Tim Wynne-Jones: The Boy in the Burning House

His father had done something terrible and he had been ashamed of it. It wasn’t hate that killed him, it was shame. But Fisher had no shame and there was no one in the world to bring shame upon him.

Unless…

An idea began to take form in Jim’s brain. The hurt faded. The rage faded. His hatred faded. There was no room for it if he was to make his plan work. He had to put aside the past, make his way lightly and carefully through the present and keep his mind on the future. If he could just keep his cool until tomorrow.

Leaning his head against the window, he watched his mother arrive. By the time she entered the house, he had summoned up a smile.

Jim had never skipped school before. But then, he had never tried to visit someone in jail, either, or cooked up a plan to track a murderer. It was a day of nevers. A day he would never forget.

He wrote a letter to Ruth Rose on the school bus. The writing was jerky but the message was clear enough. Anyway, he was hoping she would never see it. He was hoping she would see him in person. He imagined a room like in a movie, the two of them sitting on either side of a glass wall with guards at the door in case anybody tried anything funny.

By the time the bus pulled into the school driveway, he knew he wasn’t going to be able to wait until lunch time to see her. By lunch time, he might chicken out.

The jail was an historic building attached to the back of the old courthouse on St. James Hill just a few blocks from the library. He had stared up at the high grey walls and barred windows and imagined dark corridors and grizzled, desperate men in striped pyjamas. It was hard to picture Ruth Rose in such a place. And it was his fault she was there. She had wanted to be caught because he had let her down.

Inside the front door there was a stiflingly small reception area, bare of any furnishings or decoration. There were three doors and one window with thick glass — bullet-proof glass, Jim suspected — which looked into an office. There was only one person in the office. She wasn’t in uniform.

“Can I help you?” she asked, with a look that suggested she couldn’t.

Jim bent down to the little talk hole in the glass. “I’d like to speak to one of your prisoners,” he said.

The woman behind the glass twitched away a smile. “Did you have a particular one in mind?”

“Ruth Rose Fisher,” he said. “I’m not sure if it’s visiting hours yet, ma’am, but it’s really urgent.”

The woman’s expression softened. “Well, I’m sorry, but you just missed her. She’s gone.”

Jim’s eyes grew wide with surprise. “She got away?”

The woman nodded vigorously. “Uh-huh. Flew the coop. Some guy came in here with a birthday cake for her and I guess it must have had a rat-tail file hidden in it.”

Jim Hawkins the idiot.

“I was just pulling your leg,” said the woman good-naturedly. “Ruth Rose was remanded into custody pending her trial.”

“What does that mean?”

“Well, she’s been charged with public mischief, but we’re not going to keep her locked up for that. Usually she’d be out under the supervision of a family member. In this case, no one seemed to be available and Children’s Aid wasn’t interested. Luckily, someone stepped forward to act as her guardian.”

“Not her real guardian?”

“Well, it’s a bit unusual,” said the woman, leaning on the counter behind the glass. “But Chief Braithewaite figured it was all right. Anyway, the girl was all for it.”

“May I ask who took her?” said Jim as politely as possible.

The woman observed Jim closely. He tried to keep eye contact with her, tried not to look like a criminal — hoped she wouldn’t ask him why he wasn’t in school.

“I guess it can’t hurt,” she said at last. “She left here with Mr. Menzies, the publisher over at the Expositor . How does that sound to you?”

“Great,” he said. “Thank you. Thank you very much.”

“Now, don’t you go getting her in trouble,” said the woman. This time, Jim knew enough to smile.

He went directly to the newspaper office. Hec wasn’t in. He wasn’t at home, either.

“He could be anywhere,” said Dorothy.

There was nothing he could do but go back to school. He signed in late and told the secretary he would bring a letter from his mother the next day. It was difficult getting through the day, and the bus ride home seemed to take forever. Then, when he got home, there was no news. No word from Hec, no word from Ruth Rose. What was going on?

Jim tried to help, but his mother shooed him out of the house. “Why don’t you go check on those beavers,” she said. “Blow off some steam.”

He didn’t feel like going down to the south pasture, but he did go outside. And then he realized where he really wanted to go.

He set off north across the Twelfth Line. He climbed the split-rail fence and headed towards the ridge, towards Old Tabor.

Fisher was in hiding and he was obviously nearby. That was the only explanation for him being on foot the night before. Jim’s bet was on Tabor. And if Jim was right, Tabor was the very place Ruth Rose would make for. He could only hope she would tell Hec Menzies about their suspicions. It was hard to imagine her confiding in anyone after what had happened, but just maybe, if Hec told her what he had told Jim, she would open up. And then, with any luck, Hec would have told Braithewaite and there would be a whole search party already up on the ridge.

That’s what Jim hoped to find, anyway.

The field he crossed belonged to Lar Perkins. It was lying fallow this year, the bare earth hard under foot despite the rains. There had been a stiff wind and the going was relatively dry. Jim climbed the sloping field, crossed a rise and fell out of sight of his mother or anyone travelling on the Twelfth that brisk, late afternoon.

He hopped another fence. Now he was on Purvis Poole’s property, a sea of tangled weeds. He slogged on a way until he came to the shore of a sea of dunes, the edge of the first sand pit. He jumped down and cut across the pit, his feet sinking into the soggy sand. He had put on his work boots for the climb ahead but they seemed clunky now, and he wished he had worn his sneakers.

Crawling on all fours up the steep northern slope of the pit, he came out on hardpack, a road of sorts, though overgrown and unused. But as he walked, his spirit quickened, for he could see from the broken and leaning grass that something — a vehicle of some kind — had passed through recently.

He tramped past Poole’s boarded-up house, climbed another hill, forded another sand pit. He climbed out at another distant shore. He was putting continents between himself and his home. He reached, at last, the place where the rolling meadowland met the bush. He stopped to catch his breath. He turned to look at the valley below, saw the grass bend under the wind.

He could see for miles — Ormond and Pat McCoy’s spread to the east, Lar and Charlotte Perkins’ land to the west, his own house tucked nicely into the maples below. If he shielded his eyes against the westering sun, he could even make out Highway 7 to the south and the tall towers of the calcite factory on the outskirts of Ladybank.

He turned to face the road ahead, which stretched steeply before him. It was a narrow gash through the trees, mostly bedrock. Fists of granite stuck up through the earth like ancient buried giants trying to fight their way out into the air. The bush closed in on both sides.

In a few minutes Jim’s legs ached from the climb, but if he looked at the low juniper growing in the nooks and crannies of the roadway, he saw broken branches and bruised clusters of berries where the chassis of something had passed over. He trod lightly, kept his breath a secret between himself and the air.