It Wasn't Always Like This Page 7

  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.

  Still, she had never stopped thinking that it really wasn’t.

  “Pete,” Emma heard herself say now, “could you do a background check for me on a guy named Kingsley Lloyd?”

  On Pete’s end there was silence. Did he even remember what she’d told him?

  “That guy who told your father about the stream?” Pete said it almost indifferently, as though it were just an everyday thing to know someone who had drunk from a Fountain of Youth.

  “That’s the one,” Emma said.

  The world was getting smaller, had been for a while now. Hard to f ly under the radar when just a click of a mouse could unearth things that people barely remembered doing or saying. Kingsley Lloyd had disappeared long before that horrible last day in Florida. He wasn’t anyone to her, not family, not a friend. Just the man who’d given them the tea and thus someone she held responsible for all that came after that. Thinking about him was therefore not something Emma liked to do.

  But now she wondered. What type of man would lead peopl
e to a Fountain of Youth and not sip from it himself? She hadn’t seen him drink that day in her family’s kitchen, but that didn’t mean he hadn’t, did it? And if she was pondering this—far too late, but still, she had nothing but time—then wasn’t it possible that Glen Walters and his followers and their descendants had pondered it, too?

  And Charlie. If Charlie was out there—he was out there, alive, not dead, had to be—had Charlie wondered about Kingsley Lloyd? “He’s a con man,” Charlie had told her, “a charlatan, like you said. I don’t want you around him.” And she had bristled at him giving her orders because Charlie was not her father. But then they’d drunk that stupid tea from that stupid Fountain of Youth stream, and Lloyd had disappeared, and all of a sudden there were more dangerous things to worry about.

  And then the danger came home to roost.

  And then she’d been alone. And the years had passed as years do.

  But what if—

  “Em. Why are you researching a dead guy?”

  Just barely, in the background, Emma thought she could hear him pecking in his signature two-f ingered way on his laptop keys. Pete was quite the fan of the Interwebs.

  Emma cleared her throat, taking her time about it. Around her, the back end of the IKEA parking lot was f illing up. She blew out a breath. Immortality hadn’t made her brilliant, but she had her moments, few and far between.

  “I think Kingsley Lloyd might not be dead,” she said f inally.

  Chapter Eight

  St. Augustine, Florida

  1913–1914

  Emma was thinking about kissing Charlie—something she found herself doing most of the time when she wasn’t actually kissing him—the moment everything in the universe changed again.

  Shouting awoke her from her daydream—shouting about “purple f lowers.”

  She was standing among the tomatoes and green beans and squash she was supposed to be tending. Kingsley Lloyd and Frank Ryan and her own father were running and whooping toward the house. She squinted at them. She knew they’d gone to the island to collect snakes and lizards; Kingsley Lloyd had suggested they start a new exhibit of smaller reptiles. Emma would always remember thinking in that instant, Something must have happened, something serious.

  “Where’s your mother?” her father gasped as the three men clattered through the gate. “Maura! Come outside!”

  Emma glanced from one to the other. They’d returned too soon to have captured any new specimens, so why were they all in a tizzy? Even that ugly Mr. Lloyd, whom she tried to avoid as much as possible. She didn’t trust the way his bulging eyes looked past people in conversation, f ixed on some distant place. Or how he always seemed absolutely certain about everything he said. Emma liked to know things as much as the next person, but no one knew everything. She suspected that most of Mr. Lloyd’s facts were as true as Frank Ryan’s family stories. Not one bit.

  “Look!” Her father waved a clump of purple f lowers in his hand. Mr. Lloyd was clutching a basketful of the stuff in his skinny arms.

  “Can you believe it?” Frank Ryan asked. He turned to Kingsley Lloyd. “You’re a genius, sir. Brilliant!”

  Emma’s mother emerged from the house. “What in the Sam Hill is going on here?”

  “We thought we might f ind some iguanas by the pond in the center of the island,” her father said, talking a mile-a-minute. “You know how they love that pond.”

  Mother shrugged. Emma had been there only once, so brief ly and so long ago now that she barely remembered. The island was not deemed safe for a girl. Charlie had been a few times, but he preferred the birds to the gators, mostly because his father preferred the opposite.

  “Damn reptiles were hiding,” Mr. Ryan cut in. “Couldn’t f ind a single one. I told myself maybe we could capture a new gator instead, just so the trip wasn’t a waste. And then we saw the stream. I swear I’d never noticed it before.”

  Here he rambled a bit—of course he did—about alligators and their territory and habits, and thankfully Emma’s father stopped him before he launched into some tale of his Montoya ancestors and their gator-hunting abilities.

  “It was growing right at the edge,” Art O’Neill cried, sounding triumphant. “Normally they only grow in the Caribbean. But here they were. Right here in Florida!”

  He turned to Mr. Lloyd.

  Turned out that when given his turn, Kingsley Lloyd was as long-winded as Charlie’s father. More. Emma’s attention drifted during most of it, but she caught the essence: Lloyd’s grandmother was a natural healer. “Born poor,” he said. “When you’re born poor, you learn to make do. You pay attention to what’s around you. ‘Nature has everything we need,’ she always told me. You just need to know where to look and what you’re seeing.’”

  It was a pretty neat trick, Emma realized: Like Mr. Ryan, Kingsley Lloyd swore by the advice of a woman long dead. That way no one could argue with him. Once you molded your long dead relatives’ stories into fact, you could make anything sound true.

  “Science is proving her right,” Mr. Lloyd went on, his raspy voice booming with enthusiasm. “And if she was here, she would tell us that the quickest and best way to avoid contracting polio is to drink a brew made from these plants.”

  Emma rolled her eyes, but she could feel the fear of polio just the same as everyone else around here, feel it like you could feel the St. Augustine heat or smell the salt. And not just in Florida. The newspapers regularly reported cases all over, even back in Brooklyn. Epidemics they called it. There was no cure.

  “So you see,” Emma’s father f inished, “we’re going to steep a tea from the ground leaves of the plant and drink it, and all of you—all of us—will be immune to getting sick. It’s a miracle, I tell you.”

  By this time Charlie’s mother had joined them. She exchanged a wary glance with Emma’s mother. But Mr. Lloyd was grinning like he’d won a pot of gold. Did he think he could make money from this potion or whatever it was? She bet he did. How could her parents be so naïve?

  “You’re a good man, O’Neill,” he said. Lloyd clapped his hands together, then gave them a little shake. “You, too, Ryan. Protecting your families.”

  Emma wondered what Charlie would have to say about this. She already knew what he thought of Mr. Kingsley Lloyd. The man was a con artist. A charlatan.

  The tea smelled like f lowers. Well, f lowers mixed with mud and salt and something that left a sharp, dark bitterness in her throat just from sniff ing the cup. She wouldn’t have even called it “tea.” It was more like the same homegrown medicine everyone else drank to save themselves from polio and other diseases. That’s exactly what it was, in fact.

  “Drink it all,” her father told them. “Every drop.”

  Emma wrinkled her nose. At the stove, bow-legged Kingsley Lloyd stirred the muddy liquid before ladling it into each of the other cups with his squat, stubby-f ingered hand. On the other side of the O’Neill’s kitchen, clutching his own cup, Charlie waggled a brow at her. Then he cast his gaze swiftly toward Mr. Lloyd. He made a deep “er, er” sound in the back of his throat.

  A frog sound. Emma giggled.

  “Es verdad,” Charlie said in a low voice. She laughed, so hard she almost spilled her portion of the smelly stuff.

  “What did you say?” Frank Ryan asked with a sour scowl.

  “I was thinking of Great-Grandma Ester,” Charlie said. “Did she have a family story about magical tea?”

  At the stove, Kingsley Lloyd’s mottled-looking face turned a dark shade of red. “It’s not magic, boy,” he said. “It’s science.” But there was something in his tone that made Emma sure he was lying. Except what kind of lie was that?

  “I’m not a boy,” Charlie said. The teasing was gone from his voice.

  “Charlie,” his mother began.

  Mr. Ryan cast a long, hard look at his oldest son. “No, you’re not,” he sa
id. “You’re a man. Start acting like one.”

  “I will,” Charlie replied, strong and f irm. “I’ll make my own choices, too.”

  Emma held her breath. The laughter threatening to bubble inside her died down. She could feel her own father’s eyes on her, probably her mother’s too, but Emma kept her gaze on Charlie. His eyes locked on hers, and then he raised his cup to his lips.

  Emma felt a smile creep across her own. She realized that he was not giving in. He was doing what he promised his father he would do. He was making a choice.

  Charlie drank, downing the whole cup at once. She watched his Adam’s apple bob as he swallowed. Charlie. Her Charlie. That kiss had reimagined her, reimagined both of them. She was his and he was hers, and she wanted him in ways she hadn’t understood she could want. Every day there was some new revelation: He had a tiny freckle on the tip of his left earlobe she had never noticed before. If he hadn’t shaved, if the sun hit his jaw just right, some of his dark stubble turned auburn. He was ticklish at his ankles, and if she wrapped her hand around one, he shivered and laughed.

  Emma lifted her cup and drank the liquid to the dregs—not because her father had commanded, not because her parents had been walking about with pinched faces for days talking about sickness, more intensely since they’d heard that ridiculous message of doom from Preacher Walters—but because Charlie Ryan had shown her that she, too, could still own the choice to obey.

  Much later, after everything had changed forever and there was nothing Emma could do but keep living, it occurred to her that Kingsley Lloyd had been the only of them she hadn’t seen swallow the drink. Maybe he never thought the tea would work. Or maybe he was afraid it would. Maybe he waited for them to drink f irst because he already suspected what the plant was, what it could do to those who consumed it. Maybe he was in shock that he might have actually found the thing of legends.

  On the other hand, it was entirely possible that Kingsley Lloyd did not have a clue what he’d actually found until after it was all done and they were stuck with it.