By Robert King -- Daily Staff Writer

LINDEN — A fire destroyed a home near Linden on Sunday.

The fire occurred at 303 Grimes Golden Road in the Apple Mountain Lake subdivision, and was called in at 5:05 p.m. on Sunday. The owners weren't in the house at the time, and no one was injured, said Warren County Fire and Rescue Chief Richard E. Mabie.

The fire caught the attention of Yvonne Roudabush, who lives next door and was selling puppies at the time.

"I thought [the owner] was just burning trash," she said.

But when the smoke started to increase, Roudabush said, she knew something was wrong. She bolted to the front of the house in an effort to alert any residents inside.

"I was banging on the door, yelling," she said.

Robert Mitchell and his wife, Rebecca, both of Fairfax, were looking to buy a puppy from Roudabush. Mitchell called 911.

"It sounded like bullets were going off," Mitchell said of the scene. "It was thick, black smoke out of every crack of that house."

Frank Raines, a Grimes Golden Road resident, said he was getting ready to leave for Front Royal when he saw the fire.

"We heard some crackling and ran over and looked through the fence and could see the deck was on fire," Raines said.

When firefighters arrived, they saw the rear porch was fully engulfed. The fire eventually spread to the roof area and hampered firefighters' efforts, Mabie said.

"As we started to go inside, the roof started failing in the back," he said. "We basically did a defensive attack until we got it to a manageable scenario that we could protect our people."

Fire and rescue personnel searched for occupants but found nothing, Mabie said.

Officials are trying to contact the owners, who may be out of town. Some ways of finding the owners, such as checking county records, aren't available on Sundays, Mabie said.

Mabie added that the location of the house, deep in the subdivision, affected the response time. The first engines arrived at roughly 5:20 p.m.

"It always affects your response time when you are up in the mountains," he said. "It's slower, you have to go up narrow roads."

The house is a total loss, Mabie added.

Officials haven't yet determined the cause of the blaze, and the fire is still under investigation, Mabie said.

"Our biggest thing right now is to figure out what happened," he said.

* Contact Robert King at rking@nvdaily.com