Read The Mystery of the Memorial Day Fire for Free Online

Sleepyside-on-the-Hudson, and everyone wanted to talk about it.
    Ka-boom! was still Bobby Belden’s favorite sound. He shared his memories of the explosion with his brothers and sister time and time again. “Didja see how red it was when it went ka-boom, Trixie?” he’d ask. “Didja hear how loud it was?” Trixie would answer, “I saw it, Bobby, and I heard it. It wasn’t fun, though, it was awful — really awful. Two buildings were destroyed and it’s just a miracle that nobody was hurt. Do you understand that?”
    In response to his sister’s question, Bobby always nodded solemnly and said, “It was really awful, Trixie.” But moments later he’d be enthusiastically yelling “Ka-boom\” again.
    “He’s just too young to understand,” Brian had said quietly after one of Bobby’s ka-booms had made Trixie jump in fright. “Don’t worry, though, tomorrow something new will catch his attention and he’ll forget all about the fire.”
    “I hope we can all start to forget,” Trixie had told her brother.

    Trixie’s hope wasn’t to be realized. On Saturday morning when she came downstairs to breakfast, the school year was part of the past, but the fire seemed destined more than ever to be part of the town’s future.
    “Arson!” screamed the headline on the front page of the Sleepyside Sun. Brian and Mart were already huddled over the paper when Trixie joined them at the table.
    “Gleeps!” Trixie exclaimed when she saw the big, black type. “Do they really think the fire was set deliberately?”
    “The authorities are no longer speculating,” Mart said. “The cogency of the evidence is beyond contradiction.”
    “They know it’s arson?” Trixie guessed from Mart’s windy description.
    “That’s right,” Brian said. “The fire marshal says that the fire was deliberately set in the basement of Mr. Roberts’s store.”
    “The alligation permits the authorities to make that allegation,” Mart said.
    “What’s he talking about?” Trixie asked in near desperation, turning back to Brian.
    “Alligation is the word the fire experts use for deep crimp marks, like alligator skin. They show up on wood at the point of origin — the place where the fire’s been set. Any natural fire would have only one point of origin. But in the basement of Mr. Roberts’s store, the investigators found six points of origin. That, in itself, is almost a sure sign of arson,” Brian said.
    “How can they possibly know that?” Trixie asked. “How can they find the points of origin of a fire that’s burned a whole building to a crisp?”
    “That’s just the thing,” Brian said. “The building wasn’t burned to a crisp, although it should have been.”
    “The arsonist’s plan failed,” Mart added.
    “How could it have gone wrong?” Trixie asked. “If you start a fire in six different places, it seems to me that it’s going to burn. It did burn. We saw it!”
    “Correction,” Brian said. “We saw it explode. That’s what went wrong. Apparently the arsonist poured a lot of flammable liquid, like gasoline, in six different places. If he’d then started the fire immediately, there would have been such total destruction from the fire that it would have been impossible to determine anything. Instead, he must have taken his time, and while he was taking his time, the liquid was evaporating, and the vapors were rising to the ceiling. When the arsonist finally lit the fire, there wasn’t much liquid to burn — but there was a lot of vapor to explode. That’s how we wound up with the big ka-boom and the traces of arson left behind.”
    “That’s fascinating!” Trixie said. “I had no idea the fire investigators could prove so much.”
    “Unfortunately, these specialists have ample opportunity to practice their profession,” Mart said. “The statistics in this sidebar are staggering. One source quoted here states that arson may cost as much as one billion dollars a year.”
    “One billion?