Fatal Friends, Deadly Neighbors Read Online Free Page A

borrow money. I suggested that he either take on more installations or get a better job.”
    Josh didn’t follow his father-in-law’s advice. Instead of working harder, he asked the furniture company to pay him mileage. But he went further. He insisted that, legally, they had to pay him for his travel costs from job to job. Instead, they fired him.
    “He called them two weeks later,” Chuck says, “to ask them if they missed him! They told him they didn’t, and they were doing just fine without him.”
    It is an understatement to say that Josh Powell lacked tact; he had a severe deficit in getting along with people, particularly anyone he worked for. He didn’t appear to have trouble getting a job; his problem was keeping it. He was hired next by the Home Depot. Within a short time, he told his boss he had hurt his back on the job and couldn’t lift heavy items—a big part of his job description—and he also couldn’t resist pointing out things that the Home Depot was doing wrong. Once again, he was fired.
    Susan was the one who worked steadily. She was a hairstylist for Super Cuts, and then Regis, and she really liked her job, but she wasn’t making enough to keep them afloat financially.
    Josh took a job as a car salesman. He lasted a week before, once again, he was let go.
    He and Susan could no longer afford to keep their apartment and they had to move in with Josh’s dad, Steven Powell, for three weeks. Steve had been divorced from his children’s mother, Terry, since the early nineties. Terry and her daughter, Jennifer, were living then in Spokane, but Steve’s other children all lived with him: Josh’s sister, Alina, and his two brothers, John and Michael.
    There really wasn’t enough room in Steve Powell’s house for two more people, but he hung a sheet in the dining room to mark off a makeshift room for the recently married couple.
    It was an untenable situation for Susan. They had no privacy and the Powells’ living setup was so different from the Coxes’ home. Almost from the beginning, her father-in-law made her nervous. He stared at her and made remarks that seemed much too personal to her, and were full of sexual innuendo.
    Susan was relieved when Josh’s next job was at an assisted living facility for the elderly. Both Josh and Susan were in training to be assistant managers. Providentially, the position came with an apartment and three meals a day. The couple qualified because they had no children and no pets. Susan longed to have children but their financial situation was too precarious to think about it for a while. And she was only nineteen; there was time.
    At last, she and Josh had some privacy and she was happy to get away from her father-in-law’s creepiness. After their training, Susan and Josh were assigned to a home for the elderly in Yakima, Washington. Susan hoped that the assisted living field might be a niche where Josh would fit in. She got high praise from the company but he didn’t. Two months later he was out of a job again, and they had to move.
    Susan grew alarmed as she realized that her bridegroom simply could not get along with people, especially anyone in authority. He complained and criticized his bosses until he was let go. His résumé was a mishmash of short-term positions.
    Josh clearly needed to be in control, and he felt most of his jobs were beneath a man with his intelligence and education. A lot of men in their twenties go through the same thing, but they learn to bite their tongues and learn as much as they can on a job in the hope that they can move up.
    Every place they moved in Washington State, Susan got along fine. People liked her, and she was able to keep her job with Regis. But she had had to resign when she and Josh were sent to their new—if short-lived—positions in Yakima. It was Josh’s third try—and the company owners finally deemed him “untrainable.”
    Then they had to move to Oregon for training seminars on his next job. “He