"Sounds claustrophobic."
"Nope,” she said, tapping the can on her knee. “It was invigorating, knowing that I was bound into the fabric of this little place, that it would always be home, would always be a place I could call my own. That's why I came back here. I couldn't think of living or working anywhere else. Ever since I came back, I'm convinced I made the right call."
"You don't find that small towns equal small minds?"
"Not for a moment. We may be small, but we're close-knit. We look out for each other."
I decided to take a shot. “Does that mean keeping secret what once happened up on Shay's Meadow?"
She kept on looking out the windshield, and now she was smiling. “Old Jack Spooner. Still looking for that big story."
"Among other things,” I said. “Including a big date. How about this Sunday evening?"
The chief put the cruiser in drive. “How about I take you back to town?"
I wanted to protest, but I never get into a heated discussion with a woman who carries both a gun and handcuffs.
* * * *
Late that night, I was in the spare bedroom of my apartment, which I had turned into a half-ass office. I guess if I had bothered to unpack my collection of books and other items, it would be a full-ass office. By the wall that had the only window in the room—which also offered a delightful view of the nearby junkyard—I had set up my desk and my PC. I looked at the glowing screen in the darkness of the room. I imagined the several thousand people out there in Boston Falls this evening, all of them related to each other and knowing each other, knowing not only names and addresses but histories. Background. Who married whom back in 1968. Who went off to the Merchant Marine in World War I. Who humiliated his family in 1862 by moving to Georgia and fighting for the South.
I remembered what the chief had said earlier. In the darkness of this little room, knowing that my small collection of relatives were scattered around New England and the rest of the country ... Well, I could see why it would be comforting. The chief had made the right call.
Still, though. All of these people, knowing one another's secrets. All of this knowledge. All of this moving around in the confines of a small town. Like an organization, a defense organization.
Then an outsider comes in. Asking embarrassing questions. Questions about something related to a mass killing, of twenty-four people.
What then? The group comes together. The group forms a defense. Questions go unanswered, phone calls go unreturned, and books disappear from library shelves.
The small town closes ranks, puts on a friendly face, and waits until the outsider leaves or quits asking questions.
I sighed, reached forward, and started tapping on my keyboard. Within a few moments I was deep on the World Wide Web, on the homepage of a New England used-book dealer who claimed a collection in the thousands and offered overnight delivery.
There. Boston Falls, 1700-1970: A History. A couple of clicks on the keyboard and the book was mine.
This outsider wasn't planning to follow this town's script.
* * * *
Two days later, I left the office early and told Monty and Rita that I was heading over to the Superior Court building—a good half-hour drive away—but instead I made a shorter drive. I ended up at my apartment building and sat on the front stoop, waiting for the mail to show up.
I suppose I could have just picked up the mail when I got home at my usual hour, but the past few days had fed every reporter's instinct for paranoia and conspiracies. Not that I believed the U.S. mail could be intercepted and packages made to disappear, but ... Anyhow, I felt better waiting for the mail to arrive. I was beginning to believe that I was living in a town out of a Shirley Jackson short story, and I didn't want to be on the receiving end of any rock-throwing.
In the end, it was almost anticlimactic. A heavyset woman in a U.S. Postal Service uniform came up the cracked sidewalk, trundling her little mailbag. The package from the bookstore was left in my hands, and I tore open the heavy paper and took a look.
Typical small-town history book. Self-published and maybe a thousand copies. This one's cover was soiled and the binding was cracked, but I didn't care. I flipped the book open to the rear index and found three references to Shay's Meadow. The first reference was for 1774, when the town's militia drilled for a time on Shay's Meadow. The second reference was to a great party and picnic held on Shay's Meadow in 1900, to commemorate the two hundredth anniversary of the town's founding.
The third reference was to something that took place in Shay's Meadow in 1944. Something went ker-plunk in my chest as I read a page and a half of what was in Shay's Meadow at the time, and what had happened there later that summer in 1944.
* * * *
I went back to the newspaper office and puttered through the rest of the day, trying hard to be relaxed. The book was safely at home, in a box inside my bedroom closet. Monty did his usual phone work while Rita chatted with customers who came in to place classified ads announcing yard sales, lost pets, and church ham-and-bean dinners. When four P.M. came Monty announced that he was going out to see a couple of paperboys about their work habits, and when five P.M. rolled around, Rita said her day was through and asked me to lock up the office when I was done.
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.
WAR DEPARTMENT SAYS PW CAMP TO OPEN SOON.
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 p
age, 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."
Now he turned, looking straight at me. “You and your kind, you know nothing."
I nodded. “You're probably right."
"We fought and bled and died for the generations to come, so you wouldn't have to worry about secret police or cities being bombed or being sent away to a gas chamber. That's what we did for you, and how do you repay us? By using your freedom to get drugged up and watch filth on TV, and complain that the stock market isn't making enough money for you. Bah. The hell with you all. Makes me wish sometimes we'd get into another Depression, another big war, not this phony war on terrorism, so you can see what it was really like."
"Your brother, Raymond,” I said, not rising to the bait. “That's what happened, right? You got word that he died and you saw a chance for revenge, a way to get back at—"
He raised a hand from the phone and made a dismissive motion towards me. “Oh, you make it sound so cold and conniving, don't you? The truth? You want to know the truth? I was seventeen years old, carrying a rifle almost as big as me. I was face-to-face, every day, with the enemy, with what we thought of as Nazis. Truth? Most of ‘em were my age, that's right, my age, and were scared at being so far away from home. They didn't look so mean or so scary up close. So it was pretty easy duty. Just escortin’ them back and forth to the farmers’ fields or the forests. But then there came the news of Raymond..."
The old man looked out again to the parking lot. “My only brother. My best friend, really. My dad had died years earlier, so Raymond taught me how to fish and hunt and set traps out in the swamps for beaver. Older brothers sometimes get a kick out of raising hell against their younger brothers. Never Raymond. Oh, we had such grand plans, the two of us, when the war was going to be over. We were going into business for ourselves. Didn't matter what kind of business, we never got that far in talkin’ about it, but what did matter is that we were going to stick together, the two of us, when the war was over."
I sat silently there, letting him talk, my notebook still safely shut on my lap. He went on. “Then ... Mother got the telegram. Back then telegrams were delivered by taxi drivers. Always hated seeing taxi drivers in the neighborhood, ‘cause you knew they were delivering bad news. Poor Raymond. Died the day after D-Day, in France. Oh, how Mother wept, and I did, too, though I kept it secret from her. I was the man of the house, you know ... I wanted to show her how strong I was..."
The music overhead stopped for a moment, as a nurse was paged to report to the reception center. I cleared my throat and said, “What happened at the PW camp, then?"
A slight tremor of the body. “I was young, I was so sad, and so angry ... Those boys in the camp, most of ‘em were captured in Italy and North Africa. They had nothing personally to do with Raymond's death.... But one night, I heard them laughing and singing. You know why? They were happy that the invasion was on, ‘cause they knew the war would be over and they'd be going home to their families, their mothers and fathers, their brothers.... I smoked back then ... I had some matches.... That's all it took..."
He turned and looked back at me, his eyes moist. “The minute I se
t the fire, I regretted it, regretted it so much, Mr. Spooner.... Those wooden buildings went right up and I could hear them screaming inside, screaming as they were trapped.... I reported the fire and helped the firemen drag hoses there, but ... Twenty-four ... In the end, I killed twenty-four ... But what else could I have done? They were laughing and singing while my brother's body was getting colder and colder in the mud of France...."
I slowly opened up my reporter's notebook. “Then why the calls to the newspaper every Tuesday? Why were you doing that?"
A brief smile came over him, just for a moment. “A man gets to my age, your mind starts racing backward, starts remembering. I found I had to say something, confess to someone, so that I could sleep at night. And the local newspaper seemed to be the place to do it."
I uncapped my pen, started making a few notes, looking down at the notepad. “Well, here's a newspaper reporter right here, ready to hear the whole story again, Mr. Gagnon. So tell me how it all happened, right from the start."
His voice: “I'm afraid I can't do that. I'm afraid I won't let you."
I looked up, ready for a comment about the freedom of the press and the First Amendment and all that, but Mr. Gagnon was now practicing his rights under the Second Amendment, and was pointing a large pistol at me that he had pulled out from underneath his afghan.
"You see,” he said, “I've lived here all my life. Raised a family. Became a supervisor in the mills and a selectman for twenty years in the town. This is my home, my place, and I'll be damned if I'm going to let some stranger humiliate me while I'm still alive."
And then he put the barrel of the pistol in his mouth and pulled the trigger.
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