A Fever in the Heart: And Other True Cases by Ann Rule Read Free Book Online Page B

friend, he actually allowed Gabby back in his house to discuss their dilemma. The three of them, each side of the hopeless triangle, had stilted, awkward discussions. Sometimes, Gabby would show up at suppertime and they all sat together at the table again, unspoken thoughts heavy in the air. It was as if there were some solution to be found, some ending where all three of them could be happy, and yet they all knew there was none. Whatever happened, one of them was going to lose. Of them all, Morris was the strongest, heartbroken as he was Gabby was full of bluster and persuasive arguments but he held on to Jerilee like the drowning man he had once been, and Jerilee was torn, caught in a situation she could never have imagined a few months earlier. Olive Blankenbaker, still troubled by the tableau she encountered two decades ago, recalled an evening when she inadvertently walked in on one of those meetings. "I took two steaks over to Morris and Jerilee. .. and Moore was there. I said, I guess I should have brought three steaks. I didn't know you had company." Gabby just hung his head and looked away.
    l even felt kind of sorry for him, but that was before I realized what he had done to Morris." Years after it had all been played out, Olive could not speak of Gabby as anyone other than "Moore," and she could not keep the disgust and rage from her voice. For all of her life, she had worked to make her son happy and there had finally come a time when she had no power whatsoever to ease the searing pain he was suffering.
    Hammering away at Jerilee with skewed logic and raw emotion and relentless pleas, it wasn't long before Gabby Moore had convinced her to leave Morris once again and come back to live with him. This time, Morris realized his marriage was truly over.
    When his life disintegrated, Morris Blankenbaker could not bear to be in Yakima any longer, despite the fact that his mother, his brothers, his children, and his friends were all there. Everywhere he went there were reminders of Jerilee. Worse, there was every likelihood that he would actually run into his wife with her new husband. Yakima wasn't big enough to avoid that. Gabby Moore was Jerilee's new husband, he married her almost before the ink on her divorce papers was dry. He couldn't risk the possibility that she would change her mind. On September 14, 1974, Jerilee Blankenbaker became Jerilee Moore.
    Along with Amanda and Rick and Gabby's sixteen-year-old son, Derek, she and Gabby formed a new family. As he had promised, Gabby bought a house for them all to live in. It wasn't quite as lavish as he had promised, but it was a nice house. Morris's and Jerilee's children were very young. They must have been confused to find themselves in a different house, without their daddy, and to see their mother living with the man who had come to stay with them after Christmas. The swiftness with which Morris's marriage had vaporized stunned everyone who knew him. In a big city, the exchange of marital partners might have gone relatively unnoticed, but in Yakima, Washington, everyone seemed to be talking about the scandal. Morris moved to Hawaii, a long, long way from his memories of the year just past, from a dozen years of memories of Jerilee. The weather was tropical, the vegetation lush and exotic, nothing looked or smelled or felt the least bit like Yakima, Washington.
    He figured that maybe there he could forget Jerilee. But this geographical solution to a shattered world didn't work. Morris was still alone. His pain had followed him every mile of the way. Knowing how lonesome Morris was, and missing him, a bunch of his friends withdrew their savings and booked passage to Hawaii to visit him. They had barely arrived when Olive was rushed to the hospital back in Yakima. She warned Morris's half brothers and her own sisters not to tell Morris she was sick and they promised that they wouldn't. But Olive's ex-husband, Ned, came to visit her and he misunderstood the doctors'