The Boy in the Burning House Read Online Free PDF Page B

wood-stove when it was cranking out the heat, and occasionally the sound of the wind blustering outside, shaking the trees, whipping around the tarp that covered the firewood.
    â€œHe grew up with Dad, didn’t he?” Jim tried to make his voice sound casual, just table talk.
    â€œFather Fisher? Yes.” She looked at him quizzically, as if surprised that he didn’t know. “Father’s a few years older, but they were pals, I guess. You know the big old brownstone place up the hill this side of the McCoys? That was the house he grew up in. His father Wilfred Fisher was the richest man on the Twelfth Line. The richest man in this corner of the township.”
    Jim nodded. He knew the house. It was boarded up like a lot of places on the line. But it was much more imposing, set on a hill with a long circular drive. There was even a stone wall along the road and the remains of a wrought-iron fence. People around these parts didn’t go in for such showiness — didn’t have the money for it.
    â€œHow come Father Fisher doesn’t live there?” Jim asked.
    â€œProbably couldn’t afford to on a minister’s salary. Anyway, what would Nancy do in a cavernous place like that? They’d need ramps and…Lord, can you imagine the heating bill…”
    Jim was only half listening. He was busy trying to imagine Father Fisher as his father’s pal.
    His mother started talking about farm stuff — some problems they were having with the milk separator, how she thought maybe one of her hens was going broody, how someone might phone tonight about seeing the Malibu and what to say if they did. “I wasgoing to sell it as is, but Orm McCoy convinced me that with a little body work, we could get a really good price on it. An antique. Imagine.”
    Jim listened up, put aside his resentment about selling his father’s car, put aside the incident in the woods.
    At first he had hated it when his mother started talking to him about grown-up things. There was always stuff breaking down, needing parts, needing attention. When his father had been alive this had been exactly the kind of thing his folks had jawed over at the supper table, and it had been fine as background noise while he thought his own thoughts. Now he had to pay attention. His mother had never said it in so many words, but she expected him to figure out what jobs he was supposed to do.
    â€œHow do you expect me to fill his shoes?” he wanted to say. But he kept it to himself.
    His mother cleaned up while he sat at the kitchen table and did some homework. But it was hard to concentrate. He kept getting flashes of Ruth Rose’s face hovering over him, ready to bite his nose off.
    â€œThere were other kids, too, weren’t there?” he said, out of the blue, trying to sound conversational.
    â€œWhat’s that?”
    â€œOther friends. Dad and Father Fisher and some others?”
    His question met with a stony silence. Then the sound of water and a scrub brush working hard.
    â€œI’m surprised your father would have told you about that.” She didn’t sound especially suspicious or alarmed. Just surprised. Jim dared to go on.
    â€œWhy?”
    He listened while his mother rinsed the soup pot and put it in the drying rack. “Well, it was somethinghe didn’t much like to talk about, that’s all.”
    Jim swivelled around in his chair. “What happened?”
    His mother glanced at him over her shoulder. She was frowning a bit, and part of him wanted to say forget it, but he couldn’t make himself.
    â€œFrancis,” she said. “That was his name.” Jim’s interest deflated a little — Francis wasn’t one of the names Ruth Rose had mentioned — but he nodded for his mother to go on.
    â€œWell, it was long before I arrived on the scene,” she said, “when Hub was young. Francis died. A terrible death. Hub was around seventeen, I