Coming Home to You Page 17

  “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.”

  THE 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…

  “YOU 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.

  “All I want is a measly five thousand dollars,” Bret said.

  “I gave you money two weeks ago. You couldn’t have spent it already.”

  “You can afford it. You carry more than that in your wallet all the time. I’ve seen it.”

  “That’s not the point.”

  “Then what is?” Bret moved back and forth across the bedroom with the nervous pace of a caged animal, seeming more agitated by the moment. His eyes were wild; his body shook although the temperature in the suite was comfortable.

  “You’re on something,” James said.

  “No.”

  James wanted to believe him, but all the physical signs were there. He walked to him and grabbed him around the back of the neck, pulling his face close so he could look him in the eye. “Don’t lie to me.” Bret tried to pull away but couldn’t. Growing up, even though Bret was younger, he was always bigger and stronger. James rarely wrestled him and won. But tonight James moved Bret around as easily as a rag doll. “I want to know what you’re on.”

  “I told you, nothing.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “Who gives a shit what you believe?”

  James let go of him and he fell back across one of the beds. “You’d better give a shit if you want my money. I’m not financing your drug habit.”

  Bret sat up and straightened his clothes. “It’s not drugs.”

  “What, then?”

  “I got in a little over my head on a deal.” He nervously licked his lips. “I need to pay the people off.”

  “What kind of deal?”

  He hesitated, then said, “A bet.”

  “Gambling?” James took his turn pacing now. “Who?”

  “Better you don’t know. Let’s just say that if I don’t come up with five thousand by midnight, I’ll be permanently disabled.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me this to begin with?”

  “Because I was afraid you wouldn’t help me.”

  “Haven’t I always helped you when you needed me?” Bret didn’t say anything. “Haven’t I?”

  Bret stood. “Yeah, big brother. Every time I get my sorry ass in trouble, you’re right there to bail me out and remind me what a disappointment I am to you. Your help always comes with a lecture. So how about giving me the money and the lecture and letting me get the hell out of here?”

  “When are you going to get your life together? You can’t keep a job. You have no plans. No goals. Mom and George are going crazy wondering what to do about you.” Bret didn’t respond, just gave him a blank stare. “I don’t understand why you’re so unhappy. I’d give anything to be you, to be free to do anything I wanted.”

  “Free?” Bret asked angrily. “I’m not free. I’m James Hayes’s little brother. Do you have any idea what that’s like?”

  “You keep throwing that in my face. Why don’t you enlighten me?”

  “Because it’s not worth wasting my time.” He turned and headed toward the door.

  “Wait!” With a sadness that cut him to the bone, James opened his wallet, took out five thousand dollars and offered it to him. “That’s it, Bret. I mean it. Settle your debt and don’t come back asking for more because I won’t give it to you. No more money. And no more lectures.”

  “AND WHAT DID HE DO?” Kate asked, bringing James back the present.

  “He took the money and left without a word.”

  “But it wasn’t the last time you saw him that night, was it?”

  “No. Later, after the concert, we fought again like I told you. Physically.”

  “So everything you told me about that night was true?”

  “Yes. I cut the last set short and went back to the hotel. He wasn’t expecting us so soon. He was having a little party in my suite with four or five people I’d never even seen before. He’d lied to me, Kate. The story about the gambling was a cover.”

  “He admitted that?”

  “Yeah. He used the money I gave him to buy drugs.”

  “I’m so sorry,” she said, putting her hand over his. He turned his hand to thread his fingers through hers, finding comfort in touching her.

  “When I walked in and found him putting that blotting paper in his mouth, I went crazy, started beating the hell out of him and had to be pulled off by some of the band members. When I calmed down, Bret begged me to help him get straightened out, but I thought it was another of his lies and I couldn’t handle it. I’d had enough, so I
told Malcolm and the guys I was leaving for few days to cool off. I didn’t tell them I didn’t intend to come back.”

  “Why was Bret on the plane?”

  “I don’t know. Christmas was coming up and the band had a break until after the holidays, so I’d like to think Bret decided to catch a ride home. But the truth is, he could’ve been so out of it, the guys stuck him on the plane and hoped Mom and George would deal with him when they landed.” He shook his head. “Only…they never landed. Webb, Malcolm—all of them were gone in an instant. When I heard the body count and that I had been on the plane, I knew it was Bret.”

  He thought the tears would come then, but they didn’t. After so many years, so many tears shed, perhaps there were none left to fall.

  “I can’t help thinking,” he continued, “how ironic it is. I envied Bret the freedom he had. I wished more than once I could change places with him permanently and be able to go anywhere and do anything I wanted without people recognizing me. That night I got what I wanted. And in a sad way I think Bret got what he’d always wanted, too.”

  “What was that?”

  “To be me.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  “WHAT ARE YOU GOING to do?” he asked her again.

  “Fix you something to eat.”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  “I know, but at the moment that’s the only answer I have.”

  They walked to the house where Kate made him an omelet and prepared a pot of coffee. She sat quietly at the table while he ate, thinking about everything he’d told her and how difficult it had been for him to share it.

  What was she going to do? She wished she had an answer. This was an impossible situation with no obvious solution. She saw no way to finish this book and maintain her integrity without exposing him. But to expose him, to subject him to the media circus that would follow… If he thought his life had been hell before the crash, it would be a hundred times worse if he suddenly showed up alive. And there was no guarantee, despite the advanced age of his mother and stepfather, that they wouldn’t face criminal charges.