It Wasn't Always Like This (9 page)

“You a friend of the missing girl?” the cop had asked her the day she questioned the bartender. She’d seen him watching her out of the corner of her eye.

“Hired by the family,” she lied quickly. She could tell he didn’t believe her. But she pulled out her license, brazened it out. He looked worn out, this man, but focused. Brown eyes studying her, thumb rubbing across his stubbled chin. A brown trench coat, almost a duster. No wedding ring, but a faint pale line where one used to sit. A deep sandpaper voice, but f irm, too. And a sadness behind those curious eyes.

Emma was more than familiar with sadness.

“Pete Mondragon,” he’d said after a long, awkward pause.

“Emma O’Neill.” She held out her hand. Inwardly, she winced. She hadn’t used her actual name in longer than she could remember.

He was there the next place she went. And then the next.

She was working side by side with him before either of them realized that they were somehow, maybe partnering up.

Pete was as stumped as to what happened to Allie Golden as Emma was.

The search dragged out. One month. Two. Eventually, someone dumped Allie Golden in a f ield. The coroner said she’d been dead for less than a day. Poisoned. Something slow. Torturous. Then the murderers strangled her for good measure. All of which meant there had been two months in which Emma had failed to f ind her. Alive, that was.

She meant to walk away. To pull herself together and move on like always. But when the paperwork was all done and the books were closed on Allie Golden’s unfortunate and unsolved murder, Emma let Pete Mondragon convince her to go out for green chile cheeseburgers at Blake’s.

“They use Hatch chiles,” he’d told her in a devotional tone. It verged on the mystical. “You know they have to actually register their authenticity with the state Department of Agriculture?”

“Oh?”

“Iconic,” Pete said. “Mind-blowingly iconic, this burger.”

Something about his adoration of a fast-food cheeseburger, his lonely and haunted eyes alight with the thought of those chiles, made her say yes.

Or maybe it was that he said the word “authenticity.”

She’d only ever heard it used in conversation once before, in regards to a serial number that proved a certain heavy pocket watch was one-of-a-kind.

Pete ate three burgers to Emma’s one. It was like watching the gators at the Alligator Farm snap their prey into a death roll. Another nugget of Pete Mondragon wisdom, imparted in between healthy bites of burger:
“Eat. Enjoy life. Otherwise this job will kill you. It may kill you anyway. Better go knowing you enjoyed yourself.”

Here he’d paused to wipe a glob of cheese off his angular chin, a glob he proceeded to eat.

In that moment, she’d decided to trust him. Not with everything. Not yet. That would come later. Eventually she would tell him who and what she really was. And eventually, he would believe her. But still, she’d told him enough that f irst night, over those authentic burgers. She’d told him that she
had
tried to enjoy herself.

That she’d loved a boy once, and he’d loved her. That he’d left her. And that nothing had been right since.

NOW, SITTING HERE
in the enormous IKEA parking lot, she was being beckoned again by Pete’s gravelly voice in her cell: “Tell me.”

“You have the time?” she asked.

“Em, come on.”

She told him what she knew about the late Elodie Callahan. That she’d been poisoned, like Allie Golden. When Emma f inished, there was another pause, this one longer.

“You think it’s connected?”

“Pete, come on.”

“Had to ask. You working with the cops?”

“Not yet. I will eventually.”

“You want me to take some time and come out there? I have days I haven’t used.”

The offer was tempting. But Emma knew better. The wise move would be for him to stay in New Mexico. If the Church of Light—whatever that even meant now, whatever they had metastasized into—had tracked her here, she didn’t want Pete involved. She had not yet told him that all the dead girls looked like her. If he’d f igured it out himself, which he probably had, he was choosing not to tell her. Knowing what she was and
really knowing
were two different things. She’d told him more since those early days, but not everything.
Everything
was dangerous.

“No, I’m good. I won’t get in over my head.” Emma held her breath, waiting for him to call her on her bullshit. She had been in over her head for more than a century.

“They identify the toxin that poisoned her?” he asked instead, his tone matter-of-fact.

“Something natural, hard to detect,” she told him. “Reports also say she was strangled before they dumped her in the pool.”

On the other end, a sniff. “Shit.”

“Yeah,” Emma said. “Bastards do what bastards do.”

“So you think there’s a pattern.” More of a statement than a question.

“Yeah, I do.” She thought of Coral—whom she had also not yet mentioned to Pete, because what if she was wrong about Coral’s and her resemblance? And that reminded her of last night and Matt, and then she sighed again. Someday over drinks (not bourbon), she would f ill Pete in on the rest of her notable lapses of judgment.

“Well,” Pete said, drawing the word out.

She knew what he meant. Her instincts were probably right. Yet another Detective Mondragon rule: If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck
. . .
They
were
hunting her again, the Church of Light, or whatever they might call themselves these days, just as she was once again hunting them. Only now they’d found a new way to force her out of the shadows. With the other girl, the one before Elodie, it might have been a coincidence. This was no coincidence.

Even if Elodie Callahan had been the same as Emma, if she’d somehow drunk from the same waters and was immortal, it wouldn’t have mattered. She’d still be dead. They’d have burned her or dismembered her.

They would take what they wanted; maybe they had even found a way to extract immortality. Emma didn’t doubt that possibility. But the autopsy report showed Elodie wasn’t like Emma at all. She’d been poisoned, and she’d died.

“You sure you don’t want me to come out there?” Mondragon asked again.

Just for one tiny, self-indulgent moment, Emma hesitated. “No,” she said.

Better to keep him at a safe distance. Her mind was stuck on the image of Elodie Callahan and her thick, wavy brown hair and bright blue eyes. The thought stirred up a dim memory of something Charlie had said once, when he was holding Emma.

“You look like one of those paintings. The ones in that art book you have.”

He’d meant the Pre-Raphaelite girls with the wild, wavy hair and creamy skin. Emma had known she was too much in motion ever to be that still and perfect. But Charlie rarely said anything he didn’t mean. When he told her something, it counted.

Murdered Elodie Callahan would be quiet and still forever. It happened like that to girls who hadn’t yet f igured out just how impossibly evil the world could be. Maybe this wasn’t the most modern of thoughts, Emma told herself, but it was true, nonetheless.

It happened to boys, too, of course. That’s what had f irst given her a f licker of hope—the hope that Charlie was still out there somewhere, too.

EDDIE HIGGINS WAS
the f irst dead boy’s name. It was 1937, and Emma was in Chicago. She hadn’t found Charlie, not even a trace of him. Two decades had passed since that last day on the road in Florida. She had searched all over the country—f irst across the south, to Louisiana, then northward, following the Mississippi—searched for that stubborn idiot boy, and she had hidden from the Church of Light, and now here she was, still alive and kicking and seventeen, and he was still gone.

It was time to move forward.

She told herself she wasn’t giving up on Charlie, as much as she was being practical. She’d searched for longer than she’d been alive before
it
happened. Far longer than she’d even been in love. Maybe it was time to do the things that had been lost to her for so long. Charlie had been right, she supposed. Separating from him had wrecked her in more ways than she could count, but it had kept them safe. Or her, at least.

So she’d enrolled herself at Manley Senior High. A small indulgence as the world headed toward another war. A mistake in many ways, although it would save her just as her mistake in taking Charlie back to the island had saved her years ago.

Eddie Higgins’s body was discovered early one morning in the middle of October, just as the weather turned crisp and the waves of Lake Michigan began slapping harder at the shore, hinting at the winter yet to come. He had been strangled and dumped on the steps of the monument at Logan Square, a tall marble column with an eagle on top.

It was all everyone could talk about for days.

“It’s so awful,” her classmate Sylvie Parsons said to her in civics the day after Eddie’s body had been found. “Poor kid.”

Emma understood awful things.

“Bastards do what bastards do,” she’d responded, and Sylvie, who favored dark-red lipstick and bolero jackets over narrow-waist dresses and cursed loudly and creatively when she felt like it, shivered with delight and feigned shock.

Emma was—had been—in English class with Eddie. He was a senior at seventeen, handsome, slender, with dark, unruly hair. Her breath had caught in her throat the f irst day she walked into the classroom. Sitting there by the window, at f irst glance, he looked like Charlie. On closer inspection, he was taller, his nose was not as knife straight, and his skin was lighter and slightly pocked across the cheeks. And when he answered questions, his voice was higher-pitched. His thoughts were not particularly thoughtful.

And then he was dead, for no reason anyone could think of other than that horrible things sometimes happened, and this time a horrible thing had happened to a boy named Eddie Higgins. None of which would have been Emma’s particular concern except for what happened as she and Sylvie parted ways by the library. Sylvie headed toward the science classes, disappearing around the corner just as a man approached. He wore a brown suit with wide shoulders and cuffed trousers, a dark fedora angled low on his head, and a visitor’s badge pinned to his lapel.

“We’re interviewing Eddie’s classmates,” he said, homing in on Emma. “I’m with the police. Can I ask you a few questions?”

Her heart had raced for a few beats. Then she’d told herself to calm down.

“You’re Emma,” the man in the suit said, scribbling something on a notepad. “Emma O’Neill, correct?”

Now her heart was thundering. Still, she kept her wits about her enough to study him and tried to remember every detail of his face—square jaw and light gray eyes and silver-streaked hair. He didn’t look unusual or special, just the type of man who’d blend into a crowd.

“Did Eddie have any enemies?” he asked.

“I didn’t really know him,” Emma said, surprised that her voice sounded so even, so normal.

He asked some other things, but she wasn’t listening. Instead, she was rapidly calculating how long it would take her to collect her things from the rooming house where she was staying and if there was anything there worth collecting at all.

“I have study hall now,” she said. “Can I go?”

He nodded, and she walked off, past the library, and down the hall. Then she bolted around the corner and out a back door. Once outside, she broke into a panicked sprint. Because Emma had not registered at Manley Senior High School as Emma O’Neill. She had registered—in another frivolous but ultimately life-saving choice—as Emma Ryan.

Eddie’s murder and his resemblance to Charlie had to be connected. They were hunting him, too. Which meant that unlike poor Eddie, he was still alive. Maybe. Probably. Hopefully. She wouldn’t know, couldn’t know, unless and until she saw him with her own eyes. Emma knew only this: they had found
her
. It would be a long while before she made that mistake again.

But a new Emma
did
surface. One who refused to mind her own business even if it put her in danger. Tragedy had given her fuller purpose, though it might take her a while (maybe forever) to understand what that purpose was. She’d learned something else, too: Even if people helped you, came on strong and kind, that didn’t mean they weren’t out for something, weren’t looking to get around you, weren’t perfectly willing to do to you—or to those you cared about—whatever they needed.

Like Glen Walters. Like his generations of followers.

Like Kingsley Lloyd, even. He’d wanted
something
. But what?

Funny, Kingsley Lloyd. She hadn’t thought about
him
in any serious way for a long time. But he was, she knew, the one other person besides Charlie and her who could still be out there. Maybe. Doubtful. Very doubtful. Many times, over many years, she had told herself it was impossible.