There's a little bit of truth in author's work of fiction

NEWBURYPORT -- Rare is the old New England church that doesn't have a skeleton or two in the closet. Tempa Pagel found one in the steeple of her parish. In fact, she put it there.

Pagel just published her first mystery novel, ``Here's the Church, Here's the Steeple," which interweaves a present-day murder case with another dating to May 31, 1811 -- the day the Great Fire changed the face of Newburyport forever.

The plot revolves around a skeleton concealed since the fire in the belfry of Newburyport's ``First Parish Church" -- Pagel's barely disguised version of the church she attends, the First Religious Society (Unitarian Universalist) at 26 Pleasant St. The real church's steeple appears in a photo on the book's cover, menaced by a superimposed tongue of flame.

``A teacher at school who read it asked me how much of the history is true," said Pagel, a Haverhill teacher. ``I said, `All of it.' And he said, `Really? They found a skeleton up in the steeple?' Uh, nooooo. That is the fiction part." Pagel said she sees a clear distinction, ``but some people aren't."

A tour of the steeple reveals a Revere & Son bell -- yes, that Revere -- and a ton of high-tech communications equipment related to a cellphone antenna. But while there's no skeleton in view, Pagel's tale does have its roots in a real-life mystery.

Roughly a decade ago, having taken time off from teaching to raise her two children, Pagel wrote nonfiction and volunteered with the local historical society and other groups. After developing an interest in fiction, she joined a writing group in Beverly with teacher Susan Oleksiw and penned a young adult novel that ended up on the shelf.

Somewhere along the way she came across accounts of the Great Fire.

``It was the golden age of Newburyport," Pagel said at her home on Olive Street. Shipbuilding, fishing, and mercantile trade had made it one of the coastline's busiest ports. But a trade dispute prompted President Thomas Jefferson to push through the Embargo Act of 1807, forbidding US ships to dock at foreign ports, which delivered a ``huge whammy" to the shipping business for two years, she said, and ``right afterward was the Great Fire that totally destroyed the whole downtown."

The blaze started in a stable near present-day Inn Street and spread rapidly through the city's tightly packed wooden structures, wiping out 250 of them. The First Religious Society's building narrowly escaped, thanks to a friendly wind.

Ironically, the brick cityscape surrounding the steeple that tourists find so appealing is a legacy of the fire -- specifically, the city fathers' wish to rebuild in a more fireproof fashion. ``The architecture, the brick that makes it so interesting and quaint, is there because it was built up right after that time," Pagel said.

But it was another aspect of the fire that drew Pagel's attention. She noticed that one published account suggested arson, and a June 3, 1811, newspaper ad placed by several prominent citizens denounced the ``wicked design of some incendiary" and offered a $1,000 reward for information on the scoundrel.

``Those two things were kind of my `what if.' What if the fire had been set on purpose and what might the reason be? And then I went off into fiction," she said. ``Those were the only two things I ever ran across that made it sound suspicious, and you have to wonder why nobody ever followed up. Or at least I did."

Nine years after the Great Fire, a second blaze devastated another section of town, and this time a teenager was hanged for starting it.

Pagel conflates the two conflagrations, starting her novel with a fictional baker's apprentice coaxing a flame to life in 1811. But he's no mere pyromaniac. In fact, he has been hired to set the blaze . . . Nearly 200 years later, the teenager's bones are found in the church's steeple, and a local woman, amateur historian and mother Andy Gammon, is intrigued. What happened to the boy? How did he get into his hiding place? What was he hiding from? As her investigation proceeds, she stumbles onto a present-day murder mystery.

Like her sleuth, Pagel is a transplant from her native Michigan. She and her husband, Tom , also a teacher, moved to Massachusetts in search of a different lifestyle and landscape. They landed in Newburyport just after the Blizzard of '78. The town was in the middle of its revitalization and, she says, they found it more welcoming than other communities they had tried. They never left, raising two children here.

Pagel is an eighth-grade special needs teacher at John Greenleaf Whittier Middle School in Haverhill. And she's working on her second Andy Gammon mystery, which will take place up the road near Portsmouth, N.H., centering on an old hotel that sounds a lot like Wentworth by the Sea.

She'll have to hope that Granite Staters are as receptive as her fellow First Religious Society parishioners. Intensely private about the book while she was writing, Pagel didn't reveal the church's role to them until the book was hitting the shelves.

``I knew they'd be fine because they're very easygoing and it's a very liberal church, and I thought they would probably get a hoot out of it," she said. And that's just what happened.

The Rev. Harold Babcock, who presides as the church's minister, is cheerily philosophical about having his place of worship used as a murder scene.

``Actually I think everybody here feels just fine about it," he said. ``We're a pretty visible landmark anyway. The steeple has certainly appeared in a lot of photographs and newspaper articles and stuff."

And what about the skeleton in the steeple? Bothered?

``Not at all," he said, adding, ``we find a lot of dead pigeons up there."

Pagel will read from her book July 12 at the Waltham Public Library. Published by Five Star of Waterville, Maine, it's available at North Shore bookstores and Amazon.com.