It Wasn't Always Like This

by Joy Preble

  No. No. No.

  At just past nine o’clock, two girls who looked to be in their twenties exited from the side of the nursing building. Emma strode toward them, Pete following at a distance. This was their system.

  “We’re looking for a missing girl,” she called, waggling her phone at them. She let the word missing sink in. Then she moved closer.

  One had a streak of pink in her blonde hair and eyebrows plucked so thin they resembled two commas on her forehead. The other was wearing a Rangers ball cap, her long brown ponytail threaded through the back.

  “Don’t know her,” said the one with pink streak, squinting at Coral’s picture.

  The one with ball cap looked up from the image. “That’s the girl whose parents went on TV, right?” Her face went pale, and her gaze shifted from Emma to Pete, who was now standing beside her. “Y’all cops or something?”

  “Private investigators,” Emma said. “This is my partner, Detective Mondragon.” Emma slid her PI license from her pocket. Of course, Texas did not have reciprocity with the state next door, so the document was invalid. Not that these two would have any idea. Anyway, she didn’t have time to apply for a new set of papers every time she jumped to a new place. It was highly inconvenient. As was everything she had to do to keep her actual f ingerprints out of any government data bank.

  “Have you seen her?” Pete asked the girls, his voice pleasant, almost conversational. Pete managed to make even an interrogation sound like he was just shooting the breeze.

  Ball Cap hesitated. “You know, maybe I did see her,” she said. “Afternoon of New Year’s Eve.”

  Emma waited, just as Pete had taught her. She sensed the girl would f ill in the blanks, but only if she wasn’t pushed. The silence stretched on.

  “You notice anything particular?” Pete asked f inally, in that same genial Hey, y’all, let’s go get a drink voice.

  Ball Cap ran her tongue across the inside of her bottom lip. Shifted her gaze to her friend and then back to Emma and Pete. “She was at the student center. I stopped to get a coffee before going home. Place was pretty empty, closing early. They wouldn’t even make me a latte, just that crap regular stuff. Anyway, I’m pretty sure I saw her over at the bookstore across from the food court. They’d locked up already, but she was talking to some guy.”

  “You sure it was this girl?” Emma asked. She held up Coral’s picture again. Hugo had sent her the photo when it f irst became clear something bad had happened. It was actually of both Coral and Emma, but Emma had cropped herself out.

  “And the guy?” Pete’s tone toughened just a little, and she sensed him rise just so slightly on his feet, like a runner waiting for the starting gunshot. “Was he old? Young? Somewhere in between? Had you ever seen him before?”

  The girl paused. The hairs on the nape of Emma’s neck stood up, although if Pete had asked her why, she couldn’t have said. Just that she had felt this in other moments, in other years, in other places. An overwhelming sense that everything was about to change.

  “Nothing special,” the girl said. “The guy, I mean. He was medium height.” She held her hand a few inches above her head. “Blond. He needed a shave. Cute, though. He was, I don’t know, thirty, maybe? Maybe younger. She seemed to know him. I’m pretty positive about that. That’s about all I remember. I—oh! He was wearing this preppy polo shirt—so not my thing, but like I said, he was cute—and he had this tattoo on his arm, which made up for it, you know? It said, believe.”

  Emma froze. Her lungs momentarily seized up. “What?” she coughed.

  She felt more than saw Pete’s sharp glare.

  The girl frowned. The nausea rose without warning, pooling in Emma’s throat. She absolutely, positively couldn’t have been that stupid . . .

  “The tattoo,” she managed. “Describe it again.”

  After a dramatic eye roll, the girl sighed. Then she spoke slowly and deliberately, indicating that Emma was either an idiot or acting like one—she would have been happy to know Emma herself agreed that this was absolutely, positively the case. “The. Word. believe. On. His. Forearm. In. Blue. Can I go now?”

  “Shit,” Emma said. “Shit. Shit. Shit.”

  “She means in a minute,” Pete muttered. He put a hand on her arm, but Emma shook it off. She was very worried she would vomit. Matt, whose last name she did not know. Matt, who quoted war movies. Matt, who was drunkenly fascinated by how young she looked. Matt, who f lirted with Coral and then turned to Emma. Matt, who came home with her. To her apartment. Where she lived. Matt who had run his f ingers over the pocket watch that Charlie had given her. Matt who had been there in the morning.

  Who the hell was he, really? The new face of the Church of Light? Whoever he was, he had known all along who she was. There was no other explanation. She was sad and lonely and stupid. And he had tracked her to the bar while she thought she was tracking Elodie’s killer. While she was keeping an eye on Coral, although obviously she’d failed miserably there. He’d watched. And waited. And now . . .

  She had seen the tattoo and not given it a second thought. Had never bothered for one second to possibly connect it to whoever was trying to f lush her out. To the Church of Light. The people who thought she was the embodiment of evil. The people who wanted her dead. Even though Glen Walters had shouted that exact word from his pulpit probably a thousand times in the swamps of Florida, over a hundred years ago.

  Matt had known who she was. And she had invited him home with her.

  Shit. Shit. Shit.

  He had slept in her damn bed. And now Coral was missing. Without thinking, Emma placed her hands on Ball Cap’s shoulders.

  “Em,” Pete warned.

  The girl tried to shake free. “Hey, lemme go!”

  Her friend with the pink streak shoved Emma’s arm. But Emma tightened her grip. “Did you hear anything else? Anything. Think hard. Did Coral say anything to him? You have to remember something else. It was just you and your damn coffee. Think.”

  The world was slipping and sliding, the years were jamming together, and all Emma could think was that she had lived so many years—but she would always be the same as she was that day in 1913 when Kingsley Lloyd insisted they all drink that horrid tea. Always and forever a silly seventeen-year-old girl. Wily but impatient. Wanting what she wanted when she wanted it: Answers. Certainty. Charlie Ryan.

  “I’m gonna call the cops,” Pink Streak said, f ishing for her phone.

  “We are the cops,” Pete muttered, but his eyes were on Emma. “Let her go, Miss O’Neill. Just walk away. Whatever this is, just walk away.”

  Emma blinked hard a few times. The years faded, as they always did, stranding her in the present. So she did what he asked. She let go.

  The girls ran, uttering a rich assortment of vulgarities that would have shocked even the likes of Frank Ryan. Had Emma been less distracted, she would have been impressed with the variety. But her gaze landed on Matt—he of the believe tattoo—stepping around the corner of the nursing building. Her pulse exploded.

  “Pete,” she began, but something hard and blunt smacked the back of her head.

  Her vision went dim even as she heard Pete yell her name. Then there was the sound of a f ist hitting a face. She tried to run, or imagined she did, and her brain sent her images of Coral along with a terrible fear that it had all gone so very wrong.

  Someone pressed a cloth to her mouth, and she smelled something vile and thick, and after a moment there was only blackness.

  She woke up some time later—she wasn’t sure how long, but it couldn’t have been that long—bound to a chair in what seemed to be an abandoned warehouse. So much for her medical school facility theory. Although, maybe this had once been a warehouse for medical supplies.

  Pete was slumped in a chair across the room. Emma’s head ached from the blow to the back of her skull, but whatever che
mical they’d used to knock her out was no doubt coursing harmlessly through her veins or had already evaporated.

  Matt was nowhere to be seen.

  But her head was actually throbbing pretty hard, now that she realized it. She vomited neatly—as neatly as she could while lashed in place—on the f ilthy cement f loor. Almost right away she felt better. Then she looked around. It was damp and cold. It smelled like mold and ammonia and dead things.

  “I thought they’d killed you,” a girl’s voice rasped from behind her.

  Coral! Emma wrenched her neck trying to catch a glimpse over her shoulder. Yes. Coral. Alive! Tied to a cot, but Coral was alive. Tears stung Emma’s eyes.

  “You’re here,” she managed. She sniffed and tried to wriggle in her chair, tried to look more directly at Coral, but her neck was stiff and not turning properly, and her vision was doing something wonky that made her want to vomit again. She couldn’t move her hands. Her f ingers felt swollen, numb.

  “Oh, my God, Emma,” Coral croaked. Her voice sounded thin and papery, as if her throat were parched. “How did you f ind me? Where’s Hugo? Oh my God. They—”

  “It’s going to be okay,” Emma interrupted. She immediately regretted saying that. No use lying anymore. She’d told enough lies, enough to land Coral here. With a violent twist, she spun a few inches in the hard-backed chair. There. Emma swallowed. Coral was f ilthy, had lost weight; her cheeks were red and her forehead damp with sweat under stringy, lank hair. Dark circles ringed her hollow eyes. The red and blue streaks had faded into the brown. Her breathing seemed labored, and there was a heavy, wet rattle as she lapsed into a hacking cough.

  Something clicked in Emma’s bruised and disoriented brain. They made Coral sick. They didn’t have to, but they did, anyway. This was bad. Very bad.

  “I thought they were gonna kill you,” Coral said again.

  “I’m not that easy to kill,” Emma answered. She hoped she sounded feistier than she felt. She struggled to muster a brave smile for Coral’s sake.

  A few feet away, Pete moaned.

  Emma kept the smile frozen on her face. She’d told Coral the truth. She was not that easy to kill. But she def initely could be killed. And the people who’d tied her to this chair wanted her dead—along with Pete and Coral, of course. More collateral damage in a hundred-year hunt.

  Chapter Twenty

  New York City

  1939

  Alabama had turned out to be a dead end. Norman Thigpen and anything connected to the Church of Light had absolutely dropped out of sight.

  As for Charlie, all he had ever wanted was to keep Emma safe.

  By 1939 he’d come to care less about his own safety. Over two decades had passed since he’d held Emma in his arms. Planes had gotten better, but that wasn’t much comfort. Pilots had, too. Charles Lindbergh had f lown solo across the Atlantic. Lucky Lindy they called him. On the other hand, a woman pilot named Amelia Earhart and her sole crewmember, Fred Noonan, had disappeared over the Pacif ic two years ago. She had moxie, that Amelia. Charlie seen her now and then over the years, although only peripherally. She was, he realized, a year younger than he was. Or at least she would have been. She was forty when she went missing, probably dead at the bottom of the ocean. Charlie should have been forty-one.

  Life remained a strange crapshoot for most people—for everyone but Charlie Ryan, anyway.

  War had broken out again in Europe. Charlie wanted to go back there, to f ly and to f ight. It would take a little artif ice, but twenty years gone meant he could pass himself off as Charlie Ryan, Jr. Any uncanny resemblance would just be a strong familial likeness. So he’d quit his crop-dusting gig and hitched back to New York City.

  He lingered for a while, settling up the arrangements. The extra few days changed everything.

  One gray afternoon in October with sleet to match his mood, Charlie was hurrying down Seventh Avenue to catch the subway at Seventy-Second. He wasn’t sure what made him look across the street, but when he did, he skidded to a stop, nearly falling on the slick sidewalk. There, in the window of the drugstore across the wide boulevard, was a familiar f igure. One with an unmistakable frog-like face.

  Kingsley Lloyd sat at the lunch counter eating a sandwich.

  Charlie’s heart shook wildly, like the propeller on his doomed biplane, Ethel. He hadn’t seen Kingsley Lloyd since the herpetologist had disappeared from St. Augustine.

  It can’t be, he thought.

  But it was. And like Charlie, the man hadn’t aged a day.

  Charlie crossed the street, weaving between the automobiles rushing in both directions, barely avoiding an oncoming car. He walked into the store so swiftly that out in the street, the driver who almost hit him was still laying on the horn.

  “You’re alive,” Charlie barked. Of course, he’d suspected as much for a while, but seeing it in the f lesh was another matter entirely. His brain struggled to process it. He remembered that time in 1916 in North Carolina. Had that been Kingsley Lloyd, too, that brief glimpse of someone who looked familiar?

  Lloyd’s wide face went slack. His jaw dropped. He looked as though he was seeing a ghost. “I thought you were dead.”

  Charlie assessed this. “No, you didn’t,” he said. Then he socked Kingsley Lloyd square in the jaw—a haymaker that sent the little man sprawling to the dirty f loor of the f ive-and-dime. “That’s for letting us drink that stuff.”

  A collective gasp rose from the other patrons; the next thing Charlie knew, the cook was grabbing his arms and trying to pin them back. A man in a wool overcoat tried to lift Kingsley Lloyd off the f loor, but Lloyd seemed to be resisting, possibly so Charlie—who easily wrestled free of the cook—couldn’t hit him again.

  Two blue-uniformed cops shouldered their way into the f ive-and-dime. The shorter cop grabbed Charlie and, with a violent wrench, succeeded in pinning his arms in a way the cook couldn’t.

  “Everything’s jake,” Charlie gasped between clenched teeth. “My, um, uncle here’s a little hot-headed sometimes. Aren’t you, Unc?”

  There was more commotion then, and a bit of tricky negotiation with the cops.

  “Just f ine, my little nephew,” Lloyd grunted.

  Outside the sleet morphed brief ly into rain. As if by mutual plan, Charlie and Kingsley Lloyd walked east together, pounding the wet pavement, putting distance between themselves and the cops.

  “You knew,” Charlie said f inally, “when you gave our fathers that plant and told them to brew it. You knew what it would do.”

  Charlie’s strides were long; Lloyd scuttled to keep up. “I didn’t. I swear. Now the polio prevention, that was something—”

  “Shut up!” Charlie turned abruptly, almost knocking into the little man, grabbing his shoulders hard with both hands. “Don’t lie to me.” He studied Lloyd’s face. Even in a rage, Charlie knew how to be still. The man’s cheeks were mottled and blotchy. Was he sick? But Lloyd still looked exactly as he had in 1916, which meant he was immortal, just like Charlie and Emma. Had he always been unwell? Charlie tried to remember. He thought Lloyd had looked better right before he disappeared, but what did it even matter?

  The rain and mist had f lattened Kingsley Lloyd’s hair. Honestly, sick or not, he looked even more amphibian-like than before. “I . . . I wasn’t sure,” he said at last.

  Charlie dug his f ingers harder into Lloyd’s shoulders, thumbs shifting to the man’s clavicle and then higher to his carotid arteries. He could feel Kingsley Lloyd’s pulse jolt beneath his hands. “So you gambled with our lives. My parents’. Our brothers’ and sisters’. Mine and Emma’s. Do you know what you took from us? For what? And now she’s gone, and—”

  “It’s not what you think,” Lloyd protested. “God, it’s really not. I mean look at yourself. You’re exactly the same as you were. It’s a miracle, you know. A damn miracle. You are the same, right? You hav
en’t noticed any changes, have you?”

  In the Great War, Charlie had lost track of how many dead bodies he had seen. But what had never left him—would never leave him—was the utter strangeness of what it felt like to take another man’s life. Or the terrible sadness of watching a friend’s life slip away, with no power to save him.

  “Have you ever f igured out how many ways we actually can be killed?” Charlie asked calmly. Lloyd’s pulse rocketed again under his f ingers. “Fire, obviously. Drowning, I’d assume, but who knows? Poison’s a no-go, clearly. But if I shot you in the head, would that do it? Threw you in front of a subway train?”

  “Jesus Christ, man,” Lloyd whispered. “Let go of me. I didn’t know they’d come after you like that. Glen Walters and his people.”

  Charlie tightened his grip. Either Kingsley Lloyd was also hiding from Glen Walters and his Church of Light, or he was in league with them. Charlie suspected it was the former. But he had to be certain.

  Lloyd’s bug eyes protruded. “Your father was smarter than he knew. Than any of you knew. Those stories he told about your ancestors—”

  “Shut up,” Charlie said, but his heart gave a twinge. “I don’t want to talk about my family. I sure as hell don’t want you to.”

  “I’m trying to explain.”

  “You’re trying to save your skin.” But Charlie eased his grip, and after a few seconds, he let the man go.

  “Listen, Charlie.” Lloyd swallowed audibly, his sharp Adam’s apple bobbing. A vein had burst in his cheek during the attempted choking, leaving a thin red line just at the f leshy spot below his left eye. “Your father was right. But you’ve known that since Florida. There is a Fountain of Youth. It was the stream on that island.”

  “And the part I don’t know?”

  Lloyd cleared his throat noisily. “It didn’t stay there. That’s how it works. It disappears and pops up somewhere else, as far as I can tell. I believe there’s more than one, actually, although I haven’t yet f igured that part out—”

  “That drink of yours was a one-shot deal, Mr. Lloyd. We don’t need the damn fountain. What I want to know is why you left. Left all of us to—” Charlie reached for Lloyd again and the other man back-pedaled swiftly, almost stumbling. If the situation hadn’t been life or death, it might have been comical.