Read Online The Boy in the Burning House by Tim Wynne-Jones - Free Book Online Page A

the library. He had said he had some research to do and would be there at five. It was important that he not lie to her. Ithad not been all that long ago that he had been so twisted up inside he couldn’t speak, so twisted up he had tried, more than once, to kill himself. Ruth Rose had been right about the tree jumping. Jim had lied to his mother a lot in that bleak time. He couldn’t talk but he would write on the pad on the kitchen table that he had been playing in the woods or in the sand pits up the road at Purvis Poole’s or over at Jesse Desjardin’s.
    He didn’t want to have to lie to her ever again.
    Billy Bones had brought him back to his senses. Jim thought about Billy now. He thought about Ruth Rose. Maybe crazy people were the only ones he could associate with anymore. Maybe he was half crazy himself.
    He had not told Ruth Rose he was coming to the
Expositor
. He wasn’t sure he would help her. All he knew was that she had lit a fire inside him. Some kind of burning need to know.
    He checked his watch. It was time to leave. But there was something else he needed to look up, while he was here. Plucking up his courage, he dug out the newspaper yearbook for 1997 and turned to September. With his heart pumping and a lump as big as a bullfrog in his throat, he turned the pages until he found the edition that featured his father’s disappearance.
    There was an out-of-focus photo on the front page of volunteers combing the Hawkins land for traces of the missing man. With a shaking finger he scanned the article for something he dimly remembered reading there. Then his finger landed and his eyes scanned the paragraph.
    A buzz of excitement arose at one point earlyon Friday afternoon when a searcher discovered a brand new lip balm dispenser in a deep thicket near the property line and far from any road or byway. As instructed, the searcher did not touch the article but reported the find to the nearest police officer. Sadly, it turned out that the discovery was a red herring. The lip balm belonged to one of the other volunteers who had wandered out of his prescribed search area. The searcher apologized for raising the team’s hopes. It was Father Fisher of the Church of the Blessed Transfiguration, who was Hub Hawkins’ pastor and friend
.
    Without a sound, Jim closed the heavy book and leaned against the sloping counter. Dorothy wandered by from the front office on her way to the print shop. He didn’t acknowledge her smile. It crossed his mind that he must look lost in thought.
    But he wasn’t lost. For the first time in a year he felt he saw the faintest trace of a trail opening up before him.

7
    Jim stepped out of the
Ladybank Expositor
building onto McMartin Street and stood for a moment stock-still. The sunlight — what there was left of it — made him blink after almost an hour in the stuffy, windowless corridor. He still had the smell of aging newsprint in his nose.
    He took a deep breath — a good strong whiff of fall-cooled air and car fumes. His head was buzzing with strange images: a burning log cabin in a field of snow, flat irons dancing down a staircase, and a tiny little plastic dispenser of lip balm lying on the rotting floor of the forest. In his mind’s eye the dispenser glowed like something lit from inside.
    He heard his name and turned to see Hec Menzies at the door of the newspaper office, his glasses on his head.
    â€œDidn’t see you leave, Jimbo,” he said. “Get what you were after?”
    â€œI’m not sure,” said Jim. “But, thanks.”
    â€œNo problem. That’s what a paper is for.” Hec smiled at him but there were little searchlights in his eyes. “Working on a school project, are you?”
    â€œNo, sir,” said Jim, his hand instinctively closing around the folded piece of foolscap in his pocket. “Just something I was interested in, that’s all.”
    Hec nodded, rolled down