It Wasn't Always Like This (20 page)

This would not end like Robert Worley’s story, a man lying dead in a foreign f ield. He wouldn’t let it.

CHARLIE DISCOVERED A
talent for vagrancy. He took jobs as he needed, never growing too attached to anyone or anything, always staying long enough just to make what money he could and then moving on. Always quiet, always polite, never attracting attention. He changed his name as it suited him. Bland names. He was Benjamin Hollis while he lived in Chicago. Charlie Murray in Boston. Brief ly, he boxed under that name. He was broke and they were paying.

“You’re one hell of a brawler,” the trainer told him. “Where’d you learn to f ight like that?”

“In the war,” Charlie said, which was true.

He moved on the day he saw they’d put his picture on a poster. Notoriety was good only if he controlled it.

He worked at zoos. He tended aviaries and private menageries and veterinary hospitals. No one had steadier hands with frightened animals than Charlie Ryan.

One day at a vet practice in Louisville, a girl brought in a mangy mutt, back leg gone lame. Doc Barrow was out at a horse farm, tending to a diff icult birth.

“Let me see,” Charlie told the girl. “You stand by his face and talk soft to him so he’s not scared.”

He ran his f ingers slowly and thoughtfully over the dog’s leg and hip, his eyes closed as he concentrated. Doc Barrow was a good teacher and Charlie loved to learn. He would hate for the pup to be lame so young. Then he felt it: A muscle in the leg. Not torn, he didn’t think. No. Not grave after all.

“Your pup has a sprained muscle,” he told the girl. “You need to keep him quiet for a few days. No running around. I think it should heal on its own just f ine.”

He was right.

Barrow offered to make his job permanent. He needed a reliable apprentice.

“I’ll be moving on,” Charlie told him. “But thanks.”

Another possible life that he had no choice but to leave.

IN A DARK
moment, he considered becoming a daredevil pilot and crashing in a ball of f ire, a f leeting moment of fame, a way to proclaim, Charlie Ryan was here! Everyone else in the f lying business wanted notoriety these days: barnstormers and wing walkers and f lagpole sitters.

Instead, he found a series of jobs f lying crop dusters. The Agricultural Department of the US government was developing a domestic purpose for airplanes.

“You’re gonna make a ton of cash,” the guy who’d f irst hired him promised, a guy now long dead and gone.

The guy had been right, of course. Lots of other people hired him after that; he couldn’t stay longer than a year dusting the same farmland for obvious reasons. Every gig was two years, tops. But America was big and wide. It was mostly farms.

Charlie kept to himself the notion that if he continued f lying, if he stayed aloft and moving, he might even spot Emma someday from the sky—spot her far below in some random place. Stranger things had happened.

The fact that he was still living and still seventeen was proof of that.

So he f lew, every plane he could get his hands on. A Fokker like those ones the Germans had f lown in the Great War. A Moth, so easy to handle that he would forget his grief for a while as he looped and soared.

One day, as he headed back to the room he was renting in a boarding house just outside of Monterey, California, he bought a paper from the newsboy on the corner. Charlie had made it a habit to scour the various periodicals. Nothing had ever appeared, but you never knew. Something could lead him to Emma.

That something occurred one night in the early fall of 1925, in the form of a story on page seven.

Charlie stared at the page, his eyes scanning. His breath seized momentarily in his lungs. A traveling preacher named Glen Walters had died of a sudden and massive stroke after a series of tent revivals in Alabama.

According to the story, one of his followers, a man named Norman Thigpen, had taken over the preaching the next night.

This by itself might not have made the papers. But Thigpen’s talk of the need to root out evil had inspired the brief resurgence of a chapter of the Ku Klux Klan, who, in a brutal display of their brand of American justice, kidnapped a girl with long dark hair, beat her, then cut off her hair and chained her to a telephone pole. The story was that she’d been accused of immoral behavior, the specif ics of that left vague. What happened after that was unclear. Rumors abounded that it wasn’t even the Klan, but some other group with its own shadowy agenda.

When the initial shock wore off, Charlie understood the girl was not Emma. But the story stuck with him nonetheless, and not just because that bastard Glen Walters was dead. Or because there was a trail to follow, even though he sensed it wouldn’t lead him to Emma.

Something was happening. He just wasn’t sure what it was.

What he
was
sure of though, was this: The Church of Light was evolving. It was hiding in plain sight, ever on the move as he was. And wherever Emma was, she was like that, too. All of them, like that ever-disappearing town in Robert Worley’s story.

And he also knew this, although he wasn’t quite sure what to do about it: killing Walters wouldn’t bring back what he’d lost. If the war had taught Charlie one lesson, it was that killing accomplished only death.

Chapter Nineteen

Dallas, Texas

Present

Just before six thirty the next morning, Emma and Pete parked at the edge of the Brookhaven campus. The sun had yet to rise; it was still dark, not even a hint of dawn. The snow had stopped, but a stronger cold front had blown through, and the temperature hovered just above freezing.

Emma pulled her black peacoat tight around her as she climbed out of Pete’s truck. Her hair whipped wildly in the wind, and she dug into her pocket for an elastic, then swiped it back into a messy tail. On this broad, open campus with its anonymous-looking cement buildings, Dallas felt suddenly like a windy prairie.

Pete followed silently, chugging coffee from a large Styrofoam cup, his expression both alert and weary in that distinctive cop way he had, dark eyes scanning and missing nothing. He hadn’t shaved, but he wore a fresh gray Henley shirt under his jacket, and the same jeans and boots as yesterday.

He traveled light. It was a habit Emma understood quite well.

Their plan wasn’t much to speak of. Mostly they were here to nose around while the students began slowly f illing the campus. Catch people early enough before they were suff iciently caffeinated, and maybe they’d be more open. Emma had no idea if this plan would work, no idea if it was any more than a wild-goose chase. She had f inally slept, but f itfully, snatches of dreamless oblivion punctuated by wide-awake brain churning.

Across the parking lot, a few windows in the main building of the campus were already lit. Classes began early. Emma appreciated the practicality of this. If she ever went to college, maybe she’d start here.

“Nursing school building’s over there,” she said. She’d looked it up when she’d told Coral and Hugo that series of lies—always best to make them as believable as possible, with a solid foundation of knowledge and fact.

As the sun rose, the campus slowly rose to life with it.

OVER THE NEXT
two hours. Emma and Pete talked to everyone they spotted. A tall girl in scrubs and a Navajo-print hooded jacket. Two guys drinking Starbucks. A middle-aged woman who turned out to be the head of the nurse practitioner program. A tired-looking man with a goatee who was actually looking for the computer science building but had gotten lost.

“Have you seen this girl?” Emma asked each one of them. She held up the picture of Coral on her phone.

No. No. No.

At just past nine o’clock, two girls who looked to be in their twenties exited from the side of the nursing building. Emma strode toward them, Pete following at a distance. This was their system.

“We’re looking for a missing girl,” she called, waggling her phone at them. She let the word
missing
sink in. Then she moved closer.

One had a streak of pink in her blonde hair and eyebrows plucked so thin they resembled two commas on her forehead. The other was wearing a Rangers ball cap, her long brown ponytail threaded through the back.

“Don’t know her,” said the one with pink streak, squinting at Coral’s picture.

The one with ball cap looked up from the image. “That’s the girl whose parents went on TV, right?” Her face went pale, and her gaze shifted from Emma to Pete, who was now standing beside her. “Y’all cops or something?”

“Private investigators,” Emma said. “This is my partner, Detective Mondragon.” Emma slid her PI license from her pocket. Of course, Texas did not have reciprocity with the state next door, so the document was invalid. Not that these two would have any idea. Anyway, she didn’t have time to apply for a new set of papers every time she jumped to a new place. It was highly inconvenient. As was everything she had to do to keep her actual f ingerprints out of any government data bank.

“Have you seen her?” Pete asked the girls, his voice pleasant, almost conversational. Pete managed to make even an interrogation sound like he was just shooting the breeze.

Ball Cap hesitated. “You know, maybe I did see her,” she said. “Afternoon of New Year’s Eve.”

Emma waited, just as Pete had taught her. She sensed the girl would f ill in the blanks, but only if she wasn’t pushed. The silence stretched on.

“You notice anything particular?” Pete asked f inally, in that same genial
Hey, y’all, let’s go get a drink
voice.

Ball Cap ran her tongue across the inside of her bottom lip. Shifted her gaze to her friend and then back to Emma and Pete. “She was at the student center. I stopped to get a coffee before going home. Place was pretty empty, closing early. They wouldn’t even make me a latte, just that crap regular stuff. Anyway, I’m pretty sure I saw her over at the bookstore across from the food court. They’d locked up already, but she was talking to some guy.”

“You sure it was
this
girl?” Emma asked. She held up Coral’s picture again. Hugo had sent her the photo when it f irst became clear something bad had happened. It was actually of both Coral and Emma, but Emma had cropped herself out.

“And the guy?” Pete’s tone toughened just a little, and she sensed him rise just so slightly on his feet, like a runner waiting for the starting gunshot. “Was he old? Young? Somewhere in between? Had you ever seen him before?”

The girl paused. The hairs on the nape of Emma’s neck stood up, although if Pete had asked her why, she couldn’t have said. Just that she had felt this in other moments, in other years, in other places. An overwhelming sense that everything was about to change.

“Nothing special,” the girl said. “The guy, I mean. He was medium height.” She held her hand a few inches above her head. “Blond. He needed a shave. Cute, though. He was, I don’t know, thirty, maybe? Maybe younger. She seemed to know him. I’m pretty positive about that. That’s about all I remember. I—oh! He was wearing this preppy polo shirt—
so
not my thing, but like I said, he was cute—and he had this tattoo on his arm, which made up for it, you know? It said,
BELIEVE
.
”

Emma froze. Her lungs momentarily seized up. “What?” she coughed.

She felt more than saw Pete’s sharp glare.

The girl frowned. The nausea rose without warning, pooling in Emma’s throat. She absolutely, positively couldn’t have been
that
stupid . . .

“The tattoo,” she managed. “Describe it again.”

After a dramatic eye roll, the girl sighed. Then she spoke slowly and deliberately, indicating that Emma was either an idiot or acting like one—she would have been happy to know Emma herself agreed that this was absolutely, positively the case. “The. Word.
BELIEVE
. On. His. Forearm. In. Blue. Can I go now?”

“Shit,” Emma said. “Shit. Shit. Shit.”

“She means in a minute,” Pete muttered. He put a hand on her arm, but Emma shook it off. She was very worried she would vomit. Matt, whose last name she did not know. Matt, who quoted war movies. Matt, who was drunkenly fascinated by how young she looked. Matt, who f lirted with Coral and then turned to Emma. Matt, who came home with her. To her apartment. Where she lived. Matt who had run his f ingers over the pocket watch that Charlie had given her. Matt who had been there in the morning.

Who the hell was he, really? The new face of the Church of Light? Whoever he was, he had known all along who
she
was. There was no other explanation. She was sad and lonely and stupid. And he had tracked her to the bar while she thought she was tracking Elodie’s killer. While she was keeping an eye on Coral, although obviously she’d failed miserably there. He’d watched. And waited. And now . . .