It Wasn't Always Like This - Joy Preble Page 0,5

was quite devoted to f lossing, thanks to Detective Pete Mondragon in Albuquerque, who had told her you could tell a lot by a person’s teeth.

Pete Mondragon, like Coral and Hugo, had become a friend at a bad time through the unique circumstance of her existence.

They can only hide so much under expensive clothes, he’d said.

She agreed with him about that. Certainly she’d known enough people who hid their evil under fancy outf its. It didn’t take her long to admit that Pete was right about the teeth, too.

In the kitchen, wearing a peacock-blue silk robe, her dark, wavy hair in a thick, tidy braid, Emma measured out the coffee. When it was ready, she took her cup to the balcony. The weather had turned, the air warm and muggy, the sky heavy with clouds. It reminded her of Florida.

Outside, Emma sipped, the f lavor both bitter and sweet. Underneath the almost tropical air, she could sense there was something unsettled. Texas weather shifted like that, fast and brutal. Or maybe she was unsettled. The possibility of that sudden change made her think about the f irst time she’d turned seventeen. What would Matt say if she told him exactly how long ago that was? In spite of the sentiment of his tattoo—believe—she doubted he’d believe that. In Emma’s substantive experience, people believed lies far more easily than the truth.

Chapter Three

St. Augustine, Florida

1916

The smoke smell grew stronger the closer Emma and Charlie drew to the mainland, their tiny rowboat lurching with every stroke. Then they could see it: plumes rising, black and ominous, over the treetops. Emma averted her eyes. She watched Charlie’s hands on the oars, his face pale and jaw tight, and she tried to f ight back the fear. It didn’t have to be what she thought. It didn’t have to be the worst.

And then they hit the dock and Charlie was up and pulling her with him, the boat rocking wildly beneath them. At that point, she gave up the f ight. She knew she was right to be afraid, that she should always expect the very worst.

Emma had loved Charlie since that day when they were ten years old, the day he caught the hawk she’d allowed to escape. It was 1906 then, and Emma’s head was f illed with possibility in this strange new place—Florida, so different from Brooklyn, where they’d lived before. Florida was heat and light and lush plants growing. Birds and bugs and air thick as wads of cotton. Florida was where her father promised the world would be theirs.

Not that Emma had believed him, even then.

Emma’s father, Art O’Neill, had moved his family to start a business—the same reason families had always moved around the country, no matter if it was 1906 or 2006 or any year in between. Art O’Neill planned to entertain the wealthy tourists who had come down from the East for the winter with the O’Neill Alligator Farm and Museum. Not a rough-and-tumble carnival-type place like those ones in the Everglades, but a real museum with an aviary where people could learn about the creatures and see them up close. If, like Emma, you weren’t fond of reptiles, there would always be the birds to look at.

Her father had also hired an acquaintance—the ever-talkative Frank Ryan—to run the bird piece of things, and so Frank had moved down from Brooklyn, too, and brought his own family with him: a wife and three children, one of them a boy Emma’s age. Charlie, his name was, not that she thought much about him one way or the other. Apparently he was good with birds and would be helpful in the aviary. That was all she cared to know about him for the f irst few months.

They would get rich, both men whispered, the way foolish men have been whispering to their families all around the country—always, since before there was even a United States. The difference in their case (and foolish men believed there was always a difference): trust. Emma’s father always said he knew Frank Ryan enough to trust him.

They both saw the same need, waiting to be f illed. A family need. The way Emma and Charlie’s fathers saw it, families needed to be entertained with reptiles and birds. They were more than just businessmen looking for the next best thing. They were family men.

“A solid basis for a partnership,” said Emma’s father.

Emma wasn’t so sure. Mr. Ryan struck her as a braggart. Everything he said