Read Dead by Sunset: Perfect Husband, Perfect Killer? for Free Online Page B

Cheryl alone too
    long, but not on that weekend.   It was Brad's weekend to have the boys,
    and Cheryl wasn't home, she had gone up to Longview, Washington, on
    Saturday to visit their family and planned to stay overnight.   There
    was no reason for Jim to be around the house.   He didn't expect Cheryl
    to return until sometime Sunday evening.   It would, of course, be
    before seven because that was when Brad was supposed to have the boys
    back.
     
    Jim called Cheryl about 7:30
     
    P.M. to make sure that the boys had gotten home.   He knew she worried
    if Brad didn't bring them back right on the dot of seven.   Cheryl was
    crying and upset when she answered the phone.
     
    "The boys aren't home yet," she said.   "Brad had car trouble."
     
    "Should I come home?"   Jim asked.
     
    "No," she said.   "Not right away.   It'll be okay."
     
    With most divorcing couples, it would have been.   But Jim knew that
    Brad threw a fit if Cheryl didn't have the boys ready when it was his
    turn to take them, and Cheryl went nuts if they were even five minutes
    late getting home.   But anybody could have car trouble, and evidently
    Brad had called Cheryl to tell her that he would be late.
     
    Cheryl seemed nervous, Jim thought.   True, she always seemed nervous
    these days, the subtle and not-so-subtle psychological war that Brad
    was waging against her kept her constantly on edge.   She was always
    afraid that on some visitation Brad wasn't going to bring the boys back
    þthat he was just going to disappear and take her sons with him.   But
    lately she seemed convinced that, if things looked bad for Brad in the
    custody fight, she herself wasn't going to survive.   Literally not
    surzn e Whether her fears had any basis or not, Jim had caught them the
    way you catch an infectious disease.   Cheryl was so smart and so
    intuitive, and yet she had become almost stoic when she told Jim that
    she might die soonþand that it would be his job to find out the
    truth.
     
    That was nothing like Cheryl's usual behavior.   She had always been so
    strong, so resilient.   One thing about his half sister, she had never,
    ever been passive.   tSo even though Cheryl had told him he didn't have
    to come home early that Sunday night, Jim was uneasy and he headed for
    the West Slope house within an hour after he spoke to her on the
    phone.
     
    When he drove up to the house at 9:15, he saw that all the lights were
    blazing, but Cheryl's van wasn't there.
     
    That scared him.
     
    Once inside the house, Jim noticed that the vacuum cleaner was sitting
    in the middle of the living-room floor.   It looked as if Cheryl had
    rushed away in the middle of housecleaning.   With a hollow feeling in
    his stomach, Jim walked quickly through the empty rooms.   It was very
    quiet and his heart was beating too loudly.   There was a note on the
    kitchen counter.   It was from Cheryl, written on a sheet of paper she
    had torn from the notebook in which she recorded the content of all of
    Brad's phone calls.
     
    "I have gone to pick up the boys from Brad at the Mobile station next
    to the I.G.A.   If I'm   not back, please come and find me.... COME RIGHT
    AWAY!"
     
    Cheryl would have written that note between 7:30 and 8:00, Jim thought,
    and she should have been back with Jess, Michael, and Phillip within
    fifteen minutes.   Now it was almost 9:30.   Jim called their mother,
    Betty, in Longview, an hour's drive north of Portland.   Betty picked up
    the phone before the first ring had even ended.   When Jim told her that
    Cheryl had obviously left the house in a hurry, and then read the note,
    Betty started to sob.   That scared Jim even more.   That wasn't like his
    mother.
     
    "She's dead," Betty cried.   "She called me.   I told her not to meet
    Brad alone.   I know she's dead."
     
    Jim tried to comfort his mother.   He said there had to be a reasonable
    explanation why Cheryl wasn't back yet.   He told her he was heading
    down to