NORTHAMPTON - On the night her husband and son died, Elaine Yeskie awoke to a smoke detector sounding and her bedroom on Fair Street filling with smoke.

She first thought her clock radio was making a strange sound. Then the woman she shared her home with yelled, "What is that noise?"

Realizing that her home at 17 Fair St. was on fire, Yeskie thought to warn two family members who lived downstairs - her husband, Paul, and her son, Paul Jr.

Yeskie herself lived upstairs with a companion in a separate apartment.

"I was going downstairs to get them out," Yeskie said this week, in her first interview since the tragedy Sunday morning - one instance in a string of arson fires now driving a multi-agency double homicide investigation.

Groggy with sleep and the scent of smoke, Yeskie said she moved toward a door that opened into a passage linking the upstairs and downstairs dwellings.

"As I opened the door, my husband opened the bottom door and called out, 'Call the fire department.'"

Despite the smoke and dark, she believes her husband had his coat on and appeared ready to flee the building. From where he stood below her, near his own door, it was clear he was in danger.

"This black smoke just poured up right over his head," she said.

Yeskie recalls shutting her own door. She went to find the telephone to call 911. But when she picked up the receiver, the line was dead.

In the moments it took to try to place the call, smoke upstairs was intensifying, Yeskie said. "By the time I turned to go out, the place was full of smoke. I couldn't see."

She made it out of the home and down to the safety of the yard, guided by touch alone. She carried her coat and pocketbook, but had not been able to find her eyeglasses. Her companion was eight to 10 feet ahead of her as they fled the upper floor into the rain.

As they made their way down, her companion could hear someone choking from inside the lower portion of the house, home to Yeskie's husband and son.

From outside the house, Yeskie at first saw no sign of flames. Soon enough, she encountered a portion of the dwelling that was burning openly. "The windows were just a sheet of orange," she said.

Moments later, as she moved away from the house, she recalls hearing a "whooshing" sound, "real loud," which she believes may have been the fire moving through the lower portion of the dwelling.

Yeskie believes that her son or her husband made it out of the house at one point during the fire. But neither, of course, survived.

"My son would never leave his father, and his father would never leave him," she said. "I'll never know which one that was."

"When you lose one in a fire, that's bad enough. When you lose two and they're murdered - that's bad."

The two men - who family and friends say were devoted to one another, and who shared the birth date of Jan. 15 - will be buried Monday at 10 a.m. at St. Mary's Cemetery in Northampton. Calling hours are from 2 to 6 p.m. Sunday at the Czelusniak Funeral Home, 173 North St. in Northampton.

Both men were city natives.

On son's struggle

In her interview with the Gazette, Elaine Yeskie also sought to explain why her son was a client of Riverside Industries, a program that aids developmentally disabled people.

She said her son needed two blood transfusions at the time of his birth in 1970 and suffered a brain injury as a result of an insufficient supply of oxygen.

Yeskie said she was told by doctors that 20 percent of her son's brain had been damaged, a problem that would affect his ability to communicate.

Despite that, Paul W. Yeskie Jr. was known for his facility with numbers. "He was so smart," Yeskie said of her son. "He could read a book and tell you five years later what he had read in the book."

As he grew into adulthood, she said, her son's interests and abilities were broadening.

"He was changing. They told me he would outgrow this. When he was younger, it was really bad."