Last Dance, Last Chance

violence: Denny was so pathetic when Cherie left him that she truly believed he was going to change. But a few weeks after she came back to him, he returned to his old behavior.
    What started in April as bliss ended in early December. The couple separated, and Denny moved to Seattle but continued to call Cherie every day.
    For a few weeks, Cherie moved in with her mother, Gladys Bodine, in Kent, 20 miles southeast of Seattle and not far from Maple Valley.
    But Cherie couldn’t bring herself to separate completely from Denny. Part of it was that she really did care for him, and part of it was that she felt sorry for him. But she was also afraid of him. Like many women who are hounded and stalked by men who won’t let go, Cherie made the mistake of leaving the door slightly open.
    “We were partners in a mixed-doubles bowling league, and I told Denny I would continue to bowl with him on Friday nights,” Cherie recalled. “He kept calling me at work, wanting to see me, to ask how I was; sometimes he just wanted to borrow my car.
    It was Friday the 13th when Cherie had what was to be her last date with Denny. “He came out to Kent, and we went bowling,” she said. “Afterwards, he asked me to drive him into Seattle. We sat and talked in the parking lot for a long time. He wanted me to go back with him.”
    Cherie wanted to be back together, too, but she wanted things to be different. She laid down some rules. “I told him again if he’d get a job and support me, I would go back to him.”
    After she told Denny what she needed to make a relationship work, she drove him back to Seattle. Apparently, he had intended that they would return to intimacy that very night, and he was angry that he had to prove himself to her. When they were halfway to Seattle, somewhere in Tukwila, he asked Cherie to pull over and park. She agreed. “But he kept arguing, and I told him I had to get home to my mother’s house because she went to bed early and she didn’t like to have me come in late.”
    The truth was that Cherie no longer lived with her mother, but she didn’t want Denny to know the address of her new apartment. If he thought she was with her mother, he’d be lulled into believing that he could always locate her when wanted to.
    “I just didn’t want him to know where I was living.”
    Denny’s mood changed rapidly, and he turned to her and said a strange thing in a flat, monotone voice: “You won’t have to worry about your mother. You won’t have to worry about tomorrow. Neither will I. We’ll both be dead.”
    That frightened Cherie. Denny could be a lot of fun, but when he was in his depressed or angry moods, she didn’t know for sure what he might do. “I was scared then,” she remembered. “I told him I loved him and asked him how could he hurt someone who loved him, and the only one who loved him? He looked up at a hill nearby where a cross was lighted up on a church, and then he shouted, ‘Damn you God! Damn you!’”
    Then he seemed to calm down, and Cherie started the car and drove him into Seattle.
     
    Pat Jacque didn’t know any of Denny’s background. As far as she was concerned, she was dealing with a man who had no past at all.
    Denny was getting more nervous, pacing like a lion and pulling the curtains back more frequently to see if anyone was coming. He kept shaking his head when she begged him to take her car and leave. He didn’t trust her at all.
    And then he turned to her and said, “You will have to drive me.”
    It was a terrible decision that would have taken the wisdom of Solomon to determine. If she went with him, her children would be safe from him, at least. But then again, they were so young. She never left them alone, even to run across the street. There were so many dangerous things little kids could get into. Worse, if they wandered out to the road looking for her, they might be hit by a car coming along Wax Road. What if the house caught fire? What if they fell—or got into poisonous cleaning supplies? Mothers always worry about things like that. Most are nervous even with baby-sitters.
    But she had to get the man with the gun out of her house, and Pat prayed that Roy would be home soon. At age 7, Steve might be able to tell his father what had happened. She hoped that somehow Roy would find her.
    Wondering if she would ever see her family again, Pat Jacque stepped from the warmth of her home into the icy drizzle of December rain. Denny motioned for her to get in