—
Flowers was lookingat Timothy as a possible DNA match for the last person to have sex with Doris Grandfelt. According to information Fisk found on a true crime site, Flowers had determined that the sex occurred very shortly before Grandfelt was killed. If he concluded that Timothy had killed Grandfelt, then she, Fisk, was safe, except for the possibility that the surviving Grandfelts might go after Timothy’s estate with a lawsuit. If they won the lawsuit, that would be a blow to her financial security.
But if an intense look into Timothy’s personality and history suggested that he hadn’t killed Doris Grandfelt—if they concluded that his contact was a one-time, sex-for-money deal—who would they look at next? If Flowers did a deep dive into her own history, he might find a series of violent deaths.
Even if he did all of that, she doubted that she would be indicted, or could be convicted. All the evidence would be purely circumstantial. But it would be ugly, and in a criminal case, nothing was certain.
She was now deep into pure speculation, but she had the sense that the investigation was turning against her best interests. Getting Flowers off the case, she thought, might be critical.
How to do that?
She went back to the Google satellite views of Flowers’s girlfriend’s farm. Way out in the sticks. She looked at the roads around the farm…
And after a while, she thought, small risk now, or possible bigger risk later? She would have to do an on-the-spot evaluation of risk…
She went to bed in sweatpants and a tee-shirt, lay awake for a while, a little too warm, then got up, went to the garage, opened a storage cabinet, and took out the final gallon jug of Drano Max Gel. She took a few seconds to unscrew a stubborn cap and pour the contents down the utility sink. Careful not to let it splash on her, she rinsed it three times, then took it in the house and put it in the kitchen sink while she went back upstairs to dress.
A half hour after that, she was at an all-night gas station. She filled the tank on the car, then without hesitation, the gallon jug. She tightened the cap on the jug and went inside, through a cloud of small moths, to claim her change.
Looked at her watch: 1:30 a.m.
Small risk now?
Faced with the reality of it, it suddenly seemed not so small.
25
Frankie Nobles always slept soundly, even when Virgil was gone. While she didn’t believe in the mystical powers of pyramids, she and Virgil did sleep under the canted ceiling of the old farmhouse, which was like being under a pyramid. And it was nice, especially in a thunderstorm, to hear the rain drumming on the roof while they were safe and warm inside.
She was soundly asleep at three o’clock in the morning when Honus the Yellow Dog jumped off the bed and padded to the open window, looked out through the screen, and woofed. Woofed again, and then left the bedroom, running down the stairs, where he began barking frantically.
Frankie struggled toward consciousness until she heard Sam screaming from the downstairs bedroom: “Ma! Ma! The stable’s on fire. Ma! Ma!”
Frankie came out of bed as though on a catapult, ran down the stairs barefoot, found the kitchen door open, heard Honus barking frantically, now outside. She looked toward the stable and saw Sam running toward it, silhouetted against the bright light of a fire that was already climbing toward the building’s loft.
She shrieked, “Sam, come back, no, Sam! Sam!” and she went after him.
The fire was climbing the stable’s side wall, which faced her, and she ran barefoot across the farmyard, driveway stones biting into her feet, and saw Sam disappear through the stable’s front door. Honus was running in frantic circles outside the door that Sam had gone through, barking, barking, and as she got there, she could hear the two horses bawling from their stalls, crazed with fear, kicking the wooden stall walls.
She followed Sam through the door. To her left, she could see a fire crawling up a wall of hay bales, which were stored opposite the tack room. There was smoke, not as much as she’d feared, but the flames at the end of the building were ferocious, a blowtorch, a hurricane. Through it, to her right, she saw Sam running toward the opposite end of the building.
She screamed, “Sam!”
The kid turned and shouted, “The horses are crazy. We got to let them out the back.”
He disappeared through the doorway and she went after him, knowing without thinking that he was right, the horses were out of control, and they were big, and they were violent. She went out the door behind him, and he was already around the corner of the building.
Each stall had a separate, small twenty-by-thirty-foot turnout at the back of the barn, with a stable door opening into each turnout. The turnouts were contained by six-foot-tall pipe fencing. Sam slipped between pipes on the turnout fence, ran to the first stall door, turned the latch handle on the door, and yanked it open. The rescue they called Rush exploded from the stall, smashing the door back before it was fully open.
The door knocked Sam down and the panicked golden-brown horse bucked in a tight circle inside the fence as Sam rolled toward the building to get away from the horse’s iron-shod hooves. Frankie ran around to the outside of the pen and yanked the latch on the pen’s gate and dragged the gate open. Rush saw the opening and was through it in an instant, disappearing into the night.
The fire was spreading from under the roof and Frankie shouted, “Sam, get away from the wall…”
Sam was already crawling into the second turnout; sparks were firing into the sky, pieces of hay carried aloft, some the size of kitchen towels, and Frankie feared that the house might go until she realized a breeze was carrying the sparks away from the house, but toward the two of them, like flaming, falling kites.
She unlatched the second turnout gate as Sam turned the handle on the stall door, and Bruno, a big black quarter horse, pounded into the turnout and then through the open gate into the night. Frankie felt a spasm of relief as she watched the horse go, then a spasm of terror as she turned back to Sam and saw that one of his shirt sleeves was on fire and he was slapping at it while trying to pull his pajama shirt off, and she ran to him and as he turned, grabbed the back of his shirt and yanked it straight over his head.
As she did that, she stepped barefoot on a wad of burning hay and did a dance away from it, still tearing at the shirt. Flames from the shirt caught Sam’s long hair for a second, but she slapped it out and Sam shouted, “You’re on fire” and she realized she was, and she ripped her own nightshirt off as they both ran out of the pen and into the adjacent pasture.
