Fire Angels by Elizabeth Kern

Author:Elizabeth Kern
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Published: 2016-08-14T04:00:00+00:00

It was not until midafternoon of the second day that Jim Raymond heard Coroner McCarron call his name.

With trepidation Jim walked up to the microphone. McCarron, flanked by his jury of interrogators, faced him, studying him suspiciously over his large eyeglasses. He lifted a half-smoked Philip Morris from his ashtray, took a quick drag, and returned it to a glass ashtray already heaped with butts.

In answer to the first question, Jim said he’d been at the school for thirteen years, and he explained his duties. He said it was about 2:30 or so when he was returning to the boiler room after checking an oil burner in another building and he saw fire and smoke coming from the basement window outside the boiler room. He said he ran into the rectory and yelled to the housekeeper to call the fire department.

“Did you see her make the call?” McCarron asked.

“No, sir. I ran back to the boiler room, where I saw two kids who had just emptied baskets there. I told them to drop their baskets and get out of there.”

“Speak up, please sir,” McCarron said.

“Yes, sir,” Jim said.

“Then what did you do? Did you try to extinguish it yourself?”

“I may have, I don’t remember. It all happened so quickly and I may be confused on exactly what I said or did when. The fire was getting so big there was nothing I could do. I didn’t have nothing with me. Only my two hands. I was worried mostly about getting the kids out of the school.”

“So what did you do then?”

“I ran upstairs and smashed a window with a flashlight. That’s when I cut my wrist.” Jim rubbed the bandages on his wrist, partially covered by the cuff of his shirt. “I led the kids and the nun from room 207 down the fire escape. I had the keys to the door and got it open. By that time I was full of smoke and losing a lot of blood. I came down the stairs, tried to go back into the school, and I got conked on the head and ended up in the hospital.”

Another juror, a no-nonsense representative of the National Fire Protection Association, took over: “As far as you know, Mr. Raymond, where did the fire start?”

“As far as I know, it started in the back stairway. That’s where I saw the red window. Nothing touched the boiler room at all.”

“Was there any material stored in the stairwell?”

“An empty drum of calcium chloride to melt the ice on our streets and sidewalks. I didn’t see newspapers there, but I wasn’t in that stairway that day until I saw the fire.”

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