We were both silent for a moment, the only sound was my pen on paper as I hurried to make notes.
“So it really might have been some kind of psychotic break,” I said. “You can’t just quit those kind of drugs. You have to be weaned.”
“I tried to tell her that,” Selena said. “But Rob insisted.”
“If you don’t mind me asking,” I said, “why did she stay with him? It sounds like she wasn’t happy.”
“And where would she go?” Selena asked. “She used to run a home daycare, but to do that you need a house, and there was no way Rob would let her keep the house. He would have kicked her out, and he sure as hell wouldn’t have let her take the boys. Those kids were her whole world. She stayed so she wouldn’t lose them.”
I pushed back my rising despair. There was so much poverty here, so many women trapped in dire situations without the money or the resources to escape. But then Emily Drummond had stayed with Bart for the same reason—for fear she would lose her children—so maybe it wasn’t just limited to the impoverished.
“Did the other boy’s family blame Pam and Rob for the accident?”
“Oh yes, and I think they considered suing, but they changed their tune. She only had to deal with a lawsuit from the guy in the other car.”
“Do you know why the other family decided not to sue?”
“Not a clue, but Pam didn’t seem all that surprised. I think she was numb by then.”
Was this the smoking gun that Bart had given Pam a favor?
“Does the family live in Drum?” I asked.
“Out by White Rabbit Holler”
“No kidding,” I said. “I live out in White Rabbit Holler. What’s their last name? Maybe I know them.”
“The Genslers. Their son is Spencer, and I taught both of his parents. Donald and Kay.”
Pursing my lips, I shook my head. “Don’t know them, but Hank might.” I wrote down their names, then asked, “Do you know if Pam knew Jim Palmer?”
She shook her head. “No. She never mentioned him. Travis Keeling is her agent, and before that, she had an agent with State Farm. Jim Palmer’s an independent agent.” She grimaced. “Or I guess he was.”
“Could she have known him from somewhere else? Maybe their kids were on the same sports teams?”
“The boys don’t play any sports. Poor Ricky tried to play football, but he wasn’t much good at it. Quit his sophomore year—mid-season.” She shook her head. “Rob was fit to be tied over that.”
“Did you know Jim Palmer? Did you have him as a student?”
She gave me a tight smile. “Yes. He was also my insurance agent, and his daughter, Laurie, was in my geometry class last year.”
I’d just found my source of information about Pam’s victim.
Chapter Seventeen
“What about Jim’s wife?” I asked, my pen poised over the notebook.
“No,” she said with a frown. “Jim met Melinda at college and brought her back to Ewing.”
“I heard Jim’s father owned the agency before him.”
“That’s right. Jim, Sr. died from cancer about a decade ago. When the kids were small.”
“And Jim had two children?” Marco had mentioned that fact, but it wouldn’t hurt to verify it.
“A girl and a boy. Laurie was a freshman last year, and her brother Pete is in middle school.”
“It sounds like Jim was well liked. I saw signs and flowers outside the office.”
“Oh, yes,” she said, still frowning. “One of the nicest people I’ve ever met. He coached his kids’ sports teams and his business sponsored plenty of others. He was a strong presence in the Ewing Small Business Club. He even helped organize a food drive every year.”
“Can you think of any reason why someone would hate him?”
“Jim?” she asked in surprise. “No. That’s what’s so shocking about Pam murdering him. Even if you can look past the fact that she was the one who pulled the trigger, Jim was the last person you’d expect to be murdered.”
“So he didn’t have any enemies?”
“Not that I knew of,” she said. “Just a likeable guy.”
“And his wife?”
She didn’t answer, and I looked up to see her mouth shifted to one side. She gave me a hesitant smile. “I don’t know anything for a fact.”
“I’ll take that into account.”
“She never much cared for Ewing. It was no secret she wanted Jim to sell the business and move to Memphis—where she’s originally from.”
“Memphis to Ewing,” I said. “That had to be quite the culture shock.”
“I guess you would know,” Selena said. “Since you dropped here from Atlanta.”
“True,” I said. “If they met in college, I wonder what she was studying.”
“Oh, I know the answer to that one,” Selena said. “She was studying to be a nurse, only she never finished. She was a year behind Jim, and she got pregnant toward the end of her junior year. Jim was planning on comin’ back to run his daddy’s business, so she dropped out and they got married and moved back here.”
“So she gave up her dreams to become a wife and mother in a town with a population of eight thousand?”
“Pretty much.”
“Do you know if she had a job?”
“She opened a home goods store in downtown Ewing, but it went under. After that, she worked for Jim some.”
I paused and looked up at her. “How long ago was that?”
“I don’t know…five years? Six? She made a go of it for two years, but then finally threw in the towel. They nearly lost the house after that.”
If this was a Bart favor, maybe it wasn’t Jim who’d asked for the favor. Maybe it was Melinda.
“So they’re in financial trouble?”
“Not like they were a few years ago, but rumor has it their credit cards were maxed out.”
“Melinda must have put a lot of money into her inventory.”
“You don’t know the half of it,” Selena said. “She said she was trying to bring class and culture to eastern Tennessee, only her insinuations insulted half the town, and the other half wasn’t about to buy her stuff anyway. Plus everything was overpriced for the area. I heard she started selling her inventory online, but by then it was too late.”
“What about their kids?” I asked. “Have they been in any kind of trouble?”
Selena’s eyes narrowed. “What do Jim’s kids have to do with Pam shootin’ him?”
How much should I tell her? She was a huge source of information, and the more invested she was, the more she might share. Still, I ran the risk of endangering myself. What if Selena couldn’t be trusted? What if she picked up the phone after I left and called Bart himself?
“I’m just trying to understand the situation,” I said. “Obviously, something made Pam snap. She has a controlling, abusive husband, and two of her three children have had issues—”
“Three,” Selena said. “Ricky nearly flunked three classes this spring. Pam had to go to the school and ask the teachers to work with him so he’d bring them up to Ds.”