Independence Day - Alternate ending

The shocked faces around the table showed that they had never seen or heard their father speak and act with such hatred. Luke recoiled in his chair when Ray sliced the air. Josie started to protest, but one angry look from Ray stopped her before she could get a word out.

"But don't worry, buddy, I'm not going to kill you today. And I'm not going to kill you, either, Josephine." He put the knife back in its scabbard and the gun back in its holster.

With that, Ray pulled up the investigator's folder. "What we're going to do today is to talk about the kind of man you are, Richard Smithson." The man they knew as Luke squirmed in his chair. Again he started to get up. Ray patted his holster with one hand and gestured him down with the other. He sat back down.

"Josie, you are probably wondering why I called him Richard Smithson just now. It's because that's the name his mother, Ruth Smithson, gave him when he was born back in Philadelphia 36 years ago."

"No, Ray, Luke is 29," Josie corrected him.

"You think that because that's what he told you," Ray responded. "But your handy cocksman is a liar. In fact, he lies better than he fucks, as what I'm about to share with you will reveal. Here is his birth certificate. If you don't believe me, show it to him and ask him if it is real."

She studied it incredulously, then turned to "Luke" and showed it to him. "Is this you?" she asked.

"Yes, but I can explain," he replied, "You see..."

Ray cut him off. "Relax, Romeo, there's more."

He took another page from the folder. "After you dropped out, or flunked out, or got thrown out of Penn State - I'm not sure which - you appeared in Pittsburgh, calling yourself Joe Anderson. It seems that Richard Smithson had become a risky handle after the father of that girl you knocked up threatened to shoot you. I wish I could have seen you dive through that window. Josie, did he ever show you the scar on his arm from the broken glass? How many stitches was that, Rex? Oh nuts, I'm getting ahead of myself."

Connie looked at his arm. She knew just where that scar was. He had told her it was a boating accident.

"So, in Pittsburgh you evidently figured out that post-menopausal women were a safer bet, because you couldn't get them pregnant. Was that it, Rex? Joe? Richard? Luke? Or was it that they had more money than girls your age?

"In Pittsburgh you entered into a relationship with Mrs. Sally Hemings, right? She was 55, had a husband of 75 with cancer. How long did he live before she was widowed and you got your hooks in her money? Eighteen months? Two years? That's what's known in the confidence game racket as a long game, Josie. Did you know that? You see, first he plays the sympathetic friend. Then he fucks them. Then he gains their trust. Then he fucks them over. About right, Slick?

"So, you took off with her life savings and his life insurance payout and you landed in Cleveland. New state, new name, Rex Martin, and new opportunities. Now you had enough money to update your wardrobe, get a nicer apartment, and a shiny Benz. Nice.

"How am I doing so far, Loverboy?"

Luke stared back at him without saying a word. Josie looked defeated. Kristine asked, "Where did you get this stuff, Dad? Is it true?"

"Oh yes, dear, it's true. In Cleveland he began to hang out in the waiting room of a cancer hospital, mining for treasure. There he met, commiserated with, and 'consoled' (making quote marks with his hand) Irene Purcell, whose husband Glenn was being treated. He offered to keep her company at home while her husband was in the hospital. He continued to console her until poor Glenn came home. Having grown impatient, he kindly gave Irene a bottle of brown pills, telling her it was a special herbal supplement for boosting the body's ability to fight cancer. Trusting soul, she believed him, and started adding the brown arsenic pills to his daily meds."

Josie turned green. Her hand went to her mouth. She looked at Ray with terror in her eyes, then jumped up and ran to the powder room. Silence fell over the dining room as they heard her vomiting into the toilet. Kristine got up and went to help her, grabbing a glass of water from the kitchen. They returned to the table a few minutes later.

"Oh God, Ray, I didn't know," Josie mumbled, looking at him with beseeching eyes.

"Are you okay Mom?" Leo asked.

"She's had a shock," Kristine covered for her. "Is there much more Dad? I don't think she can take much more."

"Hell, I'm the one with the bad heart," he laughed, cruelly. "No, not much more. So, anyway, poor Glenn Purcell died about two weeks after coming home from the hospital. There was some surprise, because he had seemed to be getting better. But, it was cancer after all, so nobody looked deeper. And good ol' Rex was there to console her. She was so trusting she asked him to help her with her finances. He did, too. Except really he was helping himself."

Ray turned over another page. "Let's see, next stop was Chicago, where he acquired an accent, a little pencil mustache, and became Antonio Reyes. There he wooed and wed Gloria Sanchez. Her husband had just died, so he did the right thing and married her. Then cleaned her out.

Martin Masterson turned up in Kansas City, mustache shaved, accent shed, and another wealthy soon-to-be-widowed-by-cancer victim. He made Joyce Hardin fall in love with his cock while comforting her, slipped her some brown cancer-fighting supplement pills, and married her as soon after the funeral as it seemed decent. After he stole her savings and lit out, she remembered that bottle of pills he'd given her for her husband and showed it to his doctor. Doc had it analyzed. Arsenic.

"He brought her money with him to Phoenix, where Luke went to work, and you know that part of the story - better than I do, I guess. Tell me, Josie, how many of those heart pills were you supposed to give me?"

Josie sobbed. "One a day for a week, then two a day, then three a day until you got better. I swear I didn't know. How do you feel? Did I poison you?"

"I'm okay, I didn't take them. I wanted to show them to my doctor first and get his okay. I do have to ask, though, had Luke begun to soften you up to marry him after I died?"

"He mentioned it once, but I shot him down quick. I don't love him, I only loved his - well, you know."

For some reason Luke had a little smirk. "That'll be gone soon," Ray thought to himself, seeing it.

"How did you find all this out, Dad?" Kristine asked again.

"I have a very good investigator," I replied.

"One more question, Josephine," Ray asked seriously. "Did you ever leave Big Dick alone in the house?"

"No, well only when I went to the bathroom or something. Oh wait, there was one time when I had to run out and get beer for him. Why?"

"Because somebody went into my office and found my password book and then tried to log into our bank accounts and retirement funds. I hadn't kept the passwords in that book current, so he didn't get in, but he sure as heck tried." Josie didn't think she could sink any deeper into her chair, but she tried.

"So, anyway, if you weren't keeping score, that was five vulnerable women conned, four of them left broke, two husbands murdered and a third one attempted, and two wives abandoned without benefit of divorce, so throw in bigamy as well. Allison, will you please go to the front door and signal to the marshals in the car out front that they can come in?"

Luke jumped up and started for the back door. Ray pulled out his pistol and fired just over Luke's head. Wallpaper fragments and plaster dust landed in his hair. Ray walked up to him, gun pointed at his nose.

"If somehow you ever get out of jail and even think of trying to harm me or anyone I used to care about, my friend Rocco knows some guys who will kill you and make sure your body is never found. Ever hear of Jimmy Hoffa?"

Again there were gasps around the table. His son and daughter looked at each other with wondering eyes asking "Who is this guy?"

Just then the marshals were shown into the room by Allison. They put Luke in handcuffs, read him his rights, and informed him he has been charged in various states with grand larceny, theft by conversion, two counts of murder, and will have one of attempted murder added to the list.

They all watched him as the officers took him out the front door. Then Ray holstered his gun, took a last sip of coffee, and turned his back on the people who had betrayed him. Without saying a word he picked up the Manila envelope, went to his office, came back out with an already-packed suitcase, went to the garage and drove off in his car. Five minutes later Josie was served with divorce papers.

Ray intended that he would never see them again. Under terms of the divorce Josie was left with the house and $300,000. Ray had taken the rest.

The children turned on their mother for her recklessness, and for costing them the love of their father. The grandchildren were devastated at losing their grandfather and felt guilty for making him feel they had betrayed him.

Josie never spent time with another man. Her sex drive disappeared in the span of the few minutes it took for her lover to be taken off to jail and her husband to leave her. She never even touched her toys again. Crushed by guilt she shrank within herself and rarely left the house. She began to drink heavily.

Ray didn't go far. He bought a house in Sun City and tried to make a new life. But he found that his weakened heart did not leave him with enough energy to maintain things on his own. Josie had cooked, cleaned, done the laundry, done the shopping, all the mundane tasks of keeping up a home and a family. Ray didn't have it in him. He sold the house and moved into an assisted living facility. He instantly became the object of the attentions of a drove of widows, but he wasn't interested.

Ray did keep up his weekly golf game with his old friends for as long as his heart would let him. His friends were shocked by what had happened to him, and offered all the emotional support they could. When Ray became unable to continue golfing, Cousin Vinnie took his place in the foursome, and every Saturday after their game his friends would visit him in the home and they would play cards.

Eventually a woman who had known Ray and Josie in their younger years moved into the same facility. She tried to engage him in conversation, but he didn't want to talk about the old days. It pained her to see how lonely and sad he was, so she reached out to Josie and suggested that the family should try to reconnect.

"He won't want to see me," Josie said between sobs, crying with relief that Ray was still alive, and astonished to learn that he was still close by. "He and Allison always had a special connection, I'll see if she can go to see him."

Ray was stunned one day a week later when Allison came into the lounge where he had been playing dominoes with a couple of the other male residents. He recognized her at once, although she was no longer the fresh girl he remembered. She was now a pretty young woman, and she had a two little kids with her.

Ray began to rise from his chair, but it was now a difficult task for him and he hadn't made it to his feet when Allison had her arms around him in a tight hug. "Don't knock me over," he chuckled between tears.

"Oh, Grandpa, I love you. It is wonderful to see you. We all love you and we all have missed you so much, she said, quietly, into his ear as she clung to him. Everyone is so sorry about what happened, and so guilty for being so careless with your feelings."

She paused then and pulled up straight and turned to her children. "Grandpa, these are your great-grandchildren Raymond and Lizzie," she said proudly. And children, this is your Great-grandpa Ray."

Ray sank back in his chair and reached out his arms to the children and took them in a bear hug. None of them really knew what to say.

Allison wasn't sure if Ray would want to hear about the family or if he was still too bitter to want to talk about it. But when she started running through the list, starting with her parents Kristine and Eric, and then all the others, he seemed genuinely interested.

As the ringleader of that dreadful Independence Day family meeting, Kristine had borne the greatest guilt, aside from Josie, of course. She and Eric had gone through a rough patch with their marriage, but they had done counseling and were still together. Allison's sister Julia had obtained a doctorate and was teaching at Duke University. And so on through other family members.

She saved Josie for last. "Grandma is broken, Grandpa. She hardly ever leaves the house. When we go to visit she just goes through the motions. She's drinking a lot - I'm worried that she's going to kill herself with booze." Ray didn't say anything, but she could tell from his eyes that he was distressed to hear this.

"Grandpa, I have an idea. Independence Day is next month. That was always such a happy day for our family, until Mom and Grandma ruined it. Would it be okay if the family came here to visit? Or better still, if we had a celebration at my house and we came to bail you out of this place for the day?

"That sounds nice," Ray answered. "I have missed all of you every minute of every day - there isn't much else to think about here. I was hurt so badly that I swore I would never see anybody from the family again. I'm afraid that oath may have wound up hurting me more than the original insult. Let me think about it, but I think yes, that is something I would like to do. Would Josie be there?"

"Well, I guess that would be up to you. My idea was that everybody would come. I guess we could exclude her if that's what you want, but I'm sure that if we had this gathering and didn't include her she would go someplace in her head and never come back."

"Alright, let's do it. Thank you, sweetheart. You know, I have some friends who have acted as spies for me, keeping an eye on things. But there's not much you can tell about people just driving by their house."

------

Allison pulled it off. She arranged to have the entire family gather at her house - Julie even flew in from Duke. Leo drove to pick him up and bring him to the party. There were hugs and tears and stories and laughs and reconnection. When Ray first walked through the door Josie hung back, afraid of what he might say or do to her. When he saw her there, feeling small, his heart opened. He walked over to her, took her in his arms, hugged her and kissed her, just like he had so many times for so many years.

"I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry," she repeated through tears as she clung to him,

"That's past, Sweetheart. We've all suffered enough. Let's leave it behind and move on," Ray said. Then he turned back to see the faces of his loved ones, not a dry eye in the room, and said, "I'm old. Which chair is mine. I need to sit down. And I need there to be another chair next to me." He squeezed Josie's hand.

The rest of the day was spent healing. Ray instructed them that there was to be no more dwelling on the unpleasant events of the past. He was updated on everybody's lives, and got to know his great-grandchildren. When evening came they watched fireworks on TV, then Leo drove him back to the home.

They got together from time to time after that. With the great weight of her guilt eased by Ray's kindness, Josie began going to AA meetings and sobered up. Relations between all the family members became more comfortable.

Eventually the inevitable occurred, and Ray's heart gave out. Josie died not long after. They are buried side by side.

------

Ray had correctly anticipated that the murder cases against "Luke" would be hard to prove. He did five years for the money he had stolen, and was required to pay restitution with whatever was left.

Three days after he was released from prison he was approached on the sidewalk by a panhandler asking for help. While he was distracted, a car pulled up. Two men jumped out and dragged him into the back seat. He hasn't been seen or heard from since. Nobody misses him.