computer, a headline arrested her MYSTERIOUS STRANGER SAVES BOY. The
events at McAlbery School were not quite twelve days in the past, and
those four words had a special association for her. Curiosity
triggered, she instructed the computer to enlarge the quadrant in which
the story began.
The dateline was Boston, and the story was accompanied by a photograph.
The picture was still blurry and dark, but the scale was now large
enough to allow her to read the text, although not comfortably. She
instructed the computer to further enlarge one of the already enlarged
quadrants, pulling up the first column of the article so she could read
it without strain.
The opening line made Holly sit up straighter in her chair: A courageous
bystander, who would say only that his name was Jim, saved the life of
Nicholas O’Conner, 6, when a New England Power and Light Company vault
exploded under a sidewalk in a Boston residential area Thursday evening.
Softly, she said, “What the hell. . . ?”
She tapped the keys, instructing the computer to shift the field of
display rightward on the page to show her the multiply enhanced photo
that accompanied the piece. She went to a bigger scale, then to a still
bigger one, until the face filled the screen.
Jim Ironheart.
Briefly she sat in stunned disbelief, immobile. Then she was stricken
by a need to know more,not only an intellectual but a genuinely physical
need that felt not unlike a sudden and intense pang of hunger.
She returned to the text of the story and read it through, then read it
again. The O’Conner boy had been sitting on the sidewalk in front of
his home, directly on the two-by-three-foot concrete lid that covered
the entrance to the power company’s vault, which was spacious enough for
four men to work together within its subterranean confines. The kid had
been playing with toy trucks. His parents had been within sight of him
on the front porch of their house, when a stranger had sprinted along
the street “He comes right at Nicky,” the boy’s father was quoted,
“snatches him, I thought sure he was a nutcase child molester going to
steal my son.” Carrying the screaming child, the stranger leaped over a
low picket fence onto the O’Conners’ lawn, just as a 17,000-volt line in
the vault exploded behind him. The blast flipped the concrete lid high
into the air, as if it was a penny, and a bright ball of fire roared up
in In its wake.
Embarrassed by the effusive praise heaped on him by Nicky’s grateful
parents and by the neighbors who had witnessed his heroism, the stranger
claimed that he had smelled burning insulation, heard a hissing coming
from the vault, and knew what was about to happen because he had “once
worked for a power company.” Annoyed that a witness had taken his
photograph, he insisted on leaving before the media arrived because, as
he put it, “I place a high value on my privacy.”
That hair’s-breadth rescue had occurred at 7:40 Thursday evening a
Boston at 4:40 Portland time yesterday afternoon. Holly looked at the
office wall clock. It was now 2:02 Friday morning. Nicky O’Conner had
been plucked off that vault cover not quite nine and a half hours ago.
The trail was still fresh.
She had questions to ask the Globe reporter who had written the PIECE
But it was only a little after five in the morning in Boston. He
wouldn’t the at work yet.
She closed out the Press’s current-edition data file. On the COMPUTER
screen, the standard menu replaced the enlarged newspaper text.
Through a modern she accessed the vast network of data services to which
the Press subscribed. She instructed the Newsweb service to scan the
stories that had been carried by the wire services and published in
major U.S. newspapers during the past three months, looking for
INSTANCES in which the name “Jim” had been used within ten words of
either “rescue” or the phrase “saved the life.” She asked for a
printout of every article, if there should be any, but asked to be
spared multiples of the same incident.