Before He Wakes (20 page)

Russ was unaware of just how deeply in debt they were until a Sunday night late in October 1982. He never said how he happened to find it, but after Barbara had gone to bed, he came upon a cardboard box hidden under an upholstered chair in the family room. The box, he discovered, was crammed with unpaid bills. There were bills he never had known about, others he thought had been paid long before. As he sat on the floor going through them, he began to grasp how dire their financial situation was. He realized for the first time that Barbara not only had been keeping secrets from him but had been outright lying to him, and he began to cry.

He heard a noise, he later told his mother, and looked to see that Barbara had come down from the bedroom and was standing in the doorway to the den.

“You’re spying on me,” she said coldly, and turned and went back upstairs.

Russ called his mother at work the following morning and asked if she could come home. He had to talk with her. He was distraught, thoroughly beaten, when she met him at her house and he told her about finding the bills.

Doris wasn’t surprised at his disclosures. She and Al had worried about all the spending Barbara and Russ had been doing, had wondered how they could keep it up. But she also knew that Barbara had been letting bills slip. Three times she had involved Doris in her financial problems, each time begging her not to let Russ know about it.

The first time, a neighbor of Russ and Barbara’s called Doris to say that a worker had come to cut off their gas while they were at the beach. They had no phone at their beach cottage, but when Barbara called from a pay phone, Doris told her what had happened. “Please pay it and don’t tell Russ,” Barbara said. Doris took $200 to the gas company and had the gas turned back on, and Barbara repaid her later.

The second time, Barbara called from work and said the telephone company was about to cut off their service, and she was worried that the boys would be at home alone and she wouldn’t be able to reach them. Could Doris pay it—and please not tell Russ? To have Russ’s phone cut off would be a greater embarrassment than Al, who worked at the phone company, could abide, and Doris hurried to pay it.

On the third occasion, Barbara called from the beach and asked Doris to go by her house, get a check from the mailbox and deposit it without telling Russ. She did it, although later she would not remember the amount of the check or from whom it came.

She did remember that soon afterward, Russ fell in beside her as they were leaving church and said, “Mother, where did that check come from that you put in the bank?” Doris didn’t answer—she had told Barbara that she wouldn’t tell Russ. “Well, if you don’t want to tell me, okay,” he said, disappointment showing in his face. That had shamed Doris and made her vow that never again would she let Barbara involve her in any of her financial shenanigans.

Russ did not want to tell his father about the mess he and Barbara had gotten into, not only because he was ashamed, but because he knew that stress was bad for his dad’s heart condition. Everybody in the family had tried to keep bad news from Al since his triple coronary bypass five years earlier.

But Doris insisted that Al needed to know; this was too important to keep from him. Although the problems might seem insoluble to Russ, she assured him that together they could deal with them. The thing to do, she said, was to call a family meeting and tackle the situation rationally. She instructed Russ to call the Terrys and have them come to her house. He also was to fetch Barbara. Together they would analyze the situation and determine what would have to be done.

Marva arrived alone for the meeting. When Doris asked where James was, Marva said that he didn’t know he was supposed to come. Doris said that she thought it would be better if everybody were present, and Marva called her husband. Russ had gone for Barbara and the bills, and he was a long time returning, leaving the others waiting uncomfortably. Later, he told his mother that Barbara had not wanted to come and he practically had to force her to accompany him. She was sullen when she arrived. Not wanting her to think that she was being blamed for the mess, Doris greeted her at the door by saying, “Barbara, I love you.”

“Well, I don’t know why,” she later recalled Barbara replying.

“Well, we love you all, too,” her mother quickly put in.

When all the bills had been sorted and all the set payments had been added up, it became clear that Russ and Barbara owed much more each month than they were making. Some emergency measures could be taken to relieve the situation temporarily, but if the problem were to be solved, the two simply would have to change their lifestyle and get rid of some of their obligations. Al and Doris picked out a few bills that they could pay immediately, those that would prove most embarrassing if they were unpaid, and Marva and James did the same. James suggested that he would take Russ and Barbara to his bank to get another bill-consolidation loan. The loan would not be a solution, just patchwork until the bigger problems could be worked out.

The bill-consolidation loan did not work out, however. After he and Barbara had filled out the applications, Russ later told his mother, the loan officer returned to ask Barbara if she had been Barbara Ford. After she acknowledged that she had been, the bank had turned down the loan, Russ said, and the loan officer wouldn’t tell him why. No doubt the bank had checked with Security Federal Savings and Loan, where Barbara once had a house loan and where she also had been dismissed for suspected embezzlement four years earlier. Again, Russ didn’t know anything about this.

Doris and Al offered to help reduce their son’s debts by buying one of his cars. They would pay off the loan balance on it, they said, and give him one of their older cars. Russ agreed, but when he went to the bank to see about the transfer, he discovered that more was owed on the car than he had thought. Barbara had renegotiated the original loan and signed his name on the lien, he told his mother. It was such a good forgery, he said, that at first he thought it was his own signature. But he knew he hadn’t signed it.

His parents couldn’t buy the car because there was too much debt on it.

As part of her solution to the crisis, Doris insisted that Russ take over the handling of his family’s finances. And to make sure that all of the bills came to him and that Barbara couldn’t get hold of them, she suggested a post office box. She paid the first year’s rent on the box and gave Russ the key, instructing him to keep control of it.

Not only did Russ and Barbara have to put their beach house on the market, they also had to give up their big house on Falkirk into which they had invested so many dreams and so much energy. The beach cottage went quickly, but the house was slower in selling. Not until the following summer did they finally find a buyer for the house.

In August, friends helped them move into a new house they bought not far away at 1918 Bivens Road.

The move was another humiliation for Russ, a step downward for all to see. The new house was small and plain, a tract house on a small lot facing a busy road. But Barbara, ever industrious and perfectionist, soon turned it into a showplace of tidiness, something she had come by naturally. “She’s a lot like my mom in that she maintains an immaculate house,” her brother Alton later would say. “You’re almost afraid to walk in there with your shoes on.” Russ, too, had grown up in such a house, and in her housekeeping Barbara was doing only what was expected from her.

Pam Spence, her husband and baby daughter moved to Durham from Maryland in the summer of 1983 and bought the house directly across the street on Bivens Road. Pam and Barbara soon met in passing. Pam thought that Barbara was very attractive, always “groomed to the nines,” as she later put it, a woman who would turn a man’s head. But Barbara seemed cool and reserved to her. “I thought Junior League, upper class, a little on the snobby side,” Pam recalled.

She did not get invited into Barbara’s house until a few months later. She had locked herself out of her house and needed to call her husband to bring a key and let her in. She knocked on Barbara’s door and asked to use the telephone.

Pam’s parents had visited model homes as a hobby, and Pam often had gone with them. When she stepped into Barbara’s house, she got the same feeling that she always got when she entered a model home: It was a house to be shown and seen, not to be lived in. The house was not just immaculate, it looked as if an interior designer had been given a free hand with no concern for expense.

“Her house was as beautiful inside as any model home I’d ever seen,” Pam said.

While she was using the phone, Jason arrived home from school, and Barbara started yelling at him as soon as he stepped inside the back door.

“She spazzed out,” Pam recalled. “She was yelling at him for wearing his shoes into the house. I was so embarrassed. There I was standing with my shoes on. If she would do that with me there, I hated to think about what the little guy got when nobody was around.”

Later, though, Pam got to know both of Barbara’s sons, and she had never known sweeter or better-behaved boys.

By the fall of 1983, Russ and Barbara appeared to have weathered the worst of their financial crisis. It was a particularly hectic time for Russ. School was back in session and he was busy coaching the football team at Holton Junior High. He had to look after the school’s other athletic programs as well, in addition to teaching phys ed classes. At the beginning of the year, he had joined the National Guard, mainly to get the extra income that it offered, and one weekend out of each month was devoted to military drill. Russ also had realized that if he hoped to progress in education and coaching, he needed more education, and late that summer, he had enrolled in night classes at North Carolina Central University to work toward a master’s degree.

All this activity also provided an excuse for the sexual coolness that now had grown between Russ and Barbara, and she retaliated for it as she had done with Larry: by having another affair.

Preston Adams* was twenty-seven, eight years younger than Barbara, married, a graduate of the same high school she had attended. He had come to work at Brame Specialty Company as a salesman two months after Barbara had started working there as a secretary in August 1982. That Christmas, Barbara invited him to the Christmas party at her house, and he met Russ. Early in 1983, Barbara and Preston had started going to lunch together. By spring they were still going to lunch regularly, but food was not on their minds.

Later, Preston would say that he never had known another woman like Barbara. He liked sex and wanted a lot of it, he said, but she loved it and wanted even more than he did. They sometimes slipped away to have sex every day, and she wouldn’t allow him to leave until he had performed at least three or four times, he claimed. If he wasn’t ready, he said, she would perform oral sex until he was.

Sometimes they would get together two or three times a day, Preston claimed, and afterward, he would hide from Barbara because he knew that she would want more and he simply couldn’t stand it.

Barbara seemed to be without guilt about this, Preston said. She never spoke disparagingly of Russ, but she justified the affair by saying that Russ was always talking about other girls and she was sure that he had a girlfriend. This excuse was familiar as well.

Russ soon learned about this latest betrayal in a disturbing way. Barbara’s maternal grandmother, Pearl Turner Rogers, died on January 26, 1984, and her funeral was set for Saturday afternoon. Early Saturday morning, Barbara said that she had to run some errands before the funeral. She left the boys with Russ, saying that she would be back in time to help them get ready for the service.

Later in the morning, Russ went to wash his car so that it would be sparkling for the funeral procession. On the way back home, he spotted Barbara’s Oldsmobile sitting in isolation in the huge parking lot at Durham County Stadium. He pulled into the parking lot to make sure that it was Barbara’s car. It was and it was empty.

Where was Barbara? And why had she left her car here?

Suspicious, Russ drove across the street to the National Guard Armory and backed his car into a spot from which he could watch his wife’s car. Not long afterward, a car turned into the stadium parking lot and pulled alongside the Oldsmobile. Russ could tell that a man was driving the car and a woman was beside him in the front seat. He watched as they began embracing and kissing.

The amorous couple was startled when Russ’s car came to a sudden halt alongside them. Looks of near panic came to Barbara’s and Preston Adams’s faces when they recognized him. Barbara straightened herself and hurriedly exited by the passenger door as Preston frantically cranked his car. No sooner had she closed the door, Russ later told his mother, than the red-faced man sped away.

Later that day, Barbara called Preston and told him that things were bad at home. She would tell him about it at work Monday. On Monday, however, she said that everything was okay. She had smoothed things over with Russ, and there was no need for this incident to interfere with their relationship.

Barbara did not break off the affair with Preston until several weeks later, telling him then that she was going to try to work things out with Russ and did not want to run the risk of getting caught again and further threatening her marriage. Preston left Brame Specialty shortly thereafter to take another job.

Barbara left the company in June. Her mother had helped her land yet another job at Duke University Medical Center, where Barbara had first worked when she was in high school. She would be a secretary in the Department of Utilization and Review. The job not only paid more than she had been making, it offered better benefits and a chance for advancement.