Read Online Deadly Divorces by Tammy Cohen - Free Book Online

40-year-old dentist.
    A few days after Jennifer’s death her mother received a phone call. The caller told her that Barton Corbin had been involved with a fellow dental student fourteen years previously who had ‘committed suicide’ in exactly the same manner. When she died she had also been trying to end her relationship with him. For the Barbers, who’d had no idea of the existence of this former girlfriend, the news was almost too much to take in. It was ‘enormous… beyond belief’, Narda would later recall.
    Dolly Hearn had been a beautiful and vivacious raven-haired young woman when Bart Corbin first met her at dental college in Augusta, Georgia in the late 1980s. He was bowled over by her looks and charm and the way she connected with people – always using their name, always making them feel important. He wasted no time in asking her out. Dolly fitted perfectly into Bart’s ambitious master plan – she was attractive, well connected. With her by his side, he’d be well on his way to carving out a glittering career for himself.
    A couple of times Dolly took her new boyfriend back to her parent’s impressive colonial home in Washington, Georgia. At first Barbara and Carlton Hearn were taken by Bart’s quick wit and intelligence but when he told Carlton – also a dentist – that he couldn’t wait to graduate so hecould ‘stick it to people’, the Hearns rapidly realised there was a very sinister side to this bright young man. When Dolly confided a few months into the relationship that she and Bart were having troubles and that she was planning to break up with him, her parents couldn’t help feeling relieved.
    But like everyone else in Bart Corbin’s life, the Hearns hadn’t recognised the extent of his narcissism and instead attributed it to the typical arrogance of youth. Even the classmates at dental school who’d witnessed his petulant displays of anger when things didn’t go his way and his ‘explosive temper’ didn’t fully recognise the deep-rooted self obsession that lay behind his outbursts. They could have no idea then of how a narcissist reacts to rejection, of the rage stirred up when plans are thwarted or the mentality that views lovers as possessions and dictates ‘if I can’t have her, no one can’.
    Soon after trying to end her relationship with Bart, strange, disturbing things started happening to Dolly Hearn. A set of denture casts disappeared from her cubicle at the dental school. Someone put hairspray into her contact lens solution, burning her eyes. A strange pink substance was poured into her gas tank and her tyres deflated. One day someone broke into her apartment and took Tabitha, her cat.
    Dolly had no doubt who was responsible. She changed the locks and filed reports with the Richmond County Sheriff’s Office, telling officers her ex-boyfriend Bart wasbehind the campaign. Two weeks after Tabitha disappeared, she told police he’d confessed to having taken the cat and then made a big show of helping to find it. Dolly also went to the Medical College of Georgia with her complaints. The school investigated but concluded no evidence of wrongdoing. Dolly became scared and asked to sleep over at friends’ houses rather than stay in her apartment alone. Her anxious father drove to Augusta to tell a recalcitrant Bart to stop harassing his daughter. He also bought her a gun and her brother Carlton took her to the firing range to teach her how to use it.
    But then, just as suddenly as it had started, the harassment seemed to stop. Perhaps Bart had finally got the message – or at least Dolly dared hope. Maybe he’d moved on with his life and put the past behind him. For the first time in weeks she stopped looking behind her every five minutes as she walked along the high street or checking the back seat of the car before driving off.
    Dolly was back on form. Her smile –which her younger brother Gil described as being able to ‘light up a room’ and her fellow students