“Mind if I ask why you’re so damn sure there’s a mystery here? Is it just that e-mail you got from Pamela? Or is there more to it?”
She thought about that. “It’s a feeling I’ve got.”
“A feeling.”
“Yes.”
“A feeling isn’t a lot to go on,” he said neutrally.
“That’s almost funny considering it’s coming from someone who just admitted that he followed me last night because he sensed that I was a dot waiting to be connected to another dot.”
“Okay, I’ll give you that one,” he conceded. “Moving right along, what was your take on Ryland Webb this morning? Think he believes there’s more to his daughter’s death than pills and booze and wants to cover it up?”
She hesitated. “He certainly doesn’t want an investigation, does he?”
“You may not like his reasons, but he does have a few.”
“I know.” She folded her arms. “I told you, he’s an ambitious man, completely focused on his career. He didn’t have any time for Pamela seventeen years ago, and he sure doesn’t want to waste much time on her now.”
“Listen to me, Irene Stenson. If you’re thinking of going up against Ryland Webb, you’d better be real sure you’ve got a big club. Webb is a powerful man.”
“Don’t you think I know that?”
Luke drove in silence for a while.
“Sam McPherson knew Pamela fairly well, I take it?”
The question caught her by surprise. “They were friends in the old days. I don’t know what their relationship has been like these past seventeen years, though.”
“Ever have the feeling that he was romantically fixated on her?”
She pondered that for a few seconds. “I certainly never took it that way, and I’m pretty sure Pamela didn’t either. Sam was several years older, of course. She was only sixteen. Sam was in his earl wenties at the time.”
“That’s not a big age gap.”
“It would have seemed like it in high school.” She drummed her fingers on the seat.
“But looking back,
I think it was the way she treated him that made me assume that there was no romantic link between them.”
“How did she treat him?”
“Like a friend, not another potential conquest.”
He raised his brows. “Pamela had conquests in those days?”
“Pamela always thought in terms of conquests.” She smiled wryly. “What’s more, there was never a shortage of males offering themselves up to be conquered. She was beautiful and she had a talent for flirting. Guys fell like flies. But it wasn’t just her looks and sex appeal that made her popular.”
“She was a Webb.”
“You heard Maxine this morning—the family is local royalty.”
“Maybe Sam McPherson wanted to be one of her conquests but she ignored him,”
Luke suggested. “Maybe he developed an unhealthy obsession with her. One of those ‘if I can’t have her, no one’s goin o have her’ situations.”
She shivered a little. “If that was the case, why wait this long to kill her?”
“How the hell should I know? This is your project, not mine. I’m just trying to show you that if you’re going to make up a list of potential killers, it could end up being a very long one.”
“I’m not so sure about that,” she said quietly.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Everyone seems to think that Pamela summoned me to Dunsley to say good-bye.
But there’s no reason to think that in the midst of a severe clinical depression she would have even remembered a girl she only knew well for one summer back in high school. I think she sent me that e-mail because she wanted to tell me something important about the past.”
“About the deaths of your parents.”
“Yes.”
“All right, let’s take this logically.”
She almost smiled at that. “Translated, that means you’re going to try to argue me out of my conclusion.”
“Sure. But that’s because your conclusion is based on a shaky foundation. What would Pamela know about what happened to your parents? And if she did know something, why would she wait seventeen years to tell you?”
“I don’t know the answers to those questions, but I can tell you one thing. Pamela Webb was the last person I saw that night before I … found Mom and Dad.”
He glanced at her. “The last person?”
“She called me up that afternoon and asked me if I wanted to hang out at her house for a while, get dinner at the cafe and then go to the movies. Mom said it was okay, provided I made my usual promise.”
“What was that?”
“The deal I had with my folks that summer was that if Pamela drank or did drugs while I was with her,
I had to leave immediately and come straight home.”
“But your parents didn’t refuse to let you spend time with her as long as you followed the rules.”
“I think Mom felt sorry for Pamela because Ryland ignored her so much. For his part, Dad trusted me to call him to come get me if Pamela started drinking or doing drugs. But she never did either when I was with her.”
“Never?”
She shook her head. “Not once. For whatever reason, she really wanted me for a friend. She understood that I would never be allowed to spend time with her again if anything illegal went on. Dad was the chief of police, after all.”
“Go on.”
“We had dinner at the Ventana View Cafe and then we went to the movies.
Afterward we got into her car. She was supposed to drive me straight back to my house. Dad had another rule, you see. I wasn’t allowed to go beyond the town limits with Pamela because she was a new driver who hadn’t had a lot of experience behind the wheel. But instead of taking me home, she suddenly turned onto Lakefront
Road and headed toward Kirbyville.”
“What did you do?”
“At first I thought she was just teasing me. She knew Dad would never let me go anywhere with he gain if 1 violated the rule. When I realized she was serious, I pleaded with her to turn around, but she just laughed and kept driving. I got mad and threatened to jump out of the car. She drove faster. The got scared.”
“Think she did some drugs without you knowing?”
“I accused her of that. But she said she hadn’t used anything. She was driving too fast for me to bail out of the car, so I did the only thing I could do; I tightened my seat belt and prayed that she would tire o he game and turn around.”