Infamous (11 page)

Trace Marcus had arrived—his Jeep was allowed all the way up to the entrance. He was in the small tent that was being used by whoever needed it—the same tent that Alison had gone into, to dig A.J.’s shirt out of his bag.

Henry Logan had gone into the tent, too, and Alison knew he was warning the actor about the mine shaft. The scene they were about to film ended with Silas going into the mine to search for Gallagher.

She may not have received the memo about the snakes, but she
had
gotten the very clear warning about the decaying old mines. The warning was not just for this one, but for the entire area. Most of the old structures were in poor condition and in very real danger of cave-in or collapse. Some still contained caches of explosives—decaying TNT that was extremely volatile and dangerous. Henry was reminding Trace to go no more than a few feet inside, even though this mine
didn’t plunge straight down into the earth. It actually ran along the hill line, close to the surface for quite some distance and thus was deemed relatively safe.

Relatively, because the rock and earth walls were shored up by timber that was long rotted.

It was hard to imagine Trace taking any kind of risk and actually going too far into the mine, but actors could be funny that way, in the heat of the moment.

All of the interior shots of the mine were going to be filmed on a soundstage, back in California, after the weather in Jubilation got too hot.

“Need to stick around?”

Alison turned to see A.J. standing behind her, his bag in hand.

“Or can I offer you a ride back into town?” he asked.

“Oh,” she said. “No. Thanks. I’m, um, almost done. But not quite. I don’t want to make you wait.”

“I don’t mind,” he said.

“But, see, I can’t tell you absolutely if it’s going to be five minutes or three hours,” Alison admitted. She lowered her voice. “I have to approve Silas’s costume, but in order for me to do that, he’s got to come out of the tent. Which he won’t do until he’s ready.”

Once she gave her approval, she could leave the painstaking and endless responsibility of checking the actor before each take in the very capable hands of the team from continuity.

“Can’t you go in there?” A.J. asked.

“I can,” Alison said, “but I don’t want to. Fewer mistakes happen when the actor comes onto the set. I don’t want to give approval and then have him walk out here with his iPod earphones hanging out of his pocket, or a pack of Tic Tacs in his hand.”

“Does that happen often?” he asked.

“More often than it should,” she said, and then realized that he was standing there in just a snug-fitting T-shirt and jeans, having changed out of his costume. She started to unbutton the shirt he’d lent her, unfastening the tails she’d tied together in front. “I should give this back to you.”

“Oh,” he said. “No, I’m fine. I don’t need it—besides, it … looks good on you.”

“Then you should go ahead without me,” Alison told him. “I don’t want to be responsible for putting the extra from Alaska into the hospital with sunstroke.”

“When I was in the army, I spent nearly a year in the Middle East,” he told her. “Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Iraq. First Gulf War,” he added, no doubt when he saw her trying to do the math. “Not this one.”

“I saw your military ID,” she said. “But I had no idea. You’re lucky you didn’t get called back up.”

“Yeah,” A.J. said. “I didn’t get called for … well, for a lot of different reasons. Bottom line, though, I know what real heat is, and I’m well aware of my limits and … I’m fine.”

“Still,” she said, glancing over to the tent from which Trace Marcus still hadn’t emerged. Skip Smith had come outside for a cigarette, and he nodded as she met his gaze. She nodded, too, before pulling her attention back to A.J. “You’re probably dying for a shower.”

“I’m happy to wait,” he said, and then deftly changed the subject so they didn’t have to stand here arguing about it, smart man that he was. “It must be a kick for you—to be here in Arizona, where it all happened. Jubilation and the Red Rock Saloon … It’s amazing that it’s all still standing.”

“Yeah,” Alison said. “You know, Jubilation was abandoned for years, shortly after Silas Quinn died. The silver was played out, and it was a total ghost town.”

“I didn’t know that,” he said.

“Quinn’s family, the Sylvesters, still owned it,” she told him. “But they weren’t living here. There were a few squatters—hermits and madmen—who were trying to get the last of the silver from all the abandoned mines, and I think they kept the tourists and looters at bay. So when Neil Sylvester’s father came back in the 1950s, it was all just here, waiting for him. He checked to make sure the buildings weren’t going to fall down on him, did a few repairs, hired a manager to run the saloon, hired a couple of tour guides, built that motel, and boom, he was in business.”

A.J. nodded, looking over at the old mine entrance. “Really?” he said.

“Well, it wasn’t
much
of a business,” Alison conceded.

And he looked slightly perturbed as he said, “No, I didn’t mean—” He cut himself off and started again. “I’m sure he did fine. I just, um … Did you know that this is the actual mine? The one that belonged to my great-grandfather.”

“Gallagher’s Claim,” Alison said, nodding. “At least, that’s what we believe, with the inexact information and maps that we have.”

“It’s the one,” A.J. said, definite. “But it didn’t happen this way. I mean, not the way that it’s written in this script. Jamie didn’t incite the confrontation with the miner. He didn’t force a drunk to draw, and he certainly didn’t throw any women and children out of their home.”

“This scene,” Alison pointed out, “is from Silas Quinn’s eyewitness report. A direct recounting—”

“Which was never confirmed by a second source,” A.J. pointed out rather gently. “Truth is, Quinn wasn’t there.”

“Okay,” Alison said, folding her arms across her chest. “Hit me with your version. Jamie
didn’t
win this mine in a poker game with a man who was too drunk to stand up, let alone to ‘know when to fold ’em,’ or when not to face down a notorious gunslinger’s quick draw.”

“No,” A.J. said. “That part’s true. Jamie won the mine in a game from a miner who was drunk. But by the time it came into Jamie’s possession, the silver in this vein was played out. Jamie accepted what was a worthless deed, in an attempt to avoid trouble.”

“At the very least,” Alison argued, “it was land, with a cabin.”

“Land with no water isn’t worth much out here.” He was silent for a moment, staring into the air next to her, as if listening to the sound of the wind. “The cabin was more like a lean-to,” he added. “It barely had a roof, and the floor was dirt. Jamie didn’t live there—he stayed at the Jubilation Hotel. It’s not there anymore—they had a fire a few years later—but it was just a few buildings down from the Red
Rock Saloon. Hotels—the fancier the better—were more his style.

“The man from whom he won the mine,” he continued, “was named Barnum Ruggers—Sorry, Barnum T. Ruggers. Don’t want to confuse him with all of the other Barnum Ruggers now, do we?” He laughed. “He was a liar and a thief, who was wanted in Kansas and Oklahoma for horse-rustling. He wasn’t exactly a family man. No wife, no kids. Although he was a frequent customer of someone named Big Sal who worked at the Red Rock, and … Okay, I didn’t need to know that and …” He shot Alison an apologetic smile. “Sorry, um … Anyway, after the poker game, Ruggers tried to backshoot Jamie, but he was drunk, so he missed.

“Jamie could’ve killed him right then and there, in self-defense, but he didn’t. Instead he waited until the man sobered up and then took him on, face-to-face. And yeah, he drew first—he was fast—and he killed the man. He had to. That was the way it worked back then. Ruggers had a kid brother, Cal, who was just sixteen, but he was a mean SOB, too. Jamie ran him out of town, didn’t even give him a chance to pack up his things from his cabin—which is probably the basis for Quinn’s fiction about Jamie evicting the wife and kids in the dark of night.”

It was a good story. But … “You remember all those details,” Alison asked, “from conversations you had with your great-grandfather back when you were ten?”

“Yeah,” A.J. said. “I do. He told me his stories over and over. And his nearly getting shot in the back was one he liked to tell. I think he knew how close he’d come to dying that day, and the memories stayed with him, crystal clear, even all those years later. Killing, even a bastard like Ruggers, didn’t set well with him, either. It weighed on him—the lives he took. But not as much as the lives he didn’t take—namely Quinn’s.”

“Hmm,” she said.

He smiled at that. “I know how hard this is for you to believe, and I can’t tell you how much I respect your willingness to listen, I truly do.”

“But,” she said, because she heard it coming.

“But Silas Quinn wasn’t the hero that he made himself out to be,” A.J. said. “And if you think about it? Almost every account of his so-called heroic deeds can be traced back to a story he himself told first.”

“But everything
you
know,” Alison pointed out, “also can be traced back to a single source—which was your great-grandfather.”

“Not so,” A.J. countered. “I spoke to my mother on the phone last night. I didn’t get a chance to talk for very long because she’d had a hard day and she was tired, but I’m going to be speaking to her again later today. She, um, kind of dropped a bomb on me. I didn’t know this before last night, but it turns out Melody kept diaries, starting back before she married Silas Quinn.”

“Melody Quinn kept diaries?” Oh, if only that were true. What a resource that would be—a glimpse into the heart and mind of the woman who was the Jackie O of her time.

“Melody Gallagher,” A.J. gently corrected her. “And yes, ma’am. Apparently she did.”

“I’m going to want to see them,” Alison told him.

“I thought you probably would,” he said. “Considering they’ll be that documented proof you were looking for.”

“Assuming we can verify, without a doubt, that they were written by Melody Quinn,” she warned him.

“Of course,” he said, and hesitated. And here it came. Whatever excuse he was going to come up with for why she couldn’t see these alleged diaries. “There’s just a … well, a small—smallish—problem.”

“A smallish problem,” she repeated. Of course there was a problem. “They’re lost,” she guessed.

And sure enough, A.J. nodded, but then shook his head. “More like misplaced,” he told her. “But there’re not that many places they could be. My mother’s or maybe my sister Bev’s attic … Or maybe Aunt Betty has them. Or Julie, my cousin …”

He looked at her, and Alison could see that he knew she’d taken a mental step back from him.

“To be honest, I’ve never seen them,” he said quietly. “Never read them. I’m going purely on what my mother told me last night. And I can’t promise you that she didn’t fabricate her story about these diaries completely—in an effort to get me to come home. I haven’t had a chance yet to call my sister, but I can tell you this—if Bev says the diaries are real, they’re real. Then it’s just a matter of finding them.”

Alison looked at him as he stood there in the morning sunlight, a picture of both honesty and sincerity. It was rolled up in that tall, blond, and handsome package, with those steady blue eyes and that knee-melting smile.

If he’d been just an extra, an actor looking to make contacts and work on a Henry Logan picture, she might’ve invited him to lunch. And then dinner. And eventually breakfast.

Yes, he was attractive—so much so that she could imagine having an on-set relationship with him. It would be like going away to camp and having a summer romance—or so Hugh had told her. Single cast and crew members frequently hooked up for the duration, then went their separate ways when the movie was wrapped.

It was no big thing.

But it
would
be a big thing, if even part of his story turned out to be true. She couldn’t sleep with her source of information. It would add a coat of sleaze to any new truths that she did discover, and it would help others discount them.

She wasn’t the only person who believed Silas Quinn was a true American hero, and there would be a huge amount of resistance to any change in this well-known legend.

Alison took another step back from A.J., this one physical. “Suppose they are real,” she suggested. “The diaries. What if your mother kept them from you because they paint a less-than-flattering picture of your great-grandfather? What if they prove not your story but Silas Quinn’s—that Melody
was
abducted by Gallagher. When was the last entry allegedly written?”

“I don’t know,” A.J. said. “Maybe you should talk to my mother.” He laughed. “Yeah. Or maybe you shouldn’t. She’s,
um …” He took out his phone and looked at it. “I don’t have good cell coverage out here, but let me call my sister when I get back to town. She might be the one for you to talk to. I’m pretty sure she’s read them. My mother said it was a family tradition to pass them around among the women.”

“Why don’t you go and do that,” Alison suggested. “I’ll meet you in my office, later.” She checked her watch. “Say … one o’clock?”

A.J. nodded. “I’ll be there.” He turned to leave, but then turned back. “I know there were parts of the story that my great-grandfather didn’t tell me,” he said. “I was ten. I’m sure he left out a lot of the violence. And the sex. I know that when Melody came to him, in Jubilation, to ask him to help her escape, she offered him sex. Of course, in his G-rated version of the story, he said he turned her down, but … Since I’m not ten anymore, I no longer find that so easy to swallow.

“I’m not afraid of the truth, Dr. Carter,” he continued. “I’m well aware that my gramps was human. He was far from perfect, as most men are. Kinda makes Quinn’s ‘documented’ perfection a little suspect, don’t you think?”

He didn’t wait for her to answer. He just tipped his hat, which was charming.

“One o’clock in your office,” he said. “You can return the shirt then.”

The FBI had come to town, a man and a woman in dark suits and sunglasses trying to look inconspicuous as they checked out the pay phone in front of the Circle K, where I’d pressured A.J. to make that anonymous call.