The Night the Feed Store Burned

Interview Room Two

The Hollis County Sheriff’s Office was in the basement of the courthouse in Linden, twenty minutes from Calder Ridge, and the interview rooms smelled like burned coffee and floor wax. Nora was not supposed to be there. She was a volunteer fire chief, not a cop. But she had driven Travis Kell to his first day of kindergarten when his mother’s car broke down, and he let her stand behind the one-way glass.

Wade Corliss sat alone at a metal table with his bandaged hands resting in front of him. He was twenty-five now, still tall and thin, with dark hair that needed cutting and a narrow, watchful face. He looked exhausted. There was a smudge of something gray along his jaw that might have been ash, and his eyes were red-rimmed. He sat very still, the way men sit who have learned that moving makes things worse.

Kell went in first with a detective from Linden named Ruiz. They asked him where he had been between midnight and two that morning.

“Home,” Wade said.

“All night?”

“All night.”

Ruiz slid a printed still from the Gas-N-Go video across the table. The running figure in the gray hoodie. Wade looked at it for a long moment without picking it up.

“That’s not me,” he said.

“You own a gray hoodie like that?”

“Half the county owns a gray hoodie like that.”

“What happened to your hands, Wade?”

“Burned them,” Wade said. “Cooking.”

“Both hands?”

“I’m a bad cook.”

Ruiz leaned back in his chair. “Here’s what I think,” he said. “I think you went down to the feed store last night because you knew the old man kept cash in the back office. I think you broke in through the back door. I think something went wrong, maybe you knocked something over, maybe you started the fire on purpose to cover your tracks. I think you burned your hands getting out. And I think you took the dog because the dog knew you and was making noise, and you didn’t want it barking.”

Wade didn’t say anything.

“And I think you ran out of there and left an eighty-one-year-old man who gave you the only job you could get in this town lying in the smoke to die.”

For the first time, something moved in Wade Corliss’s face. It was quick, gone almost before Nora saw it. But for a moment his jaw tightened and his eyes went wide and wet, and his bandaged hands curled slowly into fists on the table.

“Is he okay?” Wade said. His voice was rough. “Mr. Teague. Is he okay?”

Ruiz and Kell exchanged a glance.

“He’s in the hospital in Springfield,” Kell said. “Smoke inhalation. He’s on oxygen. They think he’ll pull through.”

Wade closed his eyes. His shoulders, which had been held up stiff and high since Nora started watching, came down about two inches. He let out a long breath.

“Okay,” he said quietly. “Okay.”

“That’s all you’ve got to say?” Ruiz said.

Wade opened his eyes and looked at him.

“I didn’t set that fire,” he said. “I wouldn’t ever hurt Mr. Teague. That’s all I’ve got to say. You can charge me with whatever you want.” He paused. “I want a lawyer now.”

Then he sat back in his chair and didn’t say another word for the next forty minutes, no matter what they asked him.

Afterward, in the hallway, Ruiz shook his head. “He did it,” he said. “Guilty men always clam up.”

“So do scared ones,” Nora said.

Ruiz shrugged. “The state fire marshal will be out tomorrow. If it’s arson, we’ll know. Either way, he’s on parole. We can hold him on the violation till we sort it out.”

“What violation?” Nora asked.

“Him being out at one in the morning,” Ruiz said. “He’s got a ten p.m. curfew. If that’s him on the video, he broke it.”

Nora stood in the hallway after they had gone, looking through the small square window in the door of Interview Room Two. Wade was still sitting at the table, alone, staring at his hands.

Something was bothering her. Something about the bandages.

She had been a firefighter for thirty-seven years. She had treated a lot of burns, and she had seen a lot of people who had burned themselves cooking. Kitchen burns were splashes, grease spatters, a palm pressed on a hot pan handle. They were small and specific. But the gauze on Wade Corliss’s hands went all the way up past his wrists, and it had been wrapped by somebody who knew what they were doing, layered and taped the way they taught you in EMT class. Through a gap near his left thumb she could see the skin underneath, red and blistered and shining with ointment.

That was not a cooking burn. Nora had seen that kind of burn exactly once before, on a farmer who had pulled his son out of a burning truck cab with his bare hands.

That was the kind of burn you got from grabbing something hot and refusing to let go.

That was the kind of burn you got from grabbing something hot and refusing to let go.