Worth More Dead

years, they weren’t likely to miraculously mend their marriage.
    Bob was still handsome and trim, although he had gone bald before he was 40. His chestnut hair was now only a fringe. After being bald for a year or so, his vanity couldn’t stand it, so he bought an expensive toupee that looked quite natural. Most of their new neighbors didn’t even know he wore one.
    It wasn’t the way Bob looked, Carolyn explained to her friends. He was still an attractive man, but he was just too damned intractable. It was his way or the highway. Carolyn talked to her friends about her renewed hopes. She was only 36, she had a good job, and she longed for a world where she didn’t have to tiptoe around her own home. Bob had taken over paying the bills six months earlier so he even had domain over their checkbook.
    The marriage was dead. She just wanted to be herself again.
    Carolyn’s decision was reinforced one night after she went to a restaurant—Cucina Cucina—and a movie with her mother and Denise after work. Bob knew where she was, and he grudgingly agreed to stay with their children, but when she got home, she found he had locked her out. He didn’t answer the door when she pounded on it and called out to him. Embarrassed, she had to go to the Gundersons next door to get the key they kept in case of emergency.
    During the early summer of 1998, Carolyn Durall somehow found the confidence she’d lost so many years earlier. She bought some new clothes, had her hair cut and bleached a lighter blond, tried new makeup, and laughed more often. She opened a small bank account in her name only with a $400 gift certificate given to her by her bosses at Morgan Stanley. She added to it when she could; her goal was to have enough money to pay the first and last months’ rent and the damage deposit on an apartment. There wasn’t much in her account, only about a thousand dollars, but it was one of the very first independent things she had done in more than a decade.
    Carolyn was on edge by the end of July 1998. Besides the bank record of her secret account, she kept anything remotely personal and private at her office. Bob was driving her crazy, virtually stalking her. If she went out for lunch or pizza with her women friends, he would suddenly show up unannounced. “He seemed to know her every move,” one of her coworkers said. “How awful to have to live like that.”
    Bob tried to get home before Carolyn did so he could note the time of her arrival. If she got home first and he saw her van there, he would take off his shoes and socks and tiptoe barefoot into the house to see if he could catch her with a lover. When she talked to friends on the phone, both parties could hear a click that signified someone had picked up an extension. Bob made sure to pick up the mail before Carolyn did, and he went through it carefully. He listened to all their voice mail messages and monitored her Internet access. He was expert at that but found nothing.
    Carolyn didn’t have a lover or one in the wings. But she had made up her mind to be happy, which meant that one day she would find someone she could love. She hoped that she could keep in touch with Bob’s family. His father had died shortly before, but she would miss his mother and her sister-in-law. They had been good to her, and she knew they would be shocked and saddened at the divorce. This year’s red geraniums were flourishing near Carolyn’s front porch.
    Carolyn wrote down her financial status and studied it to see if she could manage on child support and her share of the family assets. She had made initial visits to two lawyers.
    “She was getting herself very well prepared for this,” Denise remembered. “She was ready to leave.”
    Although Bob Durall had never harmed Carolyn physically, her situation frightened her friends. Denise and Gary Jannusch owned a rental house, and their renters were moving out in mid-August 1998. It seemed providential. They were happy to rent it to Carolyn and her children. In late July and early August, the children stayed with her parents at their summer retreat on the island, going to camp during the day. If there should be an argument when Carolyn and Bob parted, the kids wouldn’t have to witness it.
    The only thing that troubled Denise was that she and her family were going to be in Lake Chelan for the week of August 3 to August 8. It was about a three-and-a-half-hour drive from Renton, and they would be far away on Thursday, August