by Ninie Hammon
“Sergeant Carpenter, what do you have to say to allegations that you set fire to the Twin Oaks Nursing Home in 1985 because the residents there were almost exclusively white?”
Jack looked at her in utter astonishment.
Seriously?
Jack had watched the eleven o’clock news the night before, managed to catch the story on two different stations that had produced his manila envelope of screen shots.
It began with the introduction of Anderson Rowland, a freelance journalist who had been putting together a series on the worst fires in American history when he “happened upon” something extraordinary.
“There have been so many advancements in film and photo enhancement in the past quarter century that footage shot at the time of some of these fires—blurred, grainy or out of focus then—now reveals usable images,” Rowland said.
A shot filled the screen of an inferno, a blazing three-story building so engulfed in flames it was unrecognizable. Jack recognized it, though.
“The Twin Oaks Nursing Home in Bradford’s Ridge, Kentucky, burned on June 22, 1985, killing one hundred forty people—one hundred fifteen residents and twenty-five staff. There were no survivors.”
And there it was, the iconic photo seared into the minds of America like the photo of the fireman carrying the dead baby out of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City ten years later.
In the photo, a young man whose hair is on fire carries the burning body of an elderly patient out of the flames.
It was so gripping, the look of anguish on the young man’s face so heartrending that the picture won Louisville Courier-Journal photographer Brent Atkinson a Pulitzer Prize for news photography. It also won the flaming-hair hero an appointment to West Point. His name was Chapman Whitworth.
News film footage and still pictures of the burning building from different angles filled the screen as Rowland continued speaking.
“Arson investigators call Twin Oaks the Mystery of the Century Fire. The main phone line to the building was cut. Firefighters found doors chained shut on the inside. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms agents went over the remains of the building with toothbrushes. They said gasoline was used to start fires in multiple locations simultaneously, but years of investigation have provided nothing to indicate who was responsible.”
Then Rowland began to explain about the parking lot surveillance camera, and grainy images of parked cars filled the screen.
“The parking lot camera survived the blaze because it was located on a light post near the street. Though it was trained on the lot, a small portion of the building—the front steps and door—is visible in the far edge of the camera’s range. But blowing up that portion of the film in 1985 revealed nothing but images too blurry to make out anything.”
Next was computer-enhanced footage. Though still grainy, the steps and the front door were clearly visible.
“The time stamp shows this was shot less than an hour before the fire started,” Rowland said. He paused, then continued dramatically, “Now…watch.”
At first the steps were empty, but then a figure appeared and started up them, his movements a herky-jerky surveillance camera dance. The person was a black boy wearing a T-shirt with the name “Carpenter” printed in block letters on the back. He was carrying something and the final image was a freeze-frame close-up of what the boy had in his right hand. It was a five-gallon can of gasoline.
“That’s a Bradford’s Ridge All-Star team T-shirt, and Jackson Randal Carpenter was the pitcher on that team in 1985,” Rowland said. “Fast-forward twenty-six years. The same Jack Carpenter, now a sergeant in the Harrelton, Ohio, police department, killed a school shooter at Carlisle Elementary School three months ago.”
Other images on the report had not been included in the manila envelope, previews-of-coming-attractions photos. Rowland said that after he saw the security camera footage, he went digging in the archives of the three television news stations that sent helicopters to the fire—and “got lucky” again. Inspection of a WLOU News First wide-angle shot of the burning building revealed someone standing in the edge of the woods on the south side.
The footage flashed on the screen. The quality of the news film was far superior to the surveillance camera. Blown up, it provided an image clear enough to see that the figure in the woods was the boy who’d entered the building earlier. He was wearing the same T-shirt and jeans, but the clothing was filthy. The T-shirt was no longer white. Dirt and maybe soot stained it. The right knee was torn out of his jeans and the bottom portion of both legs was blackened, had been scorched.
“Jack Carpenter was in that building when it was burning and is the only survivor of the fire, but repeated efforts to reach Carpenter and ask what he was doing there and how he managed to escape were unsuccessful.”
Nobody had called Jack about anything.
“A quarter of a century after the Mystery of the Century Fire killed a hundred and forty people, we discover that a twelve-year-old boy carried gasoline into the Twin Oaks Nursing Home minutes before the fire started—and then escaped the flames. That boy has never told a soul and has maintained his silence for twenty-six years. Why?”
Maybe because he was as surprised as you were to find out he was there.
Jack had spent most of the rest of the night staring at the ceiling above his bed, trying to remember. Which was futile and he knew it. He’d been struggling to remember that summer ever since the day he’d stood staring at a Little League team picture that belonged to a man he’d just killed—a man who intended to shoot a room full of school children. Jack had been on that same Little League team and so had Daniel Burke, but neither of them had any memories of that summer. In the weeks after that, memories had been thrust out of Jack’s mind, ejected—Theresa said by an angel—and the images in them were clear, but nothing much else was. Since then, Jack had begun to see holes in the blackout cloth that hid that time from him, like a pair of worn jeans where the last frayed threads finally break, and the fabric separates. But they weren’t normal memories that play like a movie and you can see details—what someone was wearing or what the ocean looked like behind them. Jack couldn’t remember what his bicycle looked like, couldn’t see it—even in a memory where he was riding it! Daniel said his memories were shrouded in fog. And neither one of them had been able to retrieve a single memory just by concentrating, trying to remember.
So all he could do was refuse to answer questions about the fire—certainly not questions as willfully stupid and inflammatory as the one this Barbie doll in a human being suit had just asked him.
“No comment,” he said and tried to go around her toward the back door of the building. She not only didn’t back up, she stepped closer, blocked him in, literally pinned him into the space between the open car door and the vehicle. The only way to get around her was to knock her down, a deliciously tempting option.
“Are you afraid to answer my question, Sergeant Carpenter? Or are you refusing to give me information because I’m white?”
“Please, step back out of my way, ma’am,” he said, in the tone of voice reserved for uncooperative drunks. “I do have a statement to make.”
She leapt back to free him from where she’d imprisoned him, almost shoved the microphone up his nose and waited with a look of carnivorous anticipation.
“What is it you have to say to WRDE Action News?”
“Your van is illegally parked,” he said and gestured toward the huge “Official Vehicles Only” sign the van was parked beside. “And it’s obstructing a public walkway.” The back bumper of the huge vehicle hung out over the sidewalk. He reached into his hip pocket, pulled out his citation pad and began to write as he stepped to a spot behind the van where he could see the license plate, trailing the chattering reporter like the tail on a kite.
“If you have nothing to hide, why are you unwilling to answer questions? Did you have accomplices? Why didn’t you come forward twenty-six years ago?” And fina
lly, the question she’d obviously been saving for last, “Is it true that your wife died in the 9-11 attacks on the World Trade Center, along with most of your fellow officers—but you refused to respond to the call out?”
Jack ripped off the ticket.
“You’re to appear in Webster County District Court at nine am September 28 if you wish to contest this charge. If you don’t, you can mail in a check for the amount of the fine. The address and the fine schedule are on the back of the ticket.”
He stepped around to the front of the news van and slipped the ticket under the windshield wiper.
“If you fail to appear in court or pay the fine, a warrant can be issued for your arrest.” He paused, leaned into her and said the rest slowly, with emphasis. “And then it would be my sworn duty as a police officer to serve that warrant and take you into custody.”
The challenge in his eyes was so unmistakable that it unsettled her, and she actually took a step back. Jack brushed by her and walked into the building, even managed not to slam the door in her face, a feat of self-control worthy of a Meritorious Service Commendation.
Major Crocker was standing in the doorway of his office, and when he spotted Jack, motioned for him to come in.
“My sources in forensics tell me they’re not finding a trace of anybody in the Cohens' house except Theresa Washington. So how did somebody else kill those old people without leaving so much as an eyelash behind, and she walks out of there looking like an extra in a slasher movie?”
Jack shrugged noncommittally.
“You know more than you’re telling me.”
“I don’t know anything you’d believe.”
“Try me.”
Jack said nothing. Crock reached up and popped Cher out of his right ear. He’d dubbed his hearing aids Sonny and Cher, and Cher’d been giving him trouble for a week.
“What happened in that house, Major…was supernatural.”
“Really.” It was a statement, not a question.
“I’m not talking about some wave-a-fairy-wand, now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t, hocus-pocus magic trick. I’m talking about…supernatural.”
Crock stuffed Cher back into his ear.
“As in…like a demon or something? Somebody’s possessed?”
“Something like that.”
Crocker face was impassive, his voice level. “I suppose that would go a long way toward explaining the psycho who knocked out doors and walls chasing you through warehouses three months ago.”
“That’s the whole explanation. It’s why a psycho shot up a school and killed Bishop Washington. And why another psycho killed Daniel Burke’s wife.”
Crocker let out a low whistle.
“Don’t bite off more than you can chew, Crock. I have no idea how to do a spiritual Heimlich.”
“So Daniel Burke’s part of all this, too?” Crock asked.
Jack nodded.
“Maybe that explains why he got busted last night for rape.”
“Rape?”
“This morning’s paper, you haven’t read …? Let me guess—print media never shows up at the same crime scene as you do, either.”
Ten minutes later, Jack was sitting in the break room drinking coffee that tasted like the runoff from a nuclear waste dump, reading for the third time the story about Daniel in the morning’s newspaper. He’d tried to call Daniel but settled for a voice mail message saying he was available whenever Daniel wanted to talk.
Patrolmen Paco Rodriguez and Sam Peterson came in together from a domestic violence call.
“I just don’t see how you can call hitting somebody with a Wiffle-ball stick assault with a deadly—”
Peterson stopped when he saw Jack. “There he is, our resident celebrity,” he said. “But it doesn’t sound like those loudmouths out front are angling to become Jack Carpenter groupies.”
He pulled out a chair facing Jack, spun it around and straddled it with his arms resting on the chair back. Ramirez stepped up to the soft drink machine.
“So…what gives, sergeant?” Peterson asked.
He tried to make the question sound offhanded, but Jack could see how focused he was on Jack’s response. Ramirez paused, didn’t drop his change into the slot.
“Wish I knew,” Jack said, trying for offhandedness and failing, too.
“That was you in the video, wasn’t it?” Peterson prompted. “You were carrying—”
“It was me, but I don’t know why I was…taking gasoline into the building. I don’t remember. My childhood is a void, a blank space. All the memories of that summer are gone.”
“You have amnesia?”
“Seriously?” Paco put in. Unintended skepticism was slathered over his words thicker than cheese on a burrito.
“I know it sounds …strange, but it’s true.” Jack didn’t like the defensive quality he heard in his voice. “I really don’t remember.”
A denial was what they were looking for, fishing for. If Jack had said he flat-out didn’t do it—that the video was a fake or he wasn’t the person in it—they’d have believed him in the face of a mountain of evidence to the contrary, would have stood by him and defended him. But he couldn’t say he didn’t burn down that building because maybe he did.
That’s what they were thinking, too—maybe he did.
CHAPTER 11
2011
Daniel’s media hurricane made landfall five minutes after he got to the church. In fairness, most of his synapses were diverted to the phone call he’d had with Jack on his way in and he was distracted.
Miss Minnie and Mr. Gerald dead and now…
Jack had carried gasoline into Twin Oaks?
Had he? Jack had asked him, but Daniel had no more idea than Jack did. He’d given up straining to remember that summer. It was hopeless. Snippets, pieces of memories downloaded into his mind like files off the Internet every now and then—blurred, foggy, and he couldn’t make out details. He had no control over what he recalled or when he remembered it.
What was it Theresa’d said when he’d talked to her this morning? “Chapman Whitworth put the hammer down on both of us in less time than it takes to cook a pot roast.” Make that all three of us.
The first reporter just showed up. A staff writer for the Cincinnati Post-Gazette, he strode in unannounced and told Daniel’s secretary he had an urgent matter to discuss with the church’s senior minister.
“I understand you were arrested last night—is that true Reverend Burke?” he said as soon as he stepped into Daniel’s office.
“You didn’t tell my secretary you were a reporter.” Daniel stood. “The church has a public relations person who handles all our dealings with the press. He’ll issue a statement this afternoon.”
The reporter didn’t drop a beat.
“The charges were assault and rape—how long had you known the victim before the alleged incident took place?”
Less than thirty seconds, but Daniel didn’t say that. What he did say was that he would call security and have the man forcibly removed from the building if he didn’t leave.
Daniel called his secretary into his office after the man left, told her not to allow anyone from the press in to see him, not to answer any questions, to call a staff meeting for right after lunch and to try to reach Clayton Abernathy, the chairman of the board of elders.
Two hours later, Daniel was sitting at his laptop watching the cursor blink, blink, blink on a white screen when Clayton Abernathy knocked on his office door. At seventy-seven, the man didn’t look sixty, had only a touch of gray in his black hair at the temples and the trim physique of a marathoner. Emily’d always said the old man had no wrinkles because you had to smile every now and then to crease the skin, and that the reason he stood up so straight was that he had a pool cue stuffed down the back of his shirt and one leg of his pants.
Emily.
“I didn’t return your call, but I thought we needed to sit down and talk face to face,” Abernathy was saying when Daniel tuned back in
.
“Of course, Clayton. Please sit down.”
Clayton seated himself in one of the big, comfortable chairs in front of Daniel’s desk, and Daniel sat in the other one.
He knew what was coming. Still, expecting to get hammered and actually feeling your skull crack were very different things, and Daniel couldn’t help tensing for the blow.
“I called a special board meeting this morning, and it is our unanimous view that it would not be in the best interest of Voice of Hope Community Church for you to be in the pulpit this weekend. Greg can take over for you. We’ve already contacted him.”
Daniel nodded. Clayton just sat there. The man could sit so amazingly still.
“Come on, Clayton, let’s deal with the elephant in the room. I should have told you myself, but it’s clear you know what I’ve been accused of, right?”
“Assault and rape.”
Hearing the words still sent a punch into Daniel’s belly.
“You only need to know one thing. I didn’t do anything wrong.”
He sounded artificial and phony even to his own ears. There was flat-out no way to say, “I didn’t do it” and not sound like every other man who pleaded his innocence after he got caught with his hand in the cookie jar.
“Of course, you didn’t, Daniel. We have the utmost confidence that you can resolve this matter quickly.” The old man’s face was impassive, like talking to a mannequin. “Just a case of mistaken identity, I’m sure. As soon as this woman has time to make a positive identification, you’ll be cleared, and you can put this whole ugly mess behind you.”
“I wish it were that simple.” Daniel was about to tell the elder board chairman that the woman had already picked him out of a police lineup, but before he had a chance to share that particular piece of damning information, Daniel’s cell phone rang. He pulled it out of his pocket to turn it off and saw that it was Jack.
“I apologize, but I have to take this call,” Daniel said, knowing that Abernathy would consider it exceedingly rude for him to allow this kind of intrusion.
“Jack, I’m in a meeting right now. Can this wait un—”
