my thoughts and stayed focused.
“That’s a good name for it,” I replied, “because it felt like a honeymoon. I enjoyed every single minute that we spent together, but I knew it couldn’t last, even before I was kidnapped.”
“Kidnapped? Now, Tully . . .” Donna Kay began, with a doubt in her voice like a teacher who had heard too many excuses.
“It’s true. I swear,” I pleaded. “Please. This is important to me, but I have to start at the beginning. My original intention after leaving Wyoming was to keep going and never look back, just like Butch Cassidy did. I’d had it with my life the way it had been. I needed a break. I’d never seen the ocean. I had wanderlust, but there was something else. Then, I walked into the Chat ’n’ Chew, and there you were.” I pulled my chair closer to the hammock where she was slowly rocking. “Donna Kay, I have been in love with you right up until the moment you told me you were marrying Clark.”
Donna Kay made no sudden reaction to stop me, and once the dam broke, the river of words just kept coming. It was almost as if someone else was saying them. “So in my mind, I just assumed that you would want to do what I did. It was naive of me, but I just envisioned the whole thing working out perfectly.”
“That is a common mistake that most men make,” Donna Kay said.
“I know. My idea was for you to come down to Mexico and visit me and fall in love with me and the tropics at the same time. My problems in Wyoming would be far behind me. We would live happily ever after. You would open your restaurant on the beach. I would help in the kitchen and learn to make omelets when I wasn’t tending my fishing business, which I would start. We’d spend our days growing old together under the tropical sun and shady palms of Mexico.”
“Sounds like The Swiss Family Robinson,” Donna Kay said dryly.
“Not quite.” I got out of my chair and walked to the rail so Donna Kay couldn’t see the tears that were welling up in my eyes. “I wasn’t really free to pursue my dream life with you because I was hiding something. A lie.”
“What lie?” Donna Kay still sounded skeptical.
“I wasn’t really a carefree cowboy loping along, taking his pony to the shore. Back in Wyoming, I committed a crime.”
“What kind of crime?” Donna Kay wanted to know. She suddenly sounded nervous. “Did you murder somebody?”
“No, nothing like that. It was back at the ranch. I got in a big fight with the boss lady, a real control freak named Thelma Barston, and I ended up throwing a table through her plate-glass window. She reported it to the cops and made up a lot of other stuff about assault, and pretty soon I was all over the Wyoming papers with a warrant for my arrest and a big fat reward for my capture. I ran.”
“You have got to be kidding,” Donna Kay said.
“I wish I were.”
“Go on,” Donna Kay told me.
She was listening.
“Thelma isn’t a woman to be scorned by an out-of-work cowboy. She also hired two bounty hunters to track me down.”
“Oh, God. Bounty hunters. I thought they only existed in old movies,” Donna Kay said.
“Horror movies,” I replied. “Within a week, with her political connections in Wyoming, they had trumped up the charges against me, increased the reward money to twenty grand. That certainly got the villagers fired up to find Frankenstein, and the newspapers painted me to be Charles Manson on horseback. All this happened while I was cruising across the country towing Mr. Twain to the beach. I wasn’t watching the news, I hadn’t read any papers, and I was all the way to Alabama before I even heard about it. Meanwhile the two bounty hunters were on their way—I kid you not, their names were Waldo and Wilton Stilton.”
Donna Kay shook her head and laughed. “Tell me this is just a tall tale, Tully. It’s too weird to be true.”
“How could I make up names like Waldo and Wilton Stilton?” I asked.
“I don’t think you could,” she said.
“It gets a lot weirder,” I continued. “I had a client last month who was a writer for The New Yorker. We were having a sunset cocktail at the Fat Iguana when the rumor of my Wyoming background came up, and the Stiltons returned to haunt