Fatal Friends, Deadly Neighbors Read Online Free PDF

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    It turned out that Josh and Susan had other debts that Josh couldn’t pay. They had bought their house in West Valley City when they first arrived in Utah. They could make the mortgage payments at that time because they both had jobs. But, of course, Josh’s steady employment ended shortly after that. Susan was the main breadwinner.
    Josh had run up all the credit cards they had to the maximum limit, and those creditors were hounding them for payment, too.
    Although Susan was embarrassed to ask her parents for more help, she had no choice but to stand behind Josh when he asked them for a loan.
    “We gave them five thousand dollars,” Chuck says, “so they wouldn’t lose the house and they could pay their overdue mortgage debt. Susan promised to pay us back, and after Braden was born, she went right back to work at Wells Fargo. She was making payments to us as soon as she could.”
    Josh took a job as an assistant to an accountant, but he never varied from his usual path. He complained to Susan that he was much smarter than his boss, and he soon made that clear to his employer, too. He lost his job.
    It was not a good time to be jobless. By 2009, the bottom had fallen out of the economy, scaring off house hunters who discovered that loans were drying up. Many recent home buyers found themselves upside down with their mortgages. Josh didn’t sell any more houses.
    Charlie and Braden were very young—only four and two. Susan would have loved to work part-time and be able to stay home with her children. Her goal was still to have a beauty parlor in their home, but she didn’t manage to save any money. With a business in her home, she could make money and be with the boys, too.
    As always, Susan was the main wage earner in the family. Even so, she had to use the money Josh doled out, and then explain everything she bought to him. She wasn’t even allowed to withdraw money from the bank; Josh kept changing the PIN number so she wouldn’t have access to it.
    To be sure Susan didn’t “overspend,” Josh instructed her to go through weekly supermarket ads and check off the cheapest items offered. Then he told her what groceries she could buy, and he entered a list of those items on a spreadsheet in his computer. When she returned home, he scanned all her receipts into his computer to be sure she hadn’t spent more than he’d allowed. If she went even pennies over the list he’d authorized, he would rail at her.
    Trying to stay on such a frugal budget, Susan found it almost impossible to feed her family properly. She planted a ten-by-forty-foot garden. She grew everything from green beans and carrots to watermelons and pumpkins. By cooking fresh produce from her garden in the summer and foods she canned in the winter, she hoped that Charlie and Braden would have enough to eat.
    Susan made everything from scratch when she cooked. For her, pumpkin pie meant growing the pumpkin, roasting it, scooping out the seeds, and also making the crust.
    Susan was a vegetarian, and luckily her little boys liked carrots better than candy. She froze and canned the bounty from her garden and their fruit trees.
    Josh was even more tightfisted when it came to other purchases. When Susan spent six dollars on shoes for Charlie, Josh was furious with her. She wasn’t allowed to buy socks; Josh told her to knit them. But he complained if she spent too much money on yarn, especially when she knit baby bonnets, booties, and sweaters for her friends, one of her biggest pleasures.
    When their day-care mom saw that Charlie and Braden often came to her without socks, she bought each of them a dozen pair. Susan was a little embarrassed but grateful.
    Susan had to ask Josh’s permission to drive their blue minivan, so she usually bicycled to where she had to go. And she rode a bike without gears to help on hill climbs. Most of the roads she traveled had no real shoulders so it was dangerous for her, but she rode on the pavement on busy