It Wasn't Always Like This

by Joy Preble

  “The men who came before him killed your family a hundred years ago, Miss O’Neill.”

  “Old news.”

  They stared at each other. She waited. When his gaze tightened, Emma’s heart lurched again, but not in a good way.

  “He’s dead,” Kingsley Lloyd said, and for a few grateful seconds, Emma thought he meant Matt. “He’s been dead for a long while.”

  Everything inside Emma felt as though it crumbled to dust. Her breath stopped. Her heart paused midbeat. If she could have died because of these things, she would have.

  “I don’t believe you.”

  He slid his hand into his pocket and pulled out a yellowing photograph.

  Charlie. Her Charlie. Wearing a uniform and posing with some other soldiers—no, pilots, because there was an airplane behind them. So pilots, yes. He had f lown, then. Just like he always wanted to. Emma was breathing again, heaving gulps, trying to grasp the truth.

  Lloyd reached back into his pocket and handed her something else: a fragile piece of paper. A telegram announcing the death of Charlie Ryan, RAF pilot, shot down over France on April 22, 1917.

  “You can look it up,” Lloyd said. “Verify it. I imagine you will. I’m sorry to be the one to tell you. I’m sorry I’ve known and you haven’t. But it’s the truth, Emma, and I decided you needed to know.”

  She wouldn’t allow him the satisfaction of seeing her destroyed. She didn’t know what his end game was, but with a man like that, it was always something.

  “Go the hell away before I call the cops,” she said, as though this was a threat. They both knew it wasn’t. But they both knew she was capable of more than she was showing.

  Something in his face told her he hadn’t planned on giving her the photograph. But he held it out now, and she took it, slowly as though it didn’t mean much, the aging paper sliding against her f ingertips, her heart beating hard as she held this piece of Charlie. She didn’t have to look at it again, although she knew she would. The image—each curve and line of his face, his body, the slip of a smile on his face—was already carved into her memory.

  Lloyd f inally turned and walked away, boots slapping the hospital tile, and when he was out of sight, she ripped the telegram into tiny shreds and sprinkled them over the garbage can by the water fountain.

  She did not cry again. Not then.

  Instead, she walked back to Room 358 and told Pete that she would go with him to New Mexico.

  She had watched a man burn to death.

  It was enough tragedy for one week.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Dallas, Texas

  Present

  Kingsley Lloyd drove west out of Dallas on I-30 heading toward Fort Worth. From there he would cut north, skirting Oklahoma, angling through New Mexico and up through Colorado toward Wyoming. He wasn’t exactly sure what he would do when he arrived, but he’d recently purchased a bit of land and a trailer outside of Cody, not far from the Grand Tetons. Beautiful country. A good place to start over.

  He was fond of the West, although he’d been through much of the wide world and loved many of its more obscure little corners. A café in Istanbul that served the most amazing Turkish coffee. A pizza place in Dublin, where he’d once tracked Charlie but hadn’t made contact. A lake house he’d rented for a year on Lake Superior. He’d loved listening to the boats and foghorns. A diner on the west side of Chicago, where Emma had brief ly worked before the Church of Light had murdered Eddie Higgins and sent her running again.

  She’d been easy to f ind that time, although not after that. Emma was good at sliding beneath the surface of things, which he admired. The boy—Charlie—Lloyd had found him, too, all those years ago. And now Matthew Thigpen, well, that hadn’t been easy, but he’d f igured it out and understood the man’s weaknesses. If you are going to stay alive in this world, you have to know how to get one over on the other guy.

  Sometimes he had searched for the fountain. If it existed once, it would exist again. Maybe if he found it, he could f ind a way to cure his illness. He told himself it was just a matter of time before he found the right place. And time was something Kingsley Lloyd hoped to have a lot of.

  He had not imagined himself a man who could set another man on f ire, but self-preservation was simply science. Survival of the species and all that.

  Killing Matthew Thigpen was in its own way no different than giving Charlie Ryan the copy of the pocket watch or showing him that same picture he had shown Emma. You threw people off their game, introduced a sleight of hand, made them doubt, and while they collected themselves, you moved on.

  He had kept himself from being the target. That was all that mattered.

  He liked Emma O’Neill. He always had. Such a smart girl. In other circumstances, he might have suggested joining forces. Her face when he had handed her that picture—it had made him sad. But he had to make sure she stopped searching once and for all. Let the dead rest and the Church of Light, whatever was left of it, believe that there was no one else to f ind. No man named Kingsley Lloyd who held the secret to eternity.

  Besides, Charlie Ryan had to be dead by now. Thigpen had hinted at it, and although Lloyd wasn’t sure, it seemed likely.

  Either way, he was free. He was alive. Still and always, which was just f ine with him. It was a big country, America. Still a lot of empty spaces.

  Yes, he thought as he watched the sun dipping below the horizon, huge and red and brilliant. Yes.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Somewhere outside Oklahoma City, Oklahoma

  Present

  It wasn’t that Charlie Ryan had ever stopped searching. It was simply that he had never found her. No matter where he had gone, no matter how many places, how many times he felt he must have just missed her, there had been no Emma at the end of the day. Or week. Or month. Or year. Just the pain of remembering what had been.

  Maybe Kingsley Lloyd had told him the truth. Or maybe in his anger and grief, his belief that he deserved to lose her because he’d foolishly let her go, he’d wandered so far, fought so many battles, reimagined himself so many times, that he had simply lost his way. The pocket watch Lloyd had tossed to him was a fake, of course. Lloyd had barely disappeared around that New York corner before Charlie saw that.

  The serial number was wrong and the sound of the hawk was harsh and discordant. But sometimes, he’d look at the thing anyway, trace his f inger across the etched “Emma and Charlie” on the back, and wonder. Where was she? Did she miss him as much as he missed her?

  Had she forgiven him for that day he left her? He would always be seventeen, but he was not the same person he had been then. At least that’s what he told himself.

  Charlie roamed the world, trying not to overstay his welcome. One time in Chilton, Texas, he enrolled himself in high school, concocting a story about a traveling father in the oil business who’d sent him to live with a recluse aunt. He stayed on for a few years after that, working at a local ranch, foolishly indulging the need to be the boy and then the young man he had left behind so long ago. Until the rumors started. Where was this aunt of his? And this boy wonder football player who never looked a day over seventeen—how come he still looked like a kid?

  Charlie knew too well what could come of that type of notoriety. Plus you never knew. Even in this small town, someone could be related to someone else who, back down the line, had lived in Florida at the turn of the twentieth century.

  But sometimes he couldn’t help himself because always he hoped that Emma would see or hear. A strange tightrope walk, balancing hiding while still surfacing enough that she could f ind him even as he was always trying to f ind her.

  He picked up and moved on not long after he’d heard those comments from the checker at the Quick Mart on Route 7.

  There were tricks he’d learned to stay invisible, and if Emma was alive, he was sure she’d learne
d them, too. Ways to fake social security numbers and get bank accounts and keep to yourself. It wasn’t as hard as one would imagine. Like anything else, you just got used to it.

  Once in Chicago, he knew he’d been close. He’d read about a murder of a boy, and when he looked at the picture in the paper, it was like looking at himself. There had been an Emma Ryan registered at that high school. He knew it was her. He knew it. But she was gone. No trace.

  He f lew those crop dusters, and then in the ’50s, he gave in and was hired on as a daredevil pilot in a small traveling air show. The spectators loved him, photographers snapping pictures as he barrel-rolled the tiny plane and made billows of white smoke plumes in the blue sky. He was Charlie Murray then. Maybe one day, one of those people staring up at him would be Emma.

  “Some guys came around asking questions about a Charlie Ryan,” Ernie Anderson, who ran the show, told him one day. They were doing a series of appearances outside small towns in Missouri and Illinois and Iowa.

  Charlie packed up his gear and headed out before the next show.

  He stopped f lying after that, slipping below the radar and keeping to himself.

  Over the years, Charlie felt as though he was arriving just seconds after Emma left. A phantom sense, as though he’d lost a limb but still searched for it, still felt the ache.

  After that there came a series of journeys that led him to a place and a life that made sense. That was more than a placeholder but less than what he wanted. He thought he was perhaps making his late father proud. And Emma, too, because he remembered that f irst moment he’d noticed her, the hawk on his arm, eyes fast on this girl who would steal his heart even before he understood what it was to love someone.

  And here he was now, tying a band gently around the ankle of a snow eagle at the tribal aviary where he’d come to live and work. He had never discovered the truth or the lie about his Calusa ancestors, but he felt the connection, anyway. Or at least the private joke. A Calusa had shot that damn Juan Ponce de León in the leg with a poison arrow, causing his untimely demise. It seemed a f itting metaphor for Charlie’s extensive and colorful life.

  Charlie Ryan had talent when it came to taking care of wild things. He had, after all, been at it for a very long time. So the tribal council had given him a job.

  It was later in the evening than he normally worked, but the bird had come recently to the refuge, and Charlie was the one who best knew what to do with it. He was, in any case, feeling sentimental. He’d been here in this place up past Oklahoma City for three years, and it was almost time to move on. The eternal problem of his existence.

  A tiny town, with one stoplight and two restaurants, one a Mexican café, the other a diner that doubled as a washateria on the other side. The café had a bar—two beers on tap—and so that’s where he went.

  He ordered a Budweiser. He was drinking it around 10:30 p.m. when he turned his attention to the ancient television sagging from the ceiling. A story from down in Texas (Dallas was only four hours south) had made one of the national news channels. A murder case. And a kidnapping. There’d been a spate of those, he knew. But hadn’t there always been? Charlie never ceased to wonder at the twenty-four-hour news cycle. So much repetition and invention of crisis where only a minor bobble really existed.

  He sipped the Bud and munched a chip or two from the bowl the bartender—her name was Amy, and she lived a few miles up the road with her little boy Sammy—had set in front of him.

  “You want to order some food?” Amy asked him. “Before the kitchen closes?”

  He didn’t answer her. In fact, the glass slipped from his hand and hit the bar with a clunk, tipping over and spilling the last of the beer onto the rough wooden surface.

  Unless he was mistaken, the news piece showed Emma O’Neill, looking as she always had, walking out of some hospital, where she had been taken after helping rescue a girl who’d been kidnapped. There was more to the story, but he missed it.

  Charlie was already up and running, grabbing his keys, cranking the ignition in his pickup, heading for Dallas. Hands on the wheel, eyes on the horizon, he felt the ties of all the things that had held him earthbound for so long loosening.

  Driving toward Emma—it had to be Emma—felt like f lying.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Dallas, Texas

  Present

  Peter Mondragon was packing up his truck, a stubborn man who insisted that he was just f ine with one good arm. Fortunately, Emma O’Neill traveled light, almost as light as he did. He was glad she was coming back to Albuquerque with him. It might not be the life she wanted, but it was a good place, a solid city at the edge of the mountains—not as green or lush as some places, but f ine enough.

  He was tired of police work—of the politics and the inf ighting. If he hung up his own PI shingle, she could partner with him. They made a damn good team. He just needed to remember not to act all fatherly with her. Emma O’Neill needed a business partner, not a parent.

  He tossed his duffel bag into the back, wincing as the motion tugged at his dislocated shoulder even though he was using the other arm, and laughed aloud. Emma was decades older than he was. But in this business, it was good to have someone watching out for you. For both of them.

  Emma hadn’t explained why she’d suddenly changed her mind about coming with him, but he suspected she’d tell him eventually. That’s how it was between them. Keeping Emma O’Neill’s secrets meant not pushing until she was ready.

  If he’d been a drinking man still, he’d have cracked open a beer and toasted to new beginnings. But Pete hadn’t been a drinking man in over a decade. Not since he’d screwed up his marriage and sunk his career back in San Francisco and lit out for the desert and the mountains and the clear-headedness that came with taking things one day at a time.

  He’d told Emma most of it. Hadn’t told her what he’d been contemplating right before he worked that murder case and she somehow appeared, and then there they were, elbow to elbow in clues. Things had changed after that.

  He knew she thought she had never made a difference, that her long tenure—he still had trouble wrapping his brain around it sometimes, even though he knew it was God’s absolute truth—had produced nothing of lasting value. That’s why he’d told her what he had earlier today.

  He didn’t know if it would stick in that thick O’Neill skull. But it might. Time would tell. She’d be okay if no more crazy cults went after her and tried to burn her to death or kidnapped her friends and injected them with poison and diseases or whatever other crap they came up with. One thing was for sure: Emma O’Neill was like a lightning rod for weirdness, for the dark things that most people never saw. But Pete imagined that came with immortal territory.

  And then he laughed again that he had a life in which that sentence was even possible.

  Would she ever f ind this Charlie Ryan? It seemed impossible at this point. A hundred years! Pete couldn’t imagine searching for his ex-wife for a hundred years. But his own failings aside, Shawna had not been the love of the ages. He had loved her, yes. She had, as far as he knew, loved him. But to search for her for a century? He’d have to have his own thick head examined.

  But Emma, well, that was another story. There was no one else like Emma O’Neill. Maybe that was a good thing.

  As for this fountain thing, he wasn’t sure what to make of that, either. If Emma said it still existed somewhere, then he believed her. Would he partake of it if she discovered its location during his lifetime? He had no damn idea. But if Pete had learned one thing since meeting Emma, it was that stranger things had happened. Would continue to happen. And somehow he was smack in the middle of them.

  He had thought, once upon a time, that as a cop he’d seen everything. Well, that was a damn lie, now, wasn’t it?

  This is what Pete Mondragon was contemplating as he locked up the Tundra and turned to see a mud-stre
aked blue Ford F-150, riding slowly down Emma’s street, like maybe the driver was looking for an address.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Dallas, Texas

  Present

  Emma hadn’t found the Fountain of Youth again. She hadn’t gotten rid of the pesky problem known as Kingsley Lloyd or slain the dragon known as the Church of Light, the crazy cult that was somehow also immortal in its own way. She’d saved a life and been too late to save some others. People she loved with all her heart were dead, and she had never stopped feeling like she should have been able to stop it. In a few minutes she would climb into Pete’s oversized truck and head back to New Mexico.

  Emma O’Neill had done many things over many decades. Sometimes she felt she could barely remember it all. Much of it had been sad. An equal amount hadn’t. Her hair was still long and brown and wavy. Her eyes were still bright. Her skin f lawless. She was still impatient and ever on the move. She loved art and poetry and music. She was a dreamer and pragmatist. She liked vanilla cake with lemon f illing and roast chicken and green chile cheeseburgers and pancakes and ridiculously spicy Fritos. She had a huge heart and a quick mind.

  Mostly she loved a boy named Charlie Ryan for whom she would never stop searching. And now her heart was breaking—no it was broken, shattered—because what had all that been for?

  “It could be our f irst order of business if you want,” Pete had said. “Looking for him again.” He’d swallowed the last bite of glazed donut he’d brought back when he went out to gas up the truck, washing it down with a huge gulp of coffee. If they did become partners, Emma decided, she’d have to rethink their eating habits. But no, she told him, f inding Charlie Ryan would not be part of the deal.

  She was folding clothes into a small suitcase. I’m really doing this, she thought. She had said her goodbyes to Coral and Hugo, telling them she was going to be working with Pete. She would call, she promised, and at least for a while, she knew she would. Coral would recover, but slowly and maybe not in all ways. Emma felt responsible for that, too.