Before He Wakes (22 page)

She just didn’t see how Barbara was able to do all that she was doing. She thought that Barbara felt obligated not only to be impressive at work and excel in her classes but to be a perfect mother, wife and housewife as well. Barbara tried to do everything for her sons and for Russ, whom she babied, Rohlf thought. “How do you do it all and still keep your house so spotless?” Rohlf asked after a visit to Barbara’s home. To Barbara, the question had been a compliment.

Rohlf knew that Barbara was overqualified for the job she held at Duke, and she felt certain that it was only a temporary stop. Barbara had told her that she would like to become an administrator at the medical center after she got her degree, and Rohlf had no doubt that she could do it.

Indeed, Barbara’s ambition was the source of the only problem that Rohlf had with her. Barbara seemed to want a lot of authority and often would do things without prior approval. Rohlf had had to tell her on several occasions to check with her first.

“Sometimes,” Rohlf later recalled, “I just wanted to tell Barbara to relax and not try so hard.”

As 1986 drew to a close, Barbara responded to birthday greetings from her former in-laws with a letter. “Therapy is still going very well for me,” she wrote. “I’ve discovered many things about myself, past and present, that I hope I can fully overcome and be the kind of person the Lord wants me to be…. The worst problem was admitting that there was a problem. Pray for me. I feel I still have a long road to cover before I reach a point of satisfaction.”

Russ finished his thesis in the spring of 1987 and defended it successfully. His family joined in celebration when he was awarded his master’s degree in physical education in May, taking him and Barbara and the boys to a steak house for dinner after the ceremony. Barbara seemed pleased by Russ’s accomplishment, but she was even more excited by the possibilities that were opening for her. She had been interviewed for a new position at Duke that month.

A new director was being appointed for the surgical nursing department. His name was Timothy Bevelacqua and he was thirty-one years old. He needed somebody to set up his office, a self-directed person who knew the Duke system well, a hard worker who understood the necessity of loyalty to a boss, and Barbara had been recommended to him. He offered her the job that summer.

Barbara’s boss didn’t want to lose her, but she didn’t want to hold her back either. This was a good promotion, with another increase in pay. Barbara went to work for Bevelacqua in September. After she moved into her new job, Judith Rohlf had to hire two people to do all the work that Barbara had been doing.

Bevelacqua found her to be just what he was looking for, an excellent assistant, hard working and so efficient and loyal that it was sometimes annoying. Barbara tried too hard to please, Bevelacqua thought. He got the feeling that she wanted to mother him. She even tried to make his haircut appointments.

In anticipation of her new job, Barbara planned to take only a three-hour independent study course in English that fall. She was taking the class at Duke, but it would be applied toward her degree at North Carolina Central. After her first year of full-time study, she had been gradually cutting back. The previous fall, she had switched to evening classes and taken only three-fourths of a full class load. In January, she had changed her major from nursing to psychology and taken only two classes on alternating days, one in the morning, the other in the afternoon. Overall, she was maintaining a 3.7 grade point average, although she told people that she was making a 4.0, which at times she was. But despite her new job and her success with her classes, new troubles were mounting for Barbara and Russ.

At the beginning of 1987, their spending again had begun catching up with them. In the past two years, each had bought two new cars. Barbara had gone from an Oldsmobile Cutlass Calais to an Oldsmobile 88 and now was driving a new Ford Mustang convertible. Russ had gone from a Sunbird to a Mazda pickup truck to a Ford Bronco II, which he later would wreck and replace with a Chevy Blazer. They had bought a Datsun pickup truck for Bryan when he got his license, then a Volkswagen Bug, followed by another VW. Both Russ and Barbara were wearing Rolex watches, and Russ’s parents later would be shocked to learn that his was worth nearly four thousand dollars. Barbara had a new refrigerator for the new house, new furniture. She had a new hardwood floor put in the kitchen and hallway, her kitchen counters covered with ceramic tiles. Russ also had bought a sparkling new boat, a nineteen-foot Bayliner Bowrider with a 120-horsepower Volvo engine, which he now kept at his parents’ cottage at Hyco Lake.

“Honey, you won’t believe what the Stagers have bought now,” Pam Spence’s husband had said to her when he had seen Russ pull his new boat into the driveway across the street, shortly before Russ and Barbara moved to Fox Drive.

“Where do they get all the money?” Pam had asked.

Coworkers at Duke marveled at Barbara’s spending, too. Rarely did a Monday pass that she didn’t come in talking about the purchases made over the weekend: a new outfit, a new piece of jewelry, something new she had bought for the house or the boys, some new electronic gizmo Russ had picked up. They couldn’t help but notice how frequently Barbara came in wearing new outfits, and it was clear that none of them had come from discount houses. They just couldn’t figure out where all the money was coming from.

Barbara’s former boss at Duke, Judith Rohlf, had run into Barbara and Russ at the mall several times on weekends, and she teased Barbara that she had made a good catch in Russ. Few husbands liked to shop.

“Russ is a clotheshorse,” Barbara had replied. He loved to shop for clothes, she said, and he bought most of her clothing as well. When Rohlf kidded Barbara about all the money she spent, Barbara just laughed it off.

All of this had not escaped the attention of Russ’s parents. They knew that Russ could be almost as thoughtless with spending as Barbara was, and Al kept bringing it up to him, stressing that he had to get it under control. He went on about it so much at times that Doris would glare her that’s-enough displeasure across the dining-room table at him.

Nonetheless, step by step, Barbara and Russ continued their slide back into old spending habits, lured to some degree, no doubt, by their increasing income. Both were making more money than ever. Barbara was getting nearly $18,000 a year at Duke; Russ was making about $30,000 from the school system, plus a couple of thousand dollars from the National Guard. But once again their income fell behind their spending, and as the gap grew, they reverted to old habits to deal with it.

In February 1987, shortly after both Russ and Barbara had taken out $50,000 life insurance policies, they refinanced their house, getting a better interest rate, but increasing their mortgage to $92,000. They got more than $20,000 in cash, though, to rescue them temporarily from their mounting debts.

Only a week later, however, they went back to another bank, negotiating a loan for $4,500 to buy another vehicle to replace Bryan’s worn-out Volkswagen, a 1986 Mazda truck.

As 1987 wore on, Barbara particularly became more and more free with her spending. Several more times she went to banks to arrange loans to cover her debts. And still she could not stop buying.

That fall, she wrote checks almost every day to fashionable department stores such as Thalhimer’s, Ivey’s, and Belk’s, as well as to expensive clothing shops, sometimes several a day. And more and more of those checks were being returned for insufficient funds, forty-two during one four-month period. The bank charges for overdrafts and returned checks on her account would amount to $275 for November alone. The $342 monthly payments on her Mustang convertible began going unpaid.

Friends began to notice that Russ seemed downcast much of the time, as if he had some great worry on his mind.

That fall Russ’s first wife, Jo Lynn, saw a Dennis the Menace cartoon that amused her. In it, Dennis’s friend Margaret was telling Dennis that she wanted him to be her first husband. Jo Lynn clipped it and mailed it to Russ at school. She hadn’t heard from him in more than a year, since he had written a letter to the court in her behalf to help in her child-custody dispute with her second husband. She hadn’t seen him in more than three years. She had assumed that he and Barbara had worked things out and that all was fine.

Russ called after he got the cartoon. They laughed about it and chatted briefly.

“Next time you’re in Raleigh for Guard,” Jo Lynn told him, “I’d love for you to come by and see me.”

He came on the second Sunday in November. He looked tired and a little haggard. He had recently discovered that he had high blood pressure, he said, and he didn’t understand it. He had even given up desserts because of it, and she knew how much he loved sweets, especially banana pudding and strawberry pie.

He talked about coaching and how he was becoming disillusioned with it, at least at Durham High. The school’s student body was now almost entirely black, but most of the alumni were white and didn’t support the school’s athletic programs. Russ’s teams were always just barely scratching by, and coaching seemed to be a constant struggle now.

“You know how it used to be everything to me,” he said. “It’s changing. Takes a lot out of you.”

Jo Lynn asked about the boys, and his face brightened when he told about helping Bryan get ready to go to Fort Bragg to compete for an ROTC scholarship. Russ had pressed his uniform for him and helped him spit-shine his shoes. Bryan had looked really sharp, he said. He had gotten the scholarship and now he was a student at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. Russ missed having him around the house.

Jason, he said, was beginning to really get into athletics—he was quite a golfer. He was proud of both of them.

Russ stayed only a short time and never mentioned Barbara and the troubles he had talked about before. But as he was getting ready to leave, leaning with his back against the door, he told Jo Lynn the same unsettling thing that he had mentioned three and a half years earlier.

“I know I told you once before, and I know I’m probably being paranoid, but if anything ever happens to me, I want you to look into it.”

Surely he was just being paranoid, Jo Lynn agreed. After all, years had passed since he’d first said that and nothing had happened. What could happen to him?

Maybe the same thing that happened to Barbara’s first husband, he suggested.

Surely she couldn’t have murdered him, Jo Lynn told him, hoping to offer reassurance.

“There would’ve been an investigation,” she said. “You can’t just kill somebody and get away with it.”

“But she would be clever about it,” he said. “She would make it look like an accident. Just promise me that if something does happen, you’ll look into it.”

Surely Russ was just letting his imagination get carried away, she thought, but she promised. She was more concerned about his mood. He seemed to be sagging under a heavy sadness, his energy and enthusiasm for life completely dissipated. The light that once had surrounded him wasn’t just dimmed now, it had gone out.

Before he turned to go, Russ looked at her in a way that he had not for a long time.

“I don’t know how or where,” he said, “but I think that someday we’ll be together again.”

Jo Lynn smiled, uncertain again what to say.

“The men I’ve been with since you make you look like a walk in the park,” she said.

Twilight was fading as Russ left, and an overwhelming sadness overtook Jo Lynn as she watched him go, heading off into the darkness.

16

If Russ’s National Guard unit had ever held a competition to pick its top soldier, few in the unit had any doubt that it would have been Russ Stager. His uniforms were always creased and starched. His boots and brass always gleamed. His equipment stayed in top condition and ready to go.

Russ was dedicated to the Guard and took great pride in serving in it. He was a by-the-book soldier: always showed up on time, always did his job without complaint, no matter how dirty or difficult it might be. He often volunteered for extra duty and even worked at recruiting on his own time. “He eagerly seeks responsibility and performs every task in a thorough and professional manner,” one of his commanders wrote in an evaluation.

Younger soldiers looked to Russ for direction, and officers admired him. In December 1987 he was promoted to staff sergeant, raising his monthly pay from $160 to $184. Russ also had taken advantage of a new benefit offered by the Guard. Previously, members could get only $3,500 in life insurance through the Guard, but that had recently been expanded to $50,000, and Russ had signed up for it, paying $4 monthly for the new coverage. This raised his life insurance to $165,000 through five policies, enough to make sure that Barbara was taken care of if something should happen to him.

Russ had a long-time fascination with guns, and the Guard allowed him to indulge that hobby. In 1986, he had joined his unit’s pistol team, which demanded that its members be as skilled in firearms safety as in marksmanship. He took pride in his abilities and often went practice-shooting with one or another of the team’s members. In the spring of 1987 he had attended Combat Pistol Coaches School so that he could qualify to teach others in the use of military handguns. He had taught his boys to shoot and was trying to teach Barbara to safely handle the .25 semiautomatic he had bought a couple of years earlier for protection.

On Thursday, January 28, 1988, he took a sick day at school so that he could make a run to Fort Bragg to pick up equipment for his Guard unit. He made the run in an army truck with Kenneth Hanes, a member of the unit’s honor guard who owned a frame shop and once had framed some Williamsburg prints for Barbara. Russ seemed his normal self that day, Hanes later recalled. They talked mostly about Guard matters.