Читать книгу Murder In The Heartland - M. William Phelps - Страница 18

Through the bumpy backcountry roads of Skidmore, the Kawasaki Motors plant in Maryville, where Zeb and Bobbie Jo worked, was a good twenty-minute drive from their home on West Elm Street. On the morning of December 16, Zeb grabbed his lunch bucket, kissed Bobbie Jo good-bye on the way out the door, and headed off to work. Bobbie Jo was going to be home, as she had been the past few weeks, on maternity leave from Kawasaki. She had a lot to do. In a matter of weeks, she and Zeb would welcome a new addition to their family and begin making plans to purchase a home of their own and maybe even have another child.

Life was sweet.

A strong guy, physically and mentally, Zeb was a few inches taller than Bobbie Jo, who stood five feet six inches. Zeb had broad shoulders and radiated a country toughness that spoke of his roots in town. There was one photograph of Zeb standing next to Bobbie Jo at a dog show. Lisa Montgomery and her daughter Kayla were in the same photograph, standing to Zeb and Bobbie Jo’s right side. Bobbie Jo was smiling, while Zeb held the ribbon she had won earlier with one of her prized rat terriers. With one arm around Bobbie and the other proudly displaying the purple ribbon, Zeb beamed with happiness.

Near the end of 2003, Bobbie Jo and Zeb’s Happy Haven Farms breeding business took flight. Their main business was breeding rat terriers. “Our dogs are all Type A’s…,” Bobbie Jo pointed out on her Web site. “We offer our puppies to GREAT homes only, as we’d rather keep ’em here, but realize we have to share.”

By most standards, the business was small, which was what Bobbie Jo liked. She and Zeb bred, on average, about one to two litters per year, but they had three litters between the summer of 2003 and late fall 2004. Bobbie Jo adored the small canines, especially her own terriers, Belle, Tipsy, and Fonzi; along with her Dalmatian, Maddy. Several photographs of her at various dog shows depict a young woman glowing with joy, showing her prized dogs, and just loving the life she and Zeb had built.

Near the end of March, beginning of April, Bobbie Jo officially announced she was pregnant with her first child. Within a few months, she and Zeb found out it was going to be a girl.

So Bobbie Jo picked a name.

Victoria Jo.

“Tori Jo,” she told Zeb one day, “will be the child’s nickname.”

Zeb didn’t like it all that much, but he wasn’t about to argue with his wife, who could be, some said, rather strong-willed and stubborn, but only when it pertained to good things.

Thus, Tori Jo she would be.

Soon after Bobbie Jo found out she was pregnant, she registered at the local Maryville Wal-Mart for things any first-time mother might desire: “newborn onesies, pink and yellow blankets, pink burp clothes, and a diaper bag.” She wanted common baby essentials that would help raise her daughter. What she could give the child more than any amount of money could buy was love—and she and Zeb, along with the Stinnett family and Bobbie Jo’s mother, Becky Harper, were fully prepared to shower little Victoria Jo with all the love she could handle.

With a due date of January 19, 2005, Bobbie Jo was resigned to quit her job at Kawasaki near the end of her pregnancy and concentrate on readying the house for the baby and breeding rat terriers. Like millions of proud expecting parents, Zeb and Bobbie Jo were enjoying life’s bliss in a trouble-free, uncomplicated way, just counting the days until their baby was born.

Life, indeed, should have gone on without a hitch.