If Catfish Had Nine Lives(117)

            The best we can put together is that Teddy overheard Vivienne telling Norman about Orly. He also overheard Norman tell Vivienne that he didn’t want to have any part of blackmailing Orly. Norman and Vivienne hadn’t been interested in each other romantically, but they’d had a passionate and heated conversation or two. Vivienne couldn’t believe that Norman wouldn’t help her with the blackmail scheme. Teddy is only now remembering that Vivienne was upset that he overheard her blackmail ideas. The reason she made such a scene of yelling at him that night at the convention was with the hopes she would diffuse any accusations he might have toward her. She had no idea that his memories had been jumbled enough that she had nothing to worry about.

            Cody hasn’t given the police all the details yet, but we learned that Vivienne told him that Teddy accosted her the night before their brutality toward him. Cody was taken by Vivienne’s beauty enough that he believed her lie and went along with her request to help get Teddy out to the woods and beat him up. They’d hoped to death. Cody’s criminal record might not have been violent, but he had easily crossed over to that side of things.

            Teddy didn’t remember the specifics of what happened to him. I hoped he never would.

            Apparently, Norman had been a longtime fan of Orly’s and his poetry. He’d known about Orly the poet for years, but Orly being his father was news that didn’t necessarily bother him, though was still not something he could easily accept. He hadn’t had a falling-out with his adoptive parents, and we learned that they had spoken frequently over the last year. Jim wasn’t happy to hear that he had misinformation from the Kansas City police. Apparently, the morning Norman was killed, the morning that Jake found him on the boardwalk talking about a “make-or-break” day was the result of a phone conversation with his adoptive parents. They’d told him they loved him and were glad he’d found his biological father and welcomed him into his life if that’s what made him happy.

            Vivienne hadn’t been the cowgirl to bring Teddy back to the campsite. It had been the old guy, Gary. Gary wasn’t quite “right in the head” according to Orly. He left Teddy on the edge of the campsite, close to Orly’s tent, afraid that he’d be accused of the beating. Orly found Teddy with Vivienne standing over him. When she saw Orly, she took the credit for finding Teddy in the woods and bringing him back to the campsite. Orly had no reason to question her, and at that point Teddy didn’t have any idea what was going on. Cliff and I had tried to make Gary’s odd story/poem fit with what he’d done, but it still didn’t make sense.

            We think Cody panicked when he learned that Teddy was alive. Vivienne probably thought there was a chance he would go to the police about the beating, and place the blame on her. Vivienne’s plans to kill him failed, but her act of getting rid of Norman scared Cody into silence. It was no wonder he wanted to get out of town so badly.

            The gun used to kill Norman was Orly’s .38 Special. Vivienne had stolen it out of Orly’s toolbox. I doubted he’d ever forgive himself for that, but we’d tried to make him understand that it wasn’t his fault.

            After she pulled the trigger and realized what happened, she ran into the woods and threw the gun under a rock beside the same river that Jerome and I had been fishing in, but a good ways down from where we fought the catfish. Vivienne hurried back to town and found Esther, and the two of them went into Stuart’s shop. Vivienne hadn’t been faking the “damsel in distress” act. It had been real, just more real than anyone knew—she was overwhelmed and distressed by what she’d done.

            Esther also wasn’t interested in blackmailing Orly, but she was much more distressed by the news that he was her biological father than Norman had been. Shocked, in fact, but then deeply curious about her biological heritage. Before she received the letter from Vivienne, she had no idea she was a descendant of Astin Reagal’s. In fact, her last name wasn’t even Reagal—she’d been adopted by the Andersons of Kansas City. And it wasn’t until after the bullet wound on her arm was attended to that she learned that Norman was her twin brother. Vivienne had told them separately about Orly, but never about each other, apparently with the hope that they wouldn’t conspire together and leave her out of whatever plans they made.