Infamous (47 page)

“Easy, kid,” I told him, as he grabbed for the weapon.

It didn’t come off the frame, so he just heaved and ripped the whole damn contraption out from where it was anchored in the dirt.

He’d used a weapon like that before. I could tell, because he didn’t even look down, he just slammed at the setting, pushing it into automatic mode and hauling on that trigger as he ran out from the cover of the brush, screaming like a crazy man, unable in his anger even to form words.

Much in the same way that I’d gone through that hotel room window, all those years ago, guns blazing, because I knew—I
knew
—that that monster had beaten and raped the woman whom I loved more than life itself.

At the time, I was also damn near out of my mind with fear that he’d already killed her.

But today, unlike Silas, who’d been caught unaware and went down like a tranked elephant on
National Geographic
, tall, ponytailed Brian hauled ass and ran for his life toward his waiting SUV.

“Kid, kid, kid, kid,” I said, keeping pace with A.J., “let him go, let him go! He’s out of range of that thing now, and you know it. Come on, son, you’ve got to get your family in your truck. Alison needs to get to the hospital, and she needs to go now. She’s lost a lot of blood.”

It was that last, I think, that stopped him. He planted his feet as he kept firing that weapon, stopping only to shout toward the house, “Bev! Mom! Get Alison into the truck—let’s move, let’s
go!”

“Good boy,” I said as Rose and Bev helped Alison out of the house, the screen door slapping shut behind them.

A.J. looked at me as we hustled back to Charlie’s old truck. His eyes were still a little crazy—adrenaline could do that to a man. “She doesn’t know a Brian,” he told me, talking about Alison, “or a Wayne.”

I nodded. “I know,” I said as he got behind the wheel, checking to make sure Bev, Rose, and Alison were safely inside. “At least not by those names. I was thinking though. Maybe the sheriff’s office has one of those artists who can draw us a picture of the suspect. She might recognize him that way—Brian, I mean, because I never saw Wayne’s face. Although I
have
seen a little too much of their cohort, Gene.”

He nodded, and I jumped in the back as A.J. jammed the truck into gear, and roared off down the road, away from Brian’s SUV, and into town and safety.

A.J. was in the hospital lobby, talking to the deputies, waiting for the sheriff to arrive, as Rose supervised the cleaning, stitching, and bandaging of Alison’s wounded arm.

Bev peeked in through the curtain. “Everyone decent?”

“Is the sheriff here?” Alison asked in response, making sure her hospital gown covered her completely.

“Not yet,” Bev told her, coming in as Rose went out. “But Joey’s here. Another cousin. The family history buff. He found the diaries.”

Alison sat up. “What?”

“Is it okay if he comes in?”

“Of course,” Alison said, even as her arm started to throb. She forced herself to sit back as a tall, rawboned young man came through the opening in the curtain. He smiled and held a file folder out to her.

“Joe Gallagher, Alison Carter,” Bev introduced them.

“A.J. thought you’d want to see this right away,” he said in a gentle twang much like his cousin’s. “It’s not the diaries—Sarah went up to Sitka to pick them up.”

“Joey’s sister is a pilot,” Bev told Alison.

“She should be back in about an hour,” the young man
said. “Still, there’s quite a bit of information about Jamie’s son George—Aunt Rebecca’s twin brother—in here.”

Alison reached for the file and he smiled at her obvious excitement—an easygoing, charming smile. There was something about him that was oddly familiar.

“Did we meet at the airfield?” Alison asked.

“No, ma’am,” he said. “But my great-grandfather was Jim, Jamie’s eldest son.”

Joe was young, in his early twenties, and the way he dressed and stood and spoke set her gaydar pinging. His hair was sandy brown, his eyes an odd mix of brown and green. But it wasn’t his eyes or his hair that was familiar, but rather something about the shape of his face, his cheekbones or jaw or forehead or maybe all of them combined.…

He was smiling at her patiently, as if waiting for her to figure out a puzzle.

A.J.’s grandfather Adam was Melody and Jamie’s youngest son, and the only one of the four boys still alive. Rebecca was the next youngest. Her twin, George, had died in the skies over Europe, a mere week after Melody had succumbed to cancer, back in 1944. And God, the thought of the pain Jamie’d gone through, losing his wife and son within a week, still made Alison feel a little sick.

His second-oldest son, Skyler, had been a career navy man who’d come close to dying in that same war—at Iwo Jima. According to A.J., Sky had been born in January of 1903. And Jim, the eldest, had been born in …

May of ’01.

May, April, March, February …

Exactly nine months after August, when Quinn had tracked Melody and Jamie to San Francisco. Nine months after he’d beaten and raped Melody.

Dear God.
That
was why Joe Gallagher looked so familiar.

He looked quite a bit like the tintypes Alison had seen of Silas Quinn.

“I never met Jamie,” Joe said, smiling at the recognition in Alison’s eyes. “He died before I was born. But we still talk about him like he’s just down the street at the grocery store.”
He looked wistful. “I kinda wish he’d picked me to haunt. I’ve been writing about him since I was fourteen. There’re so many great stories … A lot of funny ones. He was … something else. My father remembers playing cards with him, and the old man would play hard and even cheat. Against a twelve-year-old. But Dad said you knew that going in—it was part of the game, that was what Jamie used to say. But he didn’t cheat when it came down to the important things. He was a good man, Dr. Carter. The best. His love for his family—for
all
of his children—was legendary. And probably even more so on my side of the family.”

Alison blinked back the tears that rushed to her eyes. God, the trials Jamie and Melody had overcome had been mountainous. Not only had Quinn raped Melody in San Francisco, but she’d borne a child as a result of that violence.

And instead of making a bad situation worse, instead of allowing the hurt and suffering to continue, Jamie had begun the healing with unconditional love.

Jamie Gallagher was indeed a very good man.

“It’s a pleasure to meet you, Joe,” Alison said. “I’m looking forward to reading those diaries.”

“And I’m looking forward to reading your next book, ma’am,” he said. “Let me know if you need a research assistant.” He slipped out through the curtain before she could respond.

She
was
going to need an assistant. And an office with nearby mountains to gaze at, like the ones she could see from the windows of A.J.’s cabin …

The now broken windows …

Alison leafed through the file Joe had given her. It included a copy of the report about George Gallagher that he must’ve written for a college history class, along with about fifty pages of a document with the title
Jamie’s Stories
. He’d stuck Post-it notes on both of them, saying
FYI only. Don’t feel obliged to read this
.

She flipped past—she’d definitely read it all later—and found the original of the telegram that had been sent, notifying Jamie and Melody of their son George’s death.

Beneath it was George’s death certificate—again, an original. Father of deceased was listed as Austin James Gallagher. Mother, Melody Patience Thompson, which were, absolutely, Melody Quinn’s middle and maiden names.

“This is good,” Alison said, looking up to see A.J. coming behind the curtain. “This is really good.”

He didn’t look happy, but he forced a smile. “Are you all right?” he asked, turning to his mother, who’d come in just behind him, to verify Alison’s affirmative nod.

“She’s going to be fine,” Rose said. “The bullet didn’t break up—there was a clean exit wound. She’ll be on antibiotics for about a week as a precaution. All in all, it should heal nicely, with hardly a scar.”

A.J. nodded as he stood there, at the end of her hospital bed, just looking down at her. “May we have a little privacy?” he asked.

“Of course,” his mother said, and vanished, pulling Bev with her, and the curtain tightly closed behind them.

Alison put down the file that Joe had given her. “A.J., what’s wrong?” she asked, because something was—very wrong.

He sat down in the chair his mother had pulled up beside the bed. “I’m just going to say it, okay?” he said. “Because it’s awful and—”

“Who’s dead?” she asked, filled suddenly with dread.

But A.J. shook his head. “No,” he said. “No one’s dead. Well, no one except for this man named Wayne that Jamie says this Brian guy killed. Jamie saw him—Brian—burning a car, with Wayne’s body in it. It wasn’t a hiker who died out in the desert, Alison. It was some man named Wayne. I called the police after Jamie saw the fire. Anonymously. I let them know about the body, too.” He shook his head. “But that’s not what, um …”

Alison just waited.

And he cleared his throat, and said, “The sheriff thinks it was me. Who shot you.”

“But it wasn’t,” she said. “It couldn’t have been. You were standing right next to me.”

“He thinks I set up that robot.” A.J.’s eyes were filled not just with frustration but with anxiety, as if he were afraid that she, like the sheriff, would think him capable of such a thing. “He doesn’t believe that anyone else was there. At all.”

She sat up. “But Jamie saw that SUV. Bev wrote down the license plate number—”

“It was a car owned by some winter people that I know. Not very well, but, I do know them. The Robinsons.”

“Winter people,” Alison repeated.

And he smiled wanly. “Believe it or not, there are people who only come up here in the winter, for the skiing. If this Brian really did use the Robinsons’ SUV, he also returned it to their garage. Because it was there when the Sheriff’s Department went to check.”

“So he put it back,” Alison said. “Can’t they check its tires to see if it was used recently …?”

He sighed. “Heaven doesn’t exactly have a CSI unit. That kind of thing is expensive.”

“How hard could it be to check?” Alison asked. “Mud or fresh earth versus dried dirt? If it was parked off the road, near a trail—”

A.J. interrupted her. “There’s more.”

This wasn’t going to be good. Alison braced herself.

“The 9-mm,” he said. “The submachine gun. The sheriff has papers that say it was purchased at a gun show, four weeks ago. By me.”

“My signature was forged,” A.J. told Alison. “It’s obvious. To me, anyway. But the sheriff doesn’t see it that way.”

I’d sat in on that conversation with Sheriff Bill Fenster.

The man was a fool, and unfortunately, among Heaven’s townfolk, he was one of the few who rode on the A.J.-is-crazy bus. In fact, he sat in the front seat. He didn’t believe that I was real. Plus he didn’t like A.J. much, on account of an incident with a girl back in high school. Cindy Harris. She liked A.J. and Bill liked Cindy, and even though A.J. didn’t take Cindy up on her loud and drunken offer, made at a
party after a basketball game, to let him take her virginity, Bill, who’d overheard it, never quite managed to forgive A.J. for being the object of her desire.

Bill was only too happy to pay attention to the evidence that pointed to A.J.’s insanity and/or guilt.

A.J. had requested that Bill’s deputies find the bullet that had injured Alison—to see whether or not it had been fired from that robot gun or from a different weapon, as we both believed. It wouldn’t have taken much time or effort to figure out which one of the many bullets that had pounded into the cabin’s front had the girl’s blood on it.

But Bill had already judged A.J. and found him guilty. Besides, he was sending his team of deputies out to talk to the man who’d allegedly sold A.J. that assault weapon at that gun show. If the man agreed that the document was forged—a document that had rather randomly shown up in the sheriff’s office just that morning—then and only then would they start digging bullets out of the cabin.