It Wasn't Always Like This (5 page)

Chapter Four

Dallas, Texas

Present

“Turn right in two miles,” the GPS chirped.

Emma adjusted her sunglasses. The hangover was long gone but the day still seemed a little too bright. She tried not to think of Matt. That whole thing was best forgotten. It was time to focus on what mattered, on what could matter. A clue.

Elodie Callahan, age sixteen, had been found f loating face down in a gated subdivision swimming pool. Elodie Callahan, who was supposed to come straight home after her youth group’s holiday party, the next to last day of school.

No one remembered seeing her after the Secret Santa gift exchange. No one remembered a thing until she was naked and dead in a stranger’s backyard. She hadn’t drowned, though. She’d been poisoned.

Happy almost New Year, indeed.

“Keep right,” the GPS lady announced.

She was a bossy thing. In Emma’s weaker moments, the GPS lady reminded her of her own mother, who took a great delight—as Emma remembered it—in telling her daughter exactly what to do and how to do it.
Sit up straight. Smile. Don’t smile. At least pretend you’re listening.
But unlike her mother’s view on what and was not ladylike behavior at any given time, the GPS was generally accurate, which Emma appreciated.

Her thoughts turned back to Elodie. Emma tapped a f inger on the steering wheel. Cars had come a long way over the years. They’d probably go a long way more in the years to come, but a wrinkled ninety-year-old Elodie Callahan, tottering around at the turn of the twenty-second-century, would never know about that. Or about the sharp-as-a-needle, turquoise-colored Avanti Emma had driven for a few glorious months in the ’60s. Emma was fond of a pretty car. And fast ones, too, which had surprised her. Her current used Volvo was depressingly utilitarian, a box with Swedish safety engineering.

But she wouldn’t be able to tell Elodie any of that, either. Like Emma, Elodie was frozen in time, but with one crucial difference: she was no longer alive.

Someone had given her something to see if she would die. Same as the other girls. Yes, Emma had f igured out the pattern, but she had yet to f igure out how to stop it. How to keep dead girls from turning up. No one would be safe until she did. Including her, although she worried less about that these days than she used to.

They were still after her, the Church of Light. They would never stop, so long as they had their zealots. More than once since she’d landed in Dallas, Emma had pondered calling Pete. But she hadn’t. He already knew more than it was safe for him to know. Better go it alone as long as she could.

WHEN THEY F IRST
met, Detective Pete Mondragon asked, “This a vengeance gig for you?”

“Not exactly.” It was not the truth but also not a lie.

Even then he knew better than to push her to elaborate. He knew when to keep his mouth shut. Besides, it had started as an accident—the investigating, that is. The poking and prodding of people and facts, the uncovering of stuff that wanted to stay hidden, like evil men with no obvious motive forcing poison down a teenage girl’s throat. But it became something she was good at, something intimately personal, more than something that just passed the time.

Sometimes, a murder or a disappearance caught her eye for no other reason than a gnawing ache at the sheer senselessness of it all: this undef ined despair that told her if she didn’t investigate, no one else would. There were a lot of people out there—young, rootless girls in particular—whom the world saw as disposable. Or whom the world didn’t see at all. Which was worse.

But Emma saw them. In those moments, investigating and solving crimes felt like penance—even when none had ever borne a connection to Glen Walters. She wondered if she would ever stop what he had unleashed. If you’d believed him back in 1913, his “church” had already been around for centuries. He claimed the faith traced its roots back to the Druids on one side of the Atlantic and the denizens of a lost Atlantis on the other.

In a word, bullshit.

The same type of bullshit that attracted people decade after decade, convinced it would make them safer or happier or righteous. They drank the poison Kool-Aid. They waited for aliens to whisk them off during the return of a comet. They holed up in compounds and bunkers. Or worse.

The problem was, some legends
weren’t
bullshit. Like the one about the girl named Emma O’Neill who celebrated her f irst seventeenth birthday six years before America granted women the right to vote.

The sheaf of police reports on the front seat next to her wasn’t a product of faith, either. It was real, and it was tragic, and it was very likely the Church of Light’s doing. Bullshit disguised as faith had a way of making reality very ugly.

Ironic that Glen Walters was decades gone himself, but had become even more powerful somehow. Dead heroes were like that. His followers might have been mortal, but collectively, they were eternal, just like her. They’d put their faith in his bullshit. They would sink into the background. Vanish for a decade or two. Then she would breathe easier, thinking it was over—only to discover again and again that it wasn’t, that it never would be, unless she found a way to stop it.

As the traff ic slowed to a crawl once more, she wondered, not for the f irst time, if she could put an end to Glen Walters’s mission without having to sacrif ice herself. She’d considered that option once or twice over the years: just taking an ad out in the paper, or later on the Internet, begging the Church of Light to come f ind her. It’s me, Emma O’Neill, you bastards!

Wouldn’t
that
surprise the hell out them?

But she never would, and she knew it. She couldn’t go the way of her family or those poor innocent girls or even Glen Walters until she found out what happened to Charlie. Best to focus on the present, as always.
Someone
knew she was in Dallas.
Someone
was leaving a trail of missing and poisoned girls, trying to f ind one specif ic
girl. Her. And unless she was mistaken, it was the same group that had destroyed her family and Charlie’s family, that had destroyed
them
, Charlie and her, over a century ago.

•

“EXIT IN SIX
hundred feet,” the bossy GPS lady intoned. “Make a right at the intersection. The destination is on your left.”

Her mother would have loved GPS. Emma almost smiled at the idea of her mother behind the wheel of a slick automobile with a back-up camera and Bluetooth. And with the smile came a wince, because part of Emma always squeezed in pain, the part that refused to forget or toughen up. Maura O’Neill had been dead and gone for almost a hundred years. But Emma’s mother would have bitched—politely, but still—about Dallas traff ic.

Emma exited. Checked for oncoming cars. Made her right turn. Dallas Fellowship was on her right; you couldn’t miss the huge-gated entrance to its college-like campus. She checked the signage and followed the winding road to the f lat-roofed building labeled
YOUTH MINISTRIES
, which sat under the shadow of both a row of pecan trees and the church itself, a building so sprawling that she had to step back to see it all at once.

Such a large and well-established church seemed a bit obvious for the folks who might have chased her here, but you just never knew. Hiding in plain sight was a strategy she knew better maybe than anyone else alive. The world was tricky that way.

Emma f luffed her bangs in the rearview mirror, then gave her expensively distressed jeans, silky tank top, and red cardigan with the three-quarter length sleeves a cursory check. Her shiny pink toenails peeked out from the open toes of her heeled booties. Unlike last night’s pair, these did not have spots of taco grease. She adjusted her brown leather hobo bag over one shoulder. Matt from the bar would have observed that she looked like a high school girl.

Which was exactly what one of the other IDs she carried in her wallet, the phony school ID, conf irmed. A second driver’s license nestled in the adjacent slot, also put her age as seventeen.

Like so much about her very long life, it was as true as it was untrue.

“I’M EMMA O’NEILL,”
she told the secretary in a shy voice. She held out her hand.

The woman—Melanie Creighton, according to the nameplate on her desk, looked up with a blank stare. Then her blue eyes widened. She took a sharp breath, an audible sound like the air being suddenly uncorked in a bottle.

Bingo,
Emma thought. So she wasn’t the only one to notice that the late Elodie Callahan bore a somewhat noticeable resemblance to Emma herself. Right track, then. But would it lead to anything?

Melanie blinked a few times. “Sorry,” she said. “I—you look like . . .” She shook her head. “What did you say you were here for?”

“I’m Emma O’Neill,” Emma repeated. She smiled brightly.

Melanie f inally offered a limp hand, f ingers drifting over Emma’s, her palm waxy. Another lesson from Detective Pete Mondragon:
If they just bend a f inger or two and don’t actually shake your hand, don’t trust ’em.
’
Cause you can bet they don’t trust you.
Recovered now—a quick recovery, Emma duly noted—Melanie peered over her reading glasses. “What can I do for you, Emma?”

Her smile seemed genuine. That was the thing about people: They were often more complicated than they appeared. And also much simpler.

If you’re gonna spin ’em a story,
Pete had taught her,
keep it simple.
And at least partly true. The less you lie, the more they trust you.

“I just moved here from Florida,” Emma said. “My parents aren’t into church, but I thought . . .” She paused long enough for Melanie’s eyes to lock onto hers. “I want to join the youth group,” she blurted when the silence verged on awkward, something she was good at making happen. You learned a lot about timing when you had a lot of time. “I heard from . . . well, the kids at school were talking. They really like the youth pastor here.”

The tips of Melanie’s ears turned pink. This could mean many things or nothing at all, maybe just the thrill of having her day broken up. Something encouraging in the wake of a tragic and frightening loss.

“Pastor Meehan isn’t here. But I can give you the sign-up form, dear.” Melanie spoke fast. She opened a desk drawer and extracted a piece of paper. “It’s nothing off icial,” she said, handing it to Emma. “Just your contact information. You just come to the events. You’ll see. What school do you go to?”

Emma was prepared. “Heritage,” she said. Elodie Callahan’s school.

Melanie’s mouth fell open. She quickly closed it and covered it with her hand.

“I started right before vacation,” Emma went on, letting her voice waver as though she was unsure if this was a good thing or not. “But you know the last few days of school before Christmas . . .” She paused, looking down, then back up.

Melanie took the bait. Swallowed it whole. “Oh, honey, it’s a f ine school. Lots of good kids there. Madison Faw and Bailey Beal. Love those girls. And the boys, too. Barrett Jones—he’s the quarterback on varsity this year. And I think Tyler Gentry goes to Heritage. My own two boys graduated from there. Andy’s at UT now and Christian’s up in Denton. And . . .” She trailed off, biting her lip. Her gaze roved Emma’s face.

“What?” Emma prompted. Then, “Oh,” with her eyes going wide. “Did she go here? That girl, I mean. The one who . . .”

It had been all over the news the past few days. In fact, it had been the aforementioned Tyler Gentry whom Emma had followed to that bar last night; she instantly recognized the name. Tyler was fond of underage drinking and the occasional recreational pill or two. But a closer look—even before she’d been distracted by Coral and Hugo and Matt and that bottle of bourbon—had turned up no connections. Tyler Gentry had nothing to do with the Church of Light. She’d trailed him just to be certain, for the simple reason that certainty was harder and harder to come by.

Emma, too, could be both complicated and simple.

Still, she didn’t have to fake the tears welling in her eyes. Sixteen-year-old-girls should not be murdered. Elodie Callahan should have been enjoying her Christmas break. She should have been with her family at an all-inclusive resort in the Bahamas, possibly parasailing or f lirting with the wait staff, or at the very least sneaking rum drinks in coconuts up to her room. She should have had the luxury of going to college, of getting hangovers that didn’t miraculously melt away, of making mistakes and maybe living in a crappy apartment with sloppy roommates and realizing that however bold it felt to buy a taco off the street, a bellyache was inevitable.

“Terrible thing,” Melanie said gently. “But don’t you worry.” She fumbled in a drawer for a tissue and dabbed delicately at her eyes. “They’ll catch whoever did it. They will. You’ve come to a good place, honey. We’re glad to have you here.”

At least the last sentence was probably true.

“Everyone loved Elodie,” Melanie added.