Empty Promises

Mercer Island. Homes here are built to accommodate the trees and native vegetation and are painted in earth tones. There are bicycle paths and jogging trails, and the residents, many of them doctors, lawyers, computer entrepreneurs, and CEOs, use the floating bridge to escape the city to this suburban paradise in only fifteen minutes.
    Most Mercer Island kids grow up in affluent families. High school parking lots are filled with late-model cars belonging to students. There are the usual police problems caused by teenagers who are bored because they don’t have to work after school, kids who sample drugs, kids who get drunk and drive too fast. But if one could choose a place to raise children, Mercer Island would be it. No ghettos. No high crime neighborhoods. Only parks and discreet shopping areas.
    John Stickney grew up in a rural region on the southern end of Mercer Island. At eighteen, he was 6 feet 1, a handsome blond boy who excelled in athletics. The neighbors liked him; his friends liked him. He and his family were solid members of the Mercer Island Covenant Church, a Fundamentalist church that promoted the tenets outlined in the Old Testament and whose members eschewed alcohol and tobacco.
    John seemed to be the kind of boyfriend that all parents would want for their daughter. But it was pretty Leigh Hayden he fell in love with. The attraction was mutual, and people smiled to see them together. They started going steady when they were fourteen years old; indeed, neither had ever known another love. Had it been another time, another place—perhaps back in the days of the pioneer settlers who homesteaded in Washington—they might have married when they were only sixteen and grown old together. But it wasn’t 1850; it was 1979. John wanted to marry Leigh. He had no plans for college. In fact, he had dropped out of high school. But Leigh had plans and was nowhere near ready to get married. She was a good student and had been accepted at Washington State University in Pullman. “Wazzu,” as Washington State was called, was 300 miles east of Mercer Island and a world away from John.
    He couldn’t bear the idea of Leigh going away. They had been attached at the hip for four years. Sure, they had broken up for short periods, but he’d always been able to persuade Leigh to come back. He couldn’t really believe that she would actually pack up and move clear across the state from him. And he was afraid she would meet someone else or that she would change and they would no longer have anything in common.
    John was a bright young man, but he suffered from learning disabilities. His schoolwork had never mirrored what he really knew, what his IQ really was. He was one of thousands of kids hampered by dyslexia and therefore unable to read well; words appeared backward or upside down or jumbled to him. As a result, there was no question of John’s going to college with Leigh. The experience would have been frustrating for him. He thought about getting a job in Pullman so he could be close to her, but he sensed that might be even more painful. He would be on the fringe of her life, and he already had a good job at home, which he didn’t want to risk leaving. His family cared deeply for John, as did his church congregation. They tried to help him, prayed for him, hoped that his life would straighten out, and that he would fulfill the promise he had shown.
    John’s job was with the Industrial Rock Products Company, a firm that specialized in rock blasting. Freeways were being widened, and it was necessary to literally blast away sections of mountain rock to accommodate them. There would be ongoing demand for skills in this area, so John’s community felt that his future was off to a good start.
    Blasting with explosives is precise and terribly dangerous work, but John proved adept at it, even when he was in his mid-teens. Many of the men he worked with in this hazardous occupation had known him since he was only twelve years old. They liked the kid who was always cheerful, who never seemed to lose his temper, no matter how difficult a task. By December 1979, Stickney had worked in the rock quarry for a few years, and his boss considered him “one of the old-timers.”
    But John Stickney’s fascination with explosives continued after he left his eight hours on the job. A friend who attended school with John recalled, “He liked to blow things up. He was always blowing something up—a tree, or whatever. He’d