Read Before He Wakes for Free Online Page A

improving her appearance, and Laura trimmed Barbara’s pageboy cut to a shorter, more flattering style, which Barbara would tint blond later in the year.
    Early that fall, Laura met Steve Hamrick, a sophomore, an education major from Lexington, and they soon began dating. Steve’s roommate was a close friend named Larry Ford. Larry often ate in the campus cafeteria with Steve and Laura and two other friends, forming a comfortable group. Laura was impressed with Larry, whom she thought to be smart, level-headed, sincere, a really nice person who knew where he was going. “He was like a big brother you could just sit down and talk to,” she recalled.
    Larry, she knew, wasn’t dating anybody, and neither was Barbara. In the first weeks of school Barbara went home every weekend, and after returning from one of those trips, she had told Laura that she had broken up with her boyfriend. Laura thought that Larry and Barbara might hit it off, and she invited Barbara to join their group for lunch one day.
    Barbara didn’t say much about Larry afterward, but she did continue joining their group for activities. It wasn’t until Laura saw Larry and Barbara talking quietly in the student union one day that she thought something might happen between them. By winter, Barbara and Larry, who never had dated anyone steadily, were being thought of as another campus couple.
    Larry had grown up in rented houses in the rolling countryside near the community of Colfax in Guilford County west of Greensboro, about sixty-five miles from Durham. His parents, Doris and Henry Ford, had known each other from childhood in the small textile-mill town of Randleman in Randolph County, where Larry was born. The first of their five children, he was quiet, thoughtful, always helpful to his parents and his sisters and brothers. “He was a gentle child from the beginning,” his mother recalled years later. Teachers’ remarks on his report cards throughout his first years at Colfax School were the kind to make parents proud: “very polite,” “works well with others,” “an outstanding student.”
    The Fords had attended a Friends church in Randleman in the early years of their marriage, but there were no Quaker churches in Colfax, so they joined Shady Grove Wesleyan Methodist, the center of community activity. Larry went to Sunday school there as well as regular services and took part in the youth activities. He joined Boy Scout Post 370 at the church and eventually achieved Eagle rank.
    As a teenager, Larry caused his parents no worries, even after he got his driver’s license. “He drove just like an old man from day one,” his father said, “just as stable. He was just that kind of person.”
    Although he liked sports and was a member of the track team, Larry was more gifted in the classroom. Not only did he excel academically, he also became a school leader, president of the Beta Club, treasurer of the Inner Club Council, secretary of the Junior Civitans. During his senior year—the year his family moved into a hillside two-story farmhouse on eighty partially wooded acres along Cross Creek, nearer the center of Colfax—Larry and Linda Pope were chosen most dependable in their classes.
    Larry decided that he wanted to teach, and the Fords began rearranging their lives so they could afford to send him and their other children to college. Henry quit driving a delivery truck for Holsum Bakery in Winston-Salem to take a higher-paying job at Guilford Dairy in Greensboro; Doris went to work at Belk’s, a department store in downtown Greensboro, riding the bus back and forth every day. Larry also got a full-time summer job at Guilford Dairy to earn money for college.
    He wanted to go to North Carolina State in Raleigh, but he also applied to Appalachian State Teachers College in Boone. Appalachian was quick to accept him, and after several weeks passed without hearing from State, Larry sent off a deposit to Appalachian. Later an acceptance arrived