Worth More Dead

although Carolyn continued to work for a while, she stopped when she gave birth to the first of their children in 1989. It was a boy. A few months later, she felt once more that she and Bob should not be married, only to find that she was pregnant again. She had a second son in 1991. Carolyn adored her babies, but her marriage wasn’t working. Bob insisted on counseling. He picked the therapist, and she agreed to go. Somehow, with all four of the counselors they eventually saw together, she always came away feeling that she was the partner in the wrong, and she felt guilty that she hadn’t measured up to Bob’s expectations. Or, apparently, to the counselors’ either.
    They attended religious services together in the same church where Bob went most of his life. He taught Sunday school. In 1995, they joined the church and became even more active there. During the early years in their first house on Hoquiam Court in Renton, the Duralls outwardly seemed happy enough, although they had very different personalities. They participated in neighborhood get-togethers. Bob was a different kind of guy from most of the young husbands. One man described him as “a cocky guy, but I had the feeling: ‘Is anybody in there?’ when I talked to him. As if he wasn’t really listening.” Carolyn, on the other hand, was truly concerned about other people.
    Bob was something of a job-hopper, although he usually moved up the financial ladder. But he was let go from a few jobs because he wasn’t a man who went along with other people’s programs. When he printed out his résumé, he simply didn’t mention the jobs from which he was fired. He was a computer expert in a newly burgeoning area of business, so he never had trouble finding another job. Over the years, he worked for some time at IPC Pension Service and the Bon Marché department store.
    In the early nineties, Bob accepted a job with Royal Seafoods. There he worked closely with a man named Gary Jannusch. Gary met Carolyn and knew at once she and his wife, Denise, would have a lot in common. He grabbed Denise at the company Christmas party and brought her over to meet Bob Durall’s wife. Gary was right; Carolyn and Denise were soon best friends.
    Certainly, they had their husbands’ jobs in common, but it was far more than that. They got along, laughing at the same things. Since Carolyn wasn’t working at the time, she was happy to babysit for the Jannusches’ daughter, Tera, when Denise went back to work part time in a job-share arrangement at Morgan Stanley Dean Witter in Bellevue. Denise never worried about her little girl when she was with Carolyn.
    The Jannusches found Bob a little strange, and his lifestyle was different from most people’s. He was a health food nut, a compulsive jogger, and into meditation, strange ethereal music, and other fairly far-out mystical stuff. They felt a little sorry for Carolyn when they saw how she had to scurry to be sure Bob had his special natural foods before she could relax on any of their mutual vacations. But they didn’t presume to judge anyone else’s marriage. If Carolyn loved Bob, even though he seemed to control every aspect of her life, that was certainly her choice.
    The Jannusches and the Duralls lived in the Highlands area of Renton, a Seattle suburb, and their homes were quite close. The neighborhoods there were made up of new houses occupied by couples in their twenties and thirties. The four of them socialized, and their children liked each other.
    In 1992, Denise’s job-share partner at Morgan Stanley Dean Witter left, and she asked Carolyn if she would like to work with her; that way each young mother would have an interesting job but would only have to work part time. Carolyn liked the idea, came in to be interviewed, and was hired. Now, they were not only best friends; they were also coworkers.
    After having their two sons, Carolyn became pregnant again, an unplanned pregnancy. Bob wanted her to have an abortion, but she wouldn’t even consider it. Even though the marriage was limping along badly by 1994, Carolyn wanted the third baby. This time, she had a girl. Bob soon came to dote on his daughter. His neighbors said he absolutely adored her.
    Carolyn stayed home with the new baby for a few months, then she went back to work. Bob still didn’t help much at home, but she seemed able to handle both her job at the investment firm and her duties as a wife and mother with ease.
    By January 1998, Carolyn