Twenty-seven
Just months before George Ratliff died, Michael Peterson had published his first novel. The folks at the military base were impressed, particularly since the book was published in America by Signet, and was released as a mass-market paperback. It seemed that Peterson was on his way to a promising career, and to the people who counted on him, like Patricia and Elizabeth, that was a wonderful thing.
However, having a book on the stands about Vietnam didn’t mean that Peterson was absolutely admired by the military personnel around him. Many thought of Peterson as a braggart. They would hear him go into details about the Central Intelligence Agency and would cut him off. Ranking officers in the military didn’t need to hear any of that kind of bunk. In any context, trying to sound connected to the CIA was ludicrous, yet Peterson would sometimes assert just that. For certain people, Peterson was a complete turnoff. He might have had some success as a writer, but he was largely considered a misfit. For one thing, Peterson was a night owl, he kept strange hours. For another, he often seemed to disappear on weekends, he was somewhat shady. To most straight military people, Michael Peterson was a wannabe. He joked a lot and was fun to be around, but he wasn’t the type of guy anyone would want to get close to.
“I saw him as the husband of a schoolteacher who was trying to make a living at writing,” Bruce Berner confided. “I wasn’t interested in reading any of his books, or any of his stories, because I saw him as an oddball. It wasn’t that I had anything against Michael at the time. It’s just that I wouldn’t have felt comfortable talking to him intimately.”
As it turned out, even though they were next-door neighbors, Bruce and Amybeth Berner didn’t really see Peterson all that much. Michael Peterson would usually sleep in the day and work in the evening. Bruce and Amybeth would notice that Michael would spend hours away from home, either at the air force gym or away on some mysterious business.
No one in their group recalled seeing Michael Peterson on any regular schedule. He often let his wife and kids do things on their own, only occasionally accompanying his family, even on their trips to other parts of Europe. In fact, it was Bruce and Amybeth Berner who took Patricia, Clayton, and Todd on one of their very first visits to Paris. The boys were young, and Bruce had his two girls from his first marriage staying with him, so the two families made the trip together, doing all the usual tourist things, seeing the Eiffel Tower, eating at fine French restaurants.
“The fact that Michael wasn’t available to go to Paris, I probably didn’t think too much about it,” Bruce recalled. “I had already decided that the guy was going to do pretty much whatever he wanted to do, and it wasn’t going to make any sense to me. He would get up late in the day. He would decide he’d go out and exercise in the gym late at night. Maybe he’d go out and run at two in the morning. I mean, this is the way he was.”
Everyone around the Petersons pretty much accepted that Patricia was the breadwinner, and Michael was the free spirit. That was the nature of their relationship. They didn’t seem to act in unison, especially when it came to sharing the responsibility of raising the boys. In terms of communication, one-on-one, Michael was good with his boys. But Patricia doted on the boys, and babied Todd and Clayton even up to the time that they were ages eight and ten.
As for the day-to-day drudgery of household chores, most of that fell on Patricia. Michael had become preoccupied, even more so after George’s death, when he took on all the responsibility of caring for Elizabeth and the girls, and the Ratliff estate. Michael had become intensely involved with the military, fighting to get Liz paid, fighting to get George’s autopsy, fighting to discover the truth behind his death.
It would be years later that people would learn that George Ratliff was found to have had traces of cyanide in his system, that George had died of a sudden heart attack, that he had been taking special medication for a heart condition, prescribed to him by doctors in Germany. People later wondered if George’s medication had been tampered with before he left on his mission.
Because Michael was put off about doing any household chores, friends felt sorry for Patricia. Friends got the impression that Patricia was pleasant, that she had her hands full with her kids, but she wasn’t entirely happy. When weekend events would come up, if Michael was not around, Patricia would make up excuses for him. She would never really say what her husband was busy doing, but neighbors would know that Michael Peterson’s silver Mercedes was gone, that he was off on a romp somewhere.
Some people thought it was sad, the way Patricia would be alone so much, the way she had to take on most of the housework and the breadwinning of the Peterson household. They saw her as a very nice lady, but also as a passive person, easily controlled by Michael. It was strange that Patricia, as close as she felt to George Ratliff, had opted not to go to the funeral in Texas. It was weird that she never questioned Michael’s time spent with Elizabeth, which grew more and more frequent as the months after George’s death passed.
Patricia, in a sense, had become Michael’s shadow. Amybeth saw her as a odd woman, someone who rarely changed her outfits, someone who wasn’t very good at taking care of herself. Amybeth couldn’t really picture Michael with Patricia, especially since he was so buff, such a good-looking man with a well-kept physique. Patricia dressed in prairie-style clothes, and was the opposite of Michael in every way. Amybeth and other people sometimes wondered if Michael had become romantically interested in Liz.
Not that Liz would consider it. Not for a second.
But folks were talking, through the grapevine, and finding out little things that led them to believe that Michael might have developed a secret crush on Liz. There was the knowledge that even though Patricia was Elizabeth’s matron of honor, Michael deliberately chose not to attend George and Elizabeth’s wedding. Later after the wedding reception, Patricia made up excuses about Michael being busy at the gym.
“It was almost like Patricia wore blinders,” Amybeth recalled. “She wouldn’t see anything bad, she would only see good. It was like she refused to look at things that were bad or difficult. She only wanted to be sweet.”
But if people suspected anything about Michael, they didn’t talk about it very much. They knew better than to suspect that Liz would be interested in her best friend’s husband, and watching the interaction, they would notice that Liz, like Patricia, was usually quiet and passive around Michael. If anything, Liz was pursuing Patricia’s friendship more than she was Michael’s. But since Michael had a “take-charge” personality, it was easy to see how he could control the communication and intrude among the three of them. As for Liz’s girls, Margaret and Martha, obviously it was Michael, with his take-charge attitude, more than Patricia, who would be the one to look over their well-being.
As days and months went by, Elizabeth was shifting her perspective somewhat, trying to participate in the lives of her daughters, even bringing them to social gatherings at friends’ homes in Graefenhausen. Whenever Michael was present, he would become the center of attention, the entertainer at any given dinner or birthday party. People liked to sit around and let Michael tell stories. He was that type of guy, filled with tales of exotic travel, and he had a bellowing voice that took over any room.
People noticed that Michael never really gave them any personal details about his life. His stories were always focused on political events, or on details about a certain place in time. There was nothing ever said about his childhood, about his schooling, or even about his Vietnam experiences. But then, no one ever paid it much thought. Michael was a tremendous storyteller; he was witty, bawdy, intense, and very insightful.
Finding herself always tired and overwhelmed, Elizabeth decided to try out a nanny, Barbara O’Hara, a beautiful young woman who was unhappy working for a family who lived just down the street. Barbara loved the two little girls and was very good with children, and Barbara and Elizabeth hit it off right away. Within a week, Elizabeth decided that it would be best for Barbara to move in with her full-time. The girls needed constant attention and Liz couldn’t keep burdening her neighbors while she was busy teaching.
The arrangement with Barbara O’Hara turned out to work very well for Liz. Her girls loved Barbara, they were learning new things with her every day, and Barbara fit right in with the group of Elizabeth’s friends as well—the Berners, the Appel-Schumachers, and the Petersons.
With Barbara around, there was music played in the house, there was some semblance of normalcy again, and everyone was happy to see that. Michael took a fond liking to Barbara, and even though she was much younger, the two became buddies. Michael and Barbara would sometimes go out together on weekends. There was nothing sexual about their relationship, but the two shared their own bond. Whenever Barbara wasn’t baby-sitting, it seemed, she’d find time to run off to Darmstadt or somewhere, often tooling around with Michael.
Amybeth would recall thinking it was strange—seeing the two of them together. Amybeth and Barbara had also become friendly, and she would sometimes question Barbara, wondering why the young woman was spending so much time with Michael.
Peterson seemed to act like a kid around Elizabeth’s nanny. He would hang around with her alot . . . but Amybeth could never get a straight answer about what the two of them did together.