It Wasn't Always Like This (18 page)

Emma held her hands to the heater, felt her f ingers warm as the hot air poured out. The smell of bacon was fainter now, but still mingling with the smell of snow and cold. Her stomach growled again. “Now,” she said, “we start by f inding Coral. Then the rest. But f irst we need to head back to my place. If someone set that f ire intentionally, we need to start there. See what we can f ind.”

“Agreed,” Pete said. He shifted the truck into gear, eased over the snowy parking lot, avoiding a huge pothole near the exit toward Lemmon.

“You still owe me pancakes,” she reminded him.

“If you don’t get us killed f irst,” Pete said.

“Thanks, Detective.”

But she was relieved one of them had acknowledged that death was a distinct possibility.

Chapter Sixteen

England and France

1917

Charlie let the Great War in Europe swallow him whole.

He had always wanted to f ly, and since the Americans were late to the party, he volunteered with the British Royal Air Force. Experience wasn’t needed. His desire to f ight with the Brits was enough to get him into f light school, and after that, nobody cared he was a Yank. No one had fought a war from the air before. And no one had fought a war as hugely destructive as this one.

Flying was terrifying and exhilarating and addicting in the way things are when you don’t give a damn what happens to you. Just as he’d always dreamed. It came easily to him, automatic as breathing.

But it was complicated, too, more complicated than controlling a hawk. Living things made their own decisions in order to survive. Nonliving things broke down, and when that happened, more often than not, they took you down with them.

“You got to get a feel for the stick and rudder,” he’d tell the rookies. “A feel for the air. It’ll save your hide when the engine conks out and you have to land in a f ield or worse. You glide in right and you won’t break your neck.”

Hawks were gliders, after all. They rarely f lapped unless it was to escape.

Everyone in southern England wanted to f ly with Charlie, possibly just to say they’d lived through the experience. Below them on the scarred earth of France and Germany, bodies piled up in the trenches. Later, Charlie would realize it was just the beginning, that the Treaty of Versailles didn’t end the conf lict as much as it simply paused things and let the Germans catch their breath, so Adolf Hitler could rise to power and make the Germans feel like they hadn’t lost the f irst time.

That wasn’t the end, either.

In point of fact, Charlie—technically forever draft-eligible as long as there was a draft—would have many future conf licts to f ly right into and f ight.

Charlie fought. He survived. He did not stop missing Emma any more than the grotesquely wounded soldiers missed their phantom limbs and eyes.

BACK WHEN HE
f irst started f lying missions to France, back when somewhere below on the ground, a young Adolf Hitler was f ighting against him in the Great War, he made a friend of sorts in a fellow pilot. Robert Worley was a daredevil, a prankster, a storyteller. All those Druid tales and some of the Irish myths Frank Ryan used to spin? Robert Worley knew them, too.

Telling the old fables passed the time, helped calm the soldiers’ nerves before a mission. Talking about women did that, too. Worley had a lot to say about his girlfriend Jane back in London. Jane was tall and blonde, with lips like cherries. He hailed her other parts, too, praising them with awful, bawdy odes and ballads, making the other pilots—boys, all of them, just boys—red-faced with drunken laughter.

Charlie mentioned Emma only in the abstract. The Church of Light might have already gotten to her. If they hadn’t, she was living a new life. This is what he hoped for her. He was left only with memories and pain. No amount of warm beer or whiskey could quell either. So it was easier to let Worley talk.

“You know the one about Tuatha Dé Danann?” Worley grinned when Charlie told him no. “My Irish great-grandmother says they live forever, mate. But they can be killed. They’ve got to hide from the mortal world.”

“Well,” Charlie said, matter-of-factly. “That’s a hell of story.”

“You’ve got Irish in you, too, don’t you? Ryan—that’s Irish. So you know.”

Charlie did know.

“Got another one,” Worley said, the two pints he’d drunk encouraging him. He told of a town that disappeared, only to resurface after many years. Sometimes, when he let himself think about it, Charlie imagined the stream to be like that. Its magic was so powerful it couldn’t just stay put . . . because everyone would know about it, would mine its possibilities. That hadn’t happened.

Charlie had never believed in magic before they all drank the tea, but now he had no choice, did he?

Like many pilots, Robert had a ritual of superstitions designed to keep him safe, to ensure he made it home to England and Jane. The odds were against them even if their planes functioned perfectly; anything from a hangnail to a bad night’s sleep could cause catastrophe, not to mention what the enemy could do. Before each mission, Robert Worley painted a Celtic cross on the side of his plane, and the word “Danu,” a fresh one of each over the last—so many times that the cross and the word were a messy inch thick.

“You think I’m crazy?” he asked Charlie once.

Charlie shook his head. “No crazier than I am.”

He’d tried to leave it at that. He hadn’t come to Europe and the Great War wanting friendship. Friends were something to which he no longer felt entitled. He had not been there to save his family. He had lost Emma even if he believed he had been protecting her. He was doomed to an endless sameness, a seventeen-year-old body that even his recklessness seemed unable to destroy.

On the other hand, how could he leave this world without f inding Emma again? It would be a greater sin than any he’d already committed.

Still, if Charlie had allowed himself a friend, it would have been Robert Worley.

Maybe that was why he’d agreed to pose together for a single photograph with their unit during the war. He hated the idea of nostalgia, but he understood Robert’s f ierce desire to prove to Jane that he was what he’d claimed to be—a handsome soldier in a sharply pressed uniform, a hero of the skies.

So Charlie stood with one foot on a tree stump, his arm draped over Worley’s shoulder, both of them staring straight and solemn into the camera—Worley’s expression to act the part, Charlie’s because he felt grim.

A FEW DAYS
later, Charlie killed a man face to face for the f irst time. Worley was with him. They were shot down by the most basic of anti-aircraft f ire while on a recon mission in the French countryside not far from Marseille.

They’d managed to land the rickety two-seater biplane, a Royal Aircraft Factory B.E.8, as it smoked and sputtered, but just barely and with enough impact that the whole contraption split into pieces as they hit the ground.

Worley broke a leg and dislocated his collarbone, and Charlie’s arm got sliced open at the meaty part near his shoulder.

They were armed, but not battle ready. Neither was ready to die. By the time he was f lying over France, Charlie understood the idiocy of his choices, but the heedless anger surging through him hadn’t dissipated even one tiny bit. If he had lost everything, then at least he could destroy the enemy and save the world. If he succeeded, it would be a sign. A redemption. He would f ind Emma someday. He would make things right again.

Robert aimed his Colt at the German soldiers who attacked them as they were still crawling from the burning wreckage of the plane they’d affectionately named Ethel, managing to get off a few stray shots. Ethel seemed a big girl’s name, and the biplane was a blocky-looking old bitch that nonetheless f lew like a dream unless it was hit by machine-gun f ire in the fuselage.

The Germans began shooting.

It was Charlie whose aim rang true, hitting one German soldier directly in the belly, then grabbing up his bayonet as the man fell, slumping into the muddy f ields that incongruously smelled of springtime along with blood and excrement and other stenches of death. A tree of some sort was blooming not far away, tiny white blossoms that, if he’d had the time, would have made Charlie’s heart ache. Overhead, three black crows cawed and dipped lower in the bright blue sky. The biplane was still burning and the heat of the f lames licked at Charlie’s back.

Robert Worley was crawling, trying to stand.

Charlie thought of Emma, just a f lash of memory. Her hair, dark and shining and wavy. Her bright eyes. The way the crook of her neck smelled damp and sweet when he nuzzled his nose against it. The taste of her when they kissed—like oranges and spice and the morning air when the ocean breeze blew cool and salty. Her softness when he pressed, hard and eager, against her. The way her body f it with his, exactly, perfectly right.

He f igured he would die. Why else would his brain stop midbattle to send him these thoughts?

Instead, he charged forward, screaming sounds he had no memory of once it was all over. He plunged the bayonet into the other German, felt it stab through skin and intestines and bone. He would never forget the horrible sucking sound it made as he pulled it back out and dropped it to the earth, or the look of utter surprise on the man’s face, the smell of everything that had kept him alive and ticking coming loose and undone. The way he choked and gagged. The bright red of his blood. How his knees crumpled as he fell, with an odd grace, just as a white, billowy cloud drifted lazily above them.

“Ach,”
the man said. Only that. He fell forward, his face hitting Charlie’s boots. He quivered a few times, and was still.

Charlie had to push him away, then turned him face up and knelt at his side. With his thumbs, he closed the man’s eyes. A crow cawed.

“Jesus Christ,” Robert Worley was saying over and over.

Charlie turned.

Robert Worley was clutching his chest, a dark blood seeping out between his f ingers, spatters of red drops dotting his nose and cheeks like freckles.

A few drops had splashed his chin, too, staining already grimy skin—a face that was marred by bumps of acne. Robert Worley loved his Jane, but he was just a boy. He was no hero of the skies, no matter how hard he pretended.

Charlie stumbled across the battle-pocked earth and knelt beside his friend. Robert Worley held out his hand. Charlie took it until it was over.

“Tell Jane,” Worley said, his voice fading as his eyes stayed on Charlie’s.

“I will,” Charlie said, trying not to cry. Robert Worley was just twenty years old. Charlie Ryan would always and forever be seventeen. In that moment, he felt one hundred. The dead Germans’ papers identif ied them as Jochen Liebold, age eighteen, from Düsseldorf; and Gerhardt Arnd, nineteen, from Mannheim.

When no one came for any of them, neither the Brits nor the Germans, Charlie dug their graves. He marked the turned ground with stones, and on Robert’s he etched his copilot’s name onto the top stone. Somehow he worked his way back to safe French territory alone. It took him over a week of sleepless scavenging—long enough that the RAF assumed that he and Worley were both dead. Quite the happy kerfuff le when he turned up alive, f ilthy and starving, and quite another shift in emotion when his commanders realized Worley wasn’t with him.

AFTER THAT CHARLIE
went through the motions. Told his superiors he was ready to f ly another mission as soon as a plane was available to replace Ethel. Found a way to send a telegram to Jane MacMillan in Leeds.

Charlie would always believe that Robert Worley’s death was in some way his fault. He had been reckless. He had been lost and self-destructive and courting the one thing it was most diff icult for him to f ind: death. There was only one thing for him now. He would f ind his way home. He would destroy those who wanted him gone. And he would f ind Emma O’Neill and tell her he had lied. Or he would die trying.

Chapter Seventeen

Dallas, Texas

Present

There was a trail. There was a pattern. There had to be. That’s how people worked. They left trails; they lived according to patterns—even when they were desperate to hide both. Emma O’Neill and Detective Pete Mondragon, sitting hip to hip at Emma’s kitchen table, needed those patterns to appear. Soon. It might already be too late.

“This is the neighborhood where Elodie’s body was found,” Emma said, pointing to the map of Dallas displays on her laptop. “And this is the church where she was last seen.” She pointed to a spot to the west. “Which is approximately two miles from where she lived.”