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troublemaker who made fun of the boy with cerebral palsy who rode the bus.
    “You could see Jason going downhill. He hung around with some rough-looking characters. They’d be waiting for him when we drove up after school. I can’t remember how many times I saw Susan coming up to school,” he says. “When I did, I knew Jason was in trouble, again.”
    When Susan’s family visited, she told them none of her son’s problems, instead putting on a things-couldn’t-be-better facade. She bragged about Jason’s grades and acted as if everything were fine at home, as if no tension existed. For the first time, she was able to splurge on her family, and she did so with abandon. She sent her parents on a trip to the West Coast to visit her uncle, their first plane ride. She bought her mother clothes. When O.L. refused them, Susan insisted, often hiding sweaters or jewelry in her mother’s suitcase. “Once, when we were all visiting, Susie announced, ‘Today, we’re all going to get a new pair of shoes,’” remembers Kay. “She took us shopping and bought a pair for each of us. Susie was just that way. She used to say, ‘I’m just like my daddy, I’ve got money stashed away and nobody knows I’ve got it.’”
    Her sisters would later judge it was in 1989 that theyfirst realized everything wasn’t ideal in Susan’s new marriage. At the time, Ron worked in Port Arthur, Texas, on an extended assignment, overseeing the building of a new plant, just as he had in Baton Rouge years earlier when he and Susan met. Neighbors remember Susan felt uncomfortable about being at home alone. “I can’t say how many times she called the police, claiming someone was trying to break in,” recalls Tom Roy. “If they weren’t there over something Jason had done, they were there because she got scared in the middle of the night.”
    Then, one weekend when Ron made the trip home, Susan found photographs in his pocket, photographs of another woman. “It devastated her,” says Sandra. “Ron called me day and night for weeks after that. He begged, ‘Tell Susan that I love her.’ I’d said, ‘Susie, just give him another chance. If you love him, the two of you can work it out.’”
    It was the third marriage for each of them, and perhaps Ron was as frightened as Susan at the prospect of yet another failure. Or perhaps he truly loved her. Whatever the reason, that fall, Ron White capitulated about many things, including rescinding the postnuptial agreement that had barred Susan from ever claiming any of his assets, and writing a new will, in which he listed Jason as one of his heirs.
    Shortly thereafter, Ron White left his high-salary job at Texaco and signed on with a small, oil-contracting concern. Susan told friends it was an opportunity so potentially lucrative, he couldn’t refuse to accept the offer. They moved to Korea in the fall of 1989, just as Susan celebrated her fortieth birthday, for what was supposed to be a one-year assignment. Millikan and others on Valley Bend sighed in relief, grateful that, at least for a while, Jason would no longer interrupt their quiet neighborhood. But just a few months later, they returned. “It was like, thank God he’s gone, and then Jason was backagain,” remembers Millikan. “None of us could believe it.”
    Susan’s sisters were never quite sure why Susan, Ron, and Jason returned from overseas so much sooner than expected, except that Susan had detested Korea and fallen ill. Once back in Houston, Ron again looked for a new job. Susan introduced him to a former real-estate client, a highly placed executive with Brown & Root, the engineering and construction giant. The company had an opening, and Ron secured a slot as a project manager.
    In the summer of 1991, Susan left real estate and signed on as a broker with First Union, a small, three-broker office that specialized in mortgage loans.
    This might have been the best time of Susan’s life. With money rolling in, she splurged on