Coming Home to You (17 page)

He switched on the lamp and ignored the dust that coated his desk. Maybe one day, if he ever got his life back together, he’d build a new barn at the homestead, although he had to admit this old place had served him well for a lot of years.

He was adding up his first column of figures when the sound of the wooden door opening and closing made him raise his head. He made a mental note to oil the rusty hinges.

“You forget somethin’?” he called out.

But Aubrey didn’t answer.

He got up from the desk, walked to the door and looked down the dark alley. The heaters with their eerie orange glow provided the only illumination and did little to breach the darkness, but the silhouette of a figure by the door was unmistakable. “Aubrey?”

Kate stepped out of the shadows.

“You are really something,” she said, the harshness to her voice letting him know this wasn’t his sweet Kate talking, but the hard-edged reporter Kathryn Morgan. He could feel her anger, even from thirty feet away. “You jerked me around like a puppet. You made me doubt my own sanity when I couldn’t separate the two of you in my head. You used me, lied to me, manipulated me. You made me feel cheap and dirty because I let you touch me even when I knew it was wrong.”

She walked over to him and slapped him hard across the face.

“Damn you, James!”

T
HREE DAYS PASSED
before he decided he was ready to talk. On Sunday afternoon he showed up unannounced at the motel, looking as if he hadn’t slept or shaved or even eaten since she’d left him. His handsome face appeared gaunt, his eyes red-rimmed and puffy. In the instant after she opened the door, she felt remorse for the agony she was putting him through, but it was quickly replaced with the anger that had boiled within her since she’d realized who he was and how he’d manipulated her.

At the barn when she’d confronted him, he’d denied everything and refused to talk to her. He’d walked away. Three days of stewing about it had apparently convinced him she wasn’t going to simply disappear.

“You have to give me the chance to convince you not to publish what you know,” he said now. Not… “I’m sorry,” or “Forgive me,” or “I care about you,” or any of the declarations her schoolgirl heart had dreamed he might make.

“I
have
to?” she repeated incredulously. “I don’t have to do a damn thing.”

“Let’s get out of here. Will you take a ride with me?”

“I suppose.”

In the truck, as they rode, the air was frigid, but not only from the weather. James became silent and morose. For the moment Kate was glad of his silence, because she didn’t know how they could ever resolve this. It also gave her the opportunity to study him.

James. She still couldn’t believe it, even though the evidence sat next to her. She’d wished again and again after the plane crash that some miracle would
bring him back, and here he was—older and bigger than the James she’d known, but still vital and overwhelming. A mature man had replaced the willowy long-haired youth.

“Where are we going?” she asked.

“My house. If we’re going to talk, I don’t want to risk someone overhearing.”

“Should I be worried you’ll slit my throat and dump me in a ravine somewhere?”

His gaze flicked to her and returned to the road. “That’s not funny, Kate.”

“It wasn’t meant to be.”

“You can’t actually believe I’d hurt you.”

She wanted to say he already had. Instead, she chose silence, turning to watch the passing scenery from the side window. Let him wonder what she thought.

A few minutes later they pulled into the yard. James parked the truck and got out, coming around to open her door. When Kate stepped down, Sallie came wriggling up, licking Kate’s shoes and slacks. Kate knelt and rubbed her head. “Hey, girl. How are you?”

“She missed you,” he said, making her look up. He gave her a small tentative smile. “
I
missed you.”

She frowned. “Don’t,” she warned. “I’ve heard enough of your lies to last me a lifetime.” Angrily she stood and walked to the front door. James had left it unlocked, and she pushed it open and went inside. He followed her in, turning up the gas heater in the living room to knock the chill out of the air. He took their jackets and threw them over the back of the couch.

They faced each other across the living room like boxers in a ring. “Do you want to hit me again?” he asked finally.

The absurd question took some of the steam out of her. “Of course not.”

“Then can we talk calmly about this?”

She swallowed the anger that had settled in her throat. “I don’t know. I’m so furious right now I’m not sure I can stay in the same room with you long enough to talk.”

“Will you try?”

Reluctantly she made her way to the couch. He came forward, apparently intending to sit next to her, but she quickly pointed to the other end. “Down there. I don’t want you touching me, trying to manipulate me.”

He did as she said, leaning forward to rest his forearms on his knees. “First,” he said, “I want to tell you that, although I had no choice but to mislead you, I didn’t like doing it.”

“You used me. You pretended to have feelings for me so I’d get distracted and you could play out this bizarre little masquerade of yours.”

“You’re wrong about that.”

“What really infuriates me is how you compromised my book. All that stuff about what a bad guy James Hayes was. I don’t know what’s true and what’s fiction anymore. Do you know you’ve ruined years of work?” She didn’t give him a chance to answer. “What possible reason is there for doing that?”

“It’s a long story.”

“Another fictionalized one, no doubt.”

“Come on, Kate, ease up.”

“Ease up? You’re joking. All those lies you told, and you expect me to calmly sit here and listen to more of them?”

He sprang to his feet. “This isn’t getting us anywhere. How long do you intend to stay mad at me?”

“As long as I breathe.”

“Ah, forget it. Talking to you is like hitting myself in the head with a baseball bat. I don’t know why I was stupid enough to think you’d care about me enough to listen.”

He walked with angry strides to the front door, jerked it open and walked out.

Kate ran after him and onto the porch. He was already in the yard headed toward the side of the house, with Sallie racing next to him. “Where are you going?”

“Out,” he said, not stopping.

“It’s freezing.”

“Yeah, but that’s still a lot warmer than being in there with you.”

“But you forgot your—” he disappeared around the corner of the house “—jacket.” She sighed, went back inside and slammed the door. Well, let him freeze.

P
IGHEADED
. R
ATCHET-JAWED
. Temperamental. With every stroke of the brush on the horse’s flank, James thought of another word to describe Kate. Annoying. Exasperating. Stubborn. He’d never met a woman who riled him more than she did.

Sallie whined at his feet a second before the barn door squeaked. James had his back to the door, but Sallie’s wagging tail told him it was Kate and not the wind that had made the noise. He continued to brush the horse, his heart in his throat, and it was only a few seconds before she came and stood silently at the horse’s head. He glanced at her and she held out the jacket she’d draped over her arm. He slipped it on, then immediately resumed his brushing.

“Your leg,” she said stiffly. “Did it heal okay?”

“Yes.”

“And your side?”

“Fine.”

She said nothing else for several minutes, only watched as he worked. The horse didn’t need brushing. He’d already done it once today. But he enjoyed it. And it kept his hands busy and away from that lovely throat of hers.

“You still play the guitar sometimes, don’t you?” The question surprised him and he stopped brushing
to look at her. He had an old acoustic guitar in the storage room, and occasionally at night he took it out, sat on the porch and serenaded Sallie and the deer that ate his garden. But Kate couldn’t possibly have known that.

“How did you know I still play?”

“The calluses on your fingertips. I noticed them that day at the ranch, when you took me to see the graves of your ancestors.” He raised his hand and rubbed his thumb across the calluses made by pressing the strings. “At the time I thought it odd you’d have calluses like that on one hand and not the other, particularly on the ends and not the pads of your fingers.”

“Is that what tipped you off?”

“Partly.” She reached into her pocket, took out a red-and-gray capsule and gave it to him. “Then there was this. You hid it in your jeans and lied about taking it that night you got hurt. James Hayes is allergic to penicillin, but Bret Hayes wasn’t.”

“I was hoping that had dissolved in the washing machine.”

“I found it when I emptied your pockets.”

“One pill and calluses on my fingers couldn’t possibly have been all that gave me away.”

“No, it was a hundred little things that didn’t add up. Your lifestyle, the fact that you aren’t living on the money you inherited. The inconsistencies bothered me from the beginning, and they only really made sense if you were James pretending to be Bret. But that seemed so implausible I couldn’t force myself to even consider it. After I did, after I accepted
it
might
be possible, I set out to prove what I suspected.”

“And how did you do that?”

She took a deep breath and swallowed, as if the question was painful. “By being logical. I started thinking… If the body identified by forensics wasn’t yours and the body matched the records, then obviously the records belonged to the dead man—but had your name on them. I checked the chain of evidence and it was secure. No one could have tampered with the records after they arrived in the hands of the authorities. So the person who
supplied
the records had to have made the substitution. I took a second look at the report and found the identification was done solely through dental and sinus X rays supplied by your stepfather, who also happened to be your dentist. Since he’d also done most of Bret’s early dental work, he had records for both of you. All he had to do was switch the names.”

“But you can’t prove it. You can’t prove I’m James.”

“You’re right. I can’t. But I can prove you’re
not
Bret. I had a cop friend compare your fingerprints to the ones on Bret’s old arrest record, and they don’t match.”

“You took my fingerprints?”

“No, but I had them on one of my computer disks. You picked it up that last day at the kitchen table while we were talking. The disk was new. I’d gotten it out of the box that morning to make a backup of a file. The only prints on it were yours and mine.”

“Hell.”

“Your stepfather could be in a great deal of trouble,
you know. Tampering with a police investigation is a serious offense.”

“You’re not telling me anything I haven’t thought about or agonized over for years.” He sighed and forcefully pushed his hand through his hair. “What else do you know?”

“That you had a history of masquerading as Bret at least two years before the crash. Almost anyone would think the deed to this place and Pine Acres look fine, but the signatures had to be forged, because there’s no way the real Bret could have signed them, even though he was still alive.”

“How did you figure that out?” He was getting more exasperated by the minute. He’d known all along that she was clever, that she was one of the few people who knew enough about him to figure out what he’d done. But, he had to admit grudgingly, she was even more clever than he’d imagined.

“I used dates from newspaper articles, Bret’s employment records and other sources, and had the computer run a chronology. Bret was on an oil rig in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico at the time this property was purchased, and until he got fired from the rig six months later, he didn’t come ashore. The person who signed the papers had to be you disguised as Bret. Besides, he never had that kind of money. What I figure happened is that you used Bret’s name and bought this place as…I don’t know, some kind of hideaway. When you got tired of dealing with your fans and the media, you tucked your hair under your hat, put on a pair of cowboy boots and
became
him. The family resemblance was so strong that you were able to get away with it, despite the five-year age
difference. The ruse worked because the people here had never seen the real Bret. Did he even know about this place?”

“No, I never told him. I couldn’t risk him showing up and people suddenly seeing two of us.”

“Who knew?”

“Only Mom and George. Malcolm knew I had a place, but he didn’t know where. And I never told the guys in the band.”

“So you had this different identity conveniently available when you needed it, and everything worked fine until that night after the concert when you and Bret had your fight. He took your seat on the plane for some reason and you came here to cool off. When the plane crashed, your family didn’t call you because they thought, along with everyone else in the world, that it was
James
who’d been killed. The telephone wasn’t really unplugged, was it?”

“No. They didn’t call me because they thought I was dead.”

He blew out a heavy breath, closed his eyes and rubbed the spot between them where a headache was beginning to throb. He was also feeling queasy, a reaction, he supposed, to the stress he’d been under the past couple of days.

She’d caught him. And it sickened him that when she told, he’d be forced right back into the hell he’d managed to escape.

She touched his arm, causing him to open his eyes. He looked into her concerned face. “Are you all right?” she asked. “You’re white as a sheet.”

“Yeah, I’m okay. A little sick to my stomach.”

“I’ve been through that myself the last few days.”

Taking the brush from his hand and putting it down, she guided him to where he’d stacked bales of hay. She forced him to sit on one and put his head between his knees, pushing aside a confused Sallie who was trying to lick his face. “Go lie down and let me take care of him now,” she told the dog.

She stood in front of him and lightly rubbed the back of his bent head. Out of compassion? He prayed it was something deeper.

When he felt better, he lifted his head and leaned against the wall. She sat down next to him. “You haven’t slept, have you?” she asked.

“Not in a couple of days.”

“And you probably haven’t eaten anything.”

He told her he hadn’t, finding it frightening that she knew him so well. No wonder he was in this mess.

“You’re going to make yourself sick,” she said. “You have to start taking better care of yourself.”

“Under the circumstances I don’t really think it matters very much, do you?”

“I can’t see how it will help for you to have another breakdown.” His question must have shown on his face because she added, “I assumed you had some sort of breakdown or a serious case of depression after your brother died. I can’t imagine you not going to his funeral only out of fear that you’d be recognized. You loved him too much. You must have been physically unable to go.”

The fact that she didn’t think him a total monster, that she understood how devastated he’d been by Bret’s death, gave him a glimmer of hope.

“I was sick for months. I loved him, Kate. If you
don’t believe anything else I’ve told you, believe that. I didn’t want him to die.”

“I know. I never doubted that.”

“It was supposed to be me.”

She turned away, but before she did, he thought he saw something in her expression. Pain? If it was, then perhaps he hadn’t crushed whatever feelings she’d once had for him.

“What are you going to do?” he asked.

She leaned back against the wall, tilted her head upward and studied the aging beams above them. “I honestly don’t know.”

Indecision. That was good. He’d expected her to know exactly what she was going to do, to threaten to burn his ass in print for the lies he’d told her. This had to be a huge story, one that every reporter in the world would be ecstatic to write.

“This story will probably earn you another Pulitzer.”

“That’s not important to me, and you know it.”

“Then walk away from it. Forget you know who I am.”

There
was
pain this time when she looked at him. It distorted her lovely face and he suddenly had a sense of how difficult this situation was for her. She was hurting. She’d uncovered the biggest story of her career. And it was obvious she didn’t want to have to tell it.

“Please…walk away,” he urged again.

“You don’t understand what you’re asking. I’ve spent my whole life standing up for one thing—the truth. That’s not some intangible principle to me, but a very real and precious thing.”

“I’m not asking you to lie. Just don’t tell what you know. Don’t finish this book.”

“My silence would be the same thing. If I don’t correct the lies, I’m validating them. Hiding the fact that you didn’t die in the plane crash makes me as guilty of conspiracy as the rest of you. And I have to finish this book, James. If I don’t, Marcus and my editor will become suspicious. They know I’d never abandon this project because I’ve been too passionate about it. And I have a contract.”

“But if you finish it, you’ll hurt Mom and Ellen and George. You’ll hurt me.”

“I know.” Her voice was thick with anguish.

“I can’t go back, Kate. I can’t go back to what I was, who I was. That life came close to destroying me once. I couldn’t survive it a second time.”

“Did you hate it that much?”

“Yes. At least, toward the end I did. The music wasn’t enough anymore. Too much overshadowed it. Lenny’s breakdown, Lauren’s suicide. Those fans getting killed. One tragedy followed another. Then, in those last few months, Bret started showing up unexpectedly, demanding large sums of money, saying I owed him for all the years he’d suffered for being my little brother.
Owed
him for being my brother. My God! Can you imagine how that made me feel? He started hanging out with people who didn’t have anything better to do than party all night. When I caught him using drugs, that was it. I couldn’t take any more. I quit.”

“Quit?” She sat straight up. Her voice and her shocked look told him he’d finally said something she hadn’t known.

“Yeah, Kate. Quit. I walked out without even packing a bag, intending never to go back. So you see, it wouldn’t really be a lie if you said rock star James Hayes died that night. He really did. And before that airplane ever crashed.”

T
HE CRITICS CALLED HIM
a genius, but he was simply a kid who enjoyed music more than he enjoyed anything else. He couldn’t understand why people paid to hear him play and sing when, to his own ears, he could never quite get the music he composed to sound right.

But they did come, night after night and by the thousands. And as long as they came, he played. He always considered the concerts an extension of the jamming sessions he and Lenny and some of the guys used to have on weekends in the basement of Lenny’s grandmother’s house. He played because it was fun—for a while.

Even now, with years to reflect on it, he wasn’t sure when or how the golden life had started to lose its luster. Maybe it was because he’d been naive to think that charmed life would continue, that he could play how he wanted, when he wanted, with nothing to interfere. Stardom had been unexpected. And because he was too young to understood that stardom carried a price tag, he let himself be lured by it.

And everything happened so quickly. Within weeks of his first album’s release, he couldn’t go anywhere without being recognized. At first it was flattering. He was only a kid, after all, a thin kid with little sexual experience who suddenly found himself adored and desired by women he didn’t even know. And for a
time he allowed himself to sample everything that was offered to him.

But he soon found himself a prisoner of the people he worked so hard to entertain. The fans literally tried to tear him apart if he let them get too close.

He endured it for years, until the slender threads that held him to his brother began to break, one by one. By the time of the concert in Rome, Georgia, he no longer knew the angry man he fought with in that hotel room. The good kid who’d wanted to follow in his footsteps had turned into a hate-filled man who blamed everyone but himself for his inability to find his place in life.

You owe me
. The words Bret spat in anger at him that night still sliced James like a knife…

“Y
OU OWE ME
, man. Do you have any idea what it’s like being the little brother of the great James Hayes?”

The contempt in his brother’s voice surprised James, and for a moment he was speechless. Their relationship had deteriorated over the past few months, but he hadn’t realized how far until Bret had shown up tonight demanding more money.