It won’t be for long. I wish I could open a museum or a shelter for battered women or something on this property, but this is prime real estate, and there are zoning laws designed to protect its value.
So I’ve put this massive lot up for sale, hopefully to a nice family who will build a nice new house with a very different future. The Realtors quoted me an estimate that’s more money than I’d make in my lifetime, and far more money than I’ll ever need. So I’ll keep a fraction for myself and give the rest of the proceeds to Aiden Willis.
Another whack from the wrecking ball, this time taking out the wraparound balcony, the master bedroom where so many people lost, or took, their lives—centuries of horror gone with one crushing boom.
“I’m gonna miss that house,” says Noah.
I laugh. It feels good to laugh. Odd, unusual, but good.
“But speaking of houses,” he says, “those rooms aren’t going to paint themselves.”
Our new place, he means. Not far down the road from Uncle Lang’s old house. A three-bedroom, two-bathroom in a nice, quiet spot. Quiet sounds good right about now. We cosigned the loan, on the salaries of a newly promoted detective, first grade, and the owner of a new handyman business.
Seeing this house, even in its deliciously beaten and battered form now, brings back everything from that final night.
I lean into Noah. “You were that sure I wouldn’t shoot you?” I ask.
He cradles me with an arm. “Oh, yeah,” he says. “It was clear that you were madly in love with me.”
I smile to myself. I am, in fact, madly in love with this man.
I watch the wrecking ball do its work. I said I didn’t want to watch, but now I’m fixated. Now I have to see it. I have to see every single piece of limestone battered and knocked to the ground. I need to see every inch of earth turned over—
Noah looks at me, sees the intensity in my face.
“Y’know what?” he says. “I changed my mind. This is boring. This house is old news. I wanna go to our new house.”
This man understands me, sometimes better than I understand myself.
“Me too,” I say.
We walk off, hand in hand, leaning against each other, the sun beating down on us.
Behind us, another boom, the sound of crushing rocks, another awed gasp from the crowd, but neither of us looks back.
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WHEN I SAW the road sign that said we were ten miles from Starksville, North Carolina, my breath turned shallow, my heartbeat sped up, and an irrationally dark and oppressive feeling came over me.
My wife, Bree, was sitting in the passenger seat of our Ford Explorer and must have noticed. “You okay, Alex?” she asked.
I tried to shrug the sensations off, said, “A great novelist of North Carolina, Thomas Wolfe, wrote that you can’t go home again. I’m just wondering if it’s true.”
“Why can’t we go home again, Dad?” Ali, my soon-to-be-seven-year-old son, asked from the backseat.
“It’s just an expression,” I said. “If you grow up in a small town and then move away to a big city, things are never the same when you go back. That’s all.”
“Oh,” Ali said, and he returned to the game he was playing on his iPad.
My fifteen-year-old daughter, Jannie, who’d been sullen most of the long drive down from DC, said, “You’ve never been back here, Dad? Not once?”
“Nope,” I replied, glancing in the rearview mirror. “Not in … how long, Nana?”
“Thirty-five years,” said my tiny ninety-something grandmother, Regina Cross. She sat in the backseat between my two kids, straining to look outside. “We’ve kept in touch with the extended family, but things just never worked out to come back down.”
“Until now,” Bree said, and I could feel her gaze on me.
My wife and I are both detectives with the DC Metro Police, and I knew I was being scrutinized by a pro.
Really not wanting to reopen the “discussion” we’d been having the past few days, I said firmly, “The captain ordered us to take time off and get away, and blood is thicker than water.”
“We could have gone to the beach.” Bree sighed. “Jamaica again.”
“I like Jamaica,” Ali said.
“Instead, we’re going to the mountains,” I said.
“How long will we have to be here?” Jannie groaned.
“As long as my cousin’s trial lasts,” I said.
“That could be, like, a month!” she cried.
“Probably not,” I said. “But maybe.”
“God, Dad, how am I going to stay in any kind of shape for the fall season?”
My daughter, a gifted track athlete, had become obsessive about her workouts since winning a major race earlier in the summer.
“You’re getting to work out twice a week with an AAU-sanctioned team out of Raleigh,” I said. “They come right to the high school track here to train at altitude. Your coach even said it would be good for you to run at altitude, so please, no more about your training. We’ve got it covered.”
“How much attitude is Starksville?” Ali asked.