If Catfish Had Nine Lives (Country Cooking School Mystery) (23 page)

The stress of the haunted moments, as well as holding the now-completely-passed-out Esther, had worn on Vivienne. As Astin and Amelia Josephine and the horses completed their disappearing act, Esther slid from Vivienne’s arms. The unconscious woman fell backward onto Vivienne’s knees, causing her to fall over, too. On their way down, the trigger of the gun got pulled.

The next thing I knew I was flat on the ground with my face in the dirt, and Jerome was on top of me.

“What happened?” I said.

“The bullet was headed your direction,” Jerome said. “It missed you.”

“But it got you, young man,” Orly said as he crouched down next to us.

Jerome rolled off me and then sat up. I pulled myself up to my knees and looked at the hole in his shoulder. It wasn’t bloody. It was just a hole.

“Oh, Jerome, I’m so sorry,” I said.

“I’m fine,” he said with a smirk. “Can’t die twice, remember?”

“Excuse me,” Orly said.

“Look, you two need to kiss and get this over with. We need to help Esther,” Jake said. Gram had the gun, and Jake held Vivienne’s arms behind her so she wouldn’t get away.

I looked at Jerome. “You think you’re done here?”

“For now.”

I tipped his hat back and leaned toward him. I held his face, now so real and stubbly with the paranormal juju all around. I kissed his forehead. I felt him and he felt me. The light around wasn’t bright daylight again, but it was bright enough that we shouldn’t have been able to feel each other. But we did. Some things just might never be understood or explained.

“I have a boyfriend. I’d better stop kissing other boys on the lips,” I said.

“That you’d better. Good-bye for now, Isabelle and Miz. See you next time,” he said before he disappeared.

“I can’t wait,” I whispered.

“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.

“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.

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.

Esther had lied about who she was to Jake because it simply seemed like the best way to get more information about Astin Reagal and still maintain her privacy—something she thought was important after Vivienne told her the shocking news about Orly. Later, and when she realized she really liked Jake, she felt badly about the lie and wasn’t quite sure how to get out of it without looking deceitful at best, and somehow guilty about something at worst, considering all the violence that had been occurring at the convention.

Esther had also made up the story about Astin helping deliver a baby. She just thought she needed to sound like she knew more about him than she truly did.

Esther’s discussion with me at the fish fry was mostly fabrication, too. She wanted to do something to shine a light of suspicion on Vivienne without mentioning the true specifics of blackmail and potential murder. Esther suspected that Vivienne had had something to do with Norman’s murder, but she couldn’t prove it.

The morning Vivienne shot Esther in the arm had started off with a friendly invitation. Vivienne asked Esther if she wanted to take a walk, maybe look at the Express station. Esther said that Vivienne actually apologized to her for bringing up the blackmail idea, that it had been wrong to even consider something so awful. Esther hadn’t even noticed the gun Vivienne had placed in the waist of her jeans that was hidden by a long T-shirt until they were inside the station, and for whatever reason Vivienne brought out the gun to show to Esther. Esther thinks the shooting was what Vivienne had said it was, an accident, but no one is completely sure, of course.

Additionally, and much less important, Esther had never been romantically interested in anyone but Jake. Not even Teddy, even if she did think he was cute.

Jezzie hadn’t been interested in anyone but her boyfriend back home. She was probably the happiest of anyone to get out of town, even if she had missed her family dinner with Cliff.

Orly told me that he hadn’t had romantic thoughts for anyone since his wife had died, certainly not for anyone at a convention. He mentioned, however, that he sure hoped for the chance to know Gram a little better.

No one has figured out how the snake got into the cooler full of fish. I think Vivienne was involved, but I can’t figure out why she’d do such a thing except that some people are just prone to mean and violent behavior, and she’s one of those people.

It seemed that what I’d heard was going on at the convention had been misconstrued and misinterpreted. There’d been arguments and heated discussions, but Teddy hadn’t misbehaved and had actually attempted to help when he thought help was needed. It was easy to understand how the stories got jumbled, what with those lies mixed in with all that beautiful poetry and those moonlit nights.

After Esther was shot, the convention came to a quick close and most everyone went home, except for Cody and Vivienne, who were both arrested.

The biggest mistake Vivienne had made was that no matter how much research she did, she didn’t truly know Orly. She had no idea that he would have stepped up to the plate and made good in whatever way—financially included—that his biological children, or their biological mother, needed him to. He had already set plans in motion for Esther to meet his other two daughters.

• • •

Orly and Esther came through the front doors. Esther’s arm was in a sling, but she walked with a pep in her step and a smile on her face. She would recover fully.

They joined us in the large round booth and we all ordered burgers and fries for lunch. Esther and Jake shared a smile, as Gram and Orly shared their own smile. I was a fifth wheel, and I was just fine with it.

We replayed the whole story again, and Orly smiled at Esther. “Thing is, I’m tickled to my hairy toes to know this young gal’s my daughter, and I’m sorry as can be about Norman. I would have welcomed them both into my family. Shoot, I would have welcomed Vivienne, too, if she’d just come to talk to me and was straight about everything. The biological part wouldn’t have even mattered. I’ve got enough to share. I would have felt responsible for some of her and her mother’s hard times. My kids would have been okay, too. They’re a good group of people.”

We spent some time small-talking our way to the one question we knew Orly had. Apparently, Esther had missed the entire ghostly scene in the stable, so she had no questions about it, but Orly did. Vivienne was in jail, so no one was listening to much of the strange stuff she was spouting. And Jake had been so worried about Esther that he hadn’t appreciated the fact that he got to see three ghosts at once—even more if you counted all the horses. He said he would think on it and appreciate it someday.

But Orly. We were sure Orly wanted the truth, and he finally came around to asking the question.

“Betts, Miz, what happened? Y’all said you would tell me,” he said after the plates with the burgers and fries had been placed on the table.

“Orly, we’ve been chatting, and we’re hoping you’ll be all right with the story that we want to tell you,” Gram said.

“Yes, ma’am,” Orly said.

“Broken Rope has a glitch somewhere. We hold on to our past a little too much. It can bite us in the behind sometimes, surprise us, you know,” Gram said.

“Not really, but go on,” Orly said.

Esther just listened, her eyes wide and curious.

Gram sighed. “Sometimes, the past just demands that things be worked out, and that glitch in Broken Rope allows weird things to happen. In fact, they happen more than we’d sometimes like. That’s what went on in the stable. Some things from the past needed to be worked out.”

“I see,” Orly said doubtfully. He turned to me. “You kissed that man who saved your life. Who was he?”