It Wasn't Always Like This

by Joy Preble

  The dream shifted then to the museum. “Hurry!” she told Charlie. “Oh, God, Charlie. Hurry.” The smoke assaulted her lungs. Flames had engulfed everything. In her dream, she ran faster, pulling ahead of Charlie, the heat of the f ire drawing her forward in spite of her fear.

  “Stop!” He grabbed her arm. “You can’t.”

  She wrenched her arm away. Flames were shooting through the roof. From inside she heard one long, thin scream: her mother. She grabbed the door handle, and her hands blistered, though she couldn’t feel the pain.

  Her family was dead. “But they drank the tea,” she would say over and over, willing their charred remains to return to life even as the horrible truth sank in.

  Only this time the dream was different. This time, the smell of smoke didn’t fade. Nor did the heat in her lungs. There was a shrill sound in the background, punctuated now by a pounding, a f ist slamming against something over and over.

  Emma’s eyes f luttered open. She was coughing. She was awake.

  The air reeked of smoke.

  Now. Here. In her apartment. In Dallas.

  “Shit,” she said. “What?” She was on her couch, laptop open next to her. She’d been researching after talking to Meehan. She must have drifted off. So what was with the f ire alarm? And the pounding—

  Wait. Someone was at her door.

  “Emma O’Neill!” a gruff voice shouted. “I know you’re in there. Open up!”

  She stumbled over to the door and threw it open. The knob wasn’t hot; wasn’t that a good sign? In her half-awake state, she saw Detective Pete Mondragon of Albuquerque, New Mexico, standing in her smoke-f illed hallway. For a moment Emma thought she was still asleep. He wore jeans and the brown Carhartt f leece-lined jacket that always made him look like an aging cowboy.

  “O’Neill,” he barked, tapping the cement f loor with his square-toed boot for emphasis. “Your place is on f ire. Let’s go.”

  Emma blinked a few times. Pete? Why is Pete here?

  People were running up and down and she could hear sirens outside. The smoke stung her nose and eyes and tickled her throat, and she felt panic grow into something the size of a basketball in her chest.

  Pete reached for her hand. “Emma, we need to go.” He punctuated this with his own cough.

  Emma stepped into the hallway, and her head swam suddenly. She nearly collapsed into Pete’s arms.

  “You are not going to freeze up on me, got it, O’Neill?” he grunted. He tightened his grip around her, nudging her back inside. With his free hand, he snagged her hobo bag from the narrow coffee table and waited until she took it from him. Then he nodded to the laptop. “You’ll want that, too, O’Neill. So put it in that fancy purse of yours.”

  Emma frowned. “It’s not—”

  “Just do it.”

  She hefted up the laptop and slid it into her bag. It didn’t quite f it, and something about this annoyed her enough to break through the fear. “Watch,” she muttered, feeling like an idiot but nonetheless committed to what had just popped into her mind. She shoved the bag at Pete and strode the short distance to her bedroom.

  “Wrong way, O’Neill.”

  She didn’t answer. Her feet f inally seemed to be working, so she dashed to the pocket watch, still resting on its hook on the wall by her bed. No way was she leaving without this. It was the one thing she couldn’t lose, wouldn’t lose. Not after all these years of hanging on to it—

  “C’mon, sweetheart.” Pete was at her elbow now. He had never called her “sweetheart,” never called her anything that wasn’t her name until this moment. “Did I mention that your building is burning? We need to get the hell out of here.” His gaze skimmed the pocket watch as she jammed it into her bag. “Damn, O’Neill, really? You can’t live without that? Looks like it weighs a ton.”

  “It’s . . .” she began, but only ended up coughing more.

  “Hell, Emma, it’s from the boy. I know. No sense us both asphyxiating over it. Let’s go.” But his tone was gentle. Or as gentle as it could be.

  The f ire alarm was still screeching. Smoke from the hallway now f illed Emma’s apartment with a poisonous gray fog. The sirens outside were louder. She could hear a voice crackling over a loudspeaker, barking something distorted and incomprehensible, though she could guess the message: Get the hell out of the building now.

  “Why are you here?” Emma choked out as she let Pete guide her out the door.

  “Because you need me,” Pete said. “And you’re a stubborn cuss about saying so.”

  True enough. At present, Emma was in no position to argue with either of those observations.

  “It’s not your day to die, O’Neill,” Pete added, and under his coughing, she thought she heard him chuckle. He put one big hand on her shoulder. “You think I wouldn’t come for you? Then you got a screw loose, Emma O.”

  She stared at him. With a sharp yank, he tugged her down the hall, away from the heat. She’d been alone for too long, but even Emma O’Neill eventually recognized a lifeline in the dark when presented with one. After all, he’d thrown her one before.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Albuquerque, New Mexico

  Four Years Prior to the Present

  Allie Golden’s murder turned up no connection to the Church of Light, no lead Emma might follow to the people who were hunting her. Random kidnapping, random poisoning, random everything. And so she had no intention of staying in Albuquerque. Not even after feeling at ease with Detective Pete Mondragon, not even after telling him that she’d loved a boy once, not even after the green chile cheeseburgers, though Pete was right: they were mind-blowingly iconic. Sublime, in fact.

  She certainly had zero intention of sharing the rest of her strange and painful truths with him.

  On the other hand, they’d investigated the murder of a young girl together. A gruesome and unfair murder. That kind of intense and tragic thing built bridges, wanted or not, even if such tragedies were the hallmark of your job.

  Besides, Pete trusted her from the start, accepting at face value the Emma O’Neill she had initially presented to him. This was the Emma anyone could f ind with a cursory online search, the private investigator. If he’d looked deeper back then, he wouldn’t have found much more, anyway, except that she never took on any clients and had zero client feedback.

  She hadn’t questioned his reason for believing her. Sometimes, she’d learned, it was like that between people. You just found yourself trusting them. Until you didn’t. She could see that he was lonely, too, in that way you are when you spend too much time rooting around the dark underbelly of the world, when you see on a daily basis the kind of depraved horrors people are capable of. Maybe your own life has gone off the rails because of it, and you’ve brought yourself back, step by painful step.

  That was Pete’s story; Emma sensed it long before he told her any of the specif ics.

  Mostly she liked his company. He made her laugh with his clichéd advice, with those little hackneyed nuggets that always proved wiser and truer than most everything else she’d encountered over the last century. (A person’s teeth really were the surest sign of privilege. Poor Allie Golden had terrible teeth. She’d never stood a chance, had she?) But Emma knew she couldn’t stay in Albuquerque. If she did, it would be only a matter of time before he noticed the sameness she could never quite disguise, no matter how she changed her hair or wore her makeup or picked her outf its.

  And if she told him?

  Well, that was dangerous knowledge, and Emma had enough death on her conscience. Besides, how could she even start? Tell Pete that she had been born in 1896? That Benjamin Harrison had been president, and the f irst movie theater had yet to open? That not long after she turned seventeen, she drank a tea brewed from a stream that was in actuality a Fountain of Youth? A fountain that had disappeared? Maybe for good, or maybe to spring up some
where else? That people had been trying to kill her ever since?

  No. Impossible.

  Had it not been for the other secret—for what happened with a boy named Aaron Tinsley—she might not ever have told Pete the truth about her . . . condition. She would have stayed a few weeks, a month maybe because she enjoyed eating those cheeseburgers with him, and the pull of having a friend was strong. Having a friend was the f irst sign of having a life, a real life. But eventually, she’d have disappeared.

  “I loved a boy. But now he’s gone,” she’d told Pete. That was enough.

  Except it wasn’t.

  The truth was that Emma was already grieving when she’d shuff led onto the Allie Golden case. The truth, one she still could barely admit to herself, was that she’d suffered a loss—a loss beyond Charlie, one that had nothing and everything to do with him—and it had wrecked her in ways she thought she could no longer be wrecked.

  It had been almost one hundred years since Emma had seen Charlie. Almost a century of keeping their secrets. Of wearing her seventeen-year-old face and everything that came with that.

  In the end, she couldn’t pinpoint the exact moment she knew she would tell Pete. Sometimes the truth is like that, sliding out and surprising you even as you’re working up another lie.

  They were having lunch together at a diner on Candelaria. Emma knew it would be one of their last times together, knew she’d be leaving Albuquerque soon. It was a funky, tiny ten-table place that served stuffed sopapillas and carne adovada. The spicy menudo was Pete’s favorite and the reason he’d picked the restaurant.

  “It’s made with tripe,” he explained when she sniffed at the bowl. Emma had made a face. Tripe was just a nicer-sounding word for “cow intestines.” Really, tripe didn’t sound nice at all. It sounded exactly like what it was. There were things she missed from the good old days. Consuming tripe was not one of them.

  “Best thing for a hangover,” he added. “Not that I indulge in those anymore.”

  She nodded. Watched him slurp a healthy chunk of tripe and chew it with an admirable enthusiasm. He was the real deal, Pete Mondragon. It was a shame she had to move on.

  “Something on my face?” he said, and she shook her head, realized she’d been staring. “You okay, then?” he added. He leaned across the bowl of menudo, gaunt face shifting to a solemn expression.

  She saw in his eyes that he trusted her. She had given him far too little, but whatever he saw . . .

  She would tell him. Yes, she was going to tell him. She’d tell him and then she’d go. It wouldn’t matter if he believed her or not. She’d be gone. But she’d have told someone. The right someone. Suddenly that was all that mattered.

  “There’s something I have to tell you.” She hesitated, the words clogging her throat.

  When she stayed silent, Pete put down his spoon. “I’ve seen a lot of things in this job, O’Neill. Awful ones and wonderful ones. What people do to each other, what they are inside where they think no one will ever get to. The part they think no one will see. And here’s what I believe. Whatever you are, whatever you’ve been hiding, you’re one of the good ones. I’d stake my life on it. And I’ve never said that to anyone, not even my ex-wife.” He let out a faraway laugh. “Which says something pretty bad about me.”

  Emma sighed. Was she really going to do this? He’d think she was crazy. “You’re not going to believe me,” she said.

  “Tell me, anyway.”

  Something in those stark three words pushed her to say it. “I have this immunity in my blood,” she began, thinking she’d keep it simple. But it wasn’t simple, was it? So she told him all of it. Let him call her crazy. She was leaving. If there was one thing Emma had learned how to do well, it was that.

  And so out the rest came. She told Pete about Florida and the stream and the plant and Glen Walters’s Church of Light. About her family and the stranger named Kingsley Lloyd who had convinced Emma’s and Charlie’s fathers to brew the plant into a tea. About the f ire that killed everyone she loved, except Charlie, the one she loved the most, or thought she did.

  Confessing felt strange and daring and impossible. And despite what Pete had said, she waited for him to tell her she was insane. Because what else could he think?

  But he’d listened. So she told him about Eddie Higgins who looked everything and nothing like Charlie Ryan.

  By the time she was done, they had left the restaurant and were walking up Candelaria, Sandia Peak looming in the distance. There was snow at the top. She’d ridden the tram up once, a mile into the air, and as the car hung at the halfway point, she’d started crying because being above the world like that felt like f lying, and that reminded her of Charlie.

  “You ready to lock me up in some padded room yet?” she asked, only half-joking.

  Pete looked pale and confused, but he shook his head. “Seventeen years old since 1913, huh?”

  “Yup.”

  “From a plant on an island off Florida.”

  “That, too.”

  “And you’re looking for Charlie and trying to keep one step ahead of whoever the big bad is now, yes?”

  She nodded.

  “And the PI gigs? I mean; you are a real PI I’ve seen you work. Hell, I’ve cribbed from you.”

  Emma shrugged. “Kind of goes with the territory, you know? Plus I’ve gotten good at it. The world’s more connected than you think. One thing leads to another.”

  “Huh.” Pete stopped walking. Trained his gaze on her. His eyes showed belief. If not in her story, at least in her.

  “The boy you loved back then. Charlie. Was he good to you? Was he worth what you still feel?”

  She didn’t hesitate. “Yes.”

  As always when Emma talked about Charlie, she wondered what he was like now. What he was doing. What kind of man he was, even if he still wore a boy’s face. And then came the crushing guilt of what was left to tell.

  “There’s more,” she said. “From when I f irst moved here a year ago.”

  Pete didn’t hesitate. “I’m listening,” he said.

  Emma met Aaron Tinsley a month after she moved to Albuquerque. She’d dyed her brown hair red back in Portland, chopped off her waves for a close-cropped pixie cut. After all, her hair was the one aspect of her appearance that she could alter both dramatically and at will—and so she did so frequently.

  The pixie cut, while not her best of choices, was also not a mistake.

  Aaron Tinsley, however, was. He was a student at UNM. Twenty years old, eyes a mossy green and light brown hair that curled at the bottom of his neck. He smelled like soap and coffee and the clothes he’d just learned how to launder himself.

  The f irst time Emma spotted him was at the coffee shop on Central, where she’d taken a job to get some quick cash. There was an ink stain on the tiny side callus of his middle f inger, probably from a leaky pen. His boots were scuffed and old, and the collar of his plaid work shirt was frayed a bit on one edge. He sat for a long time at a table by the window, reading John Locke and scribbling notes in the margins. Before he closed the book, Emma saw that he’d highlighted “Every man has property in his own person. This nobody has a right to, but himself.”

  Emma didn’t give a f ig about John Locke except for a vague appreciation that at least the man hadn’t considered women property—as solid a start as any to a political philosophy. Men she’d met over the decades, even in the twentieth century, weren’t nearly as enlightened. And it had been many decades since Emma had last kissed Charlie. If she were an ordinary person, she’d be long dead. Instead, she was beautiful. Not even the awful hair dye could change that. Her skin was smooth, and under that red dye, her hair was the same lustrous brown it had always been. Her muscles were strong, her breasts f irm, and her belly f lat. Everything about her, physically, was still seventeen.

  His gaze rose to her as she re
f illed his coffee. Something about those deep green eyes held her there, coffee pot still clutched in her hand.

  It was an hour until closing, but the place was empty except for Emma, this boy, and Elias, the owner. Emma cleaned the tables and ref illed sugar packets and stirrers and helped Elias hang chile ristras in the windows—because it was November, and Elias said the long strings of red pepper would make everything look festive.

  How many places like this had she worked? How many kindly old men like Elias had she known? Most of them fathers with daughters of their own, shop owners and storekeepers who’d allowed her to scrape together enough cash to move on? Too many to count or try to count. Maybe she was feeling especially wistful that day. Philosophical, rather. Blame it on John Locke . . .

  So she ended up talking to Aaron Tinsley, of course—Aaron who carried his cup and saucer to the counter and helped Emma with the last of the bright red ristras while Elias emptied the cream and milk pitchers. Outside, the wind had picked up and rattled the windows, but inside this tiny, warm space, everything felt safe.

  “I love it when the wind blows,” Emma said impulsively. “It feels like it could take me—”

  “Anywhere,” Aaron said, f inishing her sentence.

  Her heart squeezed. That hadn’t happened since Charlie. Not once. She had been back and forth across the continent, looking for him wherever she thought he might go. Had even hunted pointlessly for an underground spring said to be somewhere below the Lincoln Center stop of the New York City subway system. (Emma never discounted these types of tales as apocryphal. New York City was just too full of secrets and urban hidey-holes and rats the size of medium-weight dogs to discount anything.) But in all of her searching, she found nothing. No fountain. No Charlie.

  Over time, there’d been other boys. Not at f irst, but eventually. Eternity was a lonely thing when your body was seventeen in every way but the chronological years.