Infamous (6 page)

“You like this guy,” Hugh deduced. “You don’t want him to be a con man. And that’s step one in a con. Make the mark like you. Check.”

“I
do
like him,” Alison realized. “I don’t really know why.”

“I do,” Hugh said. “He’s extremely hot.”

“Right,” Alison said. “And you know me when it comes to hot guys. I can’t resist ’em—no, wait, that would be
you.”

“Deny, deny, but I saw the way you looked at him.”

“Whatever you
think
you saw,” Alison said, “in the fraction of a second that you saw it—before you ran away like a frightened little girl because you knew I was going to kick your ass—was me checking to make sure he was correctly dressed to be an extra in our multimillion-dollar movie. Which he wasn’t.”

“I don’t know, Al,” Hugh said. “I think you just instinctively connected with him. I think he’s your type.”

She had to laugh. “He’s about the farthest thing from my type on the planet,” she told Hugh. “I mean, can’t you just picture me with some cowboy? He also actually called me
ma’am
, which is a strong signal that I’m not his type either. Which is a good thing.”

“Is it?” Hugh asked. “A good thing …?”

“Yes.” Alison tried to sound absolute. “Because as crazy as his story is …?” She looked up and sighed. “I
am
gonna have to go up to Alaska to check this out. I can’t not, you know? And I’ve got to be impartial. Or as impartial as I can be about the idea that Silas Quinn was lying about Kid Gallagher’s and Melody’s deaths, which, if he was, means that all of his other claims—about the shootout and the bank robbery—are therefore also suspect, which I just find really hard to swallow.” She paused. “Except …”

Hugh turned to look at her. “What?” he said.

Alison shook her head. “Nothing. No.”

“Sure sounded to me like something was cooking in that giant head of yours.”

“I don’t have a giant head. You just have an adorably tiny one.”

“Except what?” Hugh persisted. “You know you want to tell me. You’ve said it yourself—things get more clear when you let yourself think aloud. So, think aloud, babe.”

“That’s Dr. Babe to you, Junior Mint,” Alison said, and then sighed. Hugh was right. She did like to think aloud. “Okay, look. This by no means implies that I’m doubting Marshal Quinn’s impeccable word, but ever since A.J. came in here, suggesting that Melody was the victim of domestic
violence, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about a letter that was written by a local woman to her sister in Denver.” She moved the piles of papers and files around on her desk, like a giant game of three-card monty, searching for the right stack and … Got it. “Someone sent it to Henry just a few weeks ago, the original 1898 letter, just stuck in a regular envelope, like,
Hello, I know you’re about to make this movie and thought you’d be interested in seeing this.”
She handed the photocopy to Hugh. “I sent out the original to be tested for the ink and paper content, but we’re ninety-nine percent sure it’s the real deal. It was written by Mrs. Penny Eversfield, who was the wife of the man who owned Jubilation’s general store. She and her sister Hortense were voracious pen pals, and Horry, as she was lovingly called—”

“Seriously?” Hugh looked up. “That’s how you pronounce it?”

“Oh, yes,” Alison told him. “Horry saved all of her sister’s letters. There were hundreds—Penny only died in 1920. Her great-niece Lorraine has, in turn, kept them all. She’s getting on in years herself, Lorraine is, and she wants to donate them to the Silas Quinn museum that Neil Sylvester is opening here in town.”

“Dearest Horry,”
Hugh read aloud.
“Once again, the summer heat is upon us, and once again the money I had saved to come visit you and dear Papa must be spent, this time to buy a wedding veil for Mr. Eversfield’s eldest and most spoiled daughter, Mary. It had best be a thick one, or the groom may well run away
. Oh, zing, Penny.”

“The bit about Melody is at the end—middle of the second page,” Alison told him, and he shuffled the pages. “It in part clears up a mystery that no one could ever explain. Melody Quinn arrived in Jubilation in early June, yet the official welcoming ball, held by the town in her honor, didn’t happen until early August. And yes, the date got pushed even later, because the marshal was injured in the shootout at the Red Rock, but the original date of the dance was late July. Which seemed odd. But apparently, shortly after she arrived, Melody fell off her horse and got badly hurt.”

“Mrs. Quinn was confined to her bed when I arrived,”
Hugh read,
“her eyes blackened and her face bruised and bloodied, clearly in pain from a recent, violent ‘accident.’”
He looked up. “She put the word
accident
in quotes.”

“Yeah,” Alison said, drawing the word out. “That’s what I haven’t been able to stop thinking about. Keep reading.”

“She told me she’d been thrown from her horse—”

“She told me,”
Alison repeated. “Why write that? Why not just write,
She’d been thrown from her horse?”
She laughed as she rolled her eyes. “Of course now I’m finding sinister meaning in everything. According to Silas’s reports, Melody wasn’t an accomplished rider, so it’s entirely possible that she
was
thrown from a horse.”

“
I stayed with her for only a short time that afternoon,”
Hugh continued reading, “
and left as quickly as I could when the marshal arrived home
. That sounds sinister to me. Like Penny was afraid of him.”

“Or just well aware that, after all those months apart, the marshal might’ve wanted some alone time with his wife.” But as Alison gave voice to the excuse, it felt like just that—an excuse. Alone time with a wife who’d been
bruised and bloodied
from a bad fall …?

“Maybe you’ll get more answers in the other letters,” Hugh suggested, sitting up and giving her back the photocopy.

“Maybe.” Alison wasn’t convinced. “Lorraine’s sending them—they should arrive in a few days.”

“At the very least,” Hugh pointed out, “you’ll be able to use them for the new book.”

“And then there’s that,” Alison agreed. Her next opus—and it was turning into an enormous monster of a project—focused on the hardship of day-to-day life for American women in the Old West. Specifically in Jubilation, Arizona.

Hugh’s phone beeped and he pulled it from his pocket to check it. “Text message,” he announced, as he stood up and headed for the door, “from Lana the caterer. Elvis has left the building.” He turned to look back at Alison. “Thanks for letting me hide in here.”

“I think the next time Kent shows up, you should stay out there,” she told him. “Sing him a verse or two of ‘I Will Survive.’”

“Hey, hey,” Hugh said, as he opened up her trailer door. “That’s just it, though. I’m not sure I will, you know? Survive. Seeing him again …” He shook his head.

“If you want, I could probably get Trace’s thug, I mean, assistant Skippy to beat him up for you,” Alison called after him.

But he was gone.

And she was back to staring at A.J. Gallagher’s driver’s license.

She stood up, too. It was time to go find the man, and give him back his wallet.

But first, just to be thorough, she was going to photocopy the contents.

A.J. seemed to want to be alone for a bit, so I wandered the streets of Jubilation. Not much had changed in the town since I’d left in a hurry, all those years ago. And what
had
changed was being transformed by the movie crew back into what it had once been.

Within reason, of course.

Sure, there was a gas station now. And a Circle K convenience store. And a single-story motel, built with the misguided
and over-the-top architectural angles and colors popular in the 1950s which was, ironically, the
last
time a major motion picture had been made about Silas Quinn and me and the shootout at the Red Rock. In faded orange and turquoise, the neon sign out front of the place displayed the outline of the hat and face of a sneering cowboy with a cigarette in his mouth and the words
OUTLAW INN
in a loopy, electric cursive.

It was, of course, supposed to be me. It would have made me laugh, but the reminder that I used to smoke still bothered me tremendously.

As I walked on, I saw that the attack of the 1950s urban sprawl was confined, thank God, back behind Main Street. The Outlaw Inn was next to a rather grim-looking two-unit strip mall with a shop advertising “Palms Read,” which was next to an establishment where you could pawn your watch, cash your paycheck, and get tattooed and pierced all at the same time.

Combining that with an exorbitantly expensive half-sized box of Lorna Doones and the ice cold but metallic-tasting canned beer you could pick up at the Circle K, Jubilation truly had become an oasis of modern convenience.

That Circle K, as pricy as it was, was the only place in miles that sold groceries and/or food-like grocery substitutes, as A.J. called the chips and Cheetos he’d downed by the cubic ton as a child but now spurned.

The old general store, which back in the day had been owned by a real ornery sonuvabitch named Richard Eversfield, had sold a variety of supplies. But even though it was still standing, it was now a museum.

Or rather a fact-defying house of worship where tourists from Indianapolis and Des Moines could kneel at the altar of the god Silas Quinn.

Part of the Red Rock Saloon had been transformed into a museum, too, although the main room still served shots of whiskey and less-than-generous-sized glasses of beer.

A hand-lettered sign proclaimed that five dollars, paid to the bartender, would gain you admittance behind the curtain
to the back room, which held
THE ACTUAL BOOTS WORN BY THE VILLAIN KID GALLAGHER AT THE TIME OF HIS DEATH
.

The caps are theirs, not mine.

I slipped past the curtain without paying—a benefit that came with being visible only to my great-grandson—and went into the back room that had held the stage where the local ladies of the evening had put on shows (and I use the term loosely, because none of ’em had all that much talent beyond the obvious).

The movie folks were crawling all over the place, carefully packing and inventorying all of the “artifacts” that hung on the walls in the once festive room.

They hadn’t gotten to the glass display cases yet, and I strolled past them, squinting to read the handwritten explanations that were pinned near each item. A chamber pot. A spittoon. Both believed to have been used by the great Silas Quinn when he crapped and/or hacked.

And there, in a case of honor in the center of the room, were, indeed, my boots. The black ones that I’d abandoned, in order to make room in my saddle bag for more food and water.

The once fine, tooled leather was dull and cracked, the silver tarnished.

I hadn’t died in them, but I
had
been wearing them the first time I saw Mel. My life had irrevocably changed in that single moment, but it was more like a rebirth than a death. Although one could argue that in order to be reborn, a part of you has to die.

A pair of young ladies carrying boxes nearly went right through me. As I danced out of their way, I spotted another sign, proclaiming
ENTER HERE
. It was at the door to the tiny room that had once been Big Sal’s handjob factory, where a mere five cents would get you a less satisfying variation on the theme of what you’d receive by taking one of the younger, prettier, and less contagious girls to her far more ornate quarters upstairs.

I went in and saw that it had been transformed into a small theater. There were heavy shades over the single window and
about six or seven folding chairs set up in front of an old TV, upon which played a continuous video loop of an ancient and faded documentary about the notorious gun battle that had raged out in the saloon on that summer morning in 1898.

It wasn’t—let’s face it—even a fraction as entertaining as Big Sal had been even after she caught the pox and knew that her future held a slow slide into madness.

I went out through the back door—literally
through
it, seeing as how I no longer needed to open or close the damn thing—and into the narrow alleyway between the saloon and the marshal’s office.

It was not a mistake that Quinn’s and the Red Rock’s back doors were in such close proximity. Quinn owned the saloon, owned Big Sal and all of the girls who worked upstairs. And whenever he was in the mood for a little afternoon delight, to quote a song that A.J.’s sister Bev had loved but me and Age had hated, he’d just knock three times on Sal’s back door. She’d clear out and give a whistle for Nancy or Irmine or sometimes the pair of ’em together, to come down and entertain the good marshal.

And this I know not just because Big Sal told me so, but because I saw it happen.

Not from inside the room, of course. I was flesh and blood back then and walls thwarted me. But I sat at the bar—that curtain wasn’t up in those days—and watched Sal leave and the girls go in and that door shut. I meandered back to the alley where—sure enough—Quinn came out some long minutes later, buttoning the front of his trousers, which was a clue that he hadn’t been in there reading those girls Bible verses.

But I digress.

As I wandered through Jubilation, I saw that the marshal’s office and the town stables where the blacksmith had done his business were just as they’d been, too. Most of the town had been preserved, apparently, by Quinn’s descendants, the Sylvesters, who’d realized in the 1950s that this ghost town that they still owned could become a tourist attraction.