It Wasn't Always Like This - Joy Preble Page 0,23

had started up again, that people were tracking her, closing in, but uncertain of her exact identity.

The f irst time—that Emma knew of, anyway—had been a girl in Alabama, back in the ’20s. Long dark hair. She’d been attacked by a mob and murdered, for no particular reason anyone could come up with. It stuck with Emma, that crime, the closeness of it, the coincidence. As did the ones that came after it.

She was being hunted.

So she investigated. Nosed around the pub in the bowling alley on 4th where Allie worked. Too young to serve the liquor, but she could wait tables. Lucky 66 the place was called. It had been anything but that for Allie.

“You a friend of the missing girl?” the cop had asked her the day she questioned the bartender. She’d seen him watching her out of the corner of her eye.

“Hired by the family,” she lied quickly. She could tell he didn’t believe her. But she pulled out her license, brazened it out. He looked worn out, this man, but focused. Brown eyes studying her, thumb rubbing across his stubbled chin. A brown trench coat, almost a duster. No wedding ring, but a faint pale line where one used to sit. A deep sandpaper voice, but f irm, too. And a sadness behind those curious eyes.

Emma was more than familiar with sadness.

“Pete Mondragon,” he’d said after a long, awkward pause.

“Emma O’Neill.” She held out her hand. Inwardly, she winced. She hadn’t used her actual name in longer than she could remember.

He was there the next place she went. And then the next.

She was working side by side with him before either of them realized that they were somehow, maybe partnering up.

Pete was as stumped as to what happened to Allie Golden as Emma was.

The search dragged out. One month. Two. Eventually, someone dumped Allie Golden in a f ield. The coroner said she’d been dead for less than a day. Poisoned. Something slow. Torturous. Then the murderers strangled her for good measure. All of which meant there had been two months in which Emma had failed to f ind her. Alive, that was.

She meant to walk away. To pull herself together and move on like always. But when the paperwork was all done and the books were closed on Allie Golden’s unfortunate and unsolved murder, Emma let Pete Mondragon convince her to go out for green chile cheeseburgers at Blake’s.

“They use Hatch chiles,” he’d told her in a devotional tone. It verged on the mystical. “You know they have to actually register their authenticity with the state Department of Agriculture?”

“Oh?”

“Iconic,” Pete said. “Mind-blowingly iconic, this burger.”

Something about his adoration of a fast-food cheeseburger, his lonely and haunted eyes alight with the thought of those chiles, made her say yes.

Or maybe it was that he said the word “authenticity.”

She’d only ever heard it used in conversation once before, in regards to a serial number that proved a certain heavy pocket watch was one-of-a-kind.

Pete ate three burgers to Emma’s one. It was like watching the gators at the Alligator Farm snap their prey into a death roll. Another nugget of Pete Mondragon wisdom, imparted in between healthy bites of burger: “Eat. Enjoy life. Otherwise this job will kill you. It may kill you anyway. Better go knowing you enjoyed yourself.”

Here he’d paused to wipe a glob of cheese off his angular chin, a glob he proceeded to eat.

In that moment, she’d decided to trust him. Not with everything. Not yet. That would come later. Eventually she would tell him who and what she really was. And eventually, he would believe her. But still, she’d told him enough that f irst night, over those authentic burgers. She’d told him that she had tried to enjoy herself.

That she’d loved a boy once, and he’d loved her. That he’d left her. And that nothing had been right since.

Now, sitting here in the enormous IKEA parking lot, she was being beckoned again by Pete’s gravelly voice in her cell: “Tell me.”

“You have the time?” she asked.

“Em, come on.”

She told him what she knew about the late Elodie Callahan. That she’d been poisoned, like Allie Golden. When Emma f inished, there was another pause, this one longer.

“You think it’s connected?”

“Pete, come on.”

“Had to ask. You working with the cops?”

“Not yet. I will eventually.”

“You want me to take some time and come out there? I have days I haven’t used.”

The offer was tempting. But Emma knew better. The wise move would be for him