Before He Wakes (7 page)

She spent money so profligately that the Fords began to wonder how Larry, who was thrifty by nature, ever would be able to pay all the bills. Barbara was always buying something new—clothing, jewelry, things for the apartment. Larry’s sister Jane came to believe that spending money excited Barbara. She was never happier than when she was buying something, Jane thought, preferably something expensive that she could show off to others. Yet once she had bought something, she never was satisfied with it, the Fords thought. Just as playing is more important to gamblers than winning, spending clearly was more important to Barbara than having spent. And just as gambling can become addictive, spending was growing into a craving that Barbara could not control.

Barbara didn’t like her apartment—it wasn’t good enough for her, the Fords believed—and less than a year after she had moved into it, she found a small yellow house for rent on North Main Street, a step up that offered more privacy as well, but the Fords couldn’t help but wonder how long it would be before Barbara became unhappy with it, too.

The department in which Barbara worked at the bank was a large one, but she developed few friends. The department manager who hired her, Jack Kearns, thought of her as a good worker, a “clean-cut little girl,” but Barbara’s burgeoning sexuality was soon to assert itself and cause him to wonder if she was as clean-cut as she at first had appeared. He began getting complaints from other women in the department that her open talk about sex bothered them. She often wore miniskirts to work, and some of her female coworkers thought that she was flagrantly flirtatious with male employees and customers.

“Barbara could be with a group of women, acting perfectly normal,” one acquaintance later would recall, “but if a man came around, she would suddenly become an entirely different person, all aglow. It was really something to see.”

“Flirting was like a game with her,” said another. “It was indiscriminate, a physical thing, just anybody who catches her scent.”

Barbara would make friends with other women in the office, then do something that would alienate them, according to one woman. At times, for example, Barbara would seek help with her work from others, she said, then, with her work done, leave early, making her coworkers angry. But it was her open sexuality that bothered most of them, and as time went on, some women in the office would shun Barbara, calling her “loose.” One, who knew nothing of Barbara’s strict upbringing and religious training or of her teenage concerns about her looks, ironically would describe her as “a very cute girl who knew nothing about morals.”

Men were certainly taking notice. Indeed, among her male coworkers and supervisors, Barbara was popular and highly regarded. All of them would speak well of her later.

Her title was wholesale clerk, and she handled loan applications and payments from car dealers. By the spring of 1973, almost five years after her marriage, it became obvious to her coworkers that she was getting very friendly with some of the bank’s customers.

Larry would first get wind of this that spring, when Barbara told him that she was going off to spend a weekend with a group of girlfriends at the beach cottage her parents had bought when she was in high school. After she left, Larry got a late-night call.

“Do you know where your wife is?” asked a female voice. The caller hung up before Larry could question her.

Suspicious, he tried to track Barbara down. The beach house had no phone, so he called the police on the island and asked them to check at the house for Barbara and have her call him. The police reported back that nobody was staying at the house that weekend.

“I ran the gauntlet of emotions,” he later said to his mother when he told her about the call.

Doris knew how deeply troubled Larry had to be for him to talk to her about such a thing, and she didn’t press him for details. She never knew if he confronted Barbara about that weekend, although she suspected that he did. Meanwhile, their marriage stumbled on, but Larry never seemed happy anymore and he was becoming more and more remote.

Doris assumed that things were going better when Larry told her later that spring that he and Barbara were going to buy a new house of their own. It was in a new subdivision in Randolph County, five miles south of High Point, a three-bedroom split-level, still under construction. They negotiated a loan with a savings and loan company and signed a contract for the house, agreeing to pay $27,000.

The house was clearly Barbara’s idea. Larry’s parents thought that he was going along with it just to appease her, and they worried that he wouldn’t be able to keep up the payments. Barbara was eager to get into it, and she lost patience with the contractors as they worked to finish it. “Everything that she wanted, it had to be today,” her father-in-law later recalled. “Like the house. She would say, ‘They’re going to have it ready in two weeks—or else.’ ”

Barbara began buying new furniture even before the house was ready and had it delivered when she and Larry finally moved in in early May. Then she didn’t like the electric stove and refrigerator that came with the house, and she traded them for more expensive models in colors that pleased her. She bought a new washer and dryer and on and on.

The obsession for perfection that Barbara had brought from her childhood was expressed in her new house. She had longed for this symbol of status, and now that she had it, she was determined that it would reflect her taste and refinement, her superiority to the circumstances in which she found herself. Everything had to be perfect about the house, and she pushed herself to make it so. While she fussed about inside, arranging and cleaning, Larry cleared the back yard of weeds and vines, bought a tiller and put in a late garden. He erected a gym set for Bryan and built a utility shed for his tiller and lawn mower.

Larry’s family looked on with concern. Barbara never would be happy with what she had, no matter how good it might be or how much it cost, they told themselves. Larry was so deeply in debt now that they couldn’t imagine how he and Barbara would pay for all of these extravagances. After all, Larry soon would be giving up his job so that he could finish his degree and begin teaching, as he had long dreamed of doing.

Larry left Sears that summer to do his student teaching in a class for slow learners at Trindale Elementary School, only a few miles from his new house. On the occasional weekends when he went to his parents’ house that fall, he didn’t speak of any troubles, but Doris and Henry knew that something was wrong and they suspected that the new house and all her new possessions had not been enough for Barbara. Not only did Larry seem more worried and withdrawn, he was even thinner than usual. He complained of stomach troubles, and at twenty-five his hair was already turning gray.

Not until later would Larry’s parents learn that with her spending carried as far as she felt it could go, Barbara’s needs to break boundaries would turn in a different direction. Months afterward, Larry confided to his mother that he had discovered that Barbara was having an affair during this period and they had stopped sleeping together. He did not say with whom she was involved, and Doris didn’t know if Larry knew the man’s identity. But others did. Barbara’s affair was common knowledge at the bank.

Several of Barbara’s coworkers had met Larry at various times when he stopped by the bank. They all thought him a quiet, gentle, thoughtful man, and that was one reason they could not understand why Barbara became involved with Ken Hazelwood, who usually was called by his nickname, Butch. Hazelwood, eleven years older than Barbara, was brash and aggressive, nothing like Larry.

Bob Gray, Barbara’s supervisor since 1972, knew Hazelwood well. Hazelwood had worked for him at a car dealership in High Point a few years earlier. Hazelwood was a “rough character.” Barbara’s first boss, Jack Kearns, also knew Hazelwood and described him as “hot tempered,” with a “poor reputation.” Hazelwood was often in trouble of one sort or another, and years later he would be murdered, shot in the head.

Earlier in 1973, Hazelwood had started a used-car lot called Bargain Autos. He worked out a plan with NCNB to provide financing for his customers. Barbara made the credit checks on those customers, and she was in regular contact with Hazelwood. Coworkers saw that she was getting more and more friendly with him, but nobody knew just how friendly until he came to Bob Gray that fall to talk about a problem that he wanted to avoid. Barbara was going to leave Larry and move in with him, Hazelwood said. Would that affect his business dealings with the bank? NCNB didn’t involve itself in the personal lives of its employees or customers, Gray told him. Later, when Gray stopped by Hazelwood’s house one day, Hazelwood showed him personal items of Barbara’s and said that she was spending time there with him whenever she could.

Gray wasn’t the only person at the bank who knew about Barbara’s affair with Hazelwood. The husband of one of her female coworkers was employed at a finance company where Hazelwood took customers who couldn’t qualify for bank loans. Hazelwood frequently boasted to him about his sexual exploits with Barbara. She was unlike anything he’d ever seen, he claimed.

He would not be the last to comment about Barbara’s sexual appetites. “She was tremendously aggressive,” another lover recalled years later. “I thought she was a nymphomaniac to some extent. She wanted to go all night long. It was incredible, like a machine or something.”

Knowing the strain that Larry’s marriage was under, his parents were surprised when they learned before Christmas of 1973 that Barbara was pregnant again. Larry said little about it, and at the time Doris and Henry could only surmise that he and Barbara had worked out their problems.

Larry finished his student teaching just before Christmas and was awarded his degree and teaching certificate in February. He was promised a job teaching in the Randolph County schools starting in the fall. Meanwhile, he had to look for other work, and a far more lucrative opportunity presented itself. He got a job as office manager at Prehler Electrical Insulation Company in High Point, a division of the 3M Corporation. The job turned out to be better than he had hoped. It provided good benefits and paid more than he ever had made, more than he could make teaching. Once again teaching would be put on hold.

Barbara’s second child, Jason Andrew Ford, was born July 27, 1974. He would be her last. After the delivery she underwent a tubal ligation to prevent future pregnancies.

The baby offered no relief from the strain of a faltering marriage. Relations between Larry and Barbara continued to deteriorate. Larry fell into an even glummer mood and remained in it as fall arrived. His parents didn’t know how to help him. One weekend they took him to the mountains, as they had when he was much younger, for a hike along the New River, hoping to revive happy memories. Nothing seemed to help.

The estrangement he felt was redirected into a new-found passion. The year before, he had signed up for tae kwon do lessons taught by Lou Wagner, a financial consultant and fellow Marine reservist. The classes were held weekly at the High Point YWCA. Tae kwon do is a Korean martial art that espouses self-awareness and detachment, and Larry became absorbed in it that fall, drinking in the philosophy and working out hard.

Barbara was directing her passions in different directions.

Butch Hazelwood still came to the bank, still chatted with Barbara, but her coworkers had detected a distance between them since Barbara’s pregnancy. She had not tried to hide the troubles in her marriage, and since she had returned to work following Jason’s birth, her coworkers had noticed that she had become much closer with another of the bank’s customers.

Joe Albright*, who was Barbara’s age, worked for a car dealership and brought his customers to NCNB for loans. Barbara, who had been handling his account for a year, always greeted him with a big smile, was always especially nice to him. After her baby was born, she became even friendlier. Late that summer, he later would claim, Barbara told him that she was separated.

He asked if she would like to come to his house and go for a swim in his pool one afternoon. She accepted, and their swim led to sex on her first visit. After that, Barbara came regularly to his house, sometimes even bringing Bryan with her. Albright was astonished at her sexual hunger.

Her desire, Albright soon realized, was not only for him. Word reached him that he might be treading in dangerous waters. Barbara, he was told, was also involved in an affair with Clement Wilson*, described by those who knew him as a “high roller,” a “big-time operator.” Like Butch Hazelwood, Wilson was eleven years older than Barbara, a man accustomed to getting what he wanted. He had a loan at NCNB, but he came to the bank far more often than was needed to attend to it, and he always ended up talking and laughing with Barbara. Years later, Wilson would deny having an affair with her, saying that he came to the bank frequently because he was selling his business and getting ready to move from High Point, but he wouldn’t have been able to get anybody who worked with Barbara at the time to believe that.

Barbara never mentioned Wilson to Joe Albright, but when he heard that she was involved with him, he stopped inviting her to his house. He didn’t want trouble, and she, after all, kept saying that she was thinking of going back with Larry. Albright did not know at the time that she had not even moved out of the house she shared with Larry.

Finally, Barbara did leave early in November, when Jason was three months old. Larry’s family and friends would never know what precipitated the separation. His parents didn’t find out about it until he showed up for dinner one Sunday alone. Even after he told them that Barbara had left and taken the children, he remained mute about the reasons for it. They didn’t press him for details because he seemed so distressed about it. Instead, they tried to console him with normalcy. He must miss Bryan, his parents thought. They knew that Larry had been trying hard to make his marriage work for Bryan’s sake, and he was clearly devastated by his failure.