It Wasn't Always Like This (17 page)

This was the Emma O’Neill who hoisted herself into Pete’s black Tundra. The survivalist. Now, with another hour gone and Coral still missing, Pete cranked the engine. The Tundra was a noisy beast. Outside, the clouds had returned, and the temperature had plummeted. Emma shivered. The air smelled like snow.

“I’m going to feed you,” Pete said. “Because I can tell you haven’t eaten. And you’re going to f ill me in. Pancakes okay with you?”

Emma thought of arguing, then thought better of it. Uptown Pancakes—its neon sign, a short stack with butter—sat a mile away on Lemmon. Even from inside Pete’s ridiculously oversized truck, Emma imagined she could smell the bacon frying, mixing with the smoky odor of her hair in a not entirely unpleasant way. Her stomach growled.

Pancakes always reminded her of Charlie. Specif ically: the f irst time that Maura O’Neill acknowledged that her daughter and Frank Ryan’s son were more than good friends who’d grown up together. Not out loud. Like the immortality, it was a subject no one talked about, except to hint at. Certainly her parents had more important things to worry about than if their daughter had fallen in love. By that point, they had all been frozen in time together for going on two years.

But one Sunday morning, out of the blue, Emma’s mother had invited Charlie to have breakfast with them. Emma knew why; Maura O’Neill had begun a f ierce campaign of pretending that everything was normal. Asking Emma’s “young man” to eat with them, formally, was part of it. Later, while they did the dishes, her mother whispered, “Charlie loves my pancakes.”

Emma remembered her face f lushing. Her mother’s approval still meant something to her. And so she memorized the pancake recipe, a simple combination of f lour and eggs, butter and milk. She remembered imagining the future: she would make pancakes for Charlie when they were married. And not just on Sundays. Every day if he wanted them.

Of course the future doesn’t always work out the way you plan. Emma tried not to take this out on her love of pancakes.

PETE CLIMBED OUT
of the truck and started across the lot. “O’Neill,” he began, his voice quiet even though she trailed several feet behind, “how long did you think it would take me to f igure out that these dead girls who keep popping up all look a lot like you? Including your friend Coral?”

Emma froze. She kept her eyes on the restaurant. Inside would be pancakes and bacon and a steaming cup of coffee. She
really
wanted a cup of coffee.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” he demanded.

“
You
could have said something before taunting me with pancakes,” she muttered. “They make this sourdough batter one here that is seriously—”

“What else, Emma?” Using her name punched through her defenses; he rarely used her f irst name. Pete shot a wary glance around the parking lot and lowered his voice even more. “And remember that most likely, someone just tried to burn you alive. In case you hadn’t noticed.”

He had a point. She stepped forward, then paused again on the little walkway outside the glass door. “I . . . I needed to protect you. I couldn’t . . . There’s just a lot to it.” She glanced around the parking lot now, too, gloomy under the dark clouds.

As if on cue, it started to rain—hard, stinging drops.

Pete made a disgruntled sound in the back of his throat. He ran his hand through his scruffy graying hair. Emma noted that he could use a haircut but thought better of saying so at this particular moment.

“Protect
me
?” he cried, his voice rising. He strode back to the truck, leaving her no choice but to follow. Then he gestured sharply. She followed him back into the truck, angry now, too, and also wet from the rain.

“Yeah,” Emma said, climbing in and slamming the door behind her. Pete had no right to question her judgment. He wasn’t her. He hadn’t lived what she had. And then she thought,
Coral is missing. I need to f ind her. I need a lot of things, but right now, that’s the most important one.

The rain smacked the windshield, and Emma shook the water from her smoky hair.

“I didn’t ask you to come to the rescue,” she said. “You’re not my . . .”
Father,
she had been about to say before she bit back the word.

Emma hated when she f igured herself out. It made her feel small and cranky. But the truth was still the truth: being friends with her was dangerous. She hadn’t meant for Coral to become a friend. It was enough balancing Pete. Enough keeping
herself
alive and in the game. It would be so easy, she knew, to just run and hide. Not just from those who wished her gone, but from everything and everyone. Go someplace and just be. She could do that, couldn’t she? Why the hell not?

Was that what Charlie had done? Was
that
the real reason she hadn’t found him?

Maybe he was just better than she was at not being found. Of course he was.

Or she was just a shitty detective, which was also possible.

In her head, Charlie Ryan was still the Charlie Ryan she remembered, the Charlie from 1916. But why did she cling to that stupid lie? Over the years, she’d imagined different possibilities: Charlie would like football but maybe not soccer. He would enjoy texting but not phone calls. He would like thin-crust pizza, New York style, with sausage, and he’d fold his slice over and shovel it into his mouth. He would have owned the sleekest of automobiles over the years: A Dodge Charger because yes, Charlie would like muscle cars. Or maybe a Mustang. She wasn’t sure what year. A Carmen Ghia. A 1957 Thunderbird.

And he would have learned to f ly. She had dug into war records once and found various Charlie Ryans with service records, some who were pilots, but tracking them down always led to dead ends. She supposed he’d used aliases. Certainly she had, although she’d gotten sloppy about that lately, and look how that had turned out.

Because for one wrongheaded second she had thought she could have a real friend. Be a normal person.

And so people were dead. Again. And Coral was missing.

“From the beginning,” Pete said, and Emma refocused. “Whatever you’ve been holding back.” Then more quietly, “I can’t help you if I don’t know. So enough with the thick-headedness.”

Her brows furrowed. “I am not—”

“O’Neill.”

Emma’s eyes stung now and not from the smoke. “I have to f ind her,” she said. “Jesus, Pete. I don’t know—”

“From the beginning,” he repeated and touched a hand to her shoulder. “Repeat yourself. I don’t give a shit. I have all the time in the world. Bad joke. But bear with me. I need you to f ill in the dots.” He shimmied out of his jacket. “And put this on before you freeze to death.”

Emma almost smiled. “Don’t think that’s possible,” she said. “But thanks.”

She let him drape his jacket over her. The weight felt comforting. It reminded her of being tucked into bed. Or maybe it didn’t remind her. Could she remember that feeling as viscerally as she believed she remembered, a century later? There was so much she didn’t know. But Pete Mondragon, this strange protector, deserved to know as much as she did.

So she told him.

She told him what the Church of Light wanted, or what she believed they wanted: to f ind and destroy her and Charlie.

She did not say Charlie might already be dead. She would never say that.

“Or they want what I am,” Emma clarif ied. “At this point, it’s a toss-up. I mean it started as a witch hunt, you know that. But over time, well, things change. It’s like you and I have talked about before. Everyone thinks they want to live forever. Until they do.” She laughed sadly. “Not that any of them f igured that part out yet. At least, I don’t think so. Except for Kingsley Lloyd. If he’s still alive, he’s somehow the key to this whole thing, even if he doesn’t know it. It’s about power. Maybe they got to him. Maybe not.”

“What else?” Pete pressed.

Emma told him everything else she could think of, everything about the death of Elodie Callahan and her visit to Dallas Fellowship and Pastor Meehan, laying it all out.

“I don’t think Meehan’s connected,” she f inished. “But I’ve been wrong before.”
Too many times
, she thought.

By the time Emma f inished talking, the rain had turned to soft f lakes of snow. She’d never seen snow in Dallas before, although she knew it snowed here. There were still f irsts, even after 120 years. She waited for Pete to tell her that she was wrong for waiting so long to bring him fully into the case, in trying to protect him, to keep him distanced.

But he said only, “And I know that you think Charlie is still out there, too.”

She nodded.

“You know this is still all hard for me to believe, right?” Pete asked. He tapped his f ingers on the steering wheel. “If you didn’t look the way you look . . .”

“I know,” Emma said, her eyes on the rain. “But I
do
look the way I look. And you don’t. You look like you’ve aged since I last saw you, four years ago. You’re grayer. The bags under your eyes are darker.”

“Guess you don’t learn manners living forever, either,” he grumbled. He cleared his throat. “So you think this Church of Light—whoever’s in charge at this point—is killing off girls to either f ind you or lure you out.”

“Yes,” Emma said. “I’ve studied the autopsy reports. That’s why it’s been poison, because poison can’t affect me. When they start to show symptoms, then the Church of Light knows it’s not me, so they get killed. The Church of Light can’t let them live.”

Pete nodded. “So she might be dead, then?” He hesitated. “Your friend Coral?”

Something f ierce lit inside her. “She’s not,” Emma said. “I’d know if she was. This time they know they’re close. She’s bait.”

“So you’re psychic now, too?” His tone was half sarcasm, half possibility.

That was the cop in him, she knew. You needed to be a cynic to survive in his line of work. She got that.

“Sorry,” Pete said. “But let’s be clear. You think that the others weren’t just the work of some random serial killer bastard. You think that the Church took them because they f it a pattern that might have been you. Orphans. Foster children. Girls who had come suddenly to live with relatives. All matching your general physical prof ile and generally eternal age. Something that I missed or just didn’t want to see? Do I have this now?”

Emma took a deep breath and nodded. “But not Coral,” she clarif ied, although she could tell Pete got it. He was methodical like that. Needed to make sure he had all the pieces exactly so. She looked out at the swiftly falling snowf lakes. A dozen images of Charlie Ryan f illed her head, because this was all about him, too, wasn’t it? Maybe she
wasn’t
a bad detective. Maybe she hadn’t found him because they’d gotten to him long ago—like they’d now gotten to Coral.

She turned to look at Pete. “They took her to send a message: that they know I’m here. So they have to keep her alive. Because the only reason they’d take the wrong girl is to make the right girl surface. And that would be me.”

“So, back to this Kingsley Lloyd,” Pete said. Emma could see him shifting more pieces, like a huge jigsaw puzzle with no picture on the box for guidance.

“Yeah?”

“I’ve still got nothing on him,” he said. “There’re a few going by that name, but as far as I can tell, none of them are
him.
One in Wales. Another in Australia. Couple of guys in Canada. Nothing that’s shouting immortal herpetologist.” He smirked. “Although maybe the Aussie. Every damn picture he posts is worse than the next. He likes to wear this green porkpie hat. And Hawaiian shirts. But that wouldn’t be your guy, would it?”

Despite herself, Emma laughed. “Don’t think so.” She pictured Kingsley Lloyd’s froggy face, bowed legs, and thick, stout hands. He had worn corduroy trousers even in the Florida heat and plain cotton shirts and work boots. A handkerchief had always dangled from his back pocket. Most of all, she remembered that he always looked more tired and sweatier than anyone else down there, up until the very end. He’d always had a bone weariness that seemed to come from somewhere deep inside. She remembered him now, sipping all the lemonade in the museum gift shop. Gulping it down as though his thirst just couldn’t be quenched.

Back then that had just made her uneasy. Now she wondered.

Pete’s face went serious. “Em,” he said, “so they might be after him, too?”

“I think so,” she said, cupping her hands over her knees. “If I’m right. If he’s still alive, and let’s face it, I think I should have realized he
was
a long time ago.” She turned to Pete, shifting in her seat. “But if I’m right and he is, there’s always the other possibility, isn’t there? That he’s working with them.”

Pete smiled fully for the f irst time since he’d rescued her from the f ire. “Taught you well, O’Neill.” The inside of the cab was growing colder, snow piling up outside, covering the windshield until he cranked the ignition and the wipers f licked it heavily away. “So now what?”

He reached to adjust the rearview mirror, waiting. Emma knew he could tell her, of course. He knew as well as she did what they needed to do. But that wasn’t how it worked between her and Pete.
You talk a case out
.
You try not to go it alone unless you have to.