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.