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.