Worth More Dead

neighbors are there to shovel frantically.
    But this was not Cheryl Pitre’s world. As far as anyone knew, she had never visited anyone along the rows of houseboats on Fairview Avenue East.
    Cheryl’s fellow employees at Bay Ford were worried sick about her, and so were her coworkers at PJ’s Market. They had been worried since Sunday morning. When they called her house from the market, they got only Cheryl’s voice on her answering machine. As the days passed and Cheryl didn’t come to work at Bay Ford, they all had a sense of dread.
    Greg Meakin received a call from Roland Pitre at eleven on Monday morning. He sounded very concerned, “Greg,” he said, “have you seen Cheryl? She didn’t come home last night.”
    Greg hadn’t heard from Cheryl all weekend, and her regular post at the counter of the dealership looked empty without her.
    “I was instantly concerned,” Meakin recalls. “That wasn’t like Cheryl. I hate to say it, but right away several of our employees suspected that Roland had done something to her.”
     
    Ron Trogdon, a Kitsap County deputy, was dispatched to check Cheryl’s small house. From the exterior he could see no sign of a disturbance. Her car was gone, and the doors were locked.
    When Monday and Tuesday passed with no word from Cheryl, everyone who knew her feared the worst. Their one hope was that neither she nor her car had been located. There was always the possibility that she had finally had enough of Roland’s womanizing. It would be understandable; she had worked tirelessly to get him out of prison and continued to work while he went to nursing school only to have all her dreams explode. No one would have blamed her if she’d just opted out of her life and started driving, putting her disappointment behind her.
    Some of those who knew Cheryl had darker thoughts. She had been through so much disappointment in the year just past. If she had given in to depression, it was possible that she had committed suicide.
    “But that wasn’t Cheryl. We knew she wouldn’t leave her kids,” Greg Meakin said. “Not if she had a choice. That was what scared us the most.”
    Roland insisted that he had no idea where Cheryl might have gone, but he acted as if she wasn’t going to come home. He made arrangements for her family to come to Washington from Pennsylvania and take Bébé and André back home with them. He couldn’t go to college and be responsible for the children, too. Della’s days in nursing school were as full as his were.
     
    Cheryl had been gone four days by Wednesday, October 19, and no one had seen or heard from her. Then some men walking toward their motorboat moored near the houseboat docks along the 1600 block of Fairview Avenue East were startled to see a woman’s purse, a wallet, and some papers floating in the shallows of Lake Union. After they fished them out of the lake, they looked for a name or some ID.
    They saw that several items bore the name Cheryl Pitre. Her address showed that she lived in Port Orchard. They called the sheriff’s office and learned that Cheryl Pitre’s name was very familiar to Kitsap County sheriff’s detectives. She had been reported as a missing person in their jurisdiction, and this was the first solid information that they had received.
    Detectives Doug Hudson and Jim Harris went to the area where Cheryl’s purse had drifted in the lake. They didn’t really expect to find her there, but it was a place to start. Parking was at a premium along the narrow street; it was jammed with cars belonging to houseboat residents, visitors, and delivery people. The two men moved slowly north from the 1600 block to the 2200 block, looking for Cheryl’s 1984 Mercury Topaz. They doubted that her car would be there. If she had killed herself, it would likely have been by jumping off the University Bridge or the Aurora Bridge, and for that the drift pattern for her purse and wallet was all wrong; those soaring bridges were a long way away. If someone had killed Cheryl and had any cunning at all, he wouldn’t have left her car so close to her identifying belongings.
    As the Kitsap County detectives got closer to Pete’s Market and to a luxury condominium whose units were actually built on piers out over the water, they spotted a silver Topaz parked in a very dimly lighted area. The license plate read WHA-414. The plate frame said Port Orchard on the top and had the Bay Ford logo, too. There was no question that this was Cheryl’s