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“You did say this was about Keefer Dobey, didn’t you? What his death means. Or was that a lie?”
Fiercely, Brenda said, “It’s such a shame it had to happen now, when he was so excited.”
Unfortunately, while that freed me from responding to Wendy’s accusation cloaked in a question, it also closed off any other avenue of discussion.
Wendy’s eyes regained their red-rims but didn’t overflow as she clicked her tongue in disapproval. “That nonsense.”
I had a feeling this referred to the earlier mention of treasure and someone I’d never heard of. Not particularly where I wanted to go, but best to take what I could get.
“What was he excited about?”
Wendy rolled her eyes. Brenda answered.
“He was expecting results back on his genealogy test — that DNA — any time now. Years he’s been working to put together his family history, tracking down any little scrap. Never seen anybody spend so much time at the library. We don’t get the best connection up here, so he’d go to the library and spend hours and hours whenever he could, especially in winter. He’s been thinking for a while there might be something in it, but he became certain here the past year or so that he’s the descendant of a famous outlaw.”
“Famous,” Wendy scoffed.
“You can’t say Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid aren’t famous,” Brenda shot back.
“He was descended from one of them?” I asked.
“Well, no. Doesn’t seem so, according to what he was telling me about his research. But that doesn’t mean he wasn’t descended from somebody famous,” Brenda insisted. Then she temporized with, “Famous around here. The Virtanens.”
She looked at me expectantly.
I’d avoided exposing my ignorance the previous time she’d mentioned that name. I wasn’t getting away with it this time.
Into the pause that followed, Wendy snorted. Brenda’s face fell.
Diana looked up from her camera and stepped in to support KWMT-TV’s reputation for knowledge of local history. “Of course. The famous outlaws, Oscar and Pearl Virtanen. They were contemporaries of Butch and Sundance.”
Brenda beamed on Keefe’s behalf. “That’s right. They were deeply connected with Cottonwood County.”
If deeply connected with meant they’d pulled off robberies here, I didn’t see the appeal.
“Having a connection to Cottonwood County didn’t matter to him,” Wendy said. “Could have been Etta Place and the Sundance Kid, could have been Laura Bullion and Ben Kilpatrick he was descended from and he’d have been just as happy. Maybe happier.”
I’d heard of the first couple from the multiple family viewings of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid mandated by my father as fundamental to his children’s upbringings, along with Irish music, and Chicago sports teams.
The second couple meant nothing to me.
At times, ignorance — real or assumed — can be a journalist’s secret weapon. Some sources so enjoy teaching that you win them over by letting them teach you. Others can get so involved in showing off what they know that they let far more slip than they intended.
Wendy did not strike me as either of those kinds.
She struck me as the kind who saw ignorance as a weakness that dropped her respect for the other person, giving her the right to dismiss them.
I wasn’t going to be dismissed.
I finessed, “But he settled on Oscar and Pearl Virtanen as his more likely ancestors?”
Wendy snorted. She resorted to that derisive dismissal a lot. With a jerk of her head toward me, she said, “She hasn’t heard of any of them.”
Defending myself that I did know about Sundance and Etta Place would display my ignorance of the others. One out of three wasn’t bad for a batting average, but not great in these circumstances. I kept my silence.
“Keefe did a lot of research before taking the DNA test, eliminating the others as possibilities,” Brenda said. “You see—”
“Nonsense,” Wendy interrupted. “It’s all complete nonsense. And so is this. You can stay and play to the camera if you want to Brenda, but I intend to get some work done today. It’ll be hard enough to get ready for the season without Keefe. If we spend all our time talking to deputies and lookie-loos we don’t stand a chance.”
