“You remember.”
“I do.” He looked at the carpet. “A great tragedy. Early that morning, my late wife and I heard the siren go off, calling the volunteers to the fire station. We wondered what was going on. I’ll remember that call from the fire chief to my dying day.” He went to a file cabinet in what should have been the living room and opened a drawer. He pulled out a sheaf of white paper held together by a brad. “You’re welcome to sit while you read it.” He gestured to a leather chair. “Can I get you something to drink?”
“No, thanks, but I will sit.”
The insurance report was four tightly spaced pages, obviously typed on a typewriter. The first part was a form with all the pertinent information, address, owner names (Howell and Madeleine Lowe), age of dwelling (1700s), type of construction (wood frame). No wonder the place had gone up like a tinderbox. The report stated that two victims had succumbed to smoke inhalation and were deceased when the fire department found them. One juvenile was rescued and had been transported to Yale New Haven Hospital and later transferred to the newly opened Connecticut Burn Center at Bridgeport Hospital.
The rest of the report was a straightforward recitation in prose. The fire had begun in a couch, almost certainly from an improperly disposed cigarette. There were no signs of accelerant, though once the couch was burning, the fire had spread rapidly due to the presence of a dried Christmas tree standing in a nearby corner.
There had been a New Year’s Eve celebration at the house that night. The report listed the participants. Attending, in addition to the victims, were Enid Sparks, the female decedent’s sister; Deborah and Phillip Bennett; Henry and Caroline Caswell; Michael Smith; Sheila Bennett; Barry Walker; and Fran Chapman. The evening had involved much celebrating and many cocktails. Everyone except Enid Sparks was a smoker. All of those present had sat on the couch at one time or another. Toward the end of the evening, the couch had been mostly occupied by the women.
I sat back in Tom Dudley’s leather chair. The weight of the tragedy astonished me. The Lowes were dead, their son grievously injured, and all of the childhood friends had been in the house that evening. Had they all spent the last forty-plus years wondering who left the cigarette? Did they know, or suspect, who had done it? No wonder they didn’t want to see each other again. They hadn’t drifted apart, separated by geography, as so many of them had assured me. The Rabble Point set had exploded on that cold January morning.
The rest of the report consisted of interviews with all the surviving party guests. No one remembered losing a lit cigarette. Barry Walker confessed that not only did he not remember losing a cigarette, he didn’t remember much of the evening at all. It was hard for me to imagine that all these inebriated people got into their cars and drove home, though apparently they had. But then, it was hard for me to imagine a party at which almost everyone was smoking, and smoking inside the house. A lot had changed in forty years.
The last interview listed was with Fran—a telephone interview because she had returned to Maine. Unlike the others, she said she’d had one glass of wine and was able to give a sober account of the evening. She reported everyone’s movements in detail. The party had begun with cocktails in the living room. Five-year-old Austin had been there to greet them and then had been put to bed. The adults moved to the dining room for dinner. The celebrants returned to the living room to ring in the New Year. Fran reinforced what everyone else had reported. At one time or another, each one of them had sat on that couch, including Madeleine and Howell. At the end of the evening, the people on the couch had been Caroline Caswell, Sheila Bennett, and Fran herself. I had to admire Fran’s straightforwardness with the investigator.
There had been no sign of anything amiss when the guests departed, the report concluded. Howell and Madeleine had evidently gone straight to bed without doing much cleanup. The idea of them leaving the party dishes for the morning, a morning that never came, brought a tightness to my chest and tears to my eyes.
I cleared my throat. “Can I take this to the library and make a copy?” I asked.
“I never let these documents out of my sight,” Mr. Dudley responded, as if it were a perfectly reasonable thing to safeguard decades-old insurance reports. “But I can make a copy for you right here.”
I handed the report to him, and he disappeared through a swinging door. I heard a copier rev up and then chunk-chunk-chunk through the pages. Tom Dudley was back in a jiff with a neatly stapled copy, which he inserted in a new manila envelope.
“Are you working with the other man?” he asked. “What other man?” Had the cops already been there?
“A man came here about six months ago asking for the same report. I gave him a copy.”