The Boy in the Burning House

by Tim Wynne-Jones

  Jim stared at her incredulously. “Into the church?”

  Ruth Rose nodded proudly, but her expression soured. “I got in okay but then the fuzz came.”

  “The cops?”

  She nodded. “I got arrested,” she said. “Father called them. Can you believe it? His own daughter.”

  “So you told the police what you were doing,” he said with a kind of weary resignation, already imagining the scene.

  “You bet I did,” she said. “I told them about Father murdering your dad and that the proof was probably in the church office somewhere.”

  “Let me guess,” he said. “They didn’t go for it.”

  She looked at him with something approaching a wicked grin lighting up her pale face. “I kinda pulled a Ruth Rose Way on them, I guess. Went ballistic. Gave one of them a black eye,” she added. “They released me into Father’s custody. He didn’t press charges but he made sure I wasn’t around for the inquest.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Ruth Rose’s grin dissolved. “I was packed off somewhere. I don’t want to talk about it.”

  Jim didn’t want to talk about it, either. There was something more pressing he needed to know if he was to believe anything she said.

  “So now I know why you couldn’t get anybody to listen to you back then. But why are you trying now? And why me?”

  Ruth Rose suddenly looked tired. She sniffed, rubbed her nose.

  “I need your help,” she said. “Yeah, don’t say it — I need lots of help. But seriously, I’m afraid. Father’s really weird. Weird like… well, almost like your father was last fall.”

  “What are you saying?”

  She looked him straight in the eye. “I think you know what I’m saying.”

  Jim could feel the anger rising in him. He tried to remember that he was talking to a crazy person. She didn’t know anything. For all he knew, she was making it all up.

  “You’re saying, this blackmailer was blackmailing both of them — Father Fisher and my father. Then it stopped… after my dad disappeared. But now it’s started again.”

  She didn’t move a muscle.

  “Listen,” he said, his voice belligerent. “Maybe my father knew something — something Fisher did. Maybe. And maybe that’s what drove him nuts, ‘cause he wanted to tell but he didn’t want to get Fisher in trouble. But don’t try and tell me he did anything wrong. You didn’t know him. He was the best. And no freak is going to tell me different.”

  She didn’t punch him or argue, but he could see she was hurt. Well, she deserved it. She was nothing but trouble.

  She looked down, looked up again with a little scornful smile. “Like I said. You’re not ready for this.”

  He was going to shout at her. But he didn’t want to shout. Didn’t want to be dragged into her game.

  “All I meant,” she said, “was that things cooled down after Hub disappeared. Father was gloomy for a while but he wasn’t on edge.”

  “Yeah, well, you’d be gloomy if you lost a friend,” said Jim. “If you had any.” He swallowed hard. He hadn’t meant to say that.

  For once, Ruth Rose was quiet. Then, after a long silence, she looked past Jim up the lane. “You ever wonder what happened that day at the cedar grove?” she asked, her voice pitched almost too low to hear.

  Jim’s head snapped up. “Are you kidding? I never thought about anything else for most of the year.”

  “Well, try this,” she said. There was a look in her eyes as if what she was going to say was some kind of test. “Your dad meets up with Father that day, just like he told him to the night before at the church. He’s somebody your dad trusts, right? They go out for one of their long walks or for a drive, maybe, to talk things over some more. There’s a million places up this way they could go and nobody’d see them. Half the farms on this road are deserted. The wilderness stretches halfway to Hudson Bay. They could have gone anywhere.”

  Reluctantly Jim nodded, feeling a little sick.

  “Your dad wants to do something, talk to somebody, basically cave in — that’s what it sounded like to me the night before. Father doesn’t want him to. Father says it’s going to be all right. But it isn’t going to be all right if your dad starts blabbing.”

  “Blabbing about what”

  “If I knew that, I wouldn’t be here,” she said. “Maybe what happened to Tuffy.”

  “That was an accident,” snapped Jim. “Death by misadventure.”

  Ruth Rose raised her eyebrows. The gesture infuriated Jim. Nothing was an accident to her, he thought.

  “Okay, okay,” she said. “Something else. That’swhat we’ve got to find out. But something they were in together.” Jim was about to object when her eyes lit up. “You just don’t get it, do you? You won’t believe your daddy could do anything wrong. Fine, don’t. But let me finish.”

  “Okay,” said Jim. “So finish.”

  She stared at him slack-jawed, shaking her head as if she had given up on him entirely. To his surprise, he didn’t want her to give up.

  “Go on,” he said quietly.

  She sighed. “They go somewhere where no one’s around. Fisher does him in. Maybe it wasn’t intentional. Maybe they were having this fight and he killed him by mistake. But it’s done. So then he drives the car down here and leaves it so it looks like your dad just abandoned it.”

  “How?” said Jim, “There were just my dad’s footprints down here. Nobody else had been in the car. They had those forensic guys go over it. They don’t miss stuff like that. There were no ‘alien fibres’ — that’s the way they put it. Nothing.”

  “I’m not talking about aliens,” shouted Ruth Rose.

  Jim couldn’t talk anymore. His head was clogged up with painful images. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t thought them before — thought of his father meeting up with some horrible end. He had imagined biker gangs and bears. Murderers of every shape and size had paraded through his nightmares. But he had never put a real face on the killer.

  Ruth Rose lightly touched his shoulder. “Hey, I’m outa here,” she said. Her anger seemed to have passed. “You listened to me, at least. That’s more than anyone else ever did. Thanks. If you find out anything, you could… you know…”

  She left, headed back towards Ruth Rose Way. She left her pickaxe behind. Jim was going to call after her, when he looked more closely at the tool and realized that it wasn’t hers, after all, and she hadn’t stolen it from any railroad crew, either.

  She had lied. There were initials carved into the butt end. HH. It was his father’s pickaxe.

  6

  Hector Menzies had been a newspaper boy at the Ladybank Expositor when his mother was a reporter. He had been a cub reporter himself when his mother took over the reins as editor. And he had become editor when she took over from her father, Salvator Menzies, as publisher. Hector was publisher now and he was a busy man. But not so busy he couldn’t spare a few minutes for Jim Hawkins.

  Jim went to the Expositor office the next day after school. He hadn’t thought to phone and make an appointment but, luckily, Hec passed by the front office just as Dorothy was explaining to Jim that he would have to come by some other time.

  Hec led Jim into his cubby-hole of an office. It wasn’t much for the publisher of a newspaper — a ceiling you could touch if you cared to reach up, no window, no carpet and an elephantine desk that just about filled the space and looked old enough to have been Noah’s desk on the Ark.

  “We don’t have any money for frills,” Hec said to Jim. “The circulation of the Expositor has grown in direct proportion to the population of Ladybank over the last hundred years, which is to say, not at all.”

  When Hub Hawkins had disappeared, there had been lots of regional press coverage of the story, even in Ottawa and Kingston. Not because Jim’s father was famous, or anything, but because it was a mystery. Besides, Hub had been a pillar of the community: a deputy reeve of North Blandford Township, a hardworking board member of the Ladyba
nk and District Public Library, and a pretty good skip at the local curling club, which had once sent a team to the Eastern Ontario finals in Cornwall.

  Hector Menzies, although old enough to be Hub’s father, had been second on that team and a friend of the Hawkins family ever since. His grandfatherly friendship had come in handy during the awful weeks of the previous fall when the farm had been under siege. Not from grasshoppers or groundhogs — things a farmer learns to cope with — but from news men and women banging on the door at any time of the day or night. They parked their cars and satellite-rigged vans all over the place — in the way of the barn so that Iris couldn’t get her cattle out to pasture, in the way of the fields so that good neighbours couldn’t get in to help with the harvest. It was hard enough for Jim and Iris, but the media hounds made it even worse.

  Until Hector stepped in.

  Hector Protector.

  Hec set himself up as a kind of self-appointed spokesman for the family, deflecting the advances of the most obnoxious snoops and bringing some order into an otherwise chaotic situation.

  He never once used his privileged insider status to benefit his own insignificant little weekly. No glimpses of the family in mourning, no scoops. He kept private what he felt deserved to remain private. Which was pretty well everything.

  Jim had put Hec out of his mind once the siege was over, but he was glad to see him again, despite the memories his lined old face evoked. He squeezed into the only other chair in Hec’s office. The computer terminai looked out of place on the desk, and Hec looked out of place sitting behind it.

  “What can I do for you, Jimbo?” he said.

  “I want to find out about a fire that happened up near us in 1972.”

  Hec’s forehead wrinkled for a moment. He looked like he was going through a file in his head that included so many fires and car crashes and hunting accidents no reasonable human could hope to keep track of them.

  “A kid died in it,” Jim added hurriedly. “A kid named Francis Tufts. It was New Year’s. Don’t you have it on your computer or something?”

  A light went on in Hector’s grizzled face. He smiled, raising one of his bushy eyebrows. “Oh, I can find what you’re looking for since you’ve got the date and all. But I’m still a newspaperman, Jimbo, and a newspaperman depends on a sharp memory even more than he depends on a sharp pencil.” He patted the computer monitor. “You won’t find it in here,” he said. “What you want is hard copy.”

  He pushed himself up and out of his chair. “Follow me.”

  Jim followed him down a long corridor with offices on one side and a wide sloped counter all along the other. Under it, row and rows of shelves buckled with the weight of bound volumes of the Expositor. Hec dragged one off the shelf and laid it down on the counter at eye level: 1972 was embossed in gold on the cover.

  “Voilà!” he said, opening the volume to the very first page. “Easy as pie. The lead story in the first issue of the year.”

  There before Jim’s eyes was a grey and grainy photograph of a log cabin kind of slumping in the middle, as if a giant had sat on it. The windows and door were boarded up, but the stoop was recognizable as the one where the Three Musketeers had been sitting in the photo at home. Above the picture was the headline: BOY DIES IN NEW YEAR’S EVE BLAZE.

  Jim looked at Hec. If he was wondering what Jim wanted with the story, he didn’t show it. He just seemed proud to be able to provide the information.

  Jim saw that the article continued on the following page. “Can I photocopy this?” he asked.

  Hec shook his head. “Newspaper isn’t meant for the long haul. It’s meant to get read and put in the bottom of your bird cage. See how fragile the paper is?”

  Fragile and fading fast, thought Jim, suddenly worried that he might not even have time to read it.

  “But,” said Hec. “I can give you a pen with the Expositor logo on it and a sheet or two of yellow foolscap and you’re free to copy it out longhand.”

  So Jim did. He copied the whole thing. He wrote in his best hand as if it were the good draft of a school assignment.

  A New Year’s Eve blaze took the life of former North Blandford resident, nineteen-year-old Francis Tufts. The fire burned to the ground a local landmark. The log cabin, situated on the Twelfth Line, and once lived in by the Tufts family, was in the news several years ago, when it was believed to be haunted.

  The fire was reported by Jock Boomhower who was attending a get-together across the road at the home of Purvis Poole. The volunteer fire brigade made good time considering the snowy conditions but was unable to save the building. Volunteer Fire Chief, August Sweeney, stated that they had no idea there was anyone inside. It was not until Ontario Provincial Police were combing the site the following morning that they discovered the charred remains of the Tufts boy. He was identified by a silver allergy bracelet. Contacting his parents now living in Brockville, the police were able to ascertain that the boy had been expected home for Christmas but had not shown up.

  The house was being used by a neighbour, Wilfred Fisher, to store hay. An inquest will be held into the death, but according to Constable Lorne Braithewaite, there do not seem to be any signs of foul play. Among the remains around the boy were found several beer bottles and a 40 ounce rye bottle, all empty.

  Heavy snowfall through the night obliterated any footsteps leading to the building so it was not clear from which direction the boy might have journeyed. Constable Braithewaite noted the next morning that even the tracks of the fire truck and the sizeable area the fire fighters had disturbed in their efforts were completely blanketed by the new snowfall.

  Francis’s presence back in the Ladybank area was a surprise. The house had been the last dwelling place of the deceased and his family before leaving the area five years ago.

  Jim stopped to rest his fingers. He stared at the photograph, tried to imagine stepping inside a house that had once been your home, at night, with the windows boarded up, and finding it filled to the rafters with hay. It would be like a nightmare, he thought.

  Francis had been serving a sentence in the Orillia Reformatory, sent there in 1967 after being convicted in juvenile court of several cases of arson in and around Ladybank. His arrest came about in a most unusual way. In 1967, during the week of August 8-15, the Tufts family had reported a number of strange occurrences. Laverne Tufts claimed that “Stove lids danced in the air, the teapots jumped off the stove into the wood box, three flat irons walked down the staircase and dishes pranced on the dining room table.”

  A neighbour, Ormond McCoy, declared that a bone thrown out of the home, time and time again, had always returned to the house for no explicable reason.

  On the Sunday directly following the report of “Ghosts,” a flotilla of cars and the chopper from Ottawa television station CJOH arrived at the Tufts home. “Ghost Hunters” and paranormal experts descended upon the community from as far away as Buffalo, New York.

  Believing there had to be a more reasonable explanation for the occurrences, the Perth OPP detachment stationed an inspector on the property for the night. That inspector was Lorne Braithewaite, a rookie at the time, fresh out of Police College. He remembers having tea at the kitchen table with Mrs. Tufts at about 11:0() PM when 14-year-old Francis arrived home smelling strongly of gasoline. When Braithewaite received a call shortly thereafter regarding a fire at a farm down the road and later learned that arson was suspected, he returned to the Tufts household and apprehended Francis for questioning.

  Not only did Francis plead guilty to setting the fire, but he also owned up to several other fires in the area. As well, he ended speculation by admitting that he had been the “ghost“of the Tufts home. The youth was sent away and his family moved from North Bland ford. Francis is survived by his parents Wendall and Laverne Tufts and his younger brother Stanley, now residents of Brockville.

  Jim’s hand was shaking. He reread the last sentence, scarcely able to believe it. Laverne was Tuffy’s mother. He reread
the whole article and then stood leaning against the wooden counter, thinking.

  The ghost incident had happened when Francis Tufts was fourteen. The white-haired Musketeer had looked around that age — around Jim’s age — in the photo. So Eldon Fisher and Hub had been friends of the fire starter right around the time of the haunting of the Tufts house.

  Jim closed the newspaper yearbook. He didn’t want to think about the log cabin any longer, or the flames that had consumed the boy trapped inside.

  His mother was in town to do her weekly grocery shopping and they had agreed to meet at the library. He had said he had some research to do and would be there at five. It was important that he not lie to her. It had not been all that long ago that he had been so twisted up inside he couldn’t speak, so twisted up he had tried, more than once, to kill himself. Ruth Rose had been right about the tree jumping. Jim had lied to his mother a lot in that bleak time. He couldn’t talk but he would write on the pad on the kitchen table that he had been playing in the woods or in the sand pits up the road at Purvis Poole’s or over at Jesse Desjardin’s.

  He didn’t want to have to lie to her ever again.

  Billy Bones had brought him back to his senses. Jim thought about Billy now. He thought about Ruth Rose. Maybe crazy people were the only ones he could associate with anymore. Maybe he was half crazy himself.

  He had not told Ruth Rose he was coming to the Expositor. He wasn’t sure he would help her. All he knew was that she had lit a fire inside him. Some kind of burning need to know.

  He checked his watch. It was time to leave. But there was something else he needed to look up, while he was here. Plucking up his courage, he dug out the newspaper yearbook for 1997 and turned to September. With his heart pumping and a lump as big as a bullfrog in his throat, he turned the pages until he found the edition that featured his father’s disappearance.

  There was an out-of-focus photo on the front page of volunteers combing the Hawkins land for traces of the missing man. With a shaking finger he scanned the article for something he dimly remembered reading there. Then his finger landed and his eyes scanned the paragraph.