Worth More Dead

his house in the early afternoon.
    “Bob,” she asked, “where’s Carolyn? What is going on?”
    He answered a little vaguely, saying she had gone to work.
    “She never showed up at work.”
    Then Denise asked Bob if he and Carolyn had had a fight the night before.
    “Yeah,” he said curtly. “What do you know about that? I hear she told people she was going to have a serious conversation with me. What do you know about that?”
    Denise backed off. “I don’t really know. Have you checked her horse’s stall? Maybe she just totally lost it, and she went—like maybe she’s sitting in the corner of Drizzle’s stall.”
    Bob Durall didn’t appear to be worried about Carolyn, even when he heard she hadn’t gone to work. Denise could hear no emotion in his voice, but that was like him. She asked him to run upstairs and check to see if Carolyn’s makeup, her shampoo, the solution for her contact lenses, and the special gel she always used on her hair were there. He put down the phone for a few minutes then came back on the line. “Yeah, it’s all there.”
    “Okay,” she said firmly, “I want you to go and check the stall and see if she’s there. Call me back at three.”
    He did call her back then, but he hadn’t found Carolyn, and he had heard no news at all about her. No one had seen her. Still, he sounded calm, as if there was nothing to worry about.
    By now, Bob’s work associates had heard that his wife was missing, and they had also learned that he had called the class he was supposed to attend and said he wouldn’t be able to be there at all. No one knew where he had been all day Friday.
    Denise called Bob back at six. He said he still hadn’t heard from Carolyn.
    “Bob,” she said, “you should call the police and find out what you should do. Just call the Renton Police Department and tell them your wife is missing and give them the information they ask for. Just report it, and ask them how long it takes before you can officially file a missing report.”
    “Okay,” he said in a calm voice. “I’ll do that.”

    Even if a husband or other close relative calls the police, the fact is that most departments don’t take missing reports on adults—other than those with handicaps or mental disorders—until the person has been missing twenty-four to forty-eight hours. The vast majority of adults return to their homes safely within that time period, having left for reasons of their own. When there is evidence of foul play, of course, the rules change.
    But there were no overt signs that something bad had happened to Carolyn Durall. Her husband certainly didn’t seem concerned when he called the Renton Police Department to report her missing.
    He had seen her early Friday morning, he said, as they were both preparing to leave for work, but she hadn’t come home Friday evening.
    “When did you see her last?” Detective Gary Kittleson asked.
    Bob Durall spoke slowly, as if he was trying to remember helpful details. He said that he had awakened at about 5:45 Friday morning and that he had driven Carolyn’s van down to the shores of Lake Washington, where he went jogging in Gene Coulon Park. After he returned home, he was taking a shower when he heard her call out that she was going downstairs.
    “…So she was headed down the stairs from our bedroom, and I assumed she was leaving for work,” he said. “I didn’t know until late afternoon that she didn’t show up at Morgan Stanley.”
    The detective noted that Durall seemed very calm, very different from the panicky feelings of his wife’s friends.
    Bob Durall said there might be a number of reasonable explanations for his wife’s sudden disappearance, although he wasn’t specific on this Friday night. “I have no idea why she would leave or where she might have gone.”
    The Renton police did send out a statewide computer request asking for “an attempt to locate” both Carolyn and her wine-colored van.
    When her family compared notes, they realized that the last one to speak directly to Carolyn was probably her brother’s wife, who called her about 8:30 Thursday night. Bob had answered on the fourth ring, sounding “very subdued.”
    “He didn’t sound like himself,” she recalled. “He sounded disturbed, and I asked him, ‘What’s wrong? You sound sad.’ He said he was fine but ‘really tired.’ ”
    When she asked to speak to Carolyn, Bob said he thought she was probably asleep. She asked him to check. After a