I have so much work to do, but I feel that it is important to log these coincidences now in case they amount to something later.  I got home last night from a week in Chicago for the Friends of Conservation hosted by Ruetie Butler Kent and Jim Fowler.   Judy Watson and Jamie had left last Wednesday in an extended van, but said it overheated in Bushnell and that the mechanic said it would be $650.00 to repair.

 

I took Dad, Kenny Farr and Tom Watson up there with my Jeep and Don’s Dodge van with the intention of moving everything out of the bigger van down into the smaller van and my jeep and taking two cars to Chicago.  We were able to cram everything in to the one van and I sent my jeep back.  The water pump which was only a few months old, failed on the jeep’s return to Tampa.  Dad and Kenny Farr worked on the jeep and  began to make some frightening discoveries.

 

When the jeep first started overheating this summer, I asked Don to fix it and he told me and Kenny Farr that it couldn’t be fixed and kept asking me to drive the silver station wagon (The 600.00 car with no title).  The kids like to drive the wagon, because it has more seats for more kids, and Don said that the brakes were bad and he was repairing them one day as I walked past the shed.  The brakes had never been bad before, but they felt different than my brakes so I did not question it any further, like to ask why he was doing the repair, when he always pays the old man next door (James Jennings) to do this kind of stuff.  When he got through, Don went looking for Jamie and told her that he had fixed the wagon and that it was safe now and they could ride it any time they wanted.  She and her friends were a little leery of the car after that because Don had not wanted them driving it before and he would never have cared about their safety.

 

I remember the night before Don disappeared how anxious he was to bring that car home at four in the morning when it had overheated on me.  There was no reason why it could not have set there until the following morning when Kenny Farr could have wreckered it in on his way to work.  If Don knew he was going somewhere very early Monday, why did he bother with the car so late?  Monday morning when I blew the engine up on interstate in the silver wagon, I called Kenny Farr to wrecker it in.  It was then that he discovered Don had completely removed two of the brakes and had sabotaged the remaining brake assembly.

 

In the meanwhile, I had asked Kenny Farr for a second opinion on my jeep and he had told me he could fix it for $24.00 with a water pump.  I had bought the pump and had him install it, and when Don found out he went into a rage and kept telling Kenny Farr that my jeep could not be fixed and that he didn’t want Kenny Farr to touch the car.  I paid Kenny Farr on the side to do it anyway while Don was gone.  The water pump fixed the overheating problem and I had started to use the jeep again.

 

Before the water pump scene, Jamie had noticed while following me home from church, that I had no brake lights and I asked Don to fix them.  He told me that he had Kenny Farr do it.   I did not check behind him.  Again, before the water pump scene, one of the volunteers told me I had no brake lights.  I asked Don about it and he started blaming Kenny Farr and saying that he had specifically told Kenny Farr to fix the lights and that he would take care of it.  He never did, but he lied to me again and told me they were operating just fine when we checked them out.  I stepped on the brakes and Don said he could see them light up.

 

When Kenny Farr worked on the water pump, I meant to ask him to check out the brake lights, but forgot to.  Just recently, someone said that I didn’t have brake lights, so I asked Kenny Farr to fix them and I drove extra carefully in the meanwhile.  Driving to Bushnell, I told Tom Watson, who would be driving my jeep back to Tampa, if we didn’t need it, that he should be careful because my br