It Wasn't Always Like This (19 page)

Pete leaned toward the screen, elbows knocking against the detritus of the burger takeout they’d picked up, which was probably more suited for detective work than pancakes, anyway. It wasn’t pancakes, but Pete had promised to feed her, and Pete Mondragon never went back on a promise.

Once he had told her that her eating habits were like those of a thirteen-year-old boy. She didn’t disagree. It was something they had in common.

Most of the tenants on Emma’s f loor had found other accommodations, per management’s request. But returning wasn’t forbidden, and Emma was a stubborn girl when it came to things that scared her. Even smoke and f ire. Particularly a f ire that might have been set to burn her alive. She and Pete had scouted the building as best they could, but a clear cause for the f ire had yet to present itself. The snow had stopped, and the arson investigators were gone for the night.

No answers on that front meant they needed to focus on where the hell Coral might be.

Emma jabbed a f inger at the screen again. “Look, here’s where we are, right near where Coral lives.” She gestured brief ly at the window over her kitchen sink, the one that looked out on the street. “Just a few houses from here.”

Then she scrolled the map to the west and then north. “Here’s her high school.” More scrolling. “And here’s Hugo’s house. And the club they go to sometimes in Deep Ellum. And this one, off Hall. I, um, was with them there just the other night.”

No need to mention the whole Matt debacle. No need to add her other personal failings to the long list of things that weren’t going right. Pete pushed up the nosepiece of his thick black glasses. She’d helped him pick out the frames online, insisting that they looked good even though he’d balked at anything trendier than his decade-old pair with scratches on the lenses.

At the time, bristling at his fussiness, she’d thought of her sister Lucy. She’d hated wearing her spectacles even though her eyesight was weak for close work like reading or knitting. “I like a girl in spectacles,” Charlie had told Lucy after she’d gotten her f irst pair, with a sly wink at Emma. She could still picture the way her sister had blushed, her sulky mood melting away . . .

Emma shoved the memory aside. Pete peered at the laptop screen. “So no one has reported seeing Coral since the morning she disappeared, correct?” he asked. “And it was vacation, so she wouldn’t have gone to school. Her parents say she was asleep when they left, and gone when they returned. No sign of a struggle. And her boyfriend didn’t hear from her, either. Not a phone call or a text. And he even gave his phone to that cop that night, correct?”

“So he said.” Emma absently crunched a Cheeto, less out of hunger than anxiety. She pondered Hugo. She trusted him more than she trusted most people. But her hunches had been wrong before. Did he really not know where Coral was headed that day? If there had been cell phones back in St. Augustine, she would have wanted to communicate with Charlie every second.

No; she’d spent time with Hugo in the immediate aftermath. If that panic was a f lawless act, well, then he was a lot more dangerous than anyone had guessed. Another possibility: he knew where Coral was headed; he just didn’t want
Emma
to know. Emma may have trusted him, but maybe the feeling wasn’t mutual.

Anything was possible when people had secrets. And
everyone
had secrets. Even people you trusted. Maybe even especially the people you trusted, because they had an investment in maintaining that trust.

“No dead bodies matching her description have turned up,” Pete said. “So we’ve got that in our favor.”

Emma didn’t want to think about that. She
couldn’t
think about that. Coral was alive. Somewhere. They’d f ind her, and they’d get her to a hospital.

“Oh,” she said. “I—oh.” How had she not realized?

“You got something, O’Neill?” Pete’s gaze was sharp.

Yes. It was possible.

“Maybe,” she said. “If Coral is bait for me, then they wouldn’t have gone far, would they? That wouldn’t make sense. But that’s not the only thing. Not the
important
thing. Because they made Elodie sick, remember? They poisoned her, just like they poisoned Allie Golden. To see if she could
get
sick. Which means they had to have taken her to a place to experiment on her. I’ve been focusing on the idea that they’d held Elodie at a house or an apartment. But looking at this map, I’ve been thinking about the cover story I gave Coral and Hugo. That I was studying to be a nurse. I didn’t pick that out of a hat; half the people who live around here are involved in the medical profession.” She jabbed at the screen with an orange-dusted f inger. “It’s the—”

“Medical center,” Pete said, and he patted her on the back.

Emma drew closer to the map, squinting at hospital after hospital. Methodist. Parkland. Children’s. Baylor. Dozens of walk-in clinics of various sizes.

Pete rubbed his thumb over his narrow chin. The crow’s-feet at his eyes deepened as he frowned again at the screen. “So you think Elodie and Coral were taken by someone with access to poisons or disease cultures? You’re right; there’s lots of research here in Dallas. Especially after that Ebola scare a couple years back.”

Emma dug for another Cheeto, then decided against it. “Yeah, that explains Elodie. But not Coral. I mean, if they
do
know Coral’s not me, then why make her sick? Isn’t that a waste of resources? Or maybe they want me to think they’ve made a mistake. Picked a girl who doesn’t f it the whole prof ile. So I’ll think they’re slipping up. And they think they’re leading me to her so they can grab me and . . . I don’t know.”

It still didn’t make sense. And even the parts that sort of did couldn’t help them; nothing pinpointed where Coral had been taken, or even
if
she had been taken. Not for sure. On a hunch, Emma reached for her phone. She punched in Hugo’s number, not even sure what she was going to say.

He answered on the f irst ring.

“What aren’t you telling me?” she asked without saying hello.

There was a long silence. She couldn’t even hear him breathe. For a moment she wondered if the connection had broken.

When he f inally answered, his voice cracked.

“I wasn’t completely honest with you.”

“Oh?”

“We did f ight, me and Coral. It wasn’t anything much. Just silly crap about how she thought maybe I didn’t want to get an apartment with her next year. That once we were in college, I’d want to f ind someone else. Get tired of her, I guess. You know how some guys do. But I would never! That’s bullshit. And she said—she said she was gonna ask you. That you never said, but she knew you understood about love. That she could tell there was a history that you . . . That’s all pretty lame, I know.”

“Not lame,” Emma said evenly. “Honest.”

Hugo took a deep breath on the other end. “She said she was gonna ask you. And you know Coral. She does what she says she’s going to. So I guess what I’m saying is, I know you hadn’t seen her, but maybe she was trying to f ind you when she disappeared. You think that’s possible?”

She could have told him that he was an idiot for keeping this quiet. That Coral could be dead, or worse than dead. So why, why couldn’t he have just told the truth? Both to her, and to that nosy cop with the ponytail? But there was no point in calling the proverbial kettle black. Emma had told Coral and Hugo some half-baked story about spending the holidays with a study group. Had her own lies about going to Brookhaven somehow made Coral an easier target, or just a target to begin with?
The
target?

“Maybe,” she said f inally. “I’ll call you when I know more. Hang in there, Hugo. It’s going to be okay.”

Pete reached over and powered down Emma’s laptop. “Where to?” he asked.

“Brookhaven Community College,” Emma said. “I think she went there to f ind me. There’s a nursing program there. I told Coral I was a student. That I was in this study group over the holidays. Shit. Maybe someone saw something.” She scooped up her bag and headed to the door. “C’mon.”

He stayed seated. “It’s almost midnight, O’Neill.”

Emma’s shoulders sagged. “Oh,” she said, and the adrenaline coursing through her veins melted away. Now in addition to being terrif ied for Coral, she felt exhausted and faintly embarrassed.

Pete rose and walked to her couch. “You got an extra blanket?” he asked. “Unless you’re not comfortable with me bunking here. I didn’t have time to get a room yet, but I can—”

“It’s f ine,” she said. “It’s all gonna smell like smoke.”

“I’ve been in worse,” Pete said.

“Me, too.”

LATER, LYING ON
her bed, Emma stared at the pocket watch she’d hung up. She didn’t even bother to pull back the comforter. She wasn’t about to sleep. Not tonight. Why did she hold on to this heavy, ridiculous thing, anyway? To prove she had been loved once. That there had been a boy who had given her his heart.

In the dim light f iltering through the window from outside, she studied the outlines of the f lying hawk etched on the case. She remembered the way the metal felt cool against her skin when she wore it. How happy it made Charlie to give her this beautiful gift. How shallow and silly she’d been even to mention its weight.

Emma sat up and took the watch into her hand. She traced the shape of the hawk with her f inger. Charlie had lied to her that day on the road, or rather, he had not told her the full truth. Hawks wanted their freedom, yes. They were temperamental, and sometimes you had to wait them out. But those goshawks that Charlie had so carefully tended—they mated for life. They found the one for them and they didn’t let go.

She would keep on searching, not just for Coral, but for Charlie. She wouldn’t give up. Because she didn’t want the watch to be the only good thing she had left.

Chapter Eighteen

Florida and beyond

1918

Charlie headed back to America after the Armistice with no home, no job, no family, and no Emma. He had left the one person he never should have, and now she could be anywhere. And why? Because at seventeen you do very stupid things, believing with all your heart that they are not stupid at all.

His goals were the same as they had been since Worley’s death. Find Emma O’Neill and tell her what an ass he’d been. And destroy Glen Walters—if he still lived—and burn his Church of Light to the ground.

He wondered brief ly about Kingsley Lloyd. Charlie suspected that the bastard had also drunk the tea. But that wasn’t his problem. The world was a big place, and no doubt Kingsley Lloyd had run as far away from the O’Neills and Ryans as he could. Maybe
he’d
dried up the stream and taken the plants. Anything was possible.

So when his ship docked in New York, Charlie hopped a train to Florida. Cautiously, he investigated. Asked people when it seemed safe. Even asked after the Fountain of Youth, hoping Emma was trying to f ind it, too. She’d seemed so desperate for the water and its plants that last day. If he was already down in the Everglades—in the midst of the Juan Ponce de León legends, none of which had subsided, not even the tiniest bit—then he might as well ask about the fountain. Maybe there would be something that would lead him to Emma.

He hunted through St. Augustine late one evening, sneaking through the darkness, his heart pounding, the sadness f illing him in a visceral way that took him by surprise. He had thought that the war had numbed his ability to feel. It had not.

The burned shell of the Alligator Farm and Museum was gone. A civic center had replaced it. The sign out front advertised an orchestral concert the coming evening. All that was left of what had once been a vibrant business was the path that led behind the building to a small, deep pool—once the gator observation pool, where the tourists could watch them swim and feed. Now it was f illed with koi and other small f ish. The huge aviary had been torn down and replaced with grass, benches, and a white gazebo.

Other families occupied the house he’d lived in and Emma’s house, too. It was as though the O’Neills and Ryans had never existed.

The ache inside nearly overwhelmed him, but he forced himself to explore and make sure there was nothing here that he needed to know about.

There was indeed nothing. That hurt just as much.

Glen Walters had taken his traveling show of hate to places unknown. If any of his followers remained around St. Augustine, they were keeping quiet about it. The f ire had burned out in more ways than one.

After that the tiny town of Punta Gorda. A natural spring near St. Petersburg. And half a dozen hamlets and towns in between. Nothing. If he was looking for proof of the magical waters, he would f ind them in the mirror and nowhere else—a daily truth that made him want to both laugh and weep.

And so he continued, up and down and across the country, then up to parts of Canada and south to Mexico and eventually even back to Europe, on a hunch that Emma might have gone looking for the Ryan relatives who had supposedly passed down all those tales of immortality that Charlie’s father had loved to tell. He listened and looked and remained patient like his falconry training had taught him. He would f ind her. The human network of stories and gossip and the random but continual interconnections of one place to another, of someone who knew someone who might know something, fueled his search.