The Oilman's Daughter Read Online Free PDF

Mama.”
    “Well, I didn’t know it was you.”
    Judith felt the room pressing in on her. For a second time, the
woman sitting across from her had collapsed the story of her life
as she knew it. After that last night at the Mayo Hotel in 1955,
Wright
hadn’t
disappeared without a trace. Louise had
somehow been in contact with him, or his proxies at Exxon, and then
he’d even sent someone to find her—to bring her to Houston so that
he could see her for himself.
You have not gotten what you
deserved.
Now that statement contained so much more meaning
than Judith had understood.  
    When the deposition concluded, Judith drove back to Carthage,
Ryan in the front seat and Louise and Alice in the back, all four
sitting in near silence. When Judith and Ryan returned to their
house late that night, there were messages on the machine from her
half-brother Rick Harris wanting to know how the trip to Kansas
City went. That’s odd, Judith thought. She didn’t recall telling
him that they were going. 

Ten
    The next evening, a stranger came to the
door. When Ryan answered it, the man asked if his father was home.
Thinking better of revealing that it was just him and his mother
living there, Ryan said, “He’ll be home any minute.”
    The man had left the trunk of his car open. He walked over to it
and returned with three peaches. “There’s three of you?” he said.
“Here are three peaches.” He handed them to Ryan and Judith, who
had joined her son in the doorway, then got in the car and drove
away.
    A week and a half later, Judith was napping in the bedroom when
Ryan rushed in. “Mom, that man is back, and he’s driving a
different car,” he said. “He’s trying to disguise himself.” The man
had parked in the driveway, left the driver’s side door and back
door open, and was ringing the doorbell. This time, Judith called
the police. When they arrived, the man pulled a box of peaches out
of the trunk and said he was just delivering an order. The cops
laughed at that. They started calling the man “Peaches.”

----

    Up in Kansas City, Gene Balloun had
obtained the depositions from the original court case over M. A.
Wright’s will, nearly 15 years earlier. He mailed Judith copies,
and when she opened them her unease turned to dread. Now all the
inscrutable things that Louise had said back then suddenly made
sense. M. A. Wright had once tried to make things right, and
something had gone terribly wrong.
    At the end of the deposition, Louise had described to the
lawyers how her mother and her aunt had taken the jewelry that
Wright had bought her, stolen it from her flat out, along with the
deed. “The pearl necklace, it was wrapped up in real pretty
velvet,” she said. “And I had the ring in a ring box and the watch
in a box. My mother’s sister, June Van Horn, came over there and
started taking my stuff away from me, and her and I got into a
fight. And she broke my necklace and Diana stuck the pearl up her
nose and I had to take her to the doctor and get the pearl.” Van
Horn, she said, had ended up with everything.
    Later, after she’d moved out of her mother’s house, Louise had
been back there and found “envelopes after envelopes from Humble
Oil Company.” They were empty, she told the lawyers, and her mother
had told her that they’d just been utility bills.
    The tale grew stranger from there. In the 1960s, Louise had
said, she found a letter at her mother’s house from a Houston
lawyer named George Devine, telling her she urgently needed to
contact him. When she called him, her mother took the phone away
and hung it up. Then her aunt called Devine back pretending to be
Louise.
    Louise said that after that she wrote letters for years to
Humble Oil in Houston, always addressed to “dear sirs,” trying to
get ahold of Wright. “I had built him on a pedestal,” she said. “I
felt like he would protect me and all my things was taken away from
me, and I felt like that he would help me get