“Call Dad,” Heather said.
Jenn did call her father, who urged her to grab the boys and what clothes she could, and drive back to Heather’s house. He didn’t think she would be safe if she stayed in her own house.
“Take the back roads,” Max warned her. “Don’t come the way you usually do, in case he decides to follow you.”
Bart made calls, too, using his cell phone to call the Tierneys to explain his side of the fight. He spoke to Doug, and denied adamantly that he had hit Jenn, telling his brother-in-law that she was only being dramatic.
“She might get the boys to say they were witnesses,” Bart complained. “But they’re children. No one would believe them over me.”
Bart had an explanation for what had happened. He said that Jenn had been trying to choke him, and he had hit her accidentally as he tried to get her hand off his throat.
Jenn’s parents and sisters and their husbands had never known Bart to be any danger to her. But they had all been concerned from the moment he’d walked into the Tierney’s home that afternoon. He had acted so strange all day. This was an ugly ending to Thanksgiving.
Jenn scrambled hurriedly to get pajamas for the boys. As she ran out to her SUV, Kelly Comeau called out, “Happy Thanksgiving!”
Kelly would remember that night. “Well, Happy Thanksgiving to you, Kelly,” Jenn called back bleakly. “Bart just punched me in the face.”
Kelly ran across the street and helped Jenn get the boys in her car, and she drove off before Bart could stop her. Bart told Kelly, too, that Jenn had been trying to choke him and he’d had no choice but to try to get her hands off of him. He swore he hadn’t meant to hit her.
Jenn drove the back roads as Max suggested but kept looking in the rearview mirror to see if he was following her. Fortunately, he was nowhere in sight. But they had passed through a safety barrier into a kind of insanity. And nothing would ever be the same again. As frightened as she was, Jenn Corbin had no idea what lay ahead.
IT TOOK QUITE A WHILE for Jenn to get Dalton and Dillon settled down for the night, at the Tierneys’ house. Finally, exhausted, they dropped off to sleep. Jenn sat on the couch, talking quietly to Doug. She was very upset, but she seemed resolute that she was going to leave Bart. She told her brother-in-law how frightened Dalton had been when Bart hit her in the face, and that he had screamed and cried. Even Dillon, awakened when they got home, caught the panic of the moment.
Now, Jenn didn’t seem afraid—only disappointed at the path her life was taking. She told Doug that she just didn’t love Bart anymore.
Their marriage had been going downhill rapidly since midsummer, Jenn explained. Bart was jealous of the time she spent on the Internet, and increasingly suspicious. Their home life had become unbearable, Dalton and Dillon sensed the tension, and Jenn said she was finally at a place where she didn’t want to try to patch up her tattered marriage. There was nothing left to save.
In fact, she confided that Bart had been sleeping upstairs in a bedroom next to the boys’ room for a month. Jenn said she’d moved all his clothes up there to their guest room.
Feeling safe in Doug and Heather’s house, Jenn finally relaxed enough to be able to sleep.
IN THE MORNING, the sun came out and nothing seemed quite as awful as it had the night before. Jenn told Heather that she was going back to her own house; she didn’t want to have to sleep on someone else’s couch or live in a tiny apartment. She felt she could figure out a way to make a new life with her sons. Despite her sister’s misgivings, she packed up her boys and drove home.
In his business as a computer expert, Doug worked with a number of legal firms, and he gave Jenn the name of a divorce lawyer to call: Judy King. When Jenn replied that she had no money to pay an attorney, Doug told her that he would give her $5,000 to help with a divorce if she decided that was best.
Heather assured her sister that she could share their home. There was plenty of room in the new Dawsonville house that they’d moved into only two weeks before. The whole basement could be fixed up as an apartment. Even so, the Tierneys and the Barbers still hoped that there might be the possibility of a reconciliation between Bart and Jenn.
For the next six days, Bart went to his clinic, but returned home every night. Jenn kept up her part-time job at the Sugar Hill church preschool, and she saw to it that their house was as neat as always. The family ate dinner together each night, but mealtimes were stressful, with Bart and Jenn usually exchanging harsh words. Most things rolled off Dillon’s back, but Dalton had become Jenn’s shadow, with his eyes darting constantly between his father and mother; he was only seven, but he took on the job of protecting his mother. As frightened as he was of his father, Dalton had become a small but stubborn force. He would not allow anyone to hurt her—not even his father. That annoyed Bart even more.
Bart was now his own private eye. He was obsessed with discovering everything he could about Jenn’s life. He stole her cell phone from her purse and methodically called every number listed in its directory, hoping to connect with the “Chris” in Jenn’s emails.
Most of the calls he made connected him to someone he knew, and he made excuses for why he’d phoned—usually telling people he was “reprogramming Jenn’s phone for her.”
“He even called me at work,” Narda said, “and he felt kind of foolish when he realized he’d dialed one of my numbers.”
WHEN BART GOT A NUMBER that rang and rang without an answer, he jotted it down and kept calling.
In between checking on Jenn’s secret life, Bart called friends and relatives to learn what he could. He phoned Heather, wanting to talk about Jenn. “She just wants my money,” he complained. “I’ve done nothing wrong.”
Heather thought that was classic Bart; with him, it was always money, money, money.
“Bart. You punched Jenn in the face—and Dalton saw it.”
“Yes,” he argued, “but I didn’t hit her hard.”
“I saw how red her face was,” Heather snapped.
When he realized that Heather wasn’t on his side, Bart switched tactics and began to call Doug Tierney more often. He acted now as if Doug were his close buddy, and he expected his brother-in-law would pass on any information about Jenn. Bart also consulted Doug as a computer expert.
“He wanted to know where he could take the hard drive in the computer that Jenn had used,” Doug recalled.
“He was looking for all the emails she had written or received.”
Doug did his best to avoid referring Bart to a technician who could do that, but as Bart kept hounding him, he finally mumbled the name of a small firm in Norcross, Georgia. Doug hoped Bart wouldn’t pursue his almost pathological curiosity. But Bart was fanatical as he tracked Jenn’s every movement.
BART CONTACTED A NUMBER of people he had met during his marriage, and a very few he knew before he met Jenn. He was building an increasingly complicated network of those who had the potential to help him unveil all of her secrets.
One couple—Jenn Grossman and her husband, Rob—had considered themselves close friends of Jenn and Bart Corbin for more than five years. In 1999, Rob Grossman had a satellite-dish company and he installed one at the Corbin home. Rob and Bart quickly became friends, and they soon bartered back and forth, with Bart providing dental care to the Grossmans in exchange for satellite dishes on his houseboat and in his dental offices. The two Jenns got along well, too, and the couples started spending time together on a regular basis, having dinner at one another’s house and going out to restaurants on birthdays and holidays.
As for Jenn and Bart’s relationship, it seemed like a typical happy marriage to Rob and Jenn. Certainly, they never fought or argued in front of the Grossmans.
Jenn gave Jennifer Grossman the baby clothes and equipment that she’d saved after Dillon’s birth. With Bart’s vasectomy, she knew there would be no more babies for her.
Jenn Grossman had noticed that Bart swore a lot when he was working on her teeth, but thought
he was simply more relaxed around her and Rob because they were personal friends. In the fall of 2004, they had a falling out with Bart regarding a dental bill, and stopped talking, although the Grossmans assumed that sooner or later, they would work it out.
To his dismay, Max Barber had inadvertently revealed information to Bart about an item on the Corbins’ credit record. Despite his financial problems, Bart didn’t hesitate to spend money on things he wanted. In the fall of 2004, he bought himself a classic 1978 yellow Mustang convertible, and, as always, he had gone to Max to handle the sale. What Max didn’t know was that, unbeknownst to Bart, Jenn had taken out a single credit card in her name alone. The card had only a $2,000 limit. It showed up on the couple’s joint marital credit record and Bart’s finger stopped as he traced down his family’s report.
For a man who demanded that his wife account for every item on her grocery list, the information about a credit card he didn’t recognize had to have been jolting.
“This is a mistake,” Bart said. “It isn’t mine.”
He asked Max to check to see if the surprise credit card had incurred a legitimate debt. Unaware that he was giving away his daughter’s secret, Max ran the card through again, and told Bart that the charge was accurate.
Max could read Bart’s reaction as if a lightbulb had gone on over his head. He started to speak, but his son-in-law was already dashing out the door.
Jenn hadn’t bought anything even vaguely incriminating with the card, only household items. But they were duplicates of things that already existed in the house on Bogan Gates Drive. On Monday, November 29, when Jenn arrived in Lawrenceville to work with Narda, she asked her mother if she could store some things in the Lake Arts warehouse.
“She had wiped out the balance on that credit card,” Narda recalled. “She backed her car around and unloaded things she thought she and the boys would need if they had to leave their home: towels, dinnerware, salt and pepper shakers, a vacuum cleaner, even Band-Aids and aspirin tablets—just the very basic stuff she might need to set up a house. I don’t know where Jenn planned to go—maybe she didn’t either. She had taken a $500 cash advance from that card—that’s about all. She knew that she was welcome with Max and me, and with Heather and Doug, but we all lived in a different school district, and she didn’t want to take the boys out of their school.”
Bart continued to call every number stored on Jenn’s cell phone, trying to find out whom she might be talking to that he didn’t know about. Once Anita had confessed her real identity to Jenn, they had exchanged phone numbers, although Jenn wasn’t sure what, if anything, would happen in their future. When Bart stole Jenn’s cell phone on Thanksgiving Day, Anita’s number was in it—albeit without a name. Jenn alerted Anita not to answer any calls from numbers she didn’t recognize or blocked numbers—just in case.
On Tuesday, November 30, Bart took the hard drive from his Hewlett-Packard computer into ACR Data Recovery Inc. in Norcross, and asked the technician there to pull out all of the information possible on emails that had been sent to and from his wife.
He was determined to unearth everything he could about Jenn’s secrets, and it seemed he was only a few steps behind her.
Jenn was living day to day, fearful enough that she was prepared to run if she had to, but still ambivalent. Would Bart really hurt her? Before he hit her on Thanksgiving, she would have said absolutely not. Now, she wasn’t so sure.
She had never found her cell phone, so she arranged to get a replacement for the one Bart had stolen from her purse. Jenn needed the security of having a phone of her own at all times. She replaced the journal that was missing, too, but kept it with her always.
Judy King, the divorce attorney Doug had recommended, explained to Jenn that, if at all possible, she should not move out of the house. If she left, that could be construed as “abandonment,” and it would give Bart a stronger case. He could claim that Jenn had deserted him. Bart had told Jenn that he didn’t want a divorce, but if she went ahead with her threat to file, he intended to go for full custody of Dalton and Dillon, and he would keep the Bogan Gates Drive house, too.
Jenn’s teaching job at the preschool would barely support them, and she was already looking for a full-time job. She had applied at the Harmony School where the boys attended. Jenn didn’t want to argue over money, but she suspected Bart would fight her all the way.
Jenn felt suspended between the life she no longer trusted and the life she had longed for with Chris. All of her hopes had vanished like smoke in a sudden gust of wind. She would stay with Bart at least over Christmas, no matter how uncomfortable it might be.
Surely she could make it through until 2005.
JENN WAS TORN by aching indecision. Although she knew intellectually that there was no Christopher and never had been, she was unable to let go emotionally of the mind-picture she still had of him. He wasn’t real, but he still existed for her.
Chris—Anita—Hearn had fashioned her emails so that Jenn would believe they were on the same wavelength as far as their interests and concerns. Anita sounded as if she was as devoted to “her sister’s children” as Jenn was to Dalton and Dillon. She had written about taking care of her ill mother, and she was seeking to live a life with someone who was kind and gentle. Although Anita had carried out what many people would consider a cruel hoax, Jenn found it in her heart to forgive her.
She told her mother and sister only that she hoped to meet “the person” she had met online in person. She would deal with the dicier truth about who Anita really was later.
Part of Jenn Corbin still loved someone who was, in truth, neither Chris nor Anita but rather a figment of a desperate imagination. As she was going through the chaos of living with an enraged Bart, Jenn started answering the messages that Anita still sent her. She still had a friend. She even considered Anita’s suggestion that they might share a home together as they struggled to raise their children.
Cautiously, they started exchanging emails again, sometimes as often as before. The New Year would come in a few weeks, and Jenn didn’t know what she was going to do or where she would be living. And so she continued to stockpile household items in her mother’s warehouse and to write to Anita in Missouri when Bart wasn’t around.
And Bart continued his fanatical exploration into every corner of Jenn’s private world. He would not allow another woman to leave him. It did not matter that he had emotionally abandoned her years earlier. He was a man on fire.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
DECEMBER 2004
JENN HAD ONCE MUSED to her sister that there might be things about Bart she didn’t know. And, of course, there were many. Jenn might have known that Bart once dated another dental student, but she certainly didn’t know that woman had “committed suicide,” and she had never heard her name. So she could not have imagined his shock when he received the report that the hard drive he took in to be examined had emails from someone named Hearn. He had also gleaned a phone number for that person in Missouri, but his calls to that number were never answered. He had relegated Dolly to the past—but now her family name was surfacing in his life again.
FIVE DAYS AFTER THANKSGIVING, on the Wednesday morning of December 1, just before 6 A.M., the war of the Corbins escalated once more. Jenn was in their recreation room running her usual mile on her treadmill, and she assumed Bart was upstairs taking his shower. But when she walked into the master bedroom, she saw her purse lying on the floor, its contents once again strewn all over. When she checked to see if anything was missing, she saw that her new cell phone, new journal, and her only credit card were gone.
Now, she was angry. She confronted Bart as he walked from the bathroom wrapping a towel around his waist.
“You were in my purse again!” Jenn said accusingly.
“You took my phone and I want it back.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” he said dismissively, and brushed by her.
“I want what you took out of my purse,?
?? Jenn demanded.
Bart walked out of the room, ran down the stairs, and jumped into his yellow convertible. He was virtually naked—wearing nothing but the bath towel.
Jenn could see that he was out of control.
“Bart,” she warned, grabbing a cordless phone, “stop! I’m calling the police. Please don’t make me do this!”
He ignored her. Jenn punched 911. Bart had no business being out on the road nearly nude. As angry as he was, he might kill somebody. With the phone in hand, she followed him out to the driveway, and stood behind his Mustang to stop him from leaving. Although Bart’s behavior had become increasingly bizarre, she had never seen him quite like this.
Jenn didn’t want a public fight—a “scene.” She had tried throughout her marriage to avoid that. There had to be a way for them to split up with the least damage possible, but this certainly wasn’t it. By now Dalton and Dillon were awake and crouched inside the door, watching with horrified looks on their faces.
Jenn planted her bare feet firmly on the driveway as Bart steadily backed the car toward her. She was talking to the 911 operator, asking for a patrol car to come by. Jenn fully expected Bart to stop, but he kept coming. At the last moment, she tried to jump clear, but it was too late. She was still on the phone when Bart deliberately backed over her foot and drove off.
“Husband taking off with her personal belongings,” the 911 dispatcher radioed. “Vehicle is ’78 yellow Mustang…Hear female screaming—think I hear child crying in the background. He took shotgun out of the house—she doesn’t know where gun is now…”
Jenn gasped that she had been run over.
“Officers are on their way, Ma’am,” the dispatcher said. “Are you hurt badly?”
“I don’t know,” Jenn said. “I’m not sure.”
While she waited for the police, Jenn called Narda. Then she called Heather. Jenn was crying hysterically, something that was completely out of character for her. Heather couldn’t believe it—Jenn was always the one who took charge, calmed people down, and made everyone feel better. Finally, Jenn calmed down enough to tell her sister that Bart had just deliberately run over her. No wonder that Jenn herself was in shock, injured, and stunned by Bart’s behavior. Heather could hear Dalton and Dillon in the background, and they were crying loudly, too.