Bacon looked up and down the hall. “Where is everybody?”
“They’re all down in the offices.”
Bacon looked at Virgil for a moment, then said, “You better come along.”
Virgil nodded, and Bacon led the way halfway around the top square to a maintenance room stocked with custodial supplies. At the back of the room, half concealed behind a row of metal HVAC pipes, was a narrow door. Bacon kept his keys on a belt-mounted ring, and used one of them to open the door. Behind the door was a set of stairs.
“Careful. They’re steep.”
Virgil followed him up, his nose almost at the level of Bacon’s heels. At the top he found himself in a low attic-like storage room probably fifty yards long and thirty feet wide, with a low ceiling, of maybe six and a half feet. A few dozen cardboard cartons were stacked along the outside walls, some with notations: World History Texts, Hyram Algebra, and so on. The floor, walls, and boxes were covered with dust. A narrow strip of cheap carpet ran to the end of the room.
Bacon said, “Don’t step on the wooden part of the floor — it’s almost impossible to get that dust right. Stay on the rug.”
The rug ended at another pile of cardboard cartons that had “Band Uniforms, 1985” scribbled on them. In the same line, against the end wall, were boxes that said: “Football equipment, 1988,” and at the far end of the interior wall, five large moving boxes that said: “Algebra, 1962, 1968, 1974.” One of the boxes was broken, and old algebra books were spilling out.
Bacon picked up three of the band-uniform boxes, one at a time, set them aside to reveal another narrow door. He pushed it open, flicked on a light switch, and said, “Come on in.”
Behind the door was a small, tidy one-room apartment — an easy chair with a reading lamp, a television with a cable connection, and a line of bookcases that separated the sitting area from a tiny kitchen. The kitchen had a dining table that might serve two in a pinch, with a wooden chair. A compact refrigerator sat under a food-prep bench, which held a microwave oven and a toaster. A six-drawer bureau divided the kitchen from the sleeping area, which held a single bed, another lamp, a nightstand, and another wooden chair. A variety of jackets and overalls hung from hooks along the inside wall, along with a mop, broom, and dustpan.
One round decorative window looked out over the town.
“No plumbing. If you don’t rat me out, I think I can get some in next year,” Bacon said. He picked up the dining chair and offered it to Virgil, and took a seat himself in the easy chair. “So — the fire.”
Virgil sat down. “Yeah. The fire.”
Bacon sat, gathering his thoughts, and then said, “Okay. See, what happened is that in 2007, I had this little house, wasn’t worth much, but it was okay. I started this business, a side business, doing handyman work. I needed a truck, and I spent too much on it, and tools, and I spent too much on them. I got loans for it all, secured by the house. Then the economy went in the ditch, and nobody was hiring handymen, and I couldn’t make the payments. They said I could keep the house or the truck, and I needed the truck, so they took the house. Sonsofbitches.”
“Doesn’t sound right,” Virgil said.
“Wasn’t right. Did get some good tools out of it, though. Anyway, the school pay is… bad. They pay me twenty-two thousand, eight hundred and eighty dollars a year, but there just aren’t any other jobs around. Jobs I could do, anyway. Walmart pays even less, I’m too old to work the tows. I tried renting a room for a while, but that was a crappy way to live. Then I thought about this place. Put down the carpet, so I could walk back here without disturbing the dust, snuck in lumber for the walls, built the room, brought the pieces of furniture in one at a time, in the truck… and here I am.”
“Not a bad place,” Virgil said. “I could live here… if I had to.”
“Just fine, for me,” Bacon said, looking around the room. “Anyway, here’s what I do. I do my job, and more than my job. If something in the school needs fixing, I fix it. In return, I eat out of the cafeteria. Plenty of food, nobody notices one more mouth. There’s a janitor’s room in the basement with a shower, so I can shower and shave down there. Plus, I can put away money for my retirement — out of the twenty-two thousand, last year I put away more than nineteen, ’cause I really don’t make enough to pay any taxes. And I’ve been living here so long, I know every creak in the building, especially at night. I heard a creak last night. Four in the morning. I knew somebody was inside, but I was a little scared, you know? If it was somebody with a gun… I don’t have a gun.”
“Gotcha,” Virgil said.
“I snuck down there, being real careful. When I figured out that somebody was in the district offices, and the lights were still out, I let myself in a room down there, Mrs. Duncan’s social studies room, so I could duck out of sight if I had to. I was in there when I started to smell the gasoline — I don’t have a cell phone, but there’s a wired phone down in the basement, in my room down there, and I was going to sneak down there and call nine-one-one, when… This is strange…”
“What?”
“Somebody was already inside the offices, you know? Before I could leave Mrs. Duncan’s room, they came out in the hallway and broke into the offices. They were already in, but then they broke in. Then they went to the side door, down the hall, the outside door, and they broke in there, too. Then they came back, and whoosh, the fire goes up, and they ran. I heard them running, and I peeked out, and I don’t know who it was, but it was a full-sized man. Wasn’t a high school kid.”
Virgil said, “Huh.” Then, “Somebody had a key, and then they faked a break-in.”
“I believe so,” Bacon said. “The fire was burning for a couple of minutes — the alarm in the district offices should have gone off right away, but it didn’t, and I was headed for the basement to call the fire department, but then another alarm went off — I think one out in the hallway. So I didn’t have to call anyone. The firemen showed up in five or six minutes and put the fire out in one more.”
“If I say a name, could you keep it under your hat?” Virgil asked.
“Nobody but you knows about this room — I’ve kept it under my hat for all these years.”
Virgil said, “Randy Kerns.”
Bacon said nothing for a minute, then cupped his chin in his hand and rubbed for a couple seconds, and said, “I didn’t want to say that.”
“You think it was him?”
“Never saw his face, and it was dark in the hallway, except that the fire was going — but when I saw him running, something made me think of Randy.”
“Is Kerns a big enough asshole to do this?”
“Randy’s a big enough asshole to do anything,” Bacon said.
Virgil got up and took a turn around the apartment; he felt like he had to keep his head down because of the low ceiling. Then, “Mr. Bacon, I believe that Clancy Conley was killed because he discovered some serious corruption here in the school system. I think another man was killed in an attempt to throw us off the scent. Would you know anything about that? About people stealing from the school?”
He shook his head. “I don’t. I can tell you that sometimes when the school board meetings end, the board runs everybody off, and then continues the meeting. Sometimes for an hour or more. A couple times when I was working around there, Randy came out and run me off. Didn’t want me to hear what was going on. That’s all I know about that.”
“All the school board?” Virgil asked. “Or did some of the board members leave, too?”
“They all stayed: the board members, the superintendent, the accountant… uh, Viking Laughton, he’s the newspaper editor, and Randy. They all stayed in there. Just about every meeting.”