At least until last week, when Joe Waldholtz ditched his car at National Airport and bolted north on Amtrak with access to $2 million of her father’s money Enid couldn’t find. For months, the congresswoman–a Gingrich favorite–had been fighting charges that, as treasurer of her campaign, her husband had written hundreds of thousands of dollars in worthless checks and shuffled phantom funds between bank accounts in Salt Lake City, Pittsburgh and Washington. The allegations, she claimed, were a Democratic smear tactic. But as federal investigators closed in, Joe Waldholtz fled. Enid yanked off her wedding ring and filed for divorce. She said she was shocked by her husband’s “deceptions”–and offered to cooperate with the Feds.

Now Waldholtz may do some cooperating of his own. On Friday, after six days on the lam, shuffling from Springfield, Mass., to Philadelphia, he returned to D.C. and surrendered. Waldholtz, his lawyer insisted, just “needed space to get his thoughts together.” He’ll go before a grand jury this week.

Had Enid known more about her husband’s bachelor days, she might have seen all this coming. Waldholtz, the son of a modest Pittsburgh dentist, had an impressive history of leading people to believe he was a wealthy man. As a 21-year-old volunteer on a Republican campaign in Pennsylvania, he won friends by routinely picking up restaurant and bar tabs. Ever ostentatious, he showed up for envelope-stuffing sessions sporting a Louis Vuitton briefcase. Waldholtz had an almost “comic snobbery,” O’Connell remembers. “He’d run to a store and drop a couple hundred dollars on neckties without batting an eye.” One former campaign co-worker recalls him flashing a bank statement with an $80,000 balance around the office. Where’d he get the cash? His family now says that under the pretense of “overseeing” his ailing grandmother’s estate, he may have taken more than $600,000.

In Washington, Waldholtz began losing his touch. Though he claimed to be a multimillionaire (in Utah, where he moved with Enid in ‘92, he liked to tell people he was related to the Mellons), the couple failed to make their $3,800 rent payments so often the landlord drew up eviction papers. An unpaid adviser in his wife’s office, Waldholtz ran up $45,000 in personal expenses on a young staffer’s American Express card. Meanwhile, he was being prodded by the Feds to explain dozens of unpaid bills and bad cheeks (including $60,000 for jewelry)–some written against the ‘94 campaign.

Then there’s the mystery campaign cash. In the final weeks of the ‘94 race, Enid–an upper-middle-class Mormon lawyer, but no millionaire–was trailing. The Waldholtzes suddenly infused more than $1 million into a key media blitz. Enid’s opponents demanded to know where she got the money. She said she’d “made” it, but had failed to report the money on her campaign disclosure forms.

She won the election; her opponents and the Utah press, however, didn’t buy her explanation. Last month Enid offered up a new story. Her father, a San Francisco stockbroker, gave the couple $4 million, which Waldholtz promised to return in real estate and other nonliquid assets from his family’s trust. There was only one hitch: he had no trust, and Enid’s father was never repaid. Last week she then changed her story again, claiming the money was actually a loan from her father.

So Utah Republicans are wondering: was Enid in on the scam? Last week, former staffers said she ignored warnings Waldholtz was kiting checks. “I approached her with the problems,” Kaylin Loveland, Enid Waldholtz’s former campaign manager, told NEWSWEEK. “She assured me, ‘Joe will take care of them’.” By the time this is over, the congresswoman may wish he’d just taken the money and run.