“I love you, Grace Alexander, and can’t imagine living without you,” I said. “I know I’m not perfect and I bring some baggage, but I promise I’ll work hard to overcome it. Will you marry me? I love you more than I can put into words.”
Tears slid down both of her cheeks, and she wrapped her arms around my neck. She pulled back for a second, and then kissed me in a way that was transcendent. I’d never felt that way before.
“Yes,” she said. “I love you, too, Darren Street. The answer is yes.”
CHAPTER 6
Donnie Frazier and Tommy Beane had been in town for two days, just enough to make sure the information they’d received on Darren Street was accurate and to do a little surveillance. As they drove by the white house on Boyd Station Road at two in the morning, they both felt fortunate. It was on a large piece of property, with the nearest neighbor being at least a half mile away. A railroad track ran down the opposite side of the road, so there were no houses at all on that side of the road for a five-mile stretch.
“I hope there ain’t no damned yappy dog inside there,” Frazier said.
Frazier was a thirty-three-year-old beanpole of a man with long, sandy-blond hair. Six months earlier, he’d been released from the Northern Correctional Facility in Moundsville, West Virginia, after serving twelve years of a sixteen-year sentence for second-degree attempted murder.
Frazier’s brother, Bobby Lee Frazier, had stabbed Darren Street eleven times with an ice pick during an altercation in Street’s cell when they were in the same federal maximum security prison in Rosewood, California, a year and a half earlier. Bobby Lee wound up getting his throat cut by Street’s cellmate during the fight, but the cellmate later hanged himself. Donnie Frazier yearned for revenge for his brother’s death, and Street was the only person left alive.
Frazier looked over at his cohort, Tommy Beane. They’d grown up together in Cowen, West Virginia. Frazier thought Beane was stupid, but he tolerated him, mostly because he just didn’t have many friends. Beane was a burglar by trade, a lifelong thief and thug. He was short and thick, barrel-chested and heavily muscled, with black hair that he combed straight back, dark eyes, and muttonchop sideburns. The Frazier boys and Beane were all high school dropouts by the age of sixteen and had partied together, broken into houses and businesses together, and hurt people together. Theirs was a bond of redneck sociopathy—violence, and indifference to the lives of others. Beane had actually had a real job once. He’d worked for Archland Coal in Cowen for two years. It was during his tenure at Archland that he’d learned how to handle explosives. He also knew where Archland kept its dynamite and blasting caps, and just a few days earlier, Donnie had taken advantage of Beane’s knowledge and experience. He’d talked Tommy into breaking into Ashland’s warehouse, and they’d stolen fifty pounds of dynamite—more than a hundred sticks—enough caps to ignite them, and a roll of safety fuse.
Frazier had watched while Beane crimped the fuse into the blasting caps and bound the sticks into two bundles of twenty-five each back at the hotel. They were both sober tonight, and Frazier was dying for a beer. But dealing with high explosives required a steady hand and a clear mind, Beane kept saying. Sobriety actually made Frazier shaky, but he’d agreed to stay sober until the job was done. He figured they would celebrate after Street was dead.
“His car is in the driveway,” Frazier said as they passed the house a second time. “He’s there. No lights on. Let’s park at that church down the road and walk back.”
Frazier parked the beat-up, fifteen-year-old green Ford pickup behind the church, and the men pulled two gym bags from behind the seat. They crossed the road and disappeared behind the line of trees that had grown between the railroad tracks and the road. Once they reached the house, they ducked beneath the deck out back, slithered on their bellies up under the crawl space, and placed the dynamite near the center of the house. Beane then rolled out thirty feet of safety fuse and lit it, and the two men took off running. They made it back to their car in a little less than ten minutes. Frazier jumped in, started the truck, and pulled up near the road with the lights off.
“How much longer?” Frazier said.
“About four minutes. Do you want to get the hell out of here, or do you want to watch it blow?”
“I’m watching,” Frazier said. “Son of a bitch was responsible for my brother getting killed. I’m gonna sit here and watch him go up in flames.”
CHAPTER 7
The night I spent with Grace at the Oliver Hotel was magical.
Until I got a call at four in the morning.
It was from my friend Bob Ridge, the football coach and Knoxville policeman. When the phone woke me up, I looked at the caller ID and wondered, What the hell?
“Something wrong, Bob?” I said into the phone.
“Oh, Darren, thank God you’re okay. Where are you?”
“I’m at a hotel with Grace. What’s up?”
“There’s been a . . . there’s been . . . Darren, you need to come to your mother’s house right away.”
I couldn’t imagine what was going on, but an internal alarm went off and I immediately felt an incredible sense of anxiety. This was going to be bad. I just knew it was going to be bad.
“Why?” I said. “What’s happened?”
“I don’t want to talk it about it over the phone. You just need to get here as soon as you can.”
Grace had awakened by the time I hung up.
“I’m sorry,” I said, “but we need to leave. That was Bob Ridge. Something has happened at my mom’s.”
“Any idea what?” Grace said.
“He wouldn’t say, but from the tone of his voice, it isn’t good.”
It took us about twenty minutes to get dressed, get checked out, and get into the car. It took another fifteen to drive to my mom’s. I could see red-and-blue lights flashing three-quarters of a mile from her house. A quarter of a mile from her house, we were stopped by a Knoxville police officer and told we couldn’t get through. I explained to him who I was and that Bob Ridge had called me, and he let us pass. When we pulled up near the house—we had to stop a couple of hundred yards away because of all the emergency vehicles blocking the road—I got out and started jogging. It didn’t take long before I realized that my mother’s house, the house she had lived in for decades and that she loved, was nothing but a smoldering pile of ash. It had been completely obliterated. My car was leaning against a tree fifty feet from where it had been parked in the driveway.
I stopped dead in my tracks, staring in disbelief. How could this possibly be? Was I having one of my nightmares? Would I wake up in a minute drenched in sweat and babbling incoherently? There was a house there. My mom’s house. It was built solidly of wood and stone and concrete, and was full of furniture and appliances and photographs and knickknacks. How could it be gone?
Grace caught up to me a couple of seconds later and I heard her mutter, “Oh my God. No.”
Bob Ridge’s massive form came into focus a minute later.
“What . . . what happened?” I could barely speak.