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

that nobody was hanging around. The house was quiet. Everything was just as Jerilee had left it.
    Hike seemed calm as he padded around, following her as she got Amanda and Rick ready for bed, a good sign that nobody had been in the house.
    Still, Jerilee felt a little jittery with Morris at work, and she tucked the children in bed with her. She could move them after two when Morris got home. She didn't set an alarm clock, she knew she would wake up when she heard Morris come home. Something woke Jerilee at two. Some loud noise. She wasn't sure what it was, but she rolled over and looked at the clock next to the bed. It was right around two. "I realized Morris would be coming home soon," she said, "so I took the children out of the bed and put them in their own beds. Then I went back to bed myself." It was cold, and she snuggled under the blankets. She didn't fall back to sleep because it was only a few minutes before she heard Morris's car drive in back in the alley, its tires crunching on the frozen ground. "I heard our car door shut. And then I thought that I heard two more car doors shut, and Morris didn't come in." She wasn't worried. They had had three days without any trouble at all, and Morris had so many friends.
    Hike hadn't even barked, as he would if a stranger were outside. She assumed that someone had asked Morris to go out for a couple of drinks after work and that they had followed him home to pick him up. She heard male voices coming from the back of the house someplace out toward the alley. They were excited sounding, high-pitched. She strained to hear what they were saying. It wasn't much maybe ten words or so. "I stayed in bed about a half hour," Jerilee remembered. "And then I got up and went to the back window and looked out, and I saw that our car was there. So then I went outside and went to the car and looked inside the car, and nobody was there so I went back in the house went back to bed."
    Morris had actually been driving her car that night the forest green Chevy Malibu. It was parked there, and it looked just the same as always. She didn't expect Morris to be gone very long. While she was outside, Jerilee hadn't looked around very much, she was very nearsighted and she had removed her contact lenses, so it wouldn't have done much good to look around. But she did see her car parked in the back, and the Volkswagen that Morris usually drove was in the carport.
    They were both there, and that was enough to ease her mind.
    It was dark and it was cold and she could barely see her hand in front of her face. Once inside, Jerilee shivered at the thought of going back outside. Vaguely uneasy, she read for a while until she fell back to sleep.
    The children slept peacefully in the other bedroom, and Hike snoozed on the floor beside her. At five, Jerilee woke with a start. She was cold, and the other side of the bed was empty. Where was Morris? This wasn't like him. She tried to remember if he'd said anything about going somewhere after work, and she couldn't remember a thing. She was positive he had planned to come home after the Lion's Share closed. She couldn't very well call the police. What would she tell them?
    That her husband was three hours late getting home? There were probably a lot of husbands in Yakima who were a lot later than that. But Morris would have called her.
    Jerilee dialed the number she had for Mike Blankenbaker Morris's half brother. "I called Mike and asked him if he knew what Morris had planned to do after work," Jerilee said. "He said that he was going to come straight home to me. So then I was worried and I said, Well, the car is here but he hasn't come in." And Mike said, Well, just stay where you are and I'll come down and check things out."" Jerilee was beginning to feel a little less nervous. She said that she would take Hike with her and look around outside the house. "I think it will be okay," she told her brother-inlaw. He promised to wait on the phone while she