Chapter 9

Rawle Powder was speeding down the 101, heading to the scene of the firebombing in Ellershouse.
He called the Brooklyn Fire Chief, Percy Burns, en route, and got the official version of what happened.
It was definitely arson. Someone had thrown an incendiary device through the window of the home. Two young children were suffering from smoke inhalation and a woman suffered second and third degree burns on 18 per cent of her body.
He found Dawson Road fairly quickly and pinpointed the burned house.
He parked in front of the driveway next to a ditch. The snow was black and dirty in places. The house itself looked like a charcoal-blasted fireplace, but it was still standing.
Not just the facts, ma’am.
He knew he would need some good ‘colour’ for his story, in order to give it legs. He would need to quote emotional outbursts, or a raving diatribe. He would need graphic details. Colour photos of some of the burns maybe.
It was a day and a half now, after the fact, and the TV stations had all gotten film last night, during the fire, and packaged it in time for their morning news.
They had pictures of the fire blazing.
Rawle was on the trail of what would end up being a two-day old story by the time it got into the paper tomorrow morning.
Jesus. If he couldn’t dig up some colour, the story might not even run.
He stuffed his small digital camera, notebook and pens deep down into his pants pockets, then climbed out of the Golf and walked straight up to the charred house, feeling nervous.
The home-owners were not at home, obviously, but at least the structure was still standing.
Part of the roof was missing and there were downed powerlines snaked across the snowy yard.
He snapped a few close-ups. There was a wet smoke-smell still in the air. He leaned his head through a chewed-up window and snapped some more pics of what was probably once a living room. All the walls and debris and furniture in the room was stringy intexture and had been reduce dtot he colour of ashes.
Everything was ruined.
He leaned his head back out.
The property had been taped off with a yellow strip of plastic Fire Line Do Not Cross, which always helped colour-up a photograph. The tape was probably the only thing keeping the house from being bulldozed. It meant an ongoing arson investigation was taking place.
No one was home at the neighbours to the right, either, but he found a nice retired couple living in a bungalow on the left.
An old man and woman were fiddling around in their kitchen when he came up and rapped on the screen door.
A small dog started yapping somewhere inside.
“How are ya-now?” the old man said, cheerfully swinging open the main door.
“Hi,” Rawle waved. “Mind if I talk to you for a minute?”
The couple walked toward the door, holding baking utensils in their wrinkled hands, both grinning widely.
“Sure,” the man said.
“Hi. My name is Rawle Powder… I’m a newspaper man,” he said, trying to speak old-person lingo. "I work for the Halifax Gazette."
“You must be here about that awful fire,” the man said, looking over his shoulder and nodding in the direction of the ruined house. “Terrible thing.”
“Yes,” Rawle said, feeling his pulse quicken. “I’m wondering if the family is still around or…?”
“The Purcell’s? They’d be at the hospital,” the man said.
Purcell’s, Rawle committed the name to memory.
Purcell, Purcell, Purcell.
“They’re staying with some friends down in Halifax,” the old woman said, in a dottering voice. “But I don’t want to say anything I shouldn’t. Maybe you should talk to the authorities? The policemen or the firefighters? It was such an awful thing that happened.”
“Terrible,” agreed the glinty-eyed man. “It was like a war zone. This is a pretty quiet neck of the woods. We don’t see that kind of commotion too often.”
“-I told Roger,” the woman said, looking at her husband, “after the war he had to buckle down and take a civil service job. Roger thought about being a police officer too, you know. But I told him ‘over my grave.’ And come to think of it, I told the same thing to Sally. That’s the lady. They’re a nice, young couple. I told Sally what her husband did for a living was downright dangerous, what with them kids, and he was liable to get hurt. But never did I imagine it would be her that got hurt. And those poor little girls. Oh-” She put her hand over her mouth in shock, as if remembering something terrible.
Rawle’s adrenaline was going ape-shit. Did she say police officer?
“I’m sorry. Ahhh, what do you mean,” he said “when you say ‘police officer’? Are you saying Mr. Purcell is a cop?”
“No, no,” the man said. “I wanted to be a policeman. Purcell is a prison guard.”
Son of a… Rawle’s heart still pounded. It was still good news.
A prison guard.
“I didn’t know that,” Rawle said, trying to act casual.
The nearest things to Hants County that would qualify as a prison was the provincial jail in Dartmouth, or maybe the old man meant the Young Offender prison in Waterville?
Rawle knew he really needed to get the first name of the jail guard, badly. He had the last name and the woman’s name, Sally.
Authorities like the Fire Chief won’t tell the press victim’s names, not unless you had a good source.
But “news is names” as assignment editor Bert Mittelstaedt was fond of saying.
Without names, local news was all but pointless. The reason people read local news was to find out if the terrible thing that happened, happened to anyone they knew.
Rawle needed names, but he also didn’t want to push too hard and scare the couple off. The trick was to keep things conversational and make the neighbours feel like they were talking to a neighbour or something, not reciting quotes that tomorrow would be read by a third of the province.
“What prison does he work at? One around here?”
“It’s the Dartmouth jail,” the old man said. “The new jail. I forget what it’s called.”
Burnside,
“Because I know some Purcell’s who live in Dartmouth,” Rawle said, improvising. “That’s why I wondered if they were related. What’s his first name?”
“Who? This fella?” The old guy pointed back at the burned house.
“Yeah….” C’mon tell me, you old bastard.
“-Todd. That’s Todd Purcell.”
Yes!
Todd and Sally Purcell. He had the names. It wasn’t necessary to name the children, although that would have been even better. The parents were enough for now.
He felt an urge to whip out his pen and start scribbling notes, but he worried that would spook his rabbits. It was important not to act like a reporter, one of the most reviled professionals in the world, a step above politician.
A Jesus jail guard! Rawle’s mind raced with the possibilities.
He thought about the story’s potential and felt a warm, familiar prickly nervousness deep in his belly, the feeling he got whenever a story had page one potential.
The feeling was the best part of the job.
“Todd’s father lives in Dartmouth,” the old man was saying. “That might be who you’re thinking of. His father used to work at the Volvo plant. Jack Purcell, if my memory serves.”
“Aw-yeah,” Rawle went along, nodding. “That sounds familiar. That makes sense. ‘See my family’s from Dartmouth too. The Powder’s. My dad was a machinist at Volvo before he went to IMP in Enfield. Then we moved up to Hants County.”
“Oh yeah?”
They bullshitted for a while more. Eventually, the elderly couple took Rawle through what they heard and saw the night of the fire, very gradually and with Rawle still standing on the front step in the freezing cold. They did not invite him inside.
They told him the woman got burned badly on both her arms.
The old couple had been asleep but woke up and went outside when they heard the screaming.
The old woman gave a tear-filled account of what Sally Purcell looked like pacing up and down the street before the ambulance came. Rawle almost wished he had a TV camera.
“I can’t forget what I saw. Yesterday, we just did what we had to do, but today I keep seeing what I saw. I keep seeing that poor woman with her face pitch black with soot. You know? She had her arms crossed in fornt of her face and the skin was hanging down off her arms… She couldn’t stay still, she was in so much pain. She just kept pacing up and down the street. How could anyone do something so evil?”
Rawle shook his head and burned that quote into his memory. It was a page one quote. Skin hanging from her arms. Face black with soot. The woman pacing. How could anyone do something so evil?
He had no idea, but the world was full of evil, and his job was to expose it to a shell-shocked citizenry.
He still had to get the old couple’s names so he could quote them by name, especially the woman. Day assignment editor Bert Mittelstaedt hated anonymous quotes and punished reporters who used them with shitty assignments.

After talking for nearly an hour on the doorstep, the couple began to pull back into their home. Rawle saw his last chance to learn their names slipping away. He put out a stiff hand and re-introduced himself as he turned to leave. “I appreciate it very much. I’m Rawle Powder.” He was hoping they would spit out their own names in reflex as they shook hands, which they did. “Roger Biggar” and “Heti. Nice to meet you.”
Thank God for old-fashioned manners.
Rawle left abruptly after that and drove home with the heat blasting.
It was noon so he called Jack en route for a check-in.