The Night the Feed Store Burned

The Corliss Boy

By seven o’clock that morning, half of Calder Ridge was standing on Front Street.

They came in pickups and on foot, in barn coats and church coats and bathrobes, and they stood along the yellow tape Deputy Kell had strung up and looked at what was left. Nobody said much at first. Old men who had sat on that porch every morning for thirty years stood with their hands in their pockets and their jaws set. A woman Nora had delivered mail to for twenty years was crying quietly into her husband’s shoulder. A little girl in a pink snowsuit kept asking her mother where the chicks would go in the spring.

Nora stood among them in her soot-stained turnout gear, too tired to go home. Someone handed her a foam cup of coffee from the Ridge Café, and she held it in both hands and didn’t drink it.

Then the video started going around.

It began with the night clerk from the Gas-N-Go, who had seen the footage when Kell pulled it, and who had told her sister, who had told someone at the café. By eight o’clock, someone had a copy on their phone. By nine, half the people on Front Street had watched it. Nora could see it moving through the crowd like a current, people bending their heads together over screens, looking up, looking around.

She heard the name before she saw who said it.

“That’s the Corliss boy.”

It came from somewhere behind her. A man’s voice, low and certain. Nora turned. It was Dale Huckabee, who ran the hardware store and had served three terms on the town council. He was holding up his phone with the video paused on the running figure, and a little knot of people had gathered around him.

“Look at him,” Dale said. “Tall, skinny, that gray hoodie. He wears that every day. I’d know him anywhere.”

“Dale,” Nora said sharply. “You can’t tell anything from that.”

“The hell I can’t.” Dale turned the phone toward her. “Who else in this town is out running around at one in the morning? Who else has a record for breaking into a building in the middle of the night?”

Several people nodded. Nora felt something cold settle in her stomach.

Everyone knew who Wade Corliss was. He had grown up in Calder Ridge, raised by his grandmother in a little white house on Sycamore Street, a quiet, gangly kid who was good at shop class and nothing else. At eighteen, he had gone to work at the sawmill. At nineteen, a log had come off the carriage and crushed his left hand, and a doctor had given him pills for the pain, and within a year he had been arrested for breaking into the pharmacy in Linden at three in the morning. He had done three years in the state prison at Bonne Terre. He had come home eighteen months ago, on parole, to an empty house; his grandmother had died while he was inside.

Nobody would hire him. Nora knew that because she had watched it happen. He had filled out applications at the hardware store and the café and the co-op. Dale Huckabee had told him to his face, in front of customers, that he didn’t hire thieves. Finally, the only person in Calder Ridge who would give Wade Corliss a job was Wendell Teague, who hired him to unload feed trucks three afternoons a week and paid him in cash.

“He worked there,” somebody said. “He knew the place. Knew where the cash was kept.”

“Wendell gave that boy a chance,” somebody else said. “And look what he did with it.”

“We don’t know he did anything,” Nora said. Her voice came out louder than she meant. Several people turned to look at her. “We don’t know who that is. We don’t know how the fire started. The state fire marshal won’t be here till tomorrow. Nobody knows anything yet.”

Dale Huckabee looked at her with something like pity. “Nora,” he said, “you’re a good woman. But you always did think the best of people.”

“But you always did think the best of people.”

At 10:15 that morning, Deputy Kell and another deputy drove to the rented room above the old laundromat on Sycamore Street where Wade Corliss lived, and knocked on the door. Nora heard about it twenty minutes later from Kell himself, who called her as she was finally driving home to shower.

Wade had answered the door in sweatpants and a T-shirt. Both of his hands were wrapped in white gauze. He had not seemed surprised to see them. He had not asked what they wanted. He had just nodded slowly, as though he’d been expecting it, and stepped back from the doorway.

“And Nora,” Kell said. “There’s something else.”

“What?”

“Wendell’s dog was in there with him. Biscuit. That old blue heeler that sleeps on the porch at the store.” Kell paused. “She was curled up on the end of his bed.”

Nora pulled her truck over to the side of the road and sat there with the engine running.

By noon, the whole town knew. Wade Corliss had burned down the feed store, left an eighty-one-year-old man to die in the fire, and stolen his dog.