Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 34, No. 13 & 14, Winter 1989

Fire Burning Bright by Brendan DuBois

The first thing I did when the phone rang was to check the glowing red numerals of my bedroom clock radio, which told me it was four in the morning. Some people take a while to wake up when a loud noise — like a telephone — disturbs their sleep. Not me. Any loud noise at night is like a hand grenade rolled underneath my bed — it quickly gets my attention.

I swung around and switched on the side lamp, and by the time the third chime had rung. I had picked up the receiver and had a pen in the other hand.

It was Norma Quentin, night dispatcher for Franconia County. She didn’t bother apologizing for waking me up. She knows me too well.

“Thought you’d be interested,” she said, as she always does. “Purmort volunteer just responded up on Timberswamp Road — looks like a fire, suspicious origins and all the rest.”

“Jesus,” I murmured. “Tate Burnham?”

Her voice hesitated, just a bit. I’ll always remember that. “Don’t know, Jerry. They’ve been gone about ten minutes — it’ll take a while for you to get there, even if you hurry.”

I heard the crackle of static and I imagined her, sitting in a darkened cubicle, in the basement of the county courthouse, linked by telephone and radio to the rest of the county, the console lights making her skin look bloodless. I was sure her two stainless steel crutches would be there, at her side, along with a .38 caliber revolver.

“Gotta go,” Norma said. “Calls coming in.”

Soon I was dressed and in my Ford pickup, driving north along Route 3, my reporter’s notebook and camera bag on the cold and hard vinyl seat. The center of Purmort looked quiet enough — the few stores and two service stations darkened and empty — and in a few seconds I was back on Route 3, passing the small wooden building that held Justin’s Plumbing Supplies, and the offices of the weekly Purmort Sentinel (Jerry Auberg, editor).

It was cold, very cold for October, and the lights from the truck caught the bright colors of the foliage of the trees along Route 3, which each fall enticed tourists to drive for hours. On both sides of the two lane road, up beyond the trees and forests, were the ridgelines of the Purmort range. The mass of the mountains was impressive, like distant battleships sailing silently and without lights. I wondered what creatures lived up there at night and I shivered.

I missed the turnoff for Timberswamp Road and had to make a sloppy U-turn farther down. Timberswamp was a town-maintained road, unlike Route 3, which is maintained by the state. Purmort being Purmort, the road was cracked and bumpy and there were no streetlights at all. The few homes were set far into the woods, and all of them had bright and powerful yard lights on. I drove a mile and six-tenths by the truck’s odometer before I saw the flashing lights of the firetrucks and police cruisers. I pulled up behind another pickup truck — one belonging to a volunteer firefighter, no doubt, since it had a slap-on red strobe light on its roof — and stepped out, swinging my camera bag over one shoulder. The cold hit me like a wet towel against my face, and I saw my breath in the frigid air.

There were lights everywhere, blue ones from the two Purmort police cruisers and red ones from the two fire engines from the Purmort volunteer fire department. There was the loud crackling of radio static coming from the vehicles, and I walked along the road, nodding and looking at the huddled groups of volunteer firefighters, many in their nightclothes and wearing bunker jackets and heavy boots. It was then that an odd thing happened.

By that time, after all that had gone on over the summer, most of them had begun to at least accept me, if not quite trust me. But as I walked by none of them looked my way. They turned their backs and talked to one another, like tiny herds of animals in winter turning among themselves, protecting one another from an outside threat.

I walked up the road, a slight embankment of dirt and grass on the right, and that was when the smell of smoke and something else struck me, and I held onto the camera bag strap very tightly.

It began in spring, and innocently at first, with a few grass fires along some of the farms that dotted the outlying areas of Purmort. At first the firefighters and the chief of police, Randy Parnell, blamed the fires on kids smoking cigarettes or raising hell in preparation for summer vacation. Being the editor and sole reporter — and owner — of the Sentinel, I put the stories inside the paper. No cause for giving the kids publicity, I thought.

It was my fifth year in Purmort, and by the beginning of that fifth summer, I was beginning to feel that at long last Purmort was coming around to my presence. I don’t blame them much for resenting me when I started there — I had come from that great hedonistic state to the south, and I was well-educated and a newspaperman, always a doubtful combination in a small town. But I came in with a large reserve of smiles and a willingness not to be pushed around, and in a while the Sentinel did all right. I didn’t ignore the petty crimes and drunk driving arrests that every town offers, but neither did I go on investigatory rampages if the town road agent plowed out a few family driveways for free when times were tough in the winter.

The fires that spring meant nothing, and I was looking forward to another round of Town Meeting stories, until a warm May weekend when a summer cottage on Lake Arthur and a barn on Swallow Reach burned down. Then the state came in, with state police detectives and experts in arson, and in a while, through a tersely-worded press release, it was announced that the grass fires and the fires at the cottage and barn were connected. There was an arsonist at work in Purmort.

For the moment, at least, I found that hard to believe. I had come to Purmort after thirty years of banging around in newspaper work in some of the larger cities in Connecticut and Massachusetts, eventually reaching the top levels of editorial staffs. And one warm spring day, as cliche-ridden as it may sound, I decided I didn’t want to be the top editor of one of those large dailies any more. I had gone to too many funerals of my fellow editors and writers, and I decided I didn’t want to be remembered and then forgotten at a similar service. By then I was by myself. My wife Angela had left me some years back, after deciding she wanted to discover herself, and every now and then she sends me an oddly-written postcard from some small community in New Mexico, where she makes pottery. Our only son moved out to California, working in an esoteric field of physics and computers I could never fathom, and twice a year — as regular as elections — I get cards from him for Father’s Day and Christmas, each enclosing a hundred dollar check.

With that spring decision, I eventually made it to Purmort, buying a failing weekly newspaper in the process. Now, five years later, two parts of me reacted when I heard about the arsonist: as a newspaper editor interested in a story, one more exciting than anything else going on in the area, and as a resident of Purmort, wondering if my home would be there when I got home late from a selectman’s meeting or county fair.

I liked Purmort, and I liked my home. It was small and sturdily-built, with two woodstoves and a tiny barn, set on a well-wooded lot on the Sher River. In the house and barn I had thirty years of newspaper clippings, mementos and memories, over a thousand books and years of color slides from trips all over Canada and the West, and Lord, how I didn’t want to miss that. For the very first time I thought of my past arrogance as an editor, spiking stories about house and apartment fires, or burying them far inside the paper. “Not news,” I would say. “Happens all the time,” and I never suspected then the gut-wrenching feeling of coming home with all of your thoughts and hopes and wishes of a quiet evening, and seeing only a blackened pile of rubble where your den used to be.

After hearing the news of the arsonist I had to travel to three towns before finding a store that hadn’t sold out of smoke detectors, and I installed one in the basement, one on each floor of the house, and one in my barn. And, like so many of the townspeople in Purmort, I began going to bed at night with all the outdoor lights on and a loaded shotgun by my bed. I slept with a suitcase of clothes at my side and at night — no matter how cold — I kept a bedroom window open, to hear an approaching vehicle or footsteps along the grass.

Like so many others in Purmort, I never got a good night’s sleep that summer.

For a week after the first spate of fires nothing happened, until one night, after a church meeting, the Olson family from Mast Road came home to see their two-hundred-year-old farmhouse burning bright, like a beacon upon a hill. It took Kerry Olson ten minutes to drive to his nearest neighbor to find a phone, and by the time the two engines from the Purmort volunteer fire department roared up, the house had collapsed and there was nothing left to do but wet down the embers.

And just when we started to appreciate the shock of that, a day later, half of Mrs. Corinne Everett’s house burned before the Purmort department and some firefighters from Tannon arrived to save the other half. But she never went back home, Mrs. Everett, and she went to live in the county nursing home. I visited her once, for a followup story, and she sat alone in a wooden chair, staring out the window, and all she could talk about was her home, and her pet parakeet who had perished.

Oh, how the town started to change that summer. It was always another cliche that Purmort was a town where one could go to sleep at night with the house unlocked, but it was true, and the arsonist took that away. For a week or two the people in town, sitting around the Common Coffeeshop, or at Tay’s Tire, gossiped and complained and nodded and said that it had to be an outsider, some damn flatlander who was doing the burnings. But that talk faded away when it became apparent the arsonist knew the town, knew the people, and knew them both very well. When that became known, the people of Purmort stopped looking over their shoulders, and started looking at each other.

One of the selectmen, Jeff Tamworth, talked to me one night, his leathery and wrinkled face puzzled and dismayed at the same time. “Jerry,” he said as we sat in one of the booths and shared a meatloaf dinner at Ruby’s Diner, “I’ve lived here all my goddamn life and I can’t believe what I’m seeing. People are hushing up all the time now and staring at each other, and you know why? ’Cause you don’t know who the son of a bitch is. He might be the guy sittin’ next to you, having a smoke and a cup of coffee, and you sure as hell don’t want to say you’re going to visit your mom next weekend and the house is gonna be empty, or you don’t want to talk about goin’ on vacation. Christ, when you can’t talk about stuff like that with your neighbors, it’s almost as bad as it gets in the big cities.”

Having spent years in the big cities, I was too polite to disagree with him, but two nights later Jeff Tamworth and I were in agreement.

That night I was out doing a story about Bob Reardon, who’d come back from a trip out to Alaska where he had done some big game hunting. It would be a nice human interest piece, something to lighten up the Sentinel’s pages since the fires started. But while Bob might have been a demon behind a high-powered rifle, he was lousy at directions — probably couldn’t tell you which direction the sun rises every morning.

So I found myself driving back and forth on Blueberry Hill Road, looking for a green house with white shutters and a dirt driveway. About the third time I made the round trip I pulled over next to a driveway to look at my notes again. But before I could switch on the inside light, the barrel of the biggest and blackest shotgun I ever saw came through my open window and stopped about six inches from my head. I froze, both hands in mid-air.

A voice from the darkness: “Now who the hell are you, and what are you doing out here?”

“Jerry Auberg, from the Sentinel,” I said, trying to keep my voice even. “I’m looking for Bob Reardon’s place.”

The shotgun barrel wavered, and then slowly pulled away. I turned and saw a heavyset man, with a thick and scraggly beard, looking in, chewing on a lower lip. He wore a red and black checkered hunter’s jacket. “Got proof on that?” he said.

Luckily, I had a couple of copies of the newspaper with me, plus my driver’s license. Within seconds the shotgun was by the man’s side and he offered me his hand, which I shook, more to stop the trembling than anything else.

“Tyler Whitney,” he said, motioning with his shoulder. “Live up there on the hill. I was standing watch tonight, my brother Ray, he takes the morning shift, and I saw your truck go back and forth a couple of times. Sorry if I scared you, but me and my brother are building a house up there. We don’t want to lose it.”

“It’s all right,” I said, though I sure as hell didn’t feel all right. But I decided polite talk in the presence of a shotgun was the best approach.

“You’re a newspaper man,” he said. “They getting any closer to catching that fellow?”

I said, “No, not that I know of, and if they were, I’m sure the cops wouldn’t tell me. Arson’s such a tough crime to prove — you almost have to catch the guy lighting something off.”

“Maybe so,” Tyler Whitney said, picking up his shotgun. “But that fella better hope the cops catch him first. One of these nights he’s gonna pick the wrong place to torch, and he’s gonna get his damn head blown off, cops or no cops. And, buddy, you can print that in your newspaper.”

When he left I drove a few feet, stopped and stepped out and got sick by the side of the road. If he had been any meaner, if he had been drinking... I remembered the closeness of that shotgun barrel, imagined smelling the gun oil and the gunpowder, tightly wadded up and ready to explode with a twitch of a finger, less than six inches from my head.

I’m afraid I never did the interview that night with Bob Reardon.

The fires stopped for eight days, and some residents started wondering aloud if the arsonist had gotten tired or scared.

And on the ninth night, he burned down the town garage.

The mood in Purmort grew worse. People were getting dark circles under their eyes from staying up so late, and arguments and even a few fistfights broke out over trivial things at the Common Coffeeshop or Ruby’s Diner. Some children collected their favorite toys or dolls and mailed them to friends in other towns or states for safekeeping.

One of the worst nights was the night a benefit dinner was held at the Congregationalist Church, to raise money for the fire victims, four families who sat silenced and embarrassed in one corner of the church basement. The night was going along all right — the usual hams, casseroles, and baked beans — until a group of Purmort volunteer firefighters came in, dressed in their blue nylon windbreakers. And seeing that, Mrs. Olson — who had lost a hundred-year-old doll collection in her home — stood up and screamed, “I’ll bet it’s one of them, one of those volunteers. Why not? They know how to put fires out — I’ll bet you they know how to set them!” Then some of the volunteers’ wives shouted back at her, and it got worse.

And if the fires weren’t bad enough, my friends and the townspeople of Purmort had to put up with another burden — the media.

For a short while the only stories about the burning of Purmort appeared in the Sentinel, or in stories filed to the statewide Union Leader by Amos Turin, a retired high school English teacher who lived in Tannon, the next town over. But after the town garage fire, and the fire at the Keefes’ (where the eighty-seven-year-old grandmother survived by clambering out of her bedroom window and onto a garage), the wire services picked up the stories. And the avalanche started.

Boston newspapers and television stations. Camera crews from the four networks. Time and Newsweek. Reporters and writers and producers in fancy clothes, standing in the middle of the common, wanting to know where the “downtown” was and the taxi stands. When this onslaught started I had some serious thoughts to myself and spoke with Chief Parnell, finding him at his basement office in the Town Hall. He had lost a lot of weight, his usual sleek green police uniform a baggy and greasy-looking mockery. His eyes were red-rimmed and almost lifeless, like those belonging to a man fighting an invisible and spiteful foe.

I said, “Chief, when these media types get here, you be on your best behavior.”

This stirred him some from his seat, huddled against a paper-filled desk. “What do you mean by that?”

“I mean these are pros, out-of-state, sent up here to do a story. They don’t give a hoot about you or Purmort. They can buddy up to you and say, ‘Don’t worry, whatever you say will be off the record,’ and it’ll be on the six o’clock news that night. They’re up here for one story and then they’re gone, and you’ll never see them again. They don’t care what happens once they leave.”

The chief seemed to take that to heart, but not Ryan Duffy, the volunteer fire chief who worked days in Tannon. He was quoted in almost every story, and his fat, bearded face was on a lot of newscasts. It backfired, of course, with some of his own men griping about him, and eventually the state police sat on him and told Ryan to shut up. Before that, unfortunately, there were two camera crews on hand the night Mrs. Olson started screaming at the firefighters in the Congregationalist Church basement. That made the evening news, with a lot of analyzing about “small town pressures” and “coping mechanisms” and a lot of false sympathy from the television people.

One afternoon I was halfheartedly typing up some deed transfers at the Sentinel’s office when a familiar-looking man came in, dressed in casual clothes — designer jeans and sport shirt — that blinked a high price tag at you. He was about my age, beefy-looking and grinning, with dark, thinning hair. He had a gold watch about his thick wrist, and as he approached I stood up and stuck out my hand and said, “Well, I’ll be jigged. Harmon Kirk. Harmon, I don’t think I’ve spoken to you for five years.”

His grip was strong. “Right with that, Jerry.”

I said, “Still with the Courant?”

“No, that was two papers ago. Got my own column, syndicated in a lot of dailies in the Northeast. Hope to go national next year.”

Well, I knew what he was up here for, but for a while, at least, we were polite to each other, trading war stories and lies about past editors and stories. As we talked I admit I looked about my office, noticing the three mismatched desks and the piles of newsprint and the manual typewriters. A long distance from the many computerized newsrooms I had worked in.

Harmon finally said, “I guess you can figure why I’m here, Jerry. I’m doing a piece on your fires, and when I found out you were here, I knew I had to come by.”

“Not my fires,” I said, trying to smile. “And I’ll be happy to tell you what I know, so long as I’m not quoted in any way.”

Harmon’s smile flickered a bit, like an old light bulb. “Not even for an old drinking companion?”

I tapped on my chair arm a few times. “Harmon, drinking companion or no, I’ve been interviewed and re-interviewed by a dozen of your colleagues and I’m—”

“They’re your colleagues, too,” he interrupted.

I said, “True, but I also live here. This is my home.”

He said nothing for a moment, making me think he was going to leave, and he said, “Okay — off the record, I hear rumors that there are vigilantes up in the hills, trying to track down the arsonist. Any truth to that?”

I had heard the same rumors, but I didn’t want hundreds of thousands of Harmon’s readers thinking that we were all crazy hill people up here, armed with rifles and the like. I shook my head no.

It was a fairly dispirited interview. After a few minutes Harmon slapped shut his notebook and said, “Sorry to say, Jerry, you sure as hell have changed since we were in the same newsroom. I don’t think the old Jerry would’ve stonewalled me like that.”

“The old Jerry never had a home — just rental agreements,” I said. “You can imagine I feel a sense of responsibility here.”

“What about your responsibility to your readers?”

I tried to smile, tried to make him see what I had become. “My readers all live within ten miles of here — they’re my neighbors. And all of them, even me, are scared of losing our homes. And they see you folks coming in, making fun of them and using their tragedies for your own gain. Harmon, I like this town, I like it a lot, and I’m proud of living here.”

A few days later — after the Unitarian Church burned down — I ran across Harmon Kirk’s column in one of the larger dailies, and he had quoted me, of course, but by covering up my identity and naming me only as a “local newsman.” Being as I’m the only local newsman in Purmort, it didn’t do much.

Another effect of the media barrage was to focus some of the townspeople’s hostility on me. Even though I owned and wrote the local paper, and had done so for five years, the fires stripped away the thin layer of acceptability which I had so diligently grown over the many months. Hardly anyone talked to me on the streets, and sitting down at the lunch or breakfast counters at Ruby’s Diner or the Common Coffeeshop meant people on either side of me would silently pick up their plates and move elsewhere.

Subscriptions to the Sentinel — never big to begin with — started to dwindle, and I found myself caught in the middle of two opinions. Some people in Purmort thought my stories only encouraged the arsonist, and that I should report nothing (nothing!) at all about the fires. And another group of people felt I was hiding news and information, important items that the state police and the chief were hiding.

As for the first point, I could never have kept the Sentinel silent about what was going on in Purmort, and as for the second point, I had to plead a modified guilty — I never printed everything I knew.

For one thing, I accidentally learned — through a thoughtless comment by one of the state police boys in the chief’s office — how the fires were set. A set of oily rags, jammed into a corner or in a woodpile, and then set ablaze with three wooden matches. Repeated, every time. Seconds after I found this out Chief Parnell was practically on his knees, begging me not to use it.

“Jerry, this is the only thing we’ve got on the son of a bitch,” the chief said. “The only thing. You write it up in the Sentinel and he’ll switch to something else, and we’ll never be able to tie him in to all the fires when we get him.”

I had to think long and hard on that one, but in the end, I gave in. I wanted to report the news, but most of all, like everyone else in Purmort, I wanted the arsonist caught. If this made me a bad newsman, well, it was something I could live with. I wanted to save my home.

On a Wednesday late in September, I gained back some of the acceptance and respectability of the people of Purmort.

I had spent the afternoon having lunch and doing some work at home, and I was a mile on the road into town when I realized I had forgotten some notebooks in my kitchen. I turned the pickup truck around in a school bus turnoff, and a few hundred feet from home, I saw a black cloud of smoke above the trees. I sped up, thinking maybe it was a car fire, or grass fire, or some kids camping out in my back yard.

I didn’t bother to park the truck in the driveway — I drove across the lawn and into the back yard, watching the flames billow out and the smoke pour away from my barn.

It seemed like forever as I stood there by the truck, watching the flames grow larger, and watching the paint blister and blacken against the south wall of my house, and there was a quick, horrible debate going on inside my mind — call the fire department or grab the garden hose — what to do first?

Though the debate seemed to go on forever, it probably only lasted a few seconds. I ran to the garage, tossing aside rakes and shovels and grabbing the hard coil of a garden hose. My fingers and hands were trembling as I unrolled the hose in the back yard, and I broke two fingernails (and didn’t notice it until the next day) screwing in one end to the outside faucet. As I worked I muttered a lot under my breath, hoping that someone, anyone, would see the smoke and call County Dispatch.

The smoke and flames rose higher and the heat was tremendous, blackening and curling the grass, blistering the south wall of the house. I turned on the hose and the water came rushing out, and when I turned it against the barn I realized what a pitiful stream of water it really was. I kept the hose on the barn for a few long minutes — remembering what was stored there — but I knew the barn was lost after there was a sharp crack as one of the windows on the south wall of the house burst from the heat. I shuddered and turned the hose onto the south wall, trying to wet it down.

The fire trucks came in a few minutes, and in that time the entire south wall was charred and two windows were broken, but the house was saved. That was at least some consolation, for the barn had collapsed upon itself by the time the trucks arrived.

The barn, with at least two hundred books, my only childhood photos of myself and my parents’ wedding album, my winter clothes, slides from my trans-Canada trip, and two book manuscripts I had always wanted to finish, was gone.

I didn’t bother picking through the rubble. It would have depressed me even more. Instead, I spent fifty bucks for Burke Farnsworth to come by with his backhoe and flatten everything and drive it into the cellar hole.

And seven days later — just a week! — Tate Burnham was arrested and charged with the arsons.

I must give Chief Parnell and the state police credit, for not once had Tate Burnham’s name come up in any of my conversations with the chief or the state. But I learned he had been one of the handful of suspects from the start, and mainly because of the practically-forgotten cottage fire that had started it all, on Lake Arthur. The cottage belonged to the Maynard family, and Tate Burnham — who worked in one of the mills in Tannon — had been dating seventeen-year-old Cindy Maynard. She had broken up with him and for revenge, perhaps, he had burned down the family’s cottage. And to cover his tracks, the barn on Swallow Reach also went up in flames the same day.

Tate Burnham lived with his stepfather and mother in a trailer near the Purmort-Tannon line. And at one time, for about a year, he had been a volunteer firefighter in Purmort, until he dropped out last summer for no apparent reason.

The most-asked question, of course, was why? And in a private few minutes I had with Chief Parnell before Tate Burnham’s court hearing, the chief had shrugged and said, “We think he started liking it, that’s all. Simple as that. He started burning things down and enjoyed it.”

Simple motive, and a simple capture. One Wednesday members of the Greater Purmort Bird Club had been watching for a Great Thrush Whacker or something up on Garrison Hill, and they had seen Tate Burnham walk a ways across a field and go into some woods. Some minutes later they saw smoke rising in the distance and saw Tate run hell-bent-for-leather out of the woods. One of the birdwatchers recognized Tate and the state police and the chief were told, and they got search warrants and found a collection of rags and a box of matches identical to the ones used, a map marking some of the fires, and other evidence.

Though I was happy he was captured, I wished he had been caught sooner, but the fates didn’t work that way. The smoke rising the day the birdwatchers saw Tate Burnham came from my barn.

A few days later I covered Tate Burnham’s bail hearing, and that’s when the so-called Miracle of Purmort occurred.

In the basement of the Town Hall, next to the police station, was the district court. On the day of Tate Burnham’s hearing, the benches were full and there was standing-room only against the cement walls. I managed to get a seat up front. The rest of the media horde had returned, including, I wasn’t too happy to see, Harmon Kirk. He gave me a half-wave and I responded with a half-smile, and then Judge Temple came out, long black robe flowing. After some legal jumbo Chief Parnell and a state trooper came in, with Tate Burnham between them.

Tate was barely twenty, standing at least six feet and gangly. He had an acne-scarred face and a scraggly beard, and he wore army fatigue pants and a black T-shirt imprinted with a colorful logo from one of those rock bands. There was a collective sigh in the room when he walked in, and I wondered suddenly why Chief Parnell or some county sheriffs hadn’t frisked the crowd as they came in. It would have been mighty easy to smuggle in a pistol or a sawed-off shotgun, and Harmon Kirk caught my eye and smiled again, and I knew the same thing was on his — and others’ — minds. No doubt the rest of the media were there to cover the bail hearing, but I’m sure some were secretly hoping for an outburst or a vigilante display.

After some more legal talk Judge Temple set bail at fifty thousand dollars, cash or surety, meaning property or some such being put up for the bail amount. I heard a few low moans from the front right bench, and saw a heavy woman in black polyester stretch pants and a teary-eyed man, arm across her shoulders, and I imagined they were Tate Burnham’s parents. That amount probably seemed as much as a million dollars to them, and I saw Tate turn and smirk at his parents, and at that moment I felt my jaw clench, knowing this smiling twerp had torn a part of my life out with his rags and matches.

Then a few people started coming forward, either with checks or pieces of paper in their hands, and the court clerk look flustered and went up to the judge, and soon there was a line of people at the bench, all carrying something in their hands, and the courtroom started buzzing and I was scrambling to write in my reporter’s notebook as Judge Temple rapped his gavel and said, “Tate Burnham, you should consider yourself one lucky soul. About twenty of your neighbors have come forward to pay your bail.”

There was some shouting and crying from his parents, but after a few moments the handcuffs were off Tate Burnham and he was being hustled out of the courtroom, past the bright lights of the television cameras and the microphones of the reporters. The place became very crowded and I found myself wedged in among some reporters next to Wayne Ferguson, road agent for the town, who scratched at his bald head and explained why he had put up one thousand dollars for Tate Burnham’s release.

Wayne Ferguson said, “Well, the boy’s troubled, anyone can see that. I don’t see what purpose or good it’d do, having him put in jail until the trial. No purpose at all. After all’s said and done, he’s from Purmort, he’s a neighbor. And we take care of our own here.”

With that he pushed some of us aside and I was next to Harmon Kirk, who carried one of those hand-held Japanese tape recorders.

Harmon said, “Hell of a good story, Jerry.”

“That it is. But you must be disappointed — no vigilantes.”

Harmon smiled at that. “Right. No vigilantes. My editors will be dismayed. Guess I’ll have to pitch them a piece about a crazy town with a big heart.”

“Guess so,” and with that phrase, never had I been so proud to be a resident of Purmort.

That night, after my supper, I sat in front of my first-floor woodstove and watched the trapped flames flicker and dance, knowing my home was safe.

But I was up on Timber-swamp Road, shivering in the late night cold, watching the hard gray in the east signal a slow-approaching dawn. I remembered how I talked to the county dispatcher, Norma Quentin, and how she hesitated when I asked her about this fire and Tate Burnham. The smell of the smoke was mixed with something else, a harsh, greasy smell, and I made my way farther up the hill, finding my way easily enough in the lights from the firetrucks and the police cruisers. Chief Parnell was there, with two of his officers, and I nudged past them, looking at the crest of the hill where the grass had burned away.

There was no wreckage there, no blackened timbers from a house or a barn. In the middle of the burnt-out grass patch was an oak tree, its trunk scorched by the flames. Next to the trunk was a gasoline can, turned on one side, its paint bubbled and smeared away. Wrapped around the base of the tree was a chain, and the chain ran down the hill a short way, where it ended up wrapped around the legs of a charred carcass, which at first looked like a cow or a goat or a...

Only by turning my head quickly and stepping away was I able to avoid getting sick. I breathed through my mouth, not wanting to smell that horrible, greasy odor again. Chief Parnell came over to me and grabbed my arm, and we walked a bit, down the darkened road, until my head cleared.

The chief said, “Got here quick enough.”

“My sources. You know that.” I looked back up the hill, and just as quickly looked at the chief. “Who is it?”

The chief shrugged. “Not an official I.D., but based on what we know and who was reported missing last night, I’ll have to say Tate Burnham.”

“Tate Burnham...” I turned and saw the chain again, imagining what it must’ve been like, to be chained there and engulfed in flames, not being able to escape or even move. I looked back at the chief and noticed the firefighters and the two other Purmort police officers, standing in a loose circle, all staring at me.

I said, “Who do you think did this to him?”

Again that casual shrug, and though the sun was beginning to rise, I was feeling colder. “Himself, I imagine,” the chief said, his voice even.

“Himself?” I demanded, my voice rising. “Chief, you’re saying he did it to himself?”

The chief’s eyes narrowed and he said, “That’s exactly what I’m saying, Jerry. The man knew we had him nailed to the wall, knew he wasn’t going to escape a guilty verdict, knew he could never live in these parts again. Me, I think — and I’m gonna tell the state police this — I think he came up here, depressed as hell, and he killed himself, just like those monks in Vietnam back in the sixties.”

“Chief, the chain...”

The chief just raised an eyebrow. “He probably did it to himself, make sure he couldn’t chicken out. Jerry, it makes sense, now, don’t it?”

I tried to catch my breath and failed. My head seemed like it would burst, and I felt like grabbing the chief’s shoulders for some reason. The firefighters and the police officers had stepped closer to me, still standing in that loose circle, and all of them were looking at me, and their expressions were all the same, a very cold expression, of a group or tribe looking at a dangerous outsider. For a moment I almost felt like laughing, remembering how suckered we had all been, at the so-called miracle as the townspeople lined up to pay for Tate Burnham’s bail. Sure, out of the goodness of their hearts, to free Tate Burnham from the grasp of the state and to bring him back to the town where he belonged. I remembered what the road agent, Wayne Ferguson, had said: We take care of our own here.

They certainly do. The group of firefighters and police officers were closer, and again I felt like laughing at the horror of it all. I could live here for another ten or twenty or thirty years, and never would I belong, never would I be a part of what went on here in Purmort, below the surface and behind the headlines. I looked at all their faces, old and young, and they all looked like brothers.

I spoke up, loud enough so everyone could hear. “If you say so, but it’s a pity, chief. A real pity, that he died this way.”

There were some smiles given to me by the group after that, and in a minute or so, I began walking quickly back to my truck, and once I glanced behind me, and I was happy to see I was alone. I went into my truck and locked both doors and before starting the engine, I placed my head on the steering wheel and wept.

I had lost my home.