Women and automobiles, he thought to himself, there ought to be a law against it. Most of the water had boiled out of the car’s radiator, but because everything seemed to be working right, he just read it as poor maintenance.

She had suspected she might have taken a wrong turn anyway, and when the dashboard light went on, it seemed an opportune time to halt and get directions. She was doing well until she stopped at the garage, but this was something her father used to do when they traveled-confirm and reconfirm his itinerary whenever possible. It’ll take you about two hours to get here, David told her when he gave her the directions. During the day, she would enjoy the resort’s facilities, and when David returned late in the afternoon, they would go to dinner, hire a hotel babysitter, and go to the nightclub to dance and see the entertainment. Stacey was looking forward to making this something of a holiday in the famous Catskill hotel. In anticipation of her arrival, David had booked a larger room in one of the nearby resorts, rather than remain in a motel. Both were only children and both had already lost their parents. It was an important accomplishment for them, not because they didn’t trust one another when they were apart for longer periods of time so much as they sincerely enjoyed and needed one another. Usually he returned to their home in Mount Kisco late in the day from the site or remained overnight only one or two nights.ĭespite the demands of his job, Stacey and David were rarely separated more than one or two nights at a time.

He had called to say that he’d be stuck there for a good week and a half, maybe even two. She was on her way upstate to join her husband David who was an engineer working for a firm constructing a multimillion-dollar sewer plant and system for a township in the Catskills. Although it was a well-paved road, the distances between houses and villages seemed enormous to one who had lived most of her life on Jerome Avenue in the Bronx.

The car was still moving well, but she didn’t want it to break down with her five-year-old daughter Tami inside and on this highway. She had pulled into the garage when the red warning signal lit on her dashboard. Stacey Oberman made the worst decision of her life that hot late Sunday morning in August when she followed the garage mechanic’s advice and turned off the main highway to take the shortcut that would supposedly save her the best part of a good hour.

Pin by Andrew Neiderman