Inferno
Yankee, October 2000
There was fire everywhere they looked. It was formidable, dangerous, but the kind they fought several times each year. Then something happened, and everything went black.
The Worcester fire, from the inside out.
IT WAS LATE AFTERNOON — somewhere around four-thirty — on December 3, 1999, and it was already more dark outside than light. On the corner of Franklin and Grafton Streets in downtown Worcester, a block from the I-290 overpass, Bill McNeil of Bill’s Place Diner was getting ready for the early-supper crowd. Across the street from him and one flight up on a mattress in a corner of the second floor of the abandoned Worcester Cold Storage and Warehouse Company, a homeless, pregnant 19-year-old named Julie Ann Barnes, with an intellect that would later be described as “somewhat below average,” was crayoning pictures in a coloring book. Next to her on the mattress was Tom Levesque, 37, also homeless, also in the words of an acquaintance, “kind of slow.” The two were arguing, Julie Barnes would say later, over sex.
“I lay on the bed and started coloring . . . He started to lay on top of me. I pushed him off.”
The warehouse was a behemoth: a great, five-storied, ugly brown box — disused, unlighted, nearly windowless, the length of a football field — that began life, nearly a century ago, as a slaughterhouse and meat-packing plant. Over the years, there were storage rooms added, scores of them, and meat lockers the size of living rooms with ten-inch-thick metal doors. On all five floors it was the same: freezer lockers and storage space surrounding massive, columned open rooms —the old slaughter rooms, in one of which the man and the teenager now shared their mattress — all connected by a single, narrow, wrought-iron staircase with three or four turns to a floor.
Some years ago, to keep in the cold, the owners had added six-inch cork insulation over 18-inch brick walls, then coated it with Sheetrock sprayed with petroleum-based polyurethane foam.
There was a candle next to the mattress, the couple’s only source of light. One of the two accidentally knocked it over, into a pile of Julie Barnes’s clothes. The clothes caught fire. The two tried to stamp out the flames with their feet.
“But we couldn’t. He hit it with a pillow, but the pillow caught on fire.”
Probably they panicked. Then, at least briefly, Julie Barnes went searching for her cat and dog. But the warehouse was too massive and mazelike, and she soon gave up the search. The two then left the warehouse together and walked to the Common Outlets Mall, three blocks south, where they went to the Media Play arcade and lis-tened to rock CDs.
“My cat and dog was in there,” Julie Barnes, captured by a video camera with Tom Levesque just behind her, would tell a convenience-store clerk the next day. “And all my clothes got burned. I wasn’t nowhere around.”
AT THE HAIR SALON WHERE SHE WORKS in a town just outside of Worcester, Michelle Lucey was finishing a regular client’s color and cut. It was nearly six already, and she was booked until eight. Her two boys, Jerry and John, were at home with a sitter, having supper. By the time she got there, it would be close to nine; their time together (“watching TV, telling stories, catching up”) was certain to be brief. Her husband, a fireman, was working nights this week and wouldn’t be home until tomorrow morning at eight.
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The full story (as well as sixteen others) is available in the collection, ‘The Grifter, The Poet, and The Runaway Train’ (click title to access the book).