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

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.

Boston newspapers and television stations. Camera crews from the four networks. Time and Newsweek. Reporters and writers and producers in fancy clothes, standing in the middle of the common, wanting to know where the “downtown” was and the taxi stands. When this onslaught started I had some serious thoughts to myself and spoke with Chief Parnell, finding him at his basement office in the Town Hall. He had lost a lot of weight, his usual sleek green police uniform a baggy and greasy-looking mockery. His eyes were red-rimmed and almost lifeless, like those belonging to a man fighting an invisible and spiteful foe.

I said, “Chief, when these media types get here, you be on your best behavior.”

This stirred him some from his seat, huddled against a paper-filled desk. “What do you mean by that?”

“I mean these are pros, out-of-state, sent up here to do a story. They don’t give a hoot about you or Purmort. They can buddy up to you and say, ‘Don’t worry, whatever you say will be off the record,’ and it’ll be on the six o’clock news that night. They’re up here for one story and then they’re gone, and you’ll never see them again. They don’t care what happens once they leave.”

The chief seemed to take that to heart, but not Ryan Duffy, the volunteer fire chief who worked days in Tannon. He was quoted in almost every story, and his fat, bearded face was on a lot of newscasts. It backfired, of course, with some of his own men griping about him, and eventually the state police sat on him and told Ryan to shut up. Before that, unfortunately, there were two camera crews on hand the night Mrs. Olson started screaming at the firefighters in the Congregationalist Church basement. That made the evening news, with a lot of analyzing about “small town pressures” and “coping mechanisms” and a lot of false sympathy from the television people.

One afternoon I was halfheartedly typing up some deed transfers at the Sentinel’s office when a familiar-looking man came in, dressed in casual clothes — designer jeans and sport shirt — that blinked a high price tag at you. He was about my age, beefy-looking and grinning, with dark, thinning hair. He had a gold watch about his thick wrist, and as he approached I stood up and stuck out my hand and said, “Well, I’ll be jigged. Harmon Kirk. Harmon, I don’t think I’ve spoken to you for five years.”

His grip was strong. “Right with that, Jerry.”

I said, “Still with the Courant?”

“No, that was two papers ago. Got my own column, syndicated in a lot of dailies in the Northeast. Hope to go national next year.”

Well, I knew what he was up here for, but for a while, at least, we were polite to each other, trading war stories and lies about past editors and stories. As we talked I admit I looked about my office, noticing the three mismatched desks and the piles of newsprint and the manual typewriters. A long distance from the many computerized newsrooms I had worked in.