Before He Wakes (19 page)

On drop-by visits, she never had caught Barbara writing, although Barbara had claimed that she was now working on a new book, a romance novel. Nor had Carol ever seen a typewriter or any signs of writing materials in Barbara’s neat and meticulously clean house.

“Where do you do your writing?” Carol asked.

“Oh, anywhere and everywhere,” Barbara said.

On a subsequent visit, after calling in advance, Carol arrived to find Barbara sitting in an easy chair writing on a legal pad. Several paperback romance novels lay close by. Writing romance novels was something she planned to do under an assumed name for quick money between her serious writing, she said. It was really easy. The publisher supplied a format. “All you have to do,” she said, “is fill in the blanks.”

Barbara still couldn’t give her friends a publication date for
Untimely Death
, but she did confide in them that there was movie interest in her book. She was certain that it was going to be bought by a major studio.

As the weeks went on, Carol and Terri kept asking when the book would be coming out, but Barbara kept coming up with excuses for the delay.

Unbeknownst to Carol and Terri, she was also offering excuses at the bank. When her note came due, she couldn’t pay it and asked to extend it for another ninety days. That had raised suspicion from her loan officer. The collateral letter had been clear about a March publication date and $25,000 of income it would bring. Irwin Breedlove, who had confirmed the letter, was asked to look into it. He called an acquaintance who worked at Doubleday, a woman from Durham, and she promised to investigate. What she found out was a shocker. She wrote to tell him that Barbara’s letter was a mystery at the publishing house. Nobody there had ever heard of a Frances Dubose.

Pressed by the bank, Barbara managed to pay back the loan, but how she did it would become a mystery to Russ’s family, who would not learn about the loan for many years. Russ never mentioned the loan to them, and they were sure that he never knew about it. They would come to suspect that Barbara had turned to her parents to pay back the money.

By August, with no book and no money forthcoming from Barbara, Harry Welch decided that he had better try to collect the money that she still owed his radio station for her salary advances. It was a ticklish matter because of the friendship, and Harry didn’t want to have to ask for it. He got the radio station’s bookkeeper to call Barbara instead. An agreement was drawn up in which she would pay back $2,903.59 at $100 a month. She came by the station and signed it on August 17.

Summer dissolved into fall, and still Barbara couldn’t tell her friends when her book would be coming out. By now the Gordons and Welches had begun to suspect that there really was no book. Carol and Terri had discovered that in separate conversations Barbara had told them conflicting details about Larry’s death. How could you get the details wrong about something so important as that, especially if you had written a book about it?

They decided to put Barbara on the spot. They told her that they wanted to have a big publication party for her book at Croasdaile Country Club, and they had to have a date so they could begin planning. Could she press her publisher for it?

When Barbara still couldn’t give them a date, they were almost certain that the book was a fantastic hoax.

Harry decided to find out for sure. He knew a woman who worked in the publicity department at Doubleday, he said, and he would call her.

When she told him that she was certain that Doubleday was not publishing any book by Barbara, he asked her to doublecheck, he later recalled.

“I’ve checked,” she said, when she called back again. “We do not have it.”

Furthermore, she doubted that anybody was publishing it, at least not for the money Barbara was claiming to get. Nobody would pay that much to an unknown author for a first book, she said, unless it was such a hot property that the whole book industry had become aware of it.

If there was no book, did Russ know? No doubt he didn’t, the Welches and Gordons decided when they gathered to discuss what they had learned. Should they tell him? How do you tell somebody so trusting as Russ that his wife was such a liar? What would he do? What would Barbara do? What would happen to the marriage, to the children?

The four never would forget that night, the seriousness of the matter, the anxiety, the uncertainty, the long agonizing. Underlying it all was a fear that they didn’t really want to face. Carol, who had been the first to become suspicious of Barbara, was the one who brought it up.

“What if she does something to him?” she asked.

She wouldn’t do anything, the others agreed, because they knew too much.

“You don’t know what somebody might do when they’re backed in a comer,” Carol said.

Clearly, this was too much for them to face alone, and they sought help from a greater power. Both men prayed aloud, asking for guidance, for healing, for restoration. Afterward, there was a long silence, then Bill and Harry walked outside to the pen where the Welches kept a pet lion, talking quietly. When they returned, they had agreed that Russ had to be told, and that Harry, who was the closest to him and had known him longest, was the one to do it.

First, though, Harry wanted to consult with Malbert Smith, and when Malbert also agreed that Russ had to be told, they prayed about it again.

The call was one of the hardest things Harry had ever done, he said later, and he put it off several times.

“Russ, I need to see you,” he said when he finally built up his nerve. “Why don’t we get some coffee?”

They met at Shoney’s on Hillandale Road and sat in a booth near the salad bar. It was late afternoon the week before Thanksgiving, and few people were in the restaurant.

“Russ, I hate to tell you this,” Harry said as they stirred their coffee, “but I have reason to believe there’s no book.”

Russ listened in stunned silence as Harry told him what he had learned.

“Well, I guess we’re lucky that she’s still got her job at the radio station,” Russ finally said.

“I wouldn’t have been more surprised if he’d hit me,” Harry recalled later.

“Russ, she hasn’t worked there since March,” Harry said.

Now Russ looked as if he had been hit. Tears came to his eyes and his voice choked. “What’s she doing? She tells me she comes to the radio station.”

Harry couldn’t answer that question. He could only listen and offer comfort as Russ talked about his marriage for the next hour.

Other strange events had occurred in recent months, Russ told him. Several times police officers had come to his house and talked to Barbara and he didn’t know why.

“She said there’d been mistakes and she’d take care of it,” he said.

Barbara had indeed made mistakes. Twice warrants had been issued charging her with writing bad checks, once in February for a $16.63 check to Sears, again in June for a $146.78 check to Winn-Dixie. In each case she made restitution and paid court costs, but Russ never knew about either warrant.

That wasn’t all that she had failed to tell him, as it turned out. She also had taken another job. In August, she had gone to work as a secretary at Brame Specialty Company, which sold maintenance supplies for offices. An aunt of Barbara’s had worked at the company for many years and had recommended her.

The long conversation between the two old friends was their last. Russ avoided the Welches and Gordons afterward. They were sorry about that. Although they wanted nothing more to do with Barbara and her lies, they still loved Russ and would have liked to maintain a relationship with him. But they were relieved that nothing drastic happened, that there was no big blowup, at least none that they heard about. They didn’t blame Russ for avoiding them. They knew that he was hurt and embarrassed, and they felt sorry for him, but they weren’t surprised that he would stand by Barbara. They knew his character.

To avoid any further embarrassment to Russ, the Welches and Gordons agreed that they would tell nobody else what they had learned about Barbara’s book (others who knew about it were simply left to wonder why it never came out). But Russ had trouble facing his old friends at church, and he and Barbara soon joined Rose of Sharon, the church in which Barbara had spent her early years. She told Russ’s parents, who were unaware of the book hoax, that they had quit Grey Stone because the boys in Bryan’s Sunday school class were rough and used bad words. Russ never told his parents, either, but he went to Malbert Smith and explained why. Early in December, Russ also wrote a letter of resignation to Croasdaile Country Club, citing a recent increase in dues as his reason for leaving.

Although the Welches and Gordons believed there never had been a book, Barbara actually had begun one. She had written an outline and a first chapter that told her version of Larry’s death in an amateurish and melodramatic fashion. The gist of the planned book was the ordeal she had undergone, not only because she’d lost her beloved husband and the father of her children, but because of the suspicions of Larry’s family and the investigations they had spawned. The reason for those suspicions, she wrote, was the Fords’ resentment of her because of all the fine things she and Larry had accumulated during their marriage and because she “had come from an upper-middle-class family and the [Fords] were lower middle class.” Several times Barbara had sent her proposal to publishers in New York, but each time it had come back rejected.

Although her book was far from finished, Barbara already had written a dedication: “To my best friend, Russell, who believed in me and gave me the support and strength I needed to bring this story out in the open.”

Despite their attempts to avoid Barbara, the Welches and Gordons had not heard the last of her or her book. Soon after Christmas, at Barbara’s request, Terri met Barbara for lunch at the same Shoney’s in which Harry had talked with Russ weeks earlier. Barbara told her that she was sorry about everything that had happened and she hoped that Terri and Harry could forgive her. She intended to go to see Carol and tell her the same thing, she said. While they were talking, Carol walked in and saw them. She took a table but was so upset at seeing Barbara and Terri together again that she couldn’t eat and left the restaurant. An hour later, Terri called to tell her that Barbara was coming to see her to set things right.

Barbara showed up soon afterward. Carol was anxious but tried not to show it. Barbara was genial. She apologized for the problems she had caused and expressed hope that Carol could forgive her. Russ had, she said, and they were trying to make things work, which didn’t surprise Carol, knowing Russ. Barbara went on to say that she was seeing a psychiatrist about her “problem.” Carol assumed that the problem Barbara was referring to was lying, and couldn’t help but wonder if this was the truth. Despite Barbara’s seeming sincerity, Carol didn’t believe anything she said anymore.

The meeting was awkward for Carol, who was trying not to appear overly sympathetic or friendly. She wanted it to end quickly, and she was grateful when Barbara made moves to leave.

They were sitting on a sofa and as Barbara pulled herself to the edge of her seat, she suddenly turned back to Carol.

“I know it was you,” she said.

Startled, Carol stood.

Barbara didn’t often get angry in front of people outside her family, but when she did, she turned the anger inward. Her body would become almost rigid. She would become silent and take on a deep, dark, teeth-clenching look—“that stare,” her friends called it. Carol had seen that look several times, but the look in Barbara’s eyes now was beyond that, darker, deeper, meaner, more determined, a look—there was no other word for it—of sheer evil.

“I want to know how you did it,” Barbara said. “How did you know about the book?”

Frightened, Carol began walking toward the front door, urging Barbara along, thinking fast. She wanted this woman out of her house.

“Your story didn’t make sense,” she said, reaching the door and opening it for Barbara.

Carol then remembered an aunt who taught at Duke University and wrote psychology textbooks. She now told Barbara that her aunt, who was a writer, had told her that nobody would be likely to get such a big advance on a first book. It was clear that Barbara wasn’t buying that story, but Carol thanked her for coming and bade her a quick goodbye.

As Barbara departed, Carol closed the door and locked it. She couldn’t remember when she had been so scared.

14

If his friends had known that they were about to deal a double blow to Russ when they informed him about Barbara’s book hoax, they would have agonized even longer over their decision. But they had no way of knowing that just three weeks earlier Russ had stumbled onto other secrets of Barbara’s on his own and that he was already suffering great anguish when Harry brought him more.

Russ never had paid close attention to all the spending he and Barbara had been doing. He just had turned over his paychecks to Barbara and left the bookkeeping to her. “I couldn’t balance a checkbook with a pair of scales,” he once laughingly told Harry. “Barb does all of that.”

From the beginning of their marriage, they had been living on ever-expanding credit. Their credit cards had been pushed to their limits and beyond. As Barbara had done in the past, they had gotten loans to pay off loans. They had taken a second mortgage on their house. Their penchant for new cars saddled them with huge monthly payments that grew larger with every car they bought. Since her Mercedes, Barbara had had an Oldsmobile Cutlass Cruiser, a Mazda RX7, and now was driving a new Pontiac Grand Prix; Russ had had two Jeeps, a motorcycle and was also now driving a Grand Prix one year older than Barbara’s. They also had two mortgage payments because of their cottage at Long Beach. They had been living far beyond their means for three years, yet they had done nothing to curtail their flashy spending.