Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 34, No. 13 & 14, Winter 1989

It was my fifth year in Purmort, and by the beginning of that fifth summer, I was beginning to feel that at long last Purmort was coming around to my presence. I don’t blame them much for resenting me when I started there — I had come from that great hedonistic state to the south, and I was well-educated and a newspaperman, always a doubtful combination in a small town. But I came in with a large reserve of smiles and a willingness not to be pushed around, and in a while the Sentinel did all right. I didn’t ignore the petty crimes and drunk driving arrests that every town offers, but neither did I go on investigatory rampages if the town road agent plowed out a few family driveways for free when times were tough in the winter.

The fires that spring meant nothing, and I was looking forward to another round of Town Meeting stories, until a warm May weekend when a summer cottage on Lake Arthur and a barn on Swallow Reach burned down. Then the state came in, with state police detectives and experts in arson, and in a while, through a tersely-worded press release, it was announced that the grass fires and the fires at the cottage and barn were connected. There was an arsonist at work in Purmort.

For the moment, at least, I found that hard to believe. I had come to Purmort after thirty years of banging around in newspaper work in some of the larger cities in Connecticut and Massachusetts, eventually reaching the top levels of editorial staffs. And one warm spring day, as cliche-ridden as it may sound, I decided I didn’t want to be the top editor of one of those large dailies any more. I had gone to too many funerals of my fellow editors and writers, and I decided I didn’t want to be remembered and then forgotten at a similar service. By then I was by myself. My wife Angela had left me some years back, after deciding she wanted to discover herself, and every now and then she sends me an oddly-written postcard from some small community in New Mexico, where she makes pottery. Our only son moved out to California, working in an esoteric field of physics and computers I could never fathom, and twice a year — as regular as elections — I get cards from him for Father’s Day and Christmas, each enclosing a hundred dollar check.

With that spring decision, I eventually made it to Purmort, buying a failing weekly newspaper in the process. Now, five years later, two parts of me reacted when I heard about the arsonist: as a newspaper editor interested in a story, one more exciting than anything else going on in the area, and as a resident of Purmort, wondering if my home would be there when I got home late from a selectman’s meeting or county fair.

I liked Purmort, and I liked my home. It was small and sturdily-built, with two woodstoves and a tiny barn, set on a well-wooded lot on the Sher River. In the house and barn I had thirty years of newspaper clippings, mementos and memories, over a thousand books and years of color slides from trips all over Canada and the West, and Lord, how I didn’t want to miss that. For the very first time I thought of my past arrogance as an editor, spiking stories about house and apartment fires, or burying them far inside the paper. “Not news,” I would say. “Happens all the time,” and I never suspected then the gut-wrenching feeling of coming home with all of your thoughts and hopes and wishes of a quiet evening, and seeing only a blackened pile of rubble where your den used to be.

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.