Flynn grabbed his phone again and looked for obituaries in and around El Paso. “I found him. Joseph Ray Wilkes died two years ago at the age of eighty-three. He was survived by his wife, April Wilkes, and all the many children that they fostered over the years after they moved to El Paso.”

“I lived in El Paso for a year or two,” April whispered. “I wonder if he or his wife ever came into the café where I waitressed. I might have waited on one or both of them and not even known I was looking at my grandfather.”

“Does any of this help you?” Flynn asked as he picked up more pictures and then found an old, yellowed newspaper.

“It must seem a little like a dream,” Nessa said.

“More like a nightmare.” April’s words came out breathy, and her voice hardly sounded like her own.

“This is the paper with Grandpa’s obituary in it,” Flynn said. “It just says that he worked for the Missouri Pacific Railroad and gives the dates of his birth and death and tells who survived him. It mentions that he had a twin brother who preceded him in death.”

“So there was the wild-boy twin who was our grandfather, and the good-boy twin who died young, and my father is the image, both naturally and spiritually, of Grandpa’s twin brother,” Nessa said.

“He wasn’t my real grandfather.” April wiped at her tears.

Nessa gave her another hug. “We’re all cousins no matter who our grandparents are.”

“How on earth did Nanny Lucy get to be so religious and God-fearing?” Flynn asked. “She had to have a little bit of rebellion in her to go against her parents and marry the ornery twin. Let alone have Rachel.”

“It was the tornado. Think about the timing. The storm came right before she and Grandpa got married, and that turned out to be a disaster, and then there was another storm when Rachel gave birth to April,” Nessa said. “She must have related the storms, both physical and mental, to bad times in her life.” She flipped through the diary again, found the place, and read: “‘I was so afraid when that thing went over our heads that we would die, I promised God I would go to church every time the doors were open, and I would raise whatever children that God saw fit to give me and Everett to respect Him.’”

“Whew!” Flynn wiped his forehead in a dramatic gesture. “I vote that this is enough for tonight. Let’s go to bed and sleep on what we know before we go digging any deeper into that closet.”

“Amen.” Nessa laid the diary back in the suitcase. “I’ll just straighten up the kitchen a bit before I turn in.”