a few questions for me?”

She gave him the slightest of nods and stared past him. He decided to start easy. “It’s been pretty rough, hasn’t it?” His words sounded foolish to his ears. He tried again. “They tell me your baby’s just fine. That was lucky.”

“Was it?” the girl asked softly. Now her eyes focused on Kesey. Anger burned in them. “Some future he’s got! A crippled mother, no father, a life on welfare. That’s where he is now, you know. Social Services. A foster home! By the time I get out of here, he won’t know me.” Her eyes grew bright with tears.

“But Cranston,” Kesey put in. “What about him? Won’t he help?”

Brenda shook her head. “That’s all over. It was over before this. I knew it. I kept hoping he’d change his mind because of the baby. But now — Cran would never marry a cripple.”

The bitterness in her voice stung Kesey. “The two of you weren’t getting along for some time, then?”

She shook her head again. “He wanted to leave us. He has another girl, you see. And Cran has never been big on responsibilities. Families aren’t his style.”

“This other girl — how did you find out?”

“Oh, Cran told me. He wanted me to know about her. He figured I’d just get up and leave.”

“But you didn’t.”

“I’ll say not! He’s got responsibilities toward us — the baby and me. Besides, I had nowhere to go. My family threw me out. I never finished high school. So where do I go?”

Kesey nodded in understanding. “Did Cranston see a lot of the other girl?”

“More and more. He wasn’t home much. In fact, the night of the fire was the first time he’d been around at night in weeks. His girl had to take a night shift.” She began to cry.

Peter Silver was also awake this evening. His mother had left the hospital for a couple of hours and Kesey was glad of the opportunity to speak with the boy alone. He lay in bed with a tentlike affair covering his torso. Kesey saw that the flesh on his face, arms, and neck was dark red and blistered. His eyebrows were gone, as was part of the hair on his head.

“How are you doing?” Kesey asked as he sat down.

“Not too bad,” the boy said in a half-whisper.

“Hurts to talk, doesn’t it?”

He nodded. “Skin cracks.”

“I have the information you gave my men earlier, so we needn’t go through all that again. There are only a couple of questions more. You can nod or shake your head. Okay?”

The boy nodded.

“I understand you were by your storage compartment, about twelve feet from the stairs when the blast occurred. Right?”

He nodded.

“Did you see anyone around when you went down to the basement?”

Peter shook his head.

“Did you notice anything under the stairs when you came down?”

He shook his head again. “Dark,” he whispered. “Always a lot of junk under there.”

“I understand you’re a good student, Peter. You study a lot, don’t you?”

Peter nodded.

“Why?”

“Have to,” came the whisper. “College. Need scholarship. Mom can’t afford—”

Kesey formed the question carefully, but he made it sound offhand. “Peter, did you make that bomb?”

The boy looked at him with dark, clear, intelligent eyes. With an obvious effort, he raised his voice to almost a normal level. “No, sir, I didn’t.”

Kesey stood up. He knew the truth when he heard it.

The next morning, McCarthy had additional information on the 1941 fire. “No question about it, inspector. It was an accident. The investigation was thorough. They found a leaky gas line.”

“What set it off?”

“Apparently a spark from the water pump.”

“And the survivors of the fire?”

“Mostly dead now. Father Thomas has an older sister in Florida. Their father died a couple of years ago. There was a child living on the second floor. Her parents are deceased, but she’s still alive. Lives in Oregon.”

“And the milkman? The guy who rescued them?”

“His name was Planter. Charlie Planter. A real loser, apparently. Usually in trouble at school, dropped out when he was sixteen. Fired from several menial jobs, quit a couple of others, was unemployed a lot. He wasn’t even the regular milkman. He took the route for a friend who had to go out of town for a few days.”

“And after the fire?”

“For a couple of months, he was a hero. His picture was in the papers, he got a commendation from the mayor, a medal from the governor. The dairy even offered him a permanent job.”

“Did he take it?”

“Yeah, but he didn’t last long. Was fired three months later for being late on his deliveries. Went into the navy when the war broke out. He deserted eighteen months later. I couldn’t trace him after that.”

“Deserted, huh?” Kesey thought a bit. “There’s a certain mentality,” he said slowly. “I see it from time to time. You can hand some people the world on a platter and they’ll accidentally-on-purpose drop it. Then they spend their lives cursing their bad luck.”

McCarthy looked at his boss, puzzled.

Kesey thumbed through the papers on his desk. He found what he wanted — a sketch of Number 17 as it had looked before the fire. The sketch was accompanied by a floor plan. He studied it closely. The front door of Number 17 had opened into a foyer. To the left was the door to the Werners’ living quarters. Directly ahead was the staircase leading to the upper apartments and, of course, the cellar.

He’d requested that Werner stop by later that morning and when the man showed up, Kesey asked, “The front door — was it locked as a rule?”

Edward Werner shifted his weight in his chair, which squeaked in protest. There were bags under his eyes and his thinning hair needed washing. “The front door? No. We never locked it. The neighborhood is safe. You don’t have to worry about getting mugged in the hall.”

“But the individual apartments would be locked, generally?”

Werner shrugged. “We locked ours when we left. Mrs. Silver did, too. But the Howard guy, he’s not the most responsible fellow around, you know?”

Kesey nodded. “And how about the door to the basement stairway? Was that usually locked?”

Werner shook his head. “Years ago, we locked it. But it was too much of a hassle. It meant the tenants had to have two keys and keys get lost. Besides, there are meter readers and servicemen — for the washing machine and dryer — coming and going all the time. The keys were a pain. Nothing to steal down there anyhow. The tenants lock their stuff up in the storage bins.”

So anyone from the outside could have walked in the front door and gone down the basement, Kesey realized. “Who’s usually at home during the day?”

Werner shrugged again. “The Silver boy might be. Or Howard’s girlfriend. Everyone else would be at work.”

Kesey stared out the window. Peter Silver had been attending summer school. That left only a young woman on the third floor. Not likely she’d know it if a stranger walked into Number 17 and went down to the basement.

But who from the outside wanted to blow up the building? Everything came back to the motive. Kesey turned to Werner. “You and your wife didn’t get along, did you?”

The man rubbed his forehead. “We had our differences,” he said slowly. “Everybody knows that. Trouble was, Olive wanted the moon. She couldn’t understand why I didn’t make big money — why I wasn’t somebody.” He looked sadly at Kesey. “I’m just an average Joe, you know? Sometimes I got tired of her putting me down.”

Kesey’s eyes narrowed. “How tired, Mr. Werner?”

The man started and looked at him in disbelief. “You can’t think I wanted — you can’t think that!” Tears actually came to his eyes.

“Can’t I? After all, you’re rid of a wife you didn’t get along with and you stand to collect a lot of insurance.”

“You — you’re crazy!” Werner sputtered. “Ever hear of divorce? If I wanted to get rid of my wife—” His voice broke.

Kesey suddenly felt cruel. But he had to push the point. “If you divorced her, there’d be a settlement. This way, you get all the money.”

“Money!” Werner almost laughed. “I don’t get any money! I don’t get anything!”

“What?”

“My father-in-law never liked me. When we were married, he gave the house to Olive, in trust. She could live in it and have the income from the two apartments for her lifetime. But now that she’s — dead, the insurance goes to my father-in-law’s estate. I don’t even have a place to live. I’m staying at the Y.”

Kesey was speechless.

After lunch, Kesey interviewed Cranston Howard. He found himself disliking the man. Howard showed little emotion over Brenda Vine’s condition. “Yeah, it’s too bad about that,” he said offhandedly. “She’s a good kid.”

“You two got along pretty well, then?”

“Ah, no.” Howard looked away. “Brenda’s got this thing about marriage. Always pushing. That’s why she had the baby, you know. Thought she could force me to marry her. But I fooled her. I said she could move in with me, but no marriage. That surprised her!”

“And what were you planning to do about the situation?” Kesey asked.

“Do?”

“Were you going to go on living with her, or were you thinking about breaking up housekeeping?”

The young man looked uncomfortable. “As a matter of fact, I was going to leave her. It was getting to be too much. Nag, nag, nag. I didn’t need that. And whenever I didn’t do what she wanted, she’d act crazy.”

Kesey looked interested. “How do you mean?”

“Threatening to kill herself. That sort of thing.”

“Think she was serious?”

Howard’s gaze was concentrated on the floor of Kesey’s office. “Nah. It was just another way of pushing me. You know what women are like.”

“Mr. Howard,” Kesey said carefully, “do you think Brenda knew how to make a bomb?”

The young man looked up in surprise and grinned. “Inspector, anybody can make a bomb. You just get a book from the library. It’ll show you how, step by step. But I’ll tell you this: Brenda didn’t make that bomb.”

“Why are you so sure? A suicide threat is often a plea for help. If help doesn’t come, they sometimes follow through. Maybe Brenda was going to kill herself and take you with her.”

Howard looked thoughtful. Then he shook his head. “I don’t see it,” he said slowly. “She might want to kill me. Heaven knows she was mad enough at me lately. And maybe she’d kill herself. But I know one thing. If Brenda put that bomb in the basement, she’d have had the kid out of the building somehow. She’d never let anything happen to that kid.”

Kesey considered that, remembering that the girl’s first action had been to drop the child to safety. Howard might be right. He tried another line of thought. “Mr. and Mrs. Werner — do you know what they fought about?”

Howard grinned. “The whole neighborhood did. She was a real battle-axe. I gather her old man had a bit of money and didn’t like Ed. Apparently he told her Ed would never amount to anything, and it was killing her because she finally realized her old man was right. Not that there’s anything so bad about Ed. He’s just one of those guys who gets by — and nothing more.”

When Howard left, Kesey reflected that, of all the fire victims, only Howard had lost nothing he valued.

That afternoon, Kesey paid a visit to St. Dymphna’s psychiatric hospital.

“Father Thomas is being treated with certain drugs, inspector,” the doctor explained. “You may find him a bit incoherent at times. An unfortunate side effect. And you’ll have to put up with a nurse in the room. To make sure he doesn’t get overly excited.”

Kesey found Father Thomas thumbing through a magazine. He was sitting in an armchair, wearing pajamas and a robe. He seemed confused when the nurse explained who Kesey was and why he had come.

“I’ll be glad to help if I can, inspector. I just don’t see how—” His voice trailed off.

Kesey began gently. “I want you to tell me exactly what happened last Monday night. Did you hear the explosion?”

“Oh yes. I was just getting ready to leave the Mehan house next door. The blast shook the whole building. I stepped out onto the porch and saw the flames from Number 17. It reminded me—”

“Yes.” Kesey didn’t want the priest going back in time. “What did you do next?”

“I — well, it occurred to me that I should help. I ran over to the burning house.”

“Tell me exactly what you saw,” Kesey prompted.

Father Thomas closed his eyes. “Part of the building was in flames. There was a lot of smoke. A young woman and a child were on the grass. The woman was hurt.” He paused, opened his eyes and frowned.

“Take your time, Father. What happened next?”

An expression of pain crossed the priest’s face. “The man was there. He said, ‘Jump!’ ”

“And then what happened?”

Father Thomas shook his head. “I couldn’t! It was too high! My mother was lying on the floor. Something was wrong with her! My sister was screaming — the fire was getting closer...”

Sweat poured down his face. His words came out in little gasps and jerks. “The man shouted ‘Jump!’ again, but I couldn’t!” He looked at Kesey and finished very softly, “Then my father picked me up and threw me out the window.” He began to sob.

The nurse came over and put her hand on Kesey’s arm. “I think he’s had enough,” she said quietly.

Kesey nodded. It didn’t matter. He hadn’t been able to keep Father Thomas in the present long enough. The priest had gone back to 1941, and that was no help with the case of Number 17 Porter Street.

What had set him off? Kesey wondered as he headed back to his office. Mentally, he went over the priest’s story. Somewhere in it was the key that unlocked the metal door. Something had thrown Father Thomas back into the past.

On impulse, Kesey detoured to the public library and asked to see their microfilms of the 1941 newspapers. Maybe he would see something McCarthy hadn’t.

And he did. It was right there, staring at him from the microfilm account of the old fire. A young man’s face above the words, “Local hero.” The face had changed with the years, but the eyes were the same.

Back in his office, Kesey tapped McCarthy on the shoulder. “Get in touch with the naval authorities. I want Charlie Planter’s fingerprints.”

“Charlie Planter?”

“He’s our man. Changed his name after he’d deserted, of course. But you know something funny about deserters? Deep inside, they all want to come home. And Charlie eventually did. There really wasn’t much danger. When you think about it, a big metropolitan area like Boston has lots of little neighborhoods that are self-sufficient. You could grow up in South Boston, for instance, then move up north to Chelsea, and with a little care you might never run into anyone who knew you before. Even if you did, after all those years, chances are no one would recognize you. Not unless they were looking for the resemblance, as I was this afternoon. Or unless they happened to see you in exactly the same circumstances they’d seen you in forty-four years ago!”

McCarthy looked as though the light had dawned. “Is that what set Father Thomas off?”

Kesey nodded. “He saw Charlie Planter standing beside a burning house, shouting, ‘Jump!’ ”

“Are you saying that Planter set the bomb? But why?”

“Ah! The motive! That’s what had me stumped until today. I kept looking at everyone in the case and asking myself who had something to gain. But nobody had anything to gain. But when I saw that picture of Charlie Planter, I looked at things from his point of view.

“Think about it. He was a loser. Everything he did went sour. Except once. One night, forty-four years ago, he did something right. And for a short while, life was sweet. Commendations and medals and recognition. Then he went back to being plain old Charlie, and everything went sour again. How often do you think he wished he could relive that time? Be somebody important again?”

“That’s why he did it?”

“I’ll bet next year’s salary on it. He never thought anyone would get hurt. The first time, everyone except Mrs. Thomas ended up unhurt — physically anyhow — and Mrs. Thomas died only because she had a heart condition. But no one at Number 17 had a bad heart, so he figured everything was going to be okay. He’d be there to save them, just like before.

“Trouble is, a fellow like Planter doesn’t anticipate. He never considered the possibility that Mrs. Werner might take so much sedative she couldn’t be awakened. Or that anyone would be in the cellar at that hour.”

McCarthy reached for the phone.

“Shall I have Planter — Olson — picked up?”

Kesey looked at him. “No, McCarthy! It’s not hardworking, conscientious Olson — Olson who doesn’t even take off sick. I’m talking about Werner.”

“Werner? But he didn’t rescue anybody!”

“That was another thing he didn’t anticipate — that before he could get his wife out and start saving the tenants, someone else would come along and save them.”

“And he really didn’t want his wife to die?”

“Oh, no. She was the one he wanted to be a hero for. He was going to put an end to that nagging once and for all. He’d be somebody again.”

“That’s all? All that suffering... just because he wanted to be somebody?” McCarthy was silent for a moment. Then he said slowly, “Sometimes it’s a hell of a world, sir.”

“Yes, McCarthy. Sometimes it is.”