The Night the Feed Store Burned

The Dispatcher’s Recording

Pam Ridley had worked the night shift at the Hollis County 911 center for nineteen years. She was a round, gray-haired woman who knitted at her console between calls and had talked more frightened people through more terrible nights than anyone in the county. When Nora asked if she could hear the recording of the 1:09 call, Pam looked at her over her reading glasses for a long moment, then set down her knitting and pulled up the file without a word.

The call was fifty-one seconds long.

It started with coughing. Hard, ragged coughing, the deep kind that comes from lungs full of smoke, and behind it, a roaring sound Nora recognized immediately. Fire. Big fire, close.

Then Pam’s voice, calm and level. “Hollis County 911, what is the address of your emergency?”

More coughing. Then a man’s voice, young, hoarse, gasping for air.

“Feed store. Calder Ridge. Teague’s. It’s on fire. It’s all on fire.”

“Sir, is anyone inside the building?”

“No. No, I got him out. I got him out. He’s on the dock. Out back. He’s breathing but he won’t wake up. He’s old. Please. Please hurry.”

“Sir, are you injured? What’s your name?”

A pause. A long, shaky breath. In the background, very faintly, a dog was barking.

“Just hurry,” the young man said. “Please. He’s breathing. Tell them he’s on the dock.”

Then the line went dead.

Pam stopped the recording. The 911 center was very quiet. Nora realized she had been holding her breath, and let it out.

“I flagged it that night,” Pam said quietly. “I always flag the ones who hang up. I told the deputies. Somebody pulled that man out, I said. You ought to find him and shake his hand.” She shook her head. “Then the next morning they’re all saying the Corliss boy set it. Nobody ever came to listen to the tape.”

“You ought to find him and shake his hand.”

“Play it again,” Nora said.

Pam played it again. Nora listened with her eyes closed. She had heard Wade Corliss’s voice exactly once, through a one-way mirror in Interview Room Two, saying, Is he okay? Mr. Teague. Is he okay? And she had heard it before that, years ago, when he was a skinny boy on Sycamore Street and she brought the mail to his grandmother’s house, and he would come out on the porch and say thank you, Miss Nora, so quietly she could barely hear it.

It was the same voice. She was certain of it.

She drove from the 911 center directly to the probation and parole office on the second floor of the courthouse, where she found Wade’s parole officer, a brisk, tired woman named Denise Harlan, eating lunch at her desk.

Nora told her everything. The burns. The broken glass. The cot. The phone. The 911 call. Denise Harlan listened without interrupting, and when Nora was done, she put down her sandwich and sat back in her chair and was quiet for a long moment.

“So he was there,” Denise said finally.

“He was there. He pulled Wendell out of a burning building. And then he ran.”

Denise nodded slowly. She looked suddenly very tired.

“And he hasn’t told anybody,” she said. “Not the deputies, not his lawyer, not me. He’s letting the whole county believe he’s an arsonist.” She rubbed her eyes. “Do you know why?”

“I have an idea,” Nora said. “But I want to hear you say it.”

“Because he’s on parole,” Denise said. “And his curfew is ten p.m. And if he admits he was standing on that loading dock at one in the morning, he’s admitting to a parole violation.” She opened a folder on her desk and looked at it. “Wade has eighteen months of perfect compliance. Every drug test clean. Every check-in on time. But his parole conditions are strict, because of the original charge. A curfew violation, if I report it, goes to the parole board. And with his record, the board could send him back to finish his sentence.” She closed the folder. “Two more years at Bonne Terre.”

Nora sat with that for a moment.

“So he figured they couldn’t prove arson,” she said slowly. “No evidence except a blurry video. They’d have to let him go eventually. But if he told the truth about being there…”

“He goes straight back to prison,” Denise said. “For saving a man’s life.” She laughed once, without any humor. “And honestly? Even if he told the truth, who in Calder Ridge would believe him? Ex-con with a burglary record says he ran into a burning building to save an old man? Half that town would say he set it himself and then played hero.”

Nora thought about Dale Huckabee on Front Street with his phone held up. You always did think the best of people.

“I need to talk to him,” she said. “Wade. Today.”

Denise Harlan looked at her for a long time. Then she reached for her phone.

“I’ll call the jail,” she said. “You’ve got thirty minutes.”