Free A Fever in the Heart: And Other True Cases by Ann Rule

the living room into a combination bedroom/living room by putting his bed in there and blocking the front door with a wardrobe. They parked out in back on the alley side and used the back door as the only entrance. Gabby was still coaching and teaching although his contract would be up at the end of the school year. He was almost "phoning in" his participation at school, simply going through the motions, and mostly he didn't even bother with that. Gabby's wrestling team still turned out for practice and showed up at matches even if their coach wasn't the fireball he had once been.
    Sometimes it seemed they almost coached themselves, but they loved Gabby and covered for him. In an unspoken pact, some of the athletes who had graduated from Davis started showing up after school to take over Gabby's duties. He had made his wrestlers champions and they would do anything for him. Between the alumni and the kids on the squad, the wrestling matches went on mostly without Gabby. Derek Moore was doing well in school, and he was a first team starter for the Davis High School "Pirates" football team. Any other time, his father would have been bursting with pride over his accomplishments in the athletic world.
    But now, nothing mattered to Gabby but getting Jerilee back. Derek cut his dad a lot of slack. Like everyone else who knew Gabby Moore, he believed that things were going to be better in time. Derek was a strong kid who had a lot of emotional support his grandparents, his mother, his new stepfather Larry Pryse, who was an assistant football coach at Davis. At seventeen, Derek Moore's whole world was wrapped up in Yakima, in high school athletics, and in his girlfriend. Loyally, he lived with his dad and hoped for better days. Dr. Myers, Gabby's former father-in-law, was extremely concerned about him. A.J. had been treating Gabby for hypertension for a decade, and he suspected that he wasn't taking his prescribed medication a beta blocker and a diuretic. Gabby would take the medicine Myers prescribed all right, but then he would begin to feel better and, like many patients with high blood pressure, he would stop taking his pills. It was a vicious circle. Hypertension is a silent disease with few symptoms. A lot of patients die of strokes or heart attacks because they "feel fine" and they have no hint that the push of blood against fragile blood vessels has become critical.
    Sometimes, extremely high blood pressure causes headaches. Not often.
    The only sure sign of trouble is a nosebleed. If that happens, the patient is lucky. It is far better to bleed from an artery in the nose than to bleed, silently and lethally, from an artery in the brain. Gabby was drinking heavily and he was stressed to the maximum. In addition, he wasn't taking his medication. Dr. Myers met him for lunch in November and tried to talk some sense into him. He warned him that he was going to blow out an artery if he didn't pay attention. But Gabby Moore didn't seem to care. All he could talk about was Jerilee. If he couldn't have her back, he didn't want to live, anyway. Myers nodded. It didn't matter that his daughter was Gabby's first ex-wife since she was happily remarried. Now they were just two men talking as friends, and it was Gabby who was left out in the cold and in seeming agony over it. Myers hoped it wasn't going to flat out kill him It looked as though it might, when on the 18th of November, a few days after the incident at Jerilee and Morris's house, Gabby showed up at Dr. Myers's office and asked for an appointment. "He reported to me that he had had repeated nosebleeds for the past twenty-four ho ursa total of four of them which were difficult to stop," Myers said. "He appeared at my office following one of these.... Because of his blood pressure and the history of four nosebleeds in twenty-four hours, I decided to hospitalize him." It wouldn't be the first time that Gabby's hypertension became critical, Dr. Myers had been treating him for high