In the fall of 1967, Grayson Melvin met the girl of his dreams. Annie Lineberger was so far out his league that he felt like she was playing an entirely different game, but somehow he won her affections. He couldn't believe his good luck while it lasted. They both were 18, but Grayson was a baby, and Annie had been around. She was beautiful, smart and funny. When she told him she loved him, he would have died for her, right then and there. Instead, Annie died, or at least disappeared from the face of the earth. On the same night when she broke Grayson's teenage heart by giving him his walking papers, she vanished. Everyone believed he killed her. Without a body, though, nothing could be proved. And so Grayson Melvin lived his life. Kicked out of his university, he went from the Army and Vietnam to bartending to another college to newspapers, where he discovered that Annie's well-connected and vengeful family still had the power to step into his stunted life and punish him. Then, in