Billy said nothing, but Jimbo put his arm around his kid brother’s shoulder. “You saved my life, Bill. I owe you.”

Unlike Billy and Jimbo, Kathy loved Catholic shool and admired the sisters. She was, she decided, definitely going to be a nun when she grew up. She adored the memory of her father and tried to find out all she could about Johnny Morrison. Her mother had told the children that their father had been ill, was taken to the hospital, and had died. Now that she was five and in school, whatever she did, Kathy asked herself first, “Is that what Daddy Johnny would want me to do?” It was something she would continue into adulthood.

Dorothy saved some money from her singing engagements and bought part interest in the Top Hat Bar. She met a handsome, fast-talking young man who had a wonderful idea about the two of them opening a supper club in Florida. They had to move fast, he explained. She should take the children to Florida to look over a couple of places. He would stay here in Circleville, sell her interest in the bar and then join her. All she had to do was sign her share over to him.

She did what he suggested, took the children to her sisters place in Florida, checked out some clubs for sale and waited a month. He never showed up. Realizing she had been taken by a con man, she came back to Circleville again—broke.

In 1962, while she was singing at a lounge of a bowling alley, Dorothy met Chalmer Milligan, a widower. He now lived with his daughter, Challa, who was the same age as Billy, and he had a grown daughter who was a nurse. He began to date Dorothy and got her a job at the company where he was a job steward on press machines, molding parts for telephones.

From the beginning, Billy didn’t like him. He told Jimbo, “I don’t trust him.”

The Pumpkin Festival in Circleville, famous throughout the Midwest, was the annual highlight of the town. In addition to parades and floats, the streets were turned into a pumpkin fair, vendors in their booths selling pumpkin donuts, pumpkin candies and even pumpkin hamburgers. The city was transformed into a pumpkin fairyland of lights and streamers and carnival rides. The Pumpkin Festival of October 1963 was a happy time.

Dorothy felt her life had taken a good turn. She had met a man with a steady job who would be able to take care of her and who said he would adopt her three children. He would, she felt, be a good father, and she would be a good mother to Challa. On October 27, 1963, Dorothy married Chalmer Milligan.

Three weeks after their marriage, on a Sunday in mid-November, he took them out to visit his fathers small farm in Bremen, Ohio, just fifteen minutes away. It was exciting to the children to go through the white farmhouse, swing on the porch swing, poke around the springhouse out back and the old red bam a little ways down the hill. The boys would have to come out weekends, Chalmer said, to work on the place. There was a lot to do to get the soil ready for planting vegetables.