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it as a child as well. Judith asked what had happened
to Josephine, Wright’s widow. The lawyer said she heard that she’d
died, but she didn’t know the details.
    Tracking down an obituary for Josephine, Judith discovered that
Wright’s widow was living in Seattle at the time of her death. She
located a lawyer in Washington who agreed to represent her on
contingency and filed a petition in an attempt to recover something
from Josephine’s estate. The money had already been dispersed back
in 2004, most of it to M. A. Wright’s daughter from his first
marriage. (According to the terms of the will, once Josephine died,
a good portion of Wright’s money was designated for his “issue.”)
But under Washington law, if Judith could prove that she was
Wright’s daughter and had been unlawfully excluded from the will,
she could still recover whatever portion of the money a court
deemed should have been hers.
    M. A. Wright’s first daughter fought the petition—her name,
incredibly, was also Judith—and was joined by one of Josephine
Wright’s daughters. Judith’s lawyer handed the case off to an
accomplished litigator named Michael Olver, who argued in filings
that when Wright’s will stated that he intended his fortune to pass
to his children, it was written in a way that should include not
just his legitimate daughter but Judith as well. The blood tests
that could have proved definitively that Judith was Wright’s
daughter had never been completed, but DNA could now provide the
answer just as easily. “The biological mother has twice sworn that
Judith Patterson is the issue of M. A. Wright,” they wrote  “Simple
noninvasive testing with cotton swabs will confirm it.”

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    To fully pursue her new identity, though,
Judith was going to have to undo her old one. To bolster the case,
her Washington lawyers suggested she go to court in Kansas to have
her adoption nullified. Josephine Wright happened to have moved to
a state that specifically barred children given up for adoption
from later claiming inheritance from their biological parents. The
lawyers contacted a well-respected attorney in Kansas City named
Gene Balloun, who agreed to represent Judith and filed to have her
adoption vacated in the state of Kansas. To do so, however, he was
going to need Louise’s testimony.
    So one morning in August of 2006, Judith drove Louise two hours
up to Kansas City. Ryan, now 13 years old, came along, as did
Judith’s friend Alice Burkhart. That afternoon, Judith and Louise
sat in Balloun’s office with a court reporter, and just like back
in 1994, the lawyer asked Louise to recount every detail of her
affair with M. A. Wright. Balloun walked her through the whole
story, from the bus ride to the idyll at the Mayo Hotel to Wright’s
discovery of her pregnancy and her return to Baxter Springs. The
deposition was wrapping up when Balloun decided to clarify one
detail for the record. “How long was it then before you ever saw
your daughter again?” he asked.
    “What was it, ’89?” Louise said.
    Judith turned to her mother. This wasn’t right, she knew; she
remembered the afternoon when she was 16, the strange woman on the
porch, the men standing around the truck in the driveway. “You came
to my house on 413 22nd street,” she said.
    “Oh yeah, sure,” Louise said. “Probably around ’72, but I didn’t
actually see her.”
    “And how did that come about?” Balloun asked.
    Louise suddenly looked wild-eyed and scared, Judith remembers.
“I came down there to see if Sue would let me take her to Houston,”
she finally blurted out. “Because they wanted me to—they wanted to
see her. They didn’t believe that there was a daughter or
something.”
    “So you went down to Baxter Springs to see her?” Balloun
continued.
    “Yeah.”
    “Did you actually get to see her?”
    “No, not really. I saw her from the door, but I didn’t. Sue had
two kids.”
    Judith broke in again. “I answered the door,