If Catfish Had Nine Lives(116)

            “Holy moly, what’s going on?” Orly said.

            The scene shifted again. We were no longer in a cave-like tunnel. There were no horse smells. We’d made it back to the place we belonged.

            “I’ll explain later,” I said to Orly. “It’s a darn fun story.”

            “I bet.”

            The police weren’t there quickly. We had to call them again. Fortunately, Cliff answered his phone this time, because Jenny had left her post and no one answered the dispatch phone.

            Once Esther was taken care of, we knew we’d have to live up to what I’d promised Orly—a darn fun story. And I thought we did okay.





Chapter 28




            “If I’d noticed that his wife’s middle name was Josephine, we might have figured it out sooner,” Jake said. “Or if I’d had time to do a complete genealogy for Esther, maybe.”

            “Maybe,” Gram said. “I’m not so sure I would have ever thought Joe was a Josephine. It was a real surprise for me. I never once sensed that he was a she.”

            “Seems like we’re full of surprises lately,” I said.

            “I have another one,” Jake said. “They found some human bones out by where we found the mochila. It’s too soon to know much about them, but there will be a thorough investigation.”

            “Must be Astin’s,” I said.

            Jake shrugged. “Probably, but having seen the real man, well, almost the real man, I suppose, I’m not sure I find the bones as interesting. We’ll see what conclusions the forensic team comes to.”

            Gram, Jake, and I were in Bunny’s. Orly and Esther would be joining us soon, but the rest of the cowboy poetry convention attendees had gone home and the big plot of land behind the high school was now vacant and, I thought, lonely and far too empty.

            Orly was Esther’s biological father. Norman’s, too. He’d had a fling with their mother at a convention twenty-five years earlier. Their mother, also Vivienne’s mother, already had one child at the time—Vivienne—and no husband.

            As Vivienne got older, she remembered back to the time when she was very young and her mother started gaining weight. Then she went to the hospital and came home thinner. Vivienne never put the pieces together when her mother was alive, but after she died Vivienne found half-written and never-sent letters to Orly in an old shoe box. Choosing to give the babies up for adoption had been difficult for Vivienne’s mother. From the letters, Vivienne determined that her mother didn’t want to burden Orly over a one-night stand, but there was no way she could have afforded to raise the babies on her own. She and Vivienne were struggling as it was. Ultimately, the letters weren’t sent and the babies were given up for adoption. Orly never knew about them. He was never put into a position where he could have offered to help financially or in any other way. When Vivienne found out Orly was a well-off Kansas cattleman, she thought she might be able to use her knowledge of his fatherhood to her advantage, and she thought his offspring would only help her with her plan.

            It didn’t take her long to find what had happened to the babies and where they were currently living. And Vivienne researched Orly from top to bottom, once reading an article that mentioned that he was a descendant of a Pony Express rider from Broken Rope, which was coincidentally where the cowboy poetry convention was going to be held this year.

            Vivienne got both Norman and Esther to the convention by writing them letters that mentioned their Astin Reagal ancestry, and by promising them that they’d find out even more information about their birth families if they attended the convention. Norman thought it would be fun to also get an acting job, and Esther just thought it would be a fun and interesting vacation. Neither Esther nor Norman knew about each other, and until Vivienne told them at the convention, they had no idea that Orly, the man running the convention, was their biological father.