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his old college friends, but he kept in touch with Bonnie. He had not yet been in Indiana two years when he came home for a visit and called Rob Lorber. He was thinking about marrying Bonnie, he said.
    “Are you sure you want to do this?” Lorber asked.
    He thought so, Lieth said, but he was worried because of her two children. He’d never been around children, he said. He didn’t know whether they would accept him or if he would be a good father.
    Lorber thought the concerns were normal. He chose to listen and not advise. He felt that Lieth had already decided that marriage was what he wanted, and he was right. When next he heard from Lieth, it was to be told that he and Bonnie were getting married.
    The wedding took place on August 17, 1979. She gave up the job that she had held at Integon for fifteen years, and she and her two children moved into a house with Lieth at 1842 Acorn Court in Mishawaka, a suburb of South Bend. Chris was three months shy of eleven; Angela was nine. Lieth continued traveling after the marriage and was home mostly on weekends, making the transition for him and the children less traumatic.
    The company for which Lieth was working was in the process of moving its headquarters to Dallas, but when it decided to leave its computer operations in South Bend, Lieth began looking for a new job, preferably in North Carolina. He did not like the fierce winters that blew in off Lake Michigan. He also was concerned about his parents getting older and being far away from them. In the spring of 1981 he was hired as head of internal auditing at National Spinning Company in Washington, N.C.
    Bonnie and Lieth and the two children he had taken as his own moved to Washington in July of 1981 and settled in the modern, two-story frame house at 110 Lawson Road in Smallwood. Lieth later got a loan from his father to pay off the mortgage, allowing the monthly interest to be kept in the family. Lieth had to travel during his first two years in Washington, but after that he began spending most of his working hours in the big plant on the western edge of town. In the fall of 1983, Bonnie took a job teaching data processing at a community college in adjoining Martin County. In late summer of 1984, she went to work as a programmer analyst at the big Hamilton Beach appliance factory only a few miles from her house, a job she would keep for the next two years.
    In 1982, with his health beginning to fail, Richard Hensel retired from the laundry he had operated for more than half a century in Winston-Salem, turning the company over to his brother-in-law, Howard Von Stein. By then Camel City had seven outlets in Winston-Salem and other nearby towns. Howard’s reign at the top was short. Two years later, he and his partners received an offer from a Texas company that was hoping to create a nationwide chain of laundry and dry cleaning plants by buying out regional companies. “It was one of those offers they couldn’t refuse,” said one person who had some knowledge of the deal. The partners sold the laundry, and Howard joined his brother-in-law in retirement. His share of the proceeds from the sale and his investments over the years had made him a wealthy man, but few people realized it. He and Marie still lived frugally and without ostentation in the same small, modest house they had moved into in 1950. They felt no need to change the habits of a lifetime, but Howard did splurge and buy a new Buick Century.
    Howard’s retirement was to last only three years. He died suddenly of an aortic aneurism on a Saturday morning in February 1987 at the age of seventy-nine, leaving an estate valued at more than $1.2 million, most of it in two trusts he had established for his wife and son. He had named his only child to be his executor.
    Lieth had little spirit for dealing with his father’s estate. He was too worried about his mother. A heavy smoker, she had suffered for years from emphysema and heart problems. Her grief for her