It Wasn't Always Like This (26 page)

Only Emma had remained the same—physically, at any rate. Once the bruises healed.

She told herself that, really, she was no worse off than she had been. In fact, better now that, at least for the time being, the murders had stopped. She could sink back under the radar. Move on. Start over. It would be okay.

But it wasn’t okay. Not at all.

“You stopped the bad guys,” Pete said and reached for her hand, squeezing gently. It was a vast oversimplif ication.

“Maybe.”

Pete kicked back the covers and, with a low grunt, eased himself up. He was paler than she liked to see, and not just because of the white and blue hospital gown, his thin face even gaunter today. She hated that this was her fault, although she knew he would say it wasn’t.

“O’Neill.”

She raised an eyebrow.

“Girls were dying. Now they’re not. I say you did what you set out to do.”

Emma shrugged.

A steady rain was beating against the outside window. The day was gray and bleak. Outside Pete’s room, the nursing staff bustled back and forth.

“Em,” said Pete after a bit, “you could come back to Albuquerque with me. Bunk in my spare room till you found a place. Partner up, even. If you want to.”

In her aching head she was already thinking that, really, it would be better for both of them if she just moved on and didn’t look back.

“Green chile cheeseburgers,” he added encouragingly, and she laughed, just a little.

“I’ll think about it.”

His gaze lingered. “He’d be proud of you, you know. Your Charlie. I wish he could see what you’ve become.”

“You don’t know what I was,” she said and knew this sounded both f ierce and cruel. But he
didn’t
know. Most days, she felt
she
didn’t, either.

Emma walked out of the room then, telling him she’d be back. In the empty waiting area, she curled up in a chair by the window and allowed herself to cry.

She wasn’t sure how long she’d been sitting there—just f ive minutes or so—when she felt rather than heard someone else come into the small room.

Kingsley Lloyd, a wool cap pulled low over his head, wearing a navy nylon zip-up jacket that seemed totally incongruous with the man she remembered, was standing next to her chair, a pained expression on his frog-like face.

Emma’s heart surged hopefully. Why would he come back now, if not to tell her about Charlie? That was the only reason she could think of.

But Emma was Emma. Or at least, as Pete had just reminded her, she was the Emma she had become.

“You lit him on f ire,” she said, although she supposed Lloyd would argue that he had simply dropped a match. In her head, she saw Matt Thigpen burning.

Lloyd shrugged. “He would have killed you, Emma. Not to make too f ine of a point of it.”

“Is that how you justify things these days? Then I guess I haven’t missed much in a hundred years.”

“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 learned 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.