1:14 in the Morning

The pager on Nora Beckwith’s nightstand went off at 1:14 in the morning, and she was dressed and out the door before the dispatcher finished reading the address. She didn’t need the address. In a town of eleven hundred people, there was only one building on Front Street that could put that much orange into the sky.

She saw it from the top of Cemetery Hill, two miles out, as she came over the crest in her pickup with the light bar going. The whole north end of Calder Ridge was lit up like a stadium. Flames were coming through the roof of Teague Feed & Seed in a column so tall and bright it threw shadows across the frozen fields on both sides of the highway. Even from two miles away, she could see the sparks climbing into the January dark.

“Oh, Wendell,” she said out loud. “Oh, no.”

Nora had been the volunteer fire chief in Calder Ridge for eleven years and a volunteer firefighter for twenty-six before that. In daylight she was the rural mail carrier, driving the same ninety-mile loop of gravel roads six days a week, which meant she knew every mailbox, every dog, and most of the secrets in the eastern half of the county. She had fought a lot of fires. Hay barns, trailer houses, a grain dryer at the co-op that had burned for two days. She had never once pulled up to one and felt like she was watching her own house go.

Everyone in town felt that way about the feed store. It had stood on the corner of Front and Mill since 1952, a long, low building of red brick and tin with a loading dock out back and a wooden porch in front where three or four old men sat every morning of the year with coffee from the pot Wendell Teague kept going behind the counter. It sold everything a farm needed: feed and seed, fencing and fertilizer, mineral blocks and work gloves and rat poison. In the spring, it sold baby chicks out of a big galvanized tank under heat lamps, and every child in the county came in to look at them. It was where you heard who had died and who was getting married and whose cattle had gotten out. It was where you went when you didn’t know where else to go.

By the time Nora pulled up, two of her volunteers were already there with the pumper, laying hose from the hydrant on Mill Street. Deputy Travis Kell had the highway blocked off. Across the road, the night clerk from the Gas-N-Go was standing in the parking lot in her uniform, hugging herself, staring.

“Is Wendell home?” Nora shouted to Kell as she pulled on her turnout coat. “Somebody check his house!”

“Already did,” Kell shouted back. “He’s not there. Truck’s at the store.”

Nora’s stomach dropped.

“But we found him,” Kell yelled. “He’s out back. On the loading dock. He’s alive.”

She ran around the side of the building, through the heat, holding her helmet visor down against it. The fire had not reached the back of the store yet, but it was coming, smoke pouring out from under the eaves in thick gray rolls. On the concrete loading dock, a good forty feet from the building, Wendell Teague lay flat on his back in his long underwear and a flannel shirt, one of her volunteers kneeling over him with an oxygen mask. He was eighty-one years old and he looked very small.

“He was just lying here when we got here,” the volunteer said. “Breathing. Out cold. Must have gotten himself out somehow.”

Nora knelt beside him. Wendell’s face was gray and smudged with soot. There was soot in his nostrils, a bad sign, and he was breathing in long, wet rattles. His eyes were closed. She took his hand. It was cold.

“Wendell,” she said. “It’s Nora. You hear me? You’re gonna be okay. Ambulance is coming.”

He didn’t answer.

The ambulance took him at 1:41. The roof of Teague Feed & Seed fell in at 2:20. By four in the morning, there was nothing left of the building but four brick walls and a heap of smoking, twisted tin, and the smell of burned grain hung over the whole north end of town like a fog.

Nora was standing in the wet ashes out back, soaked and exhausted, when Deputy Kell came and found her. He had his phone out.

“You need to see this,” he said. “The Gas-N-Go’s got a camera on the pumps. It catches the corner of the store.”

He held up the screen. It was grainy black-and-white footage, time-stamped 1:11 a.m. In the corner of the frame, beside the feed store, a figure in a dark hooded sweatshirt came running out of the alley that led to the loading dock. Young, by the way he moved. Tall and thin. He ran straight across Front Street, right through the glow of the streetlight, and disappeared into the dark on the other side.

Three minutes before the first 911 call. Three minutes before anyone in Calder Ridge knew the feed store was on fire.

“Somebody was there,” Kell said quietly. “Somebody ran.”