Tim Wynne-Jones: The Boy in the Burning House

“Lome? Is that you?” he said, as if he was calling to an old friend.

“You know it is, Fisher”

“ Father Fisher, Lome,” he said. He actually chuckled, as if the chief were guilty of a lack of respect. “Listen, Lome,” he said smoothly. “I’m sure we can work something out.”

“I’m sure we can, too,” said the invisible voice over the loud-hailer. “Just as soon as you let the boy go.”

Fisher sighed. “Ah, but that’s just it. I can’t let the boy go. Surely you must see that.”

More spotlights blazed from the left and from the right. Jim watched spectral figures fanning out around him. Through slit eyes, he saw them crouching, running, conferring. He heard the unmistakable sound of firearms being prepared for business. Fisher immediately tightened the grip of his forearm across Jim’s windpipe.

“The boy and I are friends, Lome.”

“I know that, Father,” came the voice over the loud-hailer. “We’re all friends here, so let’s take ’er good and easy. Have ourselves a talk.”

Jim could hardly breathe. He was on the brink of passing out when, all of a sudden, the pressure across his windpipe lessened. Something had distracted Fisher’s attention.

Then Jim heard the dog, the cornfield dog, barking somewhere in the woods just off to the west.

“Over here, Poochie!” screamed a girl’s voice from below.

“Ruth Rose!” shouted Jim.

Fisher’s huge hand, stinking of kerosene, closed over Jim’s mouth. But Jim would not be silenced. Knowing Ruth Rose was there gave him a jolt of courage. He shook his head just free enough to bite down hard on the flesh at the base of his captor’s thumb. Fisher yowled and withdrew his hand, but Jim wasn’t finished. He lifted his right foot high and brought the heel of his work boot down with all his strength on Fisher’s foot. Fisher grunted with pain and Jim tore himself away from the man’s grasp and rolled out of his reach.

“Stop!” yelled Braithewaite. “Somebody grab her.”

Ruth Rose had broken through the police cordon and run to Jim’s aid. She reached him before Fisher and stood between the man and the boy, crouching like a wrestler, daring him to come closer. Others followed Ruth Rose but Fisher seemed not even to notice them. Something in his stepdaughter’s eyes seemed to bring him up short. Then the cornfield dog burst into the light and went directly to Ruth Rose’s side. She held the dog by his collar, and Fisher backed away as if it was a hound of hell.

Fisher retreated up the stream bed, stumbling, falling. Jim lay watching as several armed police swarmed past him.

Suddenly Jim gasped. For one startling instant, Fisher must have stepped into the convergence of all the searchlight beams. His face became radiant, shining. His clothes glowed as if they were made of light — as if beams of light were passing clear through him.

Then, out of the dazzling haze behind him stepped a fog-enshrouded ghost. It was Stanley Tufts, but his long pale hair was loose and wild and the light was trapped in it like a broken halo. His blue eyes were half mad and in his hands he carried a rock the size of a child’s head.

Fisher did not see him. He stepped back right into his path, turned, looked up, cringed and covered his head. Stanley brought the rock down, a glancing blow on Fisher’s shoulder. But enough to fell him.

His mother held him and, somehow, Jim held her and managed to hold onto Ruth Rose at the same time. Then Hec joined in, holding them all. Even the cornfield dog got his licks in before bounding off into the night.

All the hugging put some colour into Ruth Rose’s cheeks but she seemed in shock. She watched two attendants carry Fisher on a stretcher to an ambulance, and her wide eyes blinked like someone waking up from a nightmare.

Laverne Roncelier was wanted for questioning but they didn’t need to extradite her; she came on her own as fast as she could. And once she had checked up on Stanley in the Great War Memorial Hospital in Ladybank, she turned herself in to the police. But the blackmail letters, which Fisher had been keeping in the old clubhouse in the cave, clearly revealed that money had never been the object of the exercise. Just as Stanley had said, all she had ever wanted was justice.

Fisher’s offer of money had not only been the final insult, but also all the proof she needed of his guilt. It didn’t go unnoticed by Jim or other folks in the Ladybank area that the amount Fisher offered Laverne Roncelier to keep her mouth shut roughly coincided with the money he had raised for the Kosovo relief campaign.

Father Fisher had all kinds of things to say. He had a story for anyone who cared to listen, and they varied as the weather did that autumn. He claimed no responsibility for any wrong-doings. But then, other times his mind slipped a gear and he babbled whole scenes of the drama that had led up to the disappearance of Hub Hawkins. It was as if a little voice inside him was trying to break through the walls of denial behind which he had retreated so many years ago.

One rainy November morning, he told a forensic psychiatrist that he had pushed Hub into a deep mine shaft at Tabor just to put him out of his misery. He seemed to believe he had been doing his old friend a favour. He told how he covered his tracks, leaving the car in the cedar grove, walking away in Hub’s own shoes, just as Ruth Rose had suspected. The lip balm dispenser had been his only mistake and he had covered that well enough. He was an impressive liar. A pathological liar.

A police team following up on Fisher’s confession, discovered the bones, the earthly remains of Hub Hawkins, at the bottom of a shaft deep inside the mine. He could be laid to rest at last.

It was a strange funeral, well attended, including every preacher from every church in Ladybank and the surrounding countryside.

Jim overheard Hec talking to Iris later about the flock of preachers. “They’re here to mourn the loss of something more than a good man,” he said. Jim wasn’t quite sure what he meant, but he saw a grievous sadness in the eyes of the preachers. Father Fisher had been one of them and yet never really one of them at all. For all his good deeds, he had been an imposter, a fake. He had abused his power horribly and in his actions had made a mockery of what was for them a profound and abiding belief.

Ormond McCoy built a pine coffin for the funeral. Pat McCoy and Daisy Tysick helped Iris with the luncheon which was held at the farm. Nancy helped, too. It was hard for her to be there at all, but she returned from Tweed at Iris’s request. And at the request of Ruth Rose. It was Ruth Rose who reminded anyone who would listen of her mother’s bravery in sending the letters to Iris.

Lettie Kitchen brought her horrible green Jello with miniature marshmallows to the funeral. Hec Menzies went around getting people to try it. “Ever taste anything like that?” he asked in disbelief.

The Church of the Blessed Transfiguration came through with a loan to help out Jim and Iris. Iris had a good mind not to accept it, but Hec was able to convince her that she would be doing them a favour if she could accept the donation. The Church had a lot of healing to do.

So Iris was able to quit her job at the soap factory and concentrate on the farm. She and Jim planned crops together on winter evenings. Sometimes Ruth Rose was there. She seemed to live somewhere between her own new home, an apartment on the outskirts of Ladybank that she shared with Nancy, and her adopted home with Jim and Iris. The two households were connected by Ruth Rose Way.

Jim showed her how to do farm chores. She didn’t much like farm chores. In the fullness of winter when the land hibernated under a thick goose-down of snow, he taught her to cross-country ski.