I said sure.
About fifteen minutes after Rita left I turned off the lights out front, locked the front door, and went back to the storage room. I went through the leather-bound volumes of the old Granite Timesuntil I found the set I wanted. March 1944. It was a thin volume, and the old yellow sheets felt brittle in my hands. The musty smell transported me back in time, as I studied the tiny print under the large headlines. The advertisements were so innocent-looking that I hesitated over them. OD 30 deodorant. An appeal by the local Red Cross. And playing at the downtown Strand Theater — still operating to this day — was the movie A Guy Named Joe, starring Spencer Tracy.
Some of the stories were familiar: road construction bonds, town meeting disputes over loose dogs, and a one-car accident in the town common involving a drunk driver and an ancient maple tree.
But there were other headlines as well, headlines that reminded me just how different things were back then, when guys my age and much younger were involved in a worldwide struggle against darkness. NAZIS IN HUNGARY. PARTISAN FIGHTING CONTINUES IN BALKANS. And on page two of the paper, the latest casualty lists from the army and navy, breaking down who was wounded and who was killed from the local towns, and in which theater of operation it had occurred. In the list for the Boston Falls area there were a handful of dead, names like Coughlin, Dupont, Dupuis, and Morrill.
Then, the headline I had been looking for, and I looked up just for a moment, to make sure I wasn’t being watched.
Then, underneath the headline, the lead of the story: “The War Department announced yesterday that a prisoner of war camp for German and Italian prisoners will open in the next few weeks. The camp, located on Shay’s Meadow, is expected to hold up to five hundred PWs.”
I stared at the paper, rubbed the brittle surface. Then I started flipping through the pages, faster and faster, trying to avoid the headlines about battles in Europe and the Pacific, about scrap drives and bond drives, stories about mud season and budget appropriations.
Every now and then, a small story would appear about the prisoner of war camp up on Shay’s Meadow, a camp that had disappeared and now only existed in these faded sheets of paper and the concrete footings that were still there. The stories talked about the arrival of German and Italian prisoners from North Africa, how some of them would be working in the summer planting crops, or in the forests, cutting lumber. There had even been an escape, when an Italian prisoner who had fallen in love with a local girl had just walked away from a weeding detail at a local farm, and was picked up less than a day later.
My hands started moving more slowly as I reached the month of June. There, June 13th. The headline was on the front page, complete with a photo.
FAST-MOVING FIRE KILLS 24 AT PW CAMP. I read through the story, seeing how the blaze had started in one of the barracks, how it had been blamed on an electrical short or the careless disposal of cigarettes. The photo showed the members of the Boston Falls Volunteer Fire Department wetting down the wreckage of the barracks, smoke billowing out from the blackened timbers. I looked again at the headline. Twenty-four dead. I was getting ready to close the volume when I saw a small sidebar story with a tiny headline: Local Soldier Discovers Fire. The story said that the fire had been discovered by Paul Gagnon, a Boston Falls boy who had unexpectedly been stationed in his own hometown to serve as a guard at the PW camp.
I thought for a few moments, and then I flipped back through the month of June, looking for something familiar, something I had seen before. I found it on page two of the issue from June 9th.
Then I jumped as the phone at my desk started ringing. I snapped the bound volume shut and looked toward my desk, where the shrill ringing continued. I wondered who was calling me here, who knew I was still in the office.
The phone kept on ringing.
Come on, I thought. This is a small office. Why are you letting it ring so long? Don’t you know no one’s here?
The ringing continued.
“Fine,” I said. I got up, prepared to answer it, but just as I reached it, it stopped ringing.
I put the bound volume back in its place, and went home and locked all my doors and windows.
It was now Tuesday morning. Over the weekend I’d gone for a drive by myself, down to the beaches of New Hampshire, about a three-hour drive away. I rented a room in a small beachfront motel — spending about a quarter of my monthly rent bill for a two-night stay — and spent a fruitless few hours unsuccessfully looking for the beach that Connie Simpson, the police chief, had stayed at. I thought I would enjoy being on the wide sands, with all the delightful attractions in bathing suits around me, but my thoughts kept on going back to a small town with tall trees and sharp hills.
On Monday, after taking care of the weekend police and fire logs and writing a weekend wrap-up for that day’s paper, I spent the day at the town hall and the county courthouse, quietly checking records — the mundane paperwork that can lead you right to someone’s home address.
Now, Tuesday morning, I was walking down the freshly washed and shined floors of the Crawford County Rest Home, past the quiet staff efficiently taking care of the residents, some in wheelchairs, others sitting in a large sunroom. I was looking for someone in particular, and in Room 104, I found him.
Mr. Paul Gagnon, formerly of the U.S. Army and the War Department’s Prisoner of War Camp in Boston Falls, New Hampshire, was sitting in a chair near the window overlooking the parking lot. He looked over at me for a moment as I came in, and then resumed his gaze outside. He was nearly completely bald, with just a short frizz of white hair circling his wrinkled and freckled scalp. He had an afghan on his lap, and his black-and-red-checked shirt was buttoned all the way up to his fleshy neck. His black-rimmed glasses were repaired on one side with a strip of tape. On a shelf near the window were a collection of photos and glass knickknacks, and in his lap, his large and slowly shaking hands held a telephone. I looked at the photos for a moment and wasn’t surprised to see a face that I recognized.
I took a spare chair and looked across him, past the carefully made bed. Soft music was piped in from speakers overhead, and the room had the smell of old medicine and old memories. The television set was on, but the volume had been turned down.
“Mr. Gagnon?” I said, my reporter’s notebook closed in my lap. “Mr. Gagnon, my name is Jack Spooner. I’m from the Granite Times. I decided to come here today, so you can talk to me face-to-face instead of making your call.”
He spoke up, his voice quiet. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Yes, you do,” I said. “You’ve been calling me every Tuesday morning for the past few months, wanting to confess about those twenty-four dead prisoners of war, up on Shay’s Meadow.” Then I lied. “The phone records prove it.”
That seemed to make him think, for he sighed and shifted in his seat, and continued looking out the window. The minutes passed and then he said, “I don’t have anything to say to you.”
“Sure you do,” I said. “You’ve been saying things to me every week now, every Tuesday morning. That’s because the fire happened on a Tuesday morning, back in June 1944. Right? Everyone thought it was accidental. Electrical failure, burning cigarettes tossed in a trash bin. But you knew better, right? You knew better because you set that fire, didn’t you?”
He said nothing, but his hands tightened on the telephone. I went on. “The fire happened on June thirteenth, right? Just four days after the latest casualty lists were printed in the paper. A casualty list that included Raymond Gagnon. Your older brother. Killed in France.”