But I never paid you the attention I should have; I just figured you were jealous, or something. I never said anything about Doug to you because I didn't want to interfere, but he always struck me as being kind of… dense, and like he was always trying to find a corner to cut. I just have to look at the girls to see that you were doing what you were supposed to; they're too healthy and happy for anything else."

Teresa snorted before she told me "Yeah, Doug was dense. When we graduated high school, he'd had to study long and hard to finish up with a solid 'C' average; and that insurance job was the best thing he could have gotten. Otherwise, he'd have been selling furniture or cars or SOME

damn thing or other. All he really had going for him was the ability to schmooze with people and get them to like him. He was useless about working with his hands because he'd end up hurting himself too much — hammering his thumb, or busting his knuckles with a wrench; that kind of thing. And that cutting corners thing is just what he was like; he didn't have the balls to do anything outright crooked or criminal, but he wasn't the least bit reluctant to try anything he thought he might actually get away with. That money he took from the insurance company before he disappeared? It wasn't a big check or wad of cash that he'd taken. He'd been hanging on to dinky little refunds that he was supposed to be giving people when they overpaid their premiums; the company figured out that there were a couple hundred people that hadn't gotten anywhere between ten and twenty dollars apiece. He was supposed to cut them checks after the company told him when it happened, but he never did — he just withdrew whatever the amount was from his 'draw' account. It wasn't until some guys widow was going over his insurance that she figured out that they'd been overpaying twenty a year for the last ten years and called to ask about getting a refund that anybody noticed what was going on.