Raging Love(4)

“Savanna, Darlin’ this changes nothin’,” Colt said as he flung the door open. “Savanna, can you hear me?”

I looked at Colt, but words wouldn’t come out of my mouth. Ty started walking toward us, I guess to check on me as well, but I didn’t hear what he was saying. I felt Colt grabbing me by the arm and shaking me and still, I never moved. I guess I was just in shock.

We were supposed to be married in just three days.

How could it really be happening?

Was it just a bad dream?

Colt grabbed my hand and held it when he realized I was incoherent. He was brushing my hair out of my face and saying things to me, although I couldn’t tell you what it was. He turned to look at me and past my watery eyes, I could see his mouth moving, but couldn’t make out his words.

I turned to face the flaming building. The roof began to collapse. A loud cracking and falling sound erupted the ranch as the large structure fell to the ground in the midst of heated fire. The firefighters began hosing down the vicinity around the barn, to prevent it from spreading to any of the other buildings. All I could do was just sit there staring. I watched the fire consuming all of my happiness and turning it to ash.





Chapter 3

Colt

Savanna hadn’t said a word after the fire had consumed the whole barn, leaving it as a pile of charred rubble. She managed to scoot over in the truck to enable me to drive us back to the house. I carried her in the house and put her in bed. She had anxiety medication she took when things got too hard for her to handle, it seemed like she was having to take at least two a week lately.

After getting her settled enough, I headed back to deal with the aftermath of the fire. At one point, there had been three ladder trucks and two engines here at the ranch. As I drove back, I noticed there were only two trucks left. Firefighters were walking through the still smoking debris. My mother was standing pretty far back talking to the fire chief. I recognized him from charity events we had both attended. I approached him and held out my hand. “Sorry you had to come out tonight.”

“It’s my job. I was just tellin’ your mama that the inspector is goin’ to need to come out for insurance purposes.”

“Yeah I figured as much.” I kicked a couple pieces of charred wood back toward the pile of ash.

“I’m guessin’ this is where the big event was goin’ to take place?” The fire chief wrote something else down in his clipboard and looked back up at us.

“It was. Now I have no clue what we are goin’ to do,” I said honestly.

My mother put her arm around my back and started rubbing it. “We will get it all figured out. Don’t worry about that right now.”

I nodded. There wasn’t much to say. Everything for the wedding was in that barn. The only thing that we still had was Savanna’s dress. This was a total fucking disaster. Conner was standing around talking to a firefighter, while Ty and Miranda were on my mother’s front porch just watching from afar. I kept looking around at my family. I knew they were all concerned, but there wasn’t shit anyone could do now.

The sheriff’s department showed up about an hour later. I guess that was how long it took them to talk to some of the people who had worked hard to try to contain the fire. The fire department had just pulled away and my mother had taken everyone else inside. It had been daylight for about an hour so I estimated that it was around seven in the morning.

“Looks like you guys had a rough night,” he said as he climbed out of his vehicle.

“You could say that.” I shook his hand. “So what’s goin’ on?”

“I figured since this is goin’ to be major news around town, I would get on top of this. I need to know if you think anyone could have started this fire. Is there anyone with a vendetta against your family? Anyone that you could think of that would hurt your family?”

As I was thinking about who could have done something like this, I saw Ty pulling a shirt over his head and walking toward us. “Hey man what’s going on?” He asked.

“He was just askin’ if we know anyone that could have done this on purpose.”

Ty shook his head and let out a sigh. He got ready to say something, but we noticed Aunt Karen flying up the driveway. She jumped out of the car and came running toward us. “John, thanks for coming so fast. This is why I called you.” She handed him a cell phone. I recognized it right away from all the bullshit we had gone through before. It was Miranda’s.

Ty and I just looked at each other and watched the officer looking through the messages.

“They are all from a blocked number, but I’m sure it’s him. We hadn’t heard anything, but with the wedding being in the papers, I guess it gave him reason to believe she was back. Are they in any danger John? Do they need to leave the ranch? They have a small child to think about, you know.”