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Judy back.”
    She never got an answer, she said, but in 1972 she did get a
letter from Humble Oil asking her to return any documents she had.
So she decided to go down to Houston and try to find M.A. herself.
After she was unable to convince Sue Adams to let her take Judith,
she brought her third husband and her son Rick, now a teenager, and
managed to meet Humble’s then-president, Randall Meyer. “He said
that he wanted me to come back that afternoon and we would probably
get this matter all straightened out,” Louise recalled. But her
husband had gotten a parking ticket when they went for lunch.
Flustered and fed up with his wife’s oilman tales, he demanded that
they drive back to Kansas and abandon the whole thing.
    Louise’s memory seemed uncommonly sharp on certain details but
foggy on others. “A lot of this stuff is blank in my mind,” she
said at one point. “I’m going to tell you the truth, the way it’s
happened. My mother beat on me ever since I was a child, and my
mother was very angry with me when I got pregnant by M.A., because
back in the ’50s, you didn’t get in trouble. You didn’t have a baby
out of wedlock, and you didn’t live with people not married or
anything. And lot of this stuff I don’t remember. I can’t
remember.”

----

    The family Judith had begun to feel close
to, she now saw, had some connection to M. A. Wright beyond just
Louise’s several-month affair. Once-cryptic details—Wright’s query,
“What’s this about, your grandmother?”—suddenly clicked into
place.
    And yet the story remained a collection of fragments: Wright had
somehow tried to send money and oil deeds to Louise, and maybe even
to Judith. They had been intercepted along the way. It was unclear
if her mother was a perpetrator or—if her deposition was to be
believed—a victim of her own crooked family. Whichever it was,
Judith was beginning to suspect that the new family she’d embraced
had drawn her close for reasons she’d never imagined.
    Still, Judith pressed on with her attempt to nullify her
adoption. Even if elements of the family she was joining appeared
increasingly sinister, she needed to be legally part of it to
attain the place among Wright’s heirs that she so badly wanted. In
November 2006, a district judge in Cherokee County, Kansas, issued
a judgment voiding Judith’s adoption and confirming the facts of
the case as Judith herself now understood them. “Ms. Patterson was
born Judy Diane Bryant on January 30, 1956,” he wrote. “Her birth
mother was Ethel Louise Harris, also known as Ethel Bryant, and now
known as Ethel Louise Williams. Her birth father was Myron A.
Wright.”
    There it was, at last, on paper. As soon as the verdict came
down, Judith started going by Judith Wright Patterson. 

Eleven
    When I called Judith for the first time
in the spring of 2008, it had been two years since her adoption had
been dissolved. Her suspicions about her mother’s family had
calcified into a certainty shot through with anger and fear. She
knew now, she told me, that her mother’s family had robbed her of
the money that M. A. Wright had sent her for decades—and she was
convinced that they were now conspiring to do worse. “My life will
never be the same,” she told me.
    In September 2007, Judith had lost her initial lawsuit in
Washington over Josephine Wright’s will. The case hinged on the
fact that the will specifically bequeathed most of M. A. Wright’s
remaining fortune to his “lawful issue,” excluding any illegitimate
children. Her lawyers were appealing the verdict. Meanwhile, she
was engaged in a new legal battle, this one in Missouri, against
her mother’s family. She’d enlisted a local lawyer to pursue a
civil case alleging that her mother and her half-brother Rick—whom
she saw as the ringleaders—along with half a dozen other relatives,
had engaged in a conspiracy to intercept money from Wright that was
intended for her.
    “I think basically my