The Night the Feed Store Burned

What the Fire Said

The state fire marshal’s investigator was a lean, quiet man named Rick Ostrander who drove up from Jefferson City the next morning in a white SUV full of equipment. He had been investigating fires for twenty-two years, and he walked through what was left of Teague Feed & Seed the way Nora had seen good doctors walk into a hospital room, slowly, touching nothing, looking at everything.

Nora walked with him. She was not officially part of the investigation, but she had been first on scene, and Ostrander seemed glad to have her.

“Fires talk,” he told her, picking his way through the wet ashes with a flashlight. “They tell you where they started and how they moved. Most people don’t know how to listen.”

They spent four hours in the ruins. Ostrander photographed everything. He measured burn patterns on the brick walls with a tape. He scraped samples of char into little metal cans and labeled them. He crouched for a long time beside the remains of the front counter, then moved slowly toward the back of the building, toward Wendell’s office.

The office had been a small room in the back corner, behind the storeroom, with a door that opened onto the loading dock. It was the worst burned part of the building. The fire had been so hot there that the tin roof had melted and dripped. Ostrander stood in what had been the doorway for a long time, shining his light around.

“Here,” he said finally. “This is where it started.”

He showed her. The deepest char on the walls. The V-shaped burn pattern spreading upward from one corner like a fan. The way the steel shelving in that corner had warped and buckled more than anywhere else. And in the corner itself, half buried in ash and fallen tin, a small blackened lump of metal and melted plastic that Ostrander uncovered carefully with a brush.

“Space heater,” he said. “Old one. Coil type. No tip-over switch.” He brushed more ash away. “And look at this.”

Beside the heater lay the twisted remains of a metal frame. Folding legs, a crossbar, scraps of melted canvas.

“That’s a cot,” Nora said slowly.

“That’s a cot,” Ostrander agreed. “Two feet from a coil heater with no safety cutoff. Blanket probably slid off in the night and draped over the coils.” He shook his head. “I’ve seen it a hundred times. It’s the most common fatal fire in rural America. Old people trying to stay warm.”

Nora stared at the cot. She thought about Wendell, found on the loading dock in his long underwear and flannel shirt.

“He was sleeping here,” she said. “He was sleeping at the store.”

“Looks like it.” Ostrander made a note. “No accelerant that I can see. I’ll run the samples, but I’d bet my pension this is accidental. Nobody set this fire.”

Nora let out a breath she felt like she’d been holding since 1:14 in the morning two days before. “So it wasn’t arson.”

“Doesn’t look like it.” Ostrander straightened up and moved toward the back door, the one that opened onto the dock. It was a steel door with a small window of wired safety glass at head height. The door hung half open, scorched and warped on its hinges. Ostrander examined it for a long time. Then he shined his flashlight on the concrete floor just inside it, and crouched down.

“That’s interesting,” he said.

“What?”

“The glass.” He pointed. On the floor inside the office, half buried in ash, were shards of the door’s wired safety glass, scattered in a fan across the concrete. “Somebody broke this window,” Ostrander said. “From the outside. See how the glass fell inward, into the room? And look at the edges.” He shined his light on the jagged frame of the little window. “There’s something on the wires.”

Nora leaned close. Caught on the sharp ends of the broken safety wire, stiff and dark, were scraps of gray fabric. Cotton fleece, like a sweatshirt sleeve.

“Somebody punched through this glass from the dock side,” Ostrander said, “and reached through to open the door from inside. Probably with the fire already going, because the door handle was hot enough to scorch. You’d burn your hand bad grabbing that.”

He looked at Nora.

“The way the cops are telling it,” he said, “the kid broke in to rob the place and started the fire. But this doesn’t fit that. If you’re breaking in to rob a store at one in the morning, you don’t punch through a window with your fist while the room behind it is on fire. You do that for one reason.” He clicked off his flashlight. “You do that because there’s somebody inside.”

Nora stood in the burned-out doorway of Wendell Teague’s office for a long time after Ostrander had gone back to his SUV to write up his notes.

Forty feet from the building. That was where they had found Wendell. Unconscious, on his back, on the loading dock, breathing smoke. Her own volunteer had said it. Must have gotten himself out somehow.

But an eighty-one-year-old man knocked unconscious by smoke does not walk forty feet.

Somebody had carried him.