It Wasn't Always Like This - Joy Preble Page 0,26

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 people 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,