Bitter Harvest: A Woman's Fury, a Mother's Sacrifice by Ann Rule

is said they can spot a mouse running for cover a half-mile away. Farmers welcome them and they are beautiful to watch in flight, raptors that kill so they may survive.
    Oaks, elms, and the Kansas state tree, the cottonwood, abound, but it is the paper-white trunks of the Osage orange tree that stand out, particularly when the rest of the vegetation is dormant. The wind is fiercely cold in the winter and hot and dry in the summer. Indeed, Kansas is named for the wind; the name comes from a Siouan Indian word meaning both “people of the south wind” and “smoky wind.”
    The towns along I-70 to Topeka and I-35 to Olathe spike off onto gridlike main thoroughfares dotted with every franchise in America. The parts of Olathe, the Johnson County seat, that were built when the century was new abound in wonderful wooden houses with sagging porches and lilacs in the dooryard. On the “other” side of I-35, the houses are closer together, and have no history before last year. Business seems to follow the new houses and the franchises, but the sunflowers and zinnias crowding whitewashed fences have more appeal to the soul and the senses.
    The sun shines bright as fire in Kansas; even though every twig, bush, and tree is a sere brownish gray in the middle of March, the earth seems to come fully alive overnight in May, as if answering a silent signal of nature.

    The two Kansas Citys, population aside, are really small towns where community involvement is concerned. People know each other and there are many interconnections. The Women’s Exchange Club, which meets in an historic old firehouse in Kansas City, Missouri, is representative of the kind of mutual support that transcends age, occupation, ethnicity, and personal wealth.
    The medical communities on both sides of the Missouri River are even more akin to small towns where gossip, rumor, and scandal move with the speed of a snake in a wheat field and, more often than not, are equally impossible to trace. Many physicians are on staff at hospitals in both states.

    Celeste Walker * was a woman who would become the target of many rumors, innuendoes, and outright lies. She was in her early forties in 1995, but she scarcely looked it. She had thick blond hair—streaked perhaps by the Kansas sun, perhaps by her beautician—green eyes, a deep tan, and the taut figure of a woman who works out whether she feels like it or not. Although she had not practiced for a decade, she was a registered nurse. Her expertise was in recovery room nursing and she had occasionally done psychiatric nursing.
    Celeste had been married to Dr. John Walker for sixteen years; they had two sons, Brett, * fourteen, and Dan, * ten. The family lived in a sprawling split-level on a huge lot in Overland Park, Kansas, one of the affluent suburbs south of KCMO. John, an anesthesiologist at Shawnee Mission Medical Center, was a handsome man with brown hair and eyes and a solemn, gentle manner. Of medium height and weight, he had worn a mustache for the last few years.
    The Walkers’ home was a monument to Celeste’s creative and innovative style and it had a pool, a party room, and a dressing room in the backyard. Celeste’s flower beds covered every other available square foot, and she knew the Latin name for every bloom. During the short but fierce Kansas summers, she virtually lived outdoors, gardening, swimming, or cooking for groups of friends. Celeste wore a bathing suit as often as she wore a dress. The more tanned she got, the deeper the blue-green of her eyes seemed, and she was, without question, a sensational-looking woman.
    Celeste had an unquenchable and ebullient air, but the bubbly attitude she showed the world was a carefully constructed mask. Optimism had been—a long time ago, and down deep—her essential nature, but the many years of being married to John had knocked most of the joy out of her. Inside, she felt the desolate pain that every woman married to a clinically depressed man lives