Infamous (34 page)

Hugh was lying in a puddle of his own vomit, and even though he’d tried to cover his head with a spare shirt, he was still badly sunburned—as if he’d been lying out here since early in the afternoon.

It was a miracle that he wasn’t dead from that, let alone any potential internal bleeding from the accident.

“Please, help me get him in the truck,” Alison said, tears running down her face—a mix of fear and relief.

A.J. picked up the smaller man easily as Alison dug for her cell phone, already trying to call ahead for an ambulance. It wasn’t until they hit the main road that her cell worked, but she finally reached the police and coordinated with them so that they’d meet on the road back into town.

A road that A.J. didn’t walk.

In fact, he drove.

I was real.

What a relief.

Seriously though, Alison was still in Whoo-whoo-land about the whole thing, and her body language screamed
Don’t touch me
. She carefully kept her distance from A.J. as they got red-haired, broken-hearted Hugh transferred into the hands of the paramedics, who immediately gave him fluid intravenously.

His blood pressure was surprisingly stable, which was an indication that his injuries weren’t internal, thank God. Until they discovered otherwise, though, they were going on the theory that he’d thrown up because he’d hit his head, which wasn’t so good. Head injuries could be tricky.

As the ambulance sped off, leaving Alison staring after it like a worried mother who’d just put her kindergartner on the school bus, I knew A.J. wanted to put his arms around her. But he didn’t dare.

“He’s going to be okay,” he said instead, and Alison looked at him in surprise, almost as if she’d forgotten he was there. The pair of them were going on severely limited sleep. “And Jamie can pop in and check on him, so we don’t have to wait for a phone call for news about how he’s doing.”

“Is Jamie here?” she asked. “Right now?”

A.J. glanced at me, almost as if he were checking to see if I were at my desk and taking calls. So I nodded and spread my hands in a silent
Here I am
, and he said, “He’s here.”

“Where?” Alison asked.

“Leaning against the hood of the truck.”

Not that I needed the truck to be able to lean. I could lean anywhere, or even sit on thin air if I wanted to. Still, I figured it would be less disconcerting to A.J. if I used bits of his physical world whenever possible.

Alison turned to face me. “Which side of the truck?”

“This side.”

It was then that she surprised the hell out of me by moving toward me, her hand outstretched, as if she were going to try to touch me.

“She’s gonna get zapped,” I warned A.J., who told her just that.

She pulled her hand back. “Is it …” She started over. “Will he get zapped, too? Because I won’t do it if he doesn’t want me to.”

“Well, it’s an odd sensation,” I told her through A.J., “but I’d be happy to shake your hand, dear.”

It was the strangest handshake of my afterlife. And maybe because we both knew it was coming, it didn’t buzz quite so badly.

“Oh, my God,” she breathed, her pretty eyes looking right through me.

Up close like this, I could again see why A.J. found her so appealing. She wasn’t particularly young, yet she radiated youthfulness. It was her attitude that gave her that freshness and life. I wished I had a sense of smell, because I would’ve bet my entire stake that she smelled really good, too. Not from heavy artificial perfume, but, again, fresh and clean. Like a gorgeous spring day.

And okay, yeah, too Hallmark, I know. But A.J. was my kid, perhaps in some ways even more than any of my actual children, because Melody had done most of the hands-on raising of them. Of course, I’d been there, but I was just their father, and in those days that meant something very different than it does today. But for a while there, at the very end of my life, I was A.J.’s mommy, which sounds odd, I know. But it’s true.

The bond between us is a strong one.

And I wanted him to find someone worthy. Someone who’d bring light and laughter into his life.

“Please,” Alison said. “Do you mind if we …?”

She opened up the truck cab and reached in behind the seat, where she’d stashed her giant bag. It was half purse, half briefcase, and she pulled a script from it. It was, I saw, the latest version of that blockbuster-to-be,
Quinn
.

Dawn was lighting the sky with streaks of purple and blue, but it still wasn’t bright enough yet for her to read. So she stepped in front of the truck’s headlights and motioned for A.J. to move off a bit, down the road.

He kept going until his white shirt was just a blur, even to me. Which meant Alison probably couldn’t even see him. “That’s far enough,” she called, and she opened her script. “Tell him to start at the top of the page.”

“He can hear you fine, you don’t have to shout,” A.J. called back.

“All right, spirit of Jamie,” Alison muttered. “If you’re real, start reading.”

So I did.

“Interior, Red Rock Saloon, back room,”
A.J. recited, his voice distant but clear.
“Kid Gallagher has Melody trapped against a wall. She is clearly frightened. He kisses her roughly, she struggles. This is a total load of horse
—Sorry. I think that last must’ve been an editorial comment. Jamie says nothing like that ever happened. Not even close.”

Alison looked at the headlights, frowning slightly.

“Tell her she can move away from the truck,” I called to A.J. “My night vision’s good. Although if I have to read anything more from this ridiculous script, I just might go blind.”

A.J. paraphrased—the kid was nothing if not polite. And Alison dug through her bag for a pen. She uncapped it with her teeth as she backed away from the truck’s headlights.

She started to write, right on the white space of the script’s page.

One of the reasons this is so difficult for me
, she wrote,
is
because I needed a hero—a lot—when I was a little girl. And I used to pretend that I was Melody and if I could just hang on a little longer, that Silas Quinn would come and save me
.

I read the words, and A.J. repeated them—his voice quiet in the stillness.

Alison sat down, right there in the road. A.J. dashed back, but he stopped before he got too close, afraid that he might scare her. I knew what
that
was like.

She looked up at him in the dimness. “I could really use some breakfast,” she said. “Let’s head back to town.”

Hugh was going to be okay.

But he was so severely dehydrated that the ER doctors at the hospital in Tucson were adamant in their opinion that he’d been found just in the nick of time.

He hadn’t been hurt when his Jeep went off the road, as they’d originally feared. There was no sign of bruising or any injury to his head or internal organs.

But apparently he’d ingested something that had made him violently ill, the theory being that something he’d had in the Jeep—either food or drink—had gone bad. The ensuing illness had made him unable even to find his phone, which was in the pocket of his jeans with its voicemail box filled with messages from all the crew members who’d been frantically searching for him.

They were pumping him with fluids and an anti-nausea drug, and he’d actually roused once, which was a good sign. But he wasn’t able yet to talk and to turn their theories into facts.

As A.J. followed Alison into the catering tent where breakfast was being served, they received a round of applause for finding the young production assistant.

“We just thought we’d go out there and drive around,” Alison told the man named Rob, who was refilling a vat-sized tub of scrambled eggs, and who was also—according to Jamie—an FBI agent. “We headed away from where the teams were searching. It was on a whim.”

He looked at them both somewhat skeptically so A.J. added, “We got lucky.”

Alison was silent then, as she served herself some eggs and bacon and poured them both mugs of dark, rich coffee.

“Thanks,” A.J. said, taking one from her.

She was standing there, just holding her tray of food, looking out at all the empty tables.

“As soon as we sit down,” she said, “we’re going to be mobbed. And I hate doing this—having to lie to everyone about how we found Hugh. That was just really unpleasant.”

“Yeah,” he agreed. “I know.”

“You’re good at it, though,” she pointed out.

“No,” A.J. said, “actually I’m not.”

“Better than me.”

“Look,” he said, “we can go back to your place if you want, and I won’t take that as anything more than a … desire to be able to talk privately. Jamie’ll come with us, and I’ll leave when you ask me to.”

Of course, A.J.’d also stay if she asked him to, but he figured that was probably understood.

Alison nodded. “All right.”

And he followed her out of the tent.

It wasn’t far to River Street, wasn’t long before she balanced her tray on the railing and unlocked her door.

And A.J. was back in Alison’s kitchen.

“Can I be honest with you?” she asked as she set her tray down at her table, as she took the same chair she’d sat in when he’d first told her about Jamie.

“Of course.” That left him the sex chair, although to be honest, despite learning the truth that Jamie’s ghost was real
and A.J. wasn’t crazy, the vibe he was picking up from Alison was completely unlike the one he’d gotten the night she’d taken off her shirt.

“I’m still struggling to believe that it’s true,” she admitted. “I’m just too much of a scientist. I keep trying to figure out ways you could’ve done all that—including the jolt.”

“It does take some getting used to,” A.J. agreed, taking a sip of his coffee as Jamie sat up on the counter, across the room.

“And I can’t apologize to you,” Alison said. “Not yet. Because if this is a scam, if you’re somehow tricking me, if you nearly got Hugh killed to make me believe in this crazy,
crazy
scenario …”

“You don’t have to apologize,” he told her.

“It’ll be worse if I’ve apologized on top of being fooled,” she explained.

“It’s okay,” A.J. reassured her. “My own mother thinks I’m suffering from …” He shook his head. “If there’s anything I can do to help you believe that I’m being truthful with you …”

Alison nodded. “I’m thinking about it,” she said. “I’ll let you know.” She looked around. “Is Jamie here?”

Jamie waved at her, but of course she couldn’t see him.

“He’s over by the sink,” A.J. said.

“Tell her I want her to get out that sorry-ass script and show you that scene that she had me start to read,” Jamie said. “We need a little levity here.”

“He wants you to show me the script for
Quinn,”
A.J. told her. “That scene with, you know,
Kid Gallagher has Melody trapped against a wall
 …”

Alison pulled the script out of her bag, which was on the floor next to her chair. She plopped it onto the table. “It’s marked with the orange Post-it note,” she told him as she dug into her eggs. “Knock yourself out.”

A.J. pulled the script closer to him and opened it and …

“Read it aloud,” Jamie ordered, sliding down from the counter, to come stand behind him. “It’s ridiculous. I know, I’ll be Mel, you be ‘Kid’ Gallagher. You read the stage directions,
too, because I’m going to have to work hard to get into character here. Let me practice a few times.” He pitched his voice high. “No!
Nooooo!”

A.J. couldn’t help but laugh as he read aloud, “Interior, Red Rock Saloon, back room. Kid Gallagher has Melody trapped against a wall. She is clearly frightened. He kisses her roughly and she struggles to get free. Melody:
Stay away from me.”
Jamie read the lines along with him, in that silly high-pitched voice.
“My husband ordered you out of town!

“Gallagher, laughing:” A.J. added an appropriately sinister sounding
Mwah-ha-ha. “I’m going. And guess what? I’m taking you with me.”
He looked up at Alison. “Hmm.”

“It’s a dramatization,” she said defensively, biting a piece of bacon. “It’s supposed to be dramatic. Exciting. Maybe a little over the top.”

“A little,” A.J. agreed.

“Keep going,” Jamie prompted.

“Melody struggles even more and he pushes her harder against the wall, nearly throttling her,” A.J. read. “Melody:
No
 … Gallagher:” He deepened his voice.
“Yes. And you know what else?
Still holding her tightly with one hand, he caresses her throat, his fingers moving lightly across the bare skin exposed by the torn top of her blouse. She still struggles.”

“Noooo,”
Jamie said, even though that wasn’t his line.

“Gallagher, continued:
You’re not going to tell him a thing. It’s going to be our secret. Because if you tell him? I’ll kill him.”
He stretched out the vowel and the
Ls
in
kill
, pronouncing it
keel
.

“Okay,” Alison said, laughing and rolling her eyes, “maybe it’s a
lot
over the top. But the writers were basing this on the legend. They tried to imagine what might have transpired between Melody and Jamie before he kidnapped her. They were also going on the assumption, because it was believed to be a fact, that he
did
kidnap her. As opposed to your story that she went with him of her own free will. Of which, by the way, I’ve still seen absolutely no proof.”

“I’m working on that,” A.J. said.

“Keep reading,” Jamie said.

So A.J. kept reading. “Melody freezes. She very nearly stops breathing because she believes him. Gallagher, continued:
You know that I can, and I will. I’ll kill him, and I’ll take you with me anyway
. Melody:” He looked up at Alison. “All together now:
No
 …”