Infamous (5 page)

“I know it can’t be the easiest thing to hear”—A.J. found himself smiling, too—“but it happens to be true.”

“Okay,” Alison said. “If it’s true, where’s your proof? If you’re talking about changing history, you better have something that proves what you’re saying.”

A.J. held out his hands. “I’m proof,” he said. “If Jamie had died in 1898, I wouldn’t be sitting here today. My grandfather, Adam Gallagher, was Jamie and Melody’s youngest son. He wasn’t born until 1920, so—”

“Did you happen to bring along Grandpa’s birth certificate?” Alison asked.

A.J. glanced at Jamie, who’d stopped pacing and was leaning against the frame of a door that led into a back room—probably a bathroom. “Well,” A.J. said. “No.”

“Well”—this time her imitation of him was less friendly—“why don’t you go get it and bring it back, and
then
we’ll talk,” she told him. “It’s been surreal, but it’s time for me to get back to work.”

A.J. stood up, too, pushing his jeans slightly down his thighs. “He doesn’t have a birth certificate. 1920, in the Territory of Alaska? He was born at home, there was no official record.”

“I see.” She didn’t sound surprised. “I don’t suppose you have anything else to back up your story?”

She stood there, waiting, calmly confident both in her research and in her book, smiling slightly because she knew what his answer was going to be.

No.

“I’m willing to do a DNA test,” he told her.

“Not real useful,” she pointed out, as she moved toward the door, to open it and usher him out, “without some of Kid Gallagher’s DNA.”

“Argh,” Jamie said. “Will you
please—
”

“He was never called
Kid,”
A.J. interrupted him, holding his ground against Alison’s attempt to show him the door.
“That was just a dime novel embellishment. He hates it—hated it. The nickname.”

Her hand stilled on the doorknob. “You actually knew him?”

A.J. nodded. “He lived with us at the end of his life,” he told her. “My mother, my sister Bev, and me. From the time I was three until … Well, when I was ten, he just … died. In his sleep. He just went to bed one night, he seemed fine, it was just another day, but …” He had to clear his throat, clench his teeth. “He didn’t wake up.” He didn’t look over at Jamie. He couldn’t. But he knew the ghost was watching him.

It had been devastating. He had been a kind of a weird kid, a loner who didn’t easily make friends with the other boys at school. Jamie had filled that role, been his constant companion, his best friend, except, just like that, he was gone.

Which was why, according to A.J.’s mother, his brain had conjured Jamie up, even all these years later. Assuming that she was right and A.J. was hallucinating, as opposed to Jamie’s actually being a spirit from beyond.

Haunted or crazy.

A.J. was definitely one or the other, and he wasn’t quite sure which he wished was true. Hell of a choice to have to make.

“That must’ve been hard,” Alison said quietly. “I mean, assuming you’re not making this up.”

“I’m not,” A.J. said.

“I didn’t do it on purpose.” Jamie’s voice was rough. He had to clear his throat, too. “You know that, right?”

“Yeah,” A.J. said, answering him—and Alison, too. It
had
been incredibly hard. “And I actually do have some of Jamie’s DNA. He cut his hand in my grandfather’s—Adam’s—carpenter shop, which is my shop now. There was a leather apron that got stained—it’s not the kind of thing you can easily wash out. It’s still hanging on the wall. But of course there’s no way to prove that the blood was Jamie’s,” he added before Alison could throw that monkey wrench into the mix herself.

“If we want to prove that my story’s true,” A.J. continued,
“we need to find a sample of Melody’s DNA. I figure that, plus holding up a picture of Jamie next to me.…”

“Well, you
do
look like him,” Alison admitted. “I’ll give you that. But …” She shook her head. “I’m assuming this is the point where you announce that you have Quinn’s locket—the one that held a lock of Melody’s hair …?”

According to the legend, that locket was one of the things Quinn allegedly buried deep within one of his many silver mines after Melody was killed. He’d packed up a bunch of her belongings in a tin box, and laid it to rest. Or so he’d claimed.

“I don’t have it,” A.J. told her. “I was hoping you did.”

But Alison was already shaking her head. “It’s long gone,” she said. “And you know it. You read my book.”

He shrugged. “I figured that since Quinn had lied about Jamie’s and Melody’s deaths, he might’ve lied about burying that locket, too. You said in your book that you had access to Quinn’s belongings, that his descendants, the Sylvesters, had an attic filled with boxes—”

“I’ve been through them,” Alison interrupted him. “Thoroughly. No locket.”

“You mentioned that Quinn had kept Melody’s clothes in a locked trunk,” A.J. reminded her. “It is possible that there might be a strand of her hair or maybe a pair of shoes with some …” What? Dead skin? Toenails? Dried blood from a blister?

But Alison was giving him another of those headshakes. “Quinn’s daughter, who was also named Melody—”

“Which is fricking creepy, if you ask me,” Jamie interjected.

“—let
her
daughters use those clothes to play dress up.”

And so much for
that
idea.

“Naming your daughter after your allegedly dead first wife?” Jamie was disgusted. “I wonder what wife number two—what’s her name, Agatha—thought about
that
. You know, I don’t know if I ever told you this, kid, but I still think
she
was responsible for Quinn’s demise. Intense stomach pains, yeah, it could’ve been his appendix, but it also could’ve been
poison. I think Agatha caught ol’ Silas eyeing their little girl, and I think she put a stop to that, right quick.”

Jamie hadn’t ever told him that. Not back when A.J. was ten. He wouldn’t have understood it, anyway. A father contemplating having sex with his own daughter, let alone battering and beating his wife …?

“Maybe that’s the way to go,” A.J. said aloud, before he realized he was talking to Jamie. He turned to face Alison, tried to make it look like he’d been speaking to her from the start. “Agatha Quinn. You said in your book that you didn’t spend much time on her—research-wise. If Quinn abused Melody—my great-grandmother—then it’s likely he did the same to his second wife, isn’t it? Maybe we could find proof if we went through her things—her clothes, her papers, I don’t know …”

Alison sighed. “Look, A.J. If your name really is A.J.”

Ouch.

“After Quinn died,” she continued, “Agatha took Melody-the-second, and moved to Tucson where, after
she
died, Melody’s house burned down. Silas’s trunks were safe because Agatha had left them here, in Jubilation.” She paused. “Which does sound a little weird when I say it out loud. Why did Agatha leave everything behind? Of course, you didn’t exactly hire a van when you moved across the territory back in 1906. You boarded a train or took a horse and wagon. Still, to leave
every
thing of Silas’s …”

“Where did Agatha come from?” A.J. asked. “Maybe she had sisters or friends.”

“That she might’ve written letters to,” Alison finished for him. “No, I haven’t found any record of that. Silas Quinn’s descendants—Neil Sylvester is the person I’ve been working with. He admitted that they don’t even know Agatha’s maiden name.” She finally opened her door. “As fascinating as this has been, I’m going to have to stick with the substantiated facts, and leave the hearsay, rumor, and gossip out, no matter how …” She paused, meeting his gaze steadily, and smiling. “Intriguing it seems.”

His inner idiot’s mouth went dry and probably would’ve started him stammering again, if she hadn’t had more to say.

“I really do need to get back to work,” she continued, “so if you don’t mind …?”

She held out her hand for the file he was still holding, and he gave it to her as he headed past her, toward that little door. But then, on a whim, he also pulled his wallet out of the back pocket of his jeans and handed that to her, as well.

He’d surprised her. Good, that made two of them. Three, counting Jamie, whose eyebrows were up beneath his hair.

“My name really is A.J. Gallagher,” he said. “Feel free to copy the contents—my driver’s license and credit cards and what-all—and substantiate it.”

Alison blinked at him, and before she could find her voice and tell him that it didn’t matter, she wasn’t going to believe anything ill of her beloved hero Silas Quinn, A.J. went down the steps and out the door into the heat of the Arizona morning.

“Smooth,” Jamie said as he followed him, his boots not kicking up any dust in the motel driveway, the way A.J.’s did. “Now you have a reason to go back and see her again.”

“Yes, sir,” A.J. agreed. “That I do.”

“You’re no help at all,” Alison told Hugh, who was using her office trailer as a hiding place.

Kent from accounting was on the set today, aka Kent-that-bastard-from-accounting, who had led Hugh to believe that their impetuous St. Patrick’s Day hookup had been the start of a richly meaningful and long-term relationship instead of the cheap and easy one-nighter that Kent had truly been after. At least that was Hugh’s story.

The professional liar had been lied to, and no doubt about it, karma was a bitch.

Hugh didn’t see it as karma, though, which might’ve been part of the problem. But it was more than his desire to avoid an awkward encounter that had brought him here to her office. Alison believed that the production assistant’s heart had actually been broken. He didn’t say as much—he wouldn’t or maybe couldn’t, his stoic and pragmatic midwestern salt-of-the-earth upbringing dominating his gay gene. But Alison could tell the wound was a deep one, mostly from the way he didn’t seem to want to complain about or even badmouth Kent, aside from that one heartfelt
bastard
. He just kept changing the subject, with a flash of hurt on his perfect face.

What would he say, she wondered, if she sat down next to him, patted his hand, and said,
Sweetie, you know it’s really okay if you cry
.

The fact that her adorable buddy Hugh actually had a heart to break would’ve been the surprise of the day had one
alleged A.J. Gallagher not walked into her office and her life a few hours earlier.

“I’m just saying,” Hugh said now, feet up on the very same couch that A.J. had been sitting on as he’d given her those slow smiles that had made her grin back at him foolishly, “that if I were going to come in here to try to pull some kind of con, I’d have a worn-out library card in my fake name, too.”

“He’s from this tiny town that’s actually called Heaven, in Alaska,” Alison told him, flipping through the handful of credit and ID cards belonging to the man who, according to an extremely official-looking Alaskan driver’s license, was indeed named Austin James Gallagher. Which didn’t mean a thing. The best forgeries looked authentic. “I MapQuested it, and it’s real. Heaven, Alaska, can you believe it?” She didn’t wait for him to answer. “I googled A.J., too, and there’s, like, twenty other Gallaghers in town, not to mention—” she consulted her list “—a Dr. Rose Gallagher—I think she’s A.J.’s mother; a Gallagher’s Bar and Grill, Gallagher’s Hardware, and Gallagher and Sons Carpentry and Furniture Design. The furniture place and the doctor both have websites. Everything seems legit. The local paper had birth and death announcements for dozens of Gallaghers, going back as far as I could access. I found A.J.’s—it matched the date on his driver’s license. And—get this—I also found his father’s death announcement.” She’d printed out the obituary. “Marine Sergeant Ryan Austin Gallagher, loving husband of Rose Hawkes Gallagher, father of Beverly and A.J., son of Adam and Celeste Gallagher, killed in Vietnam in 1970—four days before A.J.’s third birthday, which had to suck. Among surviving family members listed was Ryan’s grandfather, J. Gallagher.”

“J
could be Joseph,” Hugh said. “Or John. Jack. Jerry.”

“And it could be James,” Alison said.

“So … are you saying you believe him?”

“I’m saying it’s kinda hard to dispute forty years of newspaper records.”

“Maybe when President Obama traveled through time to
plant his birth announcement in the paper in Hawaii, he stopped in Alaska and—”

“My point exactly,” Alison said, back to looking at the battered library card, and some kind of laminated military ID that seemed to imply that A.J. had been in the army but had been discharged years ago. An ACLU membership card and a little paper card with five talking points to “tell your neighbors” why off-shore drilling for oil was environmentally a bad idea. His social security card—she’d never met anyone before who actually carried that—was shoved into a separate slot, along with a bank ATM card, and what looked to be a shiny new Visa card.

He was also carrying two hundred and thirty dollars in cash.

She tried to imagine just casually handing a stranger her wallet filled with that much money and personal information. But she couldn’t do it.

She also couldn’t imagine Silas Quinn lying about Melody and Kid Gallagher’s deaths. The marshal’s honesty was legendary.

“I think maybe A.J.
thinks
he’s telling the truth,” she told Hugh. “And yeah, I know, you think he’s here to con me. I haven’t seen the actual newspapers, I’ve only seen the Internet microfiche—although I’m not sure how that could be tampered with. Clearly a trip to Alaska is in order. But … Here’s what I’m thinking: What if A.J. grew up being told that Great-grandpa was Kid Gallagher and Great-grandma was Melody Quinn, when in fact it was just a family legend or, I don’t know, some ridiculous joke. They had the same last name as this notorious outlaw. Maybe it was a pretense that young, fatherless A.J. took too seriously.”