It Wasn't Always Like This

by Joy Preble

  “I knew they were on to us,” Lloyd’s words came in a nervous rush. “Walters and his Church of Light believers. So I left. I went back to the island f irst, and it was all . . . I never should have talked to them when . . . I never imagined that they’d . . . You have to understand. I didn’t believe any of us would actually f ind a real way to eternal life. I just imagined there were things in the earth that we could use to prolong living. To keep us young. Cheat nature a little at her own game.”

  Charlie’s shoulders sagged. The rain had slowed to a drizzle.

  “You know we found the stream that day we went looking for iguanas. Your father and Art and I—you know none of us had ever seen it before. But it was like what I’d read. All those stories of aloe vera plants that healed or jellyf ish and lobsters that lived years and years and years. I just had to know what to do.” Here Lloyd paused dramatically. “It felt like destiny.”

  “With all due respect, Mr. Lloyd, screw destiny,” Charlie said.

  Lloyd gave a small, tight smile. “This plant on the edge of the stream—it looked a lot like one that grew in the forests along the Amazon. The people would brew the crushed powder into a drink and swore it kept them from illness. So I thought, why not? It couldn’t hurt. I knew it wasn’t poisonous. But if I told all of you that my grandmother was a healer, that she knew about these things, then it would sound legitimate, you know? And if it worked, well, not only would you all be protected from polio, but then I . . .” He paused. “I could get your father and Emma’s to take me on as a partner.”

  “Christ.” The weight of everything that had happened since then squeezed Charlie’s heart. So many lives forever altered or lost—his entire immediate family gone!—because of the possibility of a business deal?

  “At the time,” Lloyd said, “it seemed a grand idea.” And then more quietly, he added, “If I could’ve, I’d have run off with the lot of it.” He sighed. “I’m a self ish man. Self-preservation and all that. If I’d known I’d found a miracle, you think I’d have shared it with all of you just like that?”

  Charlie sneered. “But it was okay to try it on us f irst. That didn’t bother you?”

  Lloyd shrugged. “I drank the damn stuff, too. The next day, actually. Again, I thought, why not?” He was silent then, for a long time. The wind whipped around them.

  Eventually he said, “Glen Walters overheard me talking to Art O’Neill. It was about a year after we all, well, you know. We were at the museum. By the gator pool. Art was worried about Emma’s baby brother. About him looking so young still even though he was turning three. And it hit me then—something in the way he said it—that I hadn’t brewed a cure to polio. I’d brewed a cure to everything. It was a great shock. You may not believe me, but it was. I said as much to Art, but I don’t think he believed me. Not yet. But then I looked up after Art walked off, and there were Glen Walters and that little wife of his, standing by the seats where people watched the show, just staring at me, their mouths hanging open.”

  So that had been that. The rest Charlie knew. The slow, insidious start of things that had ended in f lames.

  “I followed the both of you best I could. After.” Lloyd paused, watching as Charlie registered this.

  “So you didn’t think we were dead, then.”

  Lloyd’s face reddened f iercely as Charlie caught him in the lie. Again Charlie noted the blotches on the man’s face, the general impression of, if not illness, then something close to it.

  But this curiosity was shoved aside by another thought. Had the son of a bitch still been tracking him? How could he not have known? It felt wrong, off. But if that led him to Emma . . .

  Lloyd reached into the breast pocket of his coat, extracting a small photograph. “You aren’t always the most subtle of travelers,” he said.

  Charlie stared. It was the fading photo taken during the war. His smiling image, his arm draped over Robert Worley’s shoulder. A mixture of surprise and grief pounded in his chest. “Where did you get this?”

  “A smart man doesn’t spill all his secrets,” Lloyd said. He slid the photo back under his coat before Charlie could make a move to grab it. “I needed to stay one step ahead of them. They’ve changed names so many times. They pop up here and there, like the fountain itself. They haven’t been the Church of Light in a few years. But we’re the key. We’re like a holy grail of abomination. The possibility of our continued existence is what holds them together. Find us, and they heal the world. Or so the theory goes. Well, I prefer not to be found.”

  “And yet here you are,” Charlie said.

  The sun was setting now, and the street lamps were coming on. The wind had shifted, the air clearing. Evening was settling golden over Manhattan. In a few days it would be All Hallows’ Eve.

  “If you know where Emma is,” Charlie began, but Kingsley Lloyd sucked in a sharp breath, gazing at a point over Charlie’s shoulder.

  The men advancing toward them were not familiar. Both wore overcoats. One had a wool cap pulled low over his head.

  A cold sweat prickled on Charlie’s lower back.

  The men were striding faster.

  “Charlie,” said Kingsley Lloyd.

  The two men were jogging now, almost to them.

  “Emma’s dead,” Kingsley Lloyd said, panicked. “I don’t know how exactly. But I’m sure of it. I—we need to get out of here. They’re Walters’s followers.”

  Once during the war, a bomb had exploded close enough to temporarily take out Charlie’s hearing. A loud buzzing had f illed his head, smoke choking his lungs, his clothes and face splattered with more than one man’s blood. He would never know why it hadn’t been him. Why others had died and he had remained whole and standing. Every man on those battlef ields, every fallen soldier at Verdun and Ypres and Château-Thierry, they’d all had people to come back to. All except Charlie.

  But something—fate? Love? He didn’t understand it, would never understand it—had saved him again and again and again. Charlie Ryan, who already had the miracle of eternity in his veins, had continued to be a very lucky man.

  The man with the wool hat lifted his arm and waved.

  Charlie had never in his life been still unless he’d meant to. Now he found himself unable to move. Lloyd shoved his hand back into his pocket, and this time extracted a small black velvet bag. He tossed it into Charlie’s hands.

  “Emma’s dead, Charlie.”

  Lloyd turned then and then bolted across the street.

  “Hey!” the wool-capped man called.

  Charlie squared his stance for a f ight. But the wool-capped man and his companion ran, right on by Charlie without stopping. Charlie saw now that they had been waving at a woman standing in the doorway of an apartment building. He moved to give chase, only to see Kingsley Lloyd hop onto the running board of a snappy blue Chrysler and motor around the corner.

  Now Charlie stood alone in the wind. He stood there for a very long time. Then he opened the velvet bag. His hands were steady despite the tumultuous beating of his heart. In the bag sat the gold-chained pocket watch he’d given Emma. The one he’d had engraved with their names, the one with the sound of the wind and the call of the hawk when you opened it.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Dallas, Texas

  Present

  Emma watched as Pete struggled to open his eyes. They were swollen, the tender f lesh underneath quickly turning purple, a bump the size of a goose egg rising on his forehead. A deep, nasty cut was oozing on his right cheek. Emma, her numb hands and feet tied to her chair, was not in much better condition.

  “Where are we?” His voice was hoarse, but he was awake and alive. That was all that mattered.

  “Not sure,” she said.

  “You can do better, O’Neill.” Pete twisted in his chair, then groaned. “Shit,” he said. “Something’s wrong with my arm.”

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p; Coral’s eyes had drifted closed, and Emma could hear she was breathing unevenly.

  Not good. Not at all. They needed to get her—and themselves—out of here.

  “What the hell did they hit me with?” Pete grunted. “A cement truck?” He tried to stand, managing to hoist himself and the chair into a C shape. The cut on his cheek dripped blood on the cement f loor. He took a labored step then another. He was right. There was something wrong with his arm. Or maybe his collarbone.

  “Let me come to you,” Emma said, struggling to lift herself. “You’re in no shape to move.”

  From the cot, Coral shook with a loud, hacking, wet cough. They were lucky she wasn’t already dead.

  Emma trudged slowly toward Pete, the heavy chair lashed to her.

  On the other side of the warehouse, Coral stopped coughing. “I’m sorry,” she said. “This is all my fault. But he was the guy from the bar, you know. The one you left with that night. And there he was waving to me when I went to your school to look for you, so I f igured—”

  “Guy you left with?” Pete grunted as he rose and began trekking toward Emma, who was still dragging her chair toward him. “Guy. You. Left. With?”

  “It’s a long story,” Emma grunted back at him.

  “We’ve got time,” Pete said.

  Emma chose to ignore him.

  Coral’s voice faded in and out. “I heard them talking. That Matt guy went to meet some med-school friend. The others are gone, I think, but Matt’s coming back. He thought I was asleep, I guess, or maybe unconscious. They’ve been giving me shots of something. And he ran out of it, I think. What’s this all about? What’s it got to do with you? I’m really scared, Emma. I don’t even know how long I’ve been here. But I think it’s awhile. I can smell myself. And it’s not a good smell.”

  Emma tried to smile reassuringly. “You smell f ine. And we are getting out of here. Don’t worry.”

  She hopped a few more inches toward Pete. Her head was throbbing.

  “Stand still, O’Neill,” Pete grumbled. “I’ve got this.”

  “No, you don’t,” she said, then swiveled her gaze as best she could to Coral and added, “Detective Mondragon gets cranky when he gets hit on the head.”

  “I was so stupid,” Coral said.

  Emma hopped another inch. The chair was weighing her down. “There’s a lot of that going around,” she said.

  “Hugo and I had this huge argument. He thought I didn’t love him, and I . . . it was just one of those things, you know? I should have called you. But I just stormed out. Grabbed my keys, and I guess I left my phone on my bed. I was just going to your apartment. But you weren’t there. Only I’d gotten it in my head that I had to talk to you. I was just so pissed at Hugo. How could he think I’d stop loving him just because we were in a new place? When you love someone like that, it’s different, you know?”

  Emma did know. But this was neither the time nor the place for that conversation.

  Pete had reached Emma, and he hopped heavily and spun around to position himself so they were back-to-back. “I’m going to untie your hands, O’Neill, which is possibly against my better judgment right now. And then you’re going to untie mine. Got it?”

  Emma reached out as best she could with her numb f ingers straining for Pete’s hands. Then their f ingers touched, and she scooted closer as she felt him pulling at the cords.

  “Am I going to die?” Coral’s voice was breathy and small.

  “No,” Emma and Pete said together, and the combined impact of this had Coral mumbling, “Okay.”

  The rope restraining Emma’s hands went slack. “You got it,” she told Pete. She wiggled her f ingers as he freed her other hand, and then she was shaking them at the wrists, trying to get the feeling back.

  “I’m good,” Pete said hoarsely.

  It worried Emma that Matt was still gone, that they were alone, that it wasn’t terribly diff icult to break free. But she had no time for what-ifs right now.

  Coral cleared her throat. “I can’t believe I trusted that lying ass. I walked around with him, looking for you. I got suspicious when you weren’t at the student center like he said you would be, but then he—”

  “It’s not your fault,” Emma interrupted, bending to untangle her feet. Her f ingers were clumsy, and it wasn’t going quickly.

  “For God’s sake,” muttered Pete, “untie me now!”

  Coral broke into another coughing f it. “But I thought you liked Matt,” she began.

  “Nope,” Emma said, still bent over trying to free her feet. “And I’m the stupid one. Just so we’re clear.”

  “We’re clear,” Pete said. “Now get me out of this damn chair. I think my shoulder is broken.” He groaned under his breath.

  Emma would have complied. Only it was then that she heard the sound of a door sliding open, and Matt, whose last name she had never learned, sauntered back into the warehouse with the pace of a man with no need to hurry.

  He looked taller than she remembered him, and less rumpled. She hoped she could do something—anything—before he noticed that her hands, which she slipped back behind her as Matt walked through the door, were no longer tied to the chair. She tucked her feet under the chair.

  Matt f licked his gaze slowly around the room, then homed in on her. He tilted his head, and she was annoyed that, he reminded her of one of the hawks that Charlie used to train.

  She met his gaze, held it until he blinked. “What did you inject her with?” She hoped she sounded more commanding than she currently felt.

  “Does it matter?” Matt asked. “For the record, I wasn’t sure until I went back to your place. But I saw that old pocket watch hanging there and knew I was right. You were Emma. Emma O’Neill. And you had no idea who I was. Not a clue. Although I have to say you can hold your bourbon.”

  Anger burned in Emma’s chest. “More than I can say for you.”

  She had hated many things over the years, and with good reason, but the thought of him touching Charlie’s watch seemed one of the worst. Still, she forced herself to stay where she was. Surely Matt saw that she and Pete were now back-to-back in the middle of the room. But if she worked fast and kept him talking . . .

  Keeping her eyes f irmly on Matt, Emma reached behind her for Pete, found his hands. “Let Coral go,” she said, willing Matt to keep his focus on her. “She’s not who you need.”

  Matt made a tsking sound. “You know I can’t do that, right?”

  “Sure you can,” Pete muttered. Emma felt his ropes give as she worked her f ingers around the knots.

  Coral’s coughing sounded ragged now. Whatever she’d been infected with was far more than just poison and probably contagious. Maybe airborne. Maybe Emma had been right the f irst time. Matt wasn’t that bright after all.

  Work with that, O’Neill, she told herself.

  Matt’s lips twisted in a small smile. “You know, when I was a boy, I sometimes thought maybe you were just a myth. But here you are. And I’m the one who found you.” He stretched out his arms, a move that reminded her of Glen Walters. “The things you must have seen. The places and the people. Time rolling at your f ingertips. And what are you doing with it? Living in some Dallas apartment? Why? You could have anything you wanted. But here you are. What a waste.”

  “Don’t know what you’re talking about.” Emma’s f ingers fumbled with another knot. Almost.

  “World’s a funny place,” Matt said. He seemed to have no pressing desire to kill them or move whatever this was forward. Was he just toying with her? Was he waiting for something?

  He had to be waiting for something. But what? Who? They would have to make their move—she would have to make her move—before that something happened.

  “Your friend Coral here likes you so much that she posted lovely pictures of you for the whole world to see. Including me.”r />
  “And your point is?” Emma tried for casual, bored even. Get yourself loose, Pete, she thought. And winced as she heard him groan again in pain.

  “It wasn’t even that hard to f ind you,” Matt said. “I think that’s why I didn’t believe it was actually you. Sitting in that dive bar. Eating tacos some girl sold you off the street. Drinking bourbon. The girl detective with a huge secret of her own. Thinking I was just some guy.”

  Emma rolled her eyes. “Don’t overestimate yourself. Those General Patton stories are getting a bit stale, by the way.”

  “I’m sorry, Emma,” Coral said.

  Emma could hear the rasp of her breath. She glared at Matt. “She needs a doctor. Just let her go. We can do this on our own.”

  “I think you’re confusing who’s in charge here, Emma.” Matt placed a hand on his chest. “You know there weren’t many of us faithful left when I took over for my father. Guardians of the world, that’s what he called us. Destroy the evil. Praise the good. No middle ground. Just right and wrong.”

  “I think you’ve got that confused,” Emma said.

  Matt shrugged. “And I think you’ve got something I want. But you’re not the only one, you know?”

  Did he mean Charlie? Emma wasn’t sure what was faster than galloping, but whatever it was, her heart was doing it.

  “I hoped to do this another way,” Matt said. “But you can’t always get what you want, can you?”

  “So you’re going with a lame old song lyric?” Emma drawled.

  Pete’s voice rose from behind her. “Hey, Matt, you know what Patton said, don’t you? ‘The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other bastard die for his.’”

  She knew his hands were still partially tied, but Emma felt Pete rise. “Go!” he hollered. “Now!”