Worth More Dead

He saw the gates close before her car got on, and he knew she would have to wait hours for the next one.”
    John and Linda Gunderson moved to Hoquiam Court, into the house next door to the Duralls. “I remember the first time I met them very well,” Linda said. “In all the stress of moving, I accidentally locked myself out, and our baby was inside. I was frantic, and then I saw Bob and Carolyn in their driveway. I introduced myself and told them what had happened. Bob said they couldn’t stop to help me because they had to go someplace, but Carolyn said, ‘Of course we’ll help you.’ ”
    The Gundersons realized that that was pretty much the way things would be. If Bob Durall had something he wanted to do or someplace to go, he couldn’t be bothered with anyone else’s problems. Carolyn always made an effort to help.
    Linda noticed that it was Carolyn who mowed their lawn and took care of the children, while it had to be a special occasion for Bob to help. Once in a while, neighbors saw Bob in his yard while his children played outside, but if any other adult in their cul-de-sac came outside, he assumed that he no longer had to supervise and went in his house.
    Carolyn had become very close to Bob’s family, and she tried to keep her unhappiness from them. In a dozen years, she had become good friends with his sister, and she liked his mother, who was nearing 80. They shared traditions and celebrated holidays. Her mother-in-law always gave Carolyn scarlet geraniums for Mother’s Day, planting them herself in a wine barrel near the front door. Sometimes the Jannusches came over while Bob’s folks were visiting.
    “Bob wasn’t very nice to his parents,” Gary Jannusch recalled. “They were great people—we really liked his dad—but he was just mean to them sometimes.”
    There came a time when Linda Gunderson wondered if her neighbors spent any time together. “When Carolyn came home from work,” Linda said, “Bob left. And when he drove up, she would leave to go shopping or to ride her horse.”
    Denise Jannusch understood that. While Bob had never physically hurt Carolyn, he verbally abused her much of the time.
    And he didn’t make a secret of the possibility that he was seeing women outside the marriage. The Gundersons recalled a time when Bob was working at IPC. “He came driving up in a panic,” John Gunderson said. “He said there was some crazy woman coming after him, and he had to get Carolyn and the kids out of the house.”
    While he did drive off with his family a few minutes later, the woman never showed up. A fellow worker at IPC verified that most people there were aware that Bob was seeing a woman he worked with. When he suddenly broke up with her, she suffered a nervous breakdown and ended up losing her job.
    Bob left IPC. In the mid-nineties, he became the supervisor of the computer division of the King County Housing Authority, where he was responsible for all their information systems.
    Thanks to a gift from his mother-in-law to both Carolyn and Bob, they belonged to a prestigious country club. It was Bob who took advantage of it. In photos, the couple still looked happy. But there was something in Carolyn’s eyes that warred with her smile.
    By the summer of 1998, they had been married for a dozen years. Their children were nine, seven, and four. They argued sometimes, but few residents on Hoquiam Court realized the depth of the troubles in their marriage. All couples argue occasionally, and the Duralls weren’t yelling and screaming at each other. Whatever their differences, they seemed quite civilized to one another, but they just didn’t seem to be having much fun together.
    The Duralls’ marriage had long since fallen into a pattern that many wives are all too familiar with. Carolyn realized too late that to placate Bob she had given up little pieces of herself for years until she had virtually no power left. Their marriage was all about making Bob happy, a task that was daunting, if not impossible, to achieve.
    Her close women friends, coworkers, and neighbors knew; they often talked about their relationships over coffee, and the women who went to neighborhood barbecues or office parties noticed that Carolyn was edgy when the time came for her to go home. Bob rarely validated her as a wife or as a person. He didn’t trust her to handle money, even though they both contributed their salaries to the family income. Carolyn had to account for every penny, and Bob