NORTHAMPTON - A collective sigh of relief. They got someone. A week and a day has passed since a faceless monster passed through a sleeping city armed with nothing but seething hate and a cigarette lighter, and they got him. If it all pans out - and Monday night's arrest leads to the conviction local law enforcement believes it will - Northampton's nightmare is over.

But look now - the monster has a face, a face that looks just like ours, and somehow, the news is as jarring and sleep-depriving as the headlines of Dec. 28.

The theories that leaped from everyone's lips are squelched. It wasn't roving gangs using house-burning in affluent Northampton as a means of initiation. It wasn't a classic pyromaniac who just wanted to fiddle while the city burned. It wasn't a soulless drifter, to whom life meant nothing more than a cricket to be crushed beneath his heel. It wasn't a jihadist, an anarchist or a disgruntled city worker getting back at those who laid him off.

It was one of us. It was a kid we coached in Little League, the kid we drove to lacrosse practice, or loaned money for a used car or wrote references to prospective employers or bailed out when he did something dumb.

He was, allegedly, Tony Baye, 25, an unassuming, strapping young man who went to college, worked as a line cook and had eyes as kind as a collie's.

Maybe it's even scarier now than it was that Sunday. The kid who went to all our schools, who showed up for work, who was partying at the Deuce - the World War II Club - with old friends not hours before, had something snap and needed to feed the snap to make it go away. Maybe whatever snapped happened a long time ago, between the baseball games, the lacrosse tournaments, the awards he got from the D.A.R.E program, the corsage he bought for the prom.

Like the grieving mother who hears the impossible news that it was her baby who grew up to do something unspeakable, and cries out "Where did we go wrong?" so must a city, more close knit now than before, look into itself. It was - if police are correct - one of us, one of our babies, to whom we gave the best years of our lives, and who, somehow, wanted to light fires in return.

How did we go wrong? This is a community where people look out for one another, right, that feeds the hungry, the homeless, the scarred? If the schools were threatened and teachers' jobs were on the line, it votes for an tax override, even though the individual financial sacrifice is significant. Those teachers, those firefighters, those cops - they're us, we reminded ourselves. And now all that is turned back on us and the face in the mirror belongs to someone else.

Was it easier to take when it was some faceless fiend killing, or attempting to kill, at random, like Charles Whitman firing his M1 from a Texas tower. Does this make us feel safer or even more terrified - that he was just a regular kid with no hate seemingly inside him? If our Tony can be our Tony one week and someone else entirely the next, does it makes us sleep better at night, or will our dreams be haunted with what-ifs?

'Not the face I pictured'

"It feels safer that he's caught, and hopefully he's the only one, but it's almost creepy when you think of it," said Orchard Street resident Lance Williams. "I don't know what kind of demon it takes to do something like this, but that's not the face I pictured."

"My friends and I are in total shock," said Alyson Fortier, 24, of Southampton, who grew up in the city and has been friends with Tony Baye since first grade. The two were together, in fact, Saturday night at the Deuce only hours before his alleged deadly spree. "He didn't say anything that would make you think he was acting weird," said Fortier. "My family liked him a lot."

Of course they did. The only people families don't like are the hooded, uncommunicative, untrustworthy types their offspring bring home. Shake Mom and Dad's hand and look them in the eye and that's all we ask for. Tony gave us that. I saw it when I coached him in Little League and I saw it when I ran into him over the years.

"I'm so confused; it all seems so strange," said Fortier. "I thought whoever did this would be out of town and in Florida by now."

Three hundred tips

The Yeskie men died Dec. 27, there can be no doubt now, says Northwestern District Attorney Elizabeth Scheibel, of asphyxia as a result of fire. It was incendiary, not accidental, she said. Some detectives working the case had not slept eight hours total since Sunday. Three hundred tips came in from an engaged community. Tony Baye has been "brought to justice," Scheibel said. Applied to him, her words fight against each other like mongoose and snake.

The "dangerous weapon" mentioned in the report was a cigarette lighter. He wasn't traveling with gas cans in the car. He went packing with the least significant weapon since box cutters were used to take over doomed airplanes. The damage he did came with the same degree of shock.

"The same things you did yesterday, do today and tomorrow," Scheibel cautioned Tuesday.

Terrorism, it's long been framed, is a way for the oppressed to strike back against the powerful in a way impossible to defend. What was it this alleged young perpetrator was striking back against?

It is believed that he took part in the neighborhood watch groups that sprang up as a result of his actions. Some even thought he may have been present at the Ward 3 meeting last week.

Twenty-three people from law enforcement stood abreast Tuesday afternoon at the press conference in the Northwestern district attorney's office, only a portion of what it took to crack the case. Many of these same officials stood stunned and graven not eight days ago at the fire station, vowing to catch the perpetrator, knowing full well that only 11 percent of all serial arsons are solved.

Mayor Clare Higgins' voice cracked almost imperceptibly as she spoke of the vulnerability we all felt when Sunday morning's event's roared out of televisions and newspaper front pages

Northampton Police Chief Russell Sienkiewicz, out in the post-press conference chill, said there were no celebrations Monday night after the arrest, no toasting of arresting officers or sleep-deprived detectives. "You don't get excited when people have died as a result of violence," he said. "What you do is get determined, and make sure everybody working on this has everything he or she needs to do the job at the highest level." But then he added, "When you get the guy, all you want to do is jump out of your skin and say, 'Hey, everybody! We can all sleep now!'"

"I'm just happy for our citizens," said Sienkiewicz.

Uncharacteristic

David Maxwell of Williamsburg, who grew up in Northampton, said the news of the arrest was as jarring as that of the fires reported Dec. 27. "It was hard to believe it the first time around," he said. "It's so uncharacteristic of this town, but there's such a detachment these days, with all the video games and such. Who, actually, is in touch with reality at all?"

The rush to judgment has a few folks worried. "We've got time on that, let's wait it out," said Ward 3 resident Tommy McCue. "America, especially under Bush, adopted a guilty-till-proven-innocent policy. Let's get back to our roots."

That said, the idea of a regular kid from the neighborhood is shocking. "I thought it was a revenge thing," said McCue. "Somebody got screwed left and right and somebody was going to pay. It's tough to think of it in a town so special - I mean, this is the place everybody wants to move to. It's a magic town, but why COULDN'T we have an arsonist?"

"Consumer confidence is low and this doesn't help us," said Jane O'Connor of Hawley, who lived in the city in the 1970s and was visiting Northampton Tuesday. "People can play armchair psychology, but above all, we need each other. Those who knew him will say, 'That kid went bad and could we have avoided that?' But to realize that anybody can slip through the cracks gives pause. We need to look at our outreach services."

"My neighbor's house got torched on Highland Ave.," said Jody Narbin, out with her shoed-and-jacketed service dog Rosie. "My first reaction? A nut. I thought they were holding back information at that meeting the other night because the person was in the room."

Hard to imagine

The person may have been in the room. For some on Dec. 27 morning, the person was in the house.

Ward 3 residents and urban artists Eben Kling and Katherine Romansky sat on a Main Street bench Tuesday and tried to digest the news coming from law enforcement. Kling, 23, survived a house fire with his mom when he was 6, with "flames licking through the floorboards. I lost everything but my pajamas. I thought I'd never be afraid of anything again, but this was surreal. One minute you think it's a bunch of drunk kids, then it's one deranged person."

"You could say it could be anybody, but it was this anybody who chose to do it," said Romansky.

"It seems like a mountain of destruction for one guy," said Kling. "I can't help thinking - is it gonna happen again? I can't imagine that kind of negligence against another human being."

Bridge Street neighbor Eve Laing stood in the street and watched the Yeskies' house burn that Sunday morning. She and her cat Georgie have stayed by the window ever since, sometimes half the night, listening for something just a little bit off. Even with the wave of relief she experienced Tuesday, the unsettling feeling that someone was able to sneak around and try to kill people is something she'll never shake, she said.

Personal

The week of horror and the fast arrest has been the starkest of ironies for the folks at Riverside Industries in Easthampton. Gene Taver was Paul W. Yeskie Jr.'s job coach there all those years ago and helped him transition to his role as tax-paying workingman, enabling him to work 12 exemplary years as a wet sander at Florence Casket Co. Our story Saturday on Paul's relationship with his crewmates at the factory warmed Taver's heart, even as it was breaking from the shock of his death. "It was sad to say goodbye to him when he no longer needed us in the system," said Taver. "It was overwhelming to say goodbye Sunday night."

"The randomness is the scary part," said Taver. "What kind of a connection do we have? We need more than just porch lights. There's human blackness in all of us; social restraints keep us from acting upon it, but some people can crack. How carefully do we look at our neighbors? There's an underlying need to just say, 'Can we help you?'"

But until the innocents die and the seemingly innocent turns violent, these incidents can remain abstract, headlines with body counts, horror from far, far away - can you pass the muffins?

"That it was Paul personalized it," said Taver.

That it was Tony personalizes it even more.