The Book of Lost Fragrances: A Novel of Suspense (18 page)

No. Not now. Not now.

At the clinic, Malachai had taught her an exercise using her own innate abilities to help control the visions. Her “sanity commandments,” she called them. Now, effortlessly, she remembered and followed the string of instructions:

Open a window. A door. Get fresh air. Take long, concentrated breaths. Stop your mind from spiraling by giving it a task. Identify the scents in the air.

Without being conscious of having left the workshop, Jac found herself standing outside in the courtyard. Breathing in the cool morning garden air. Grass. Roses. Lilacs. Hyacinth. She almost smiled at all the deep-purple hyacinths planted along the pathways.

Jac kept breathing. Walked past boxwood pyramids and into the labyrinth.

Now she was home. Here. Hidden by the two-hundred-year-old cypresses pruned into impenetrable walls so tall that a man couldn’t see over them. This complicated puzzle of warrens and dead ends. Anyone who didn’t know how to navigate the maze was lost. But Jac and her brother knew the route by heart. At least, they had as children.

At the maze’s center, two stone sphinxes waited for her. In a fit of laughter, she and Robbie had named them Pain and Chocolat—after their favorite breakfast croissant.

Between them a stone bench. In front of the bench, a stone obelisk covered with hieroglyphics. Jac sat down in its shadow.

No one in the house liked coming inside the maze. So to escape an angry parent or nanny, this green room was her hiding place. Here she was safe from everyone but Robbie.

And she never minded when he came to keep her company.

Where was he?

Jac felt panic threatening. That wouldn’t help. She needed to stay focused; try to find some answers. She inhaled the sharp, clean smell. Forced her mind to return to the state of the workroom. It was chaos. Even if there were clues to what had happened there two nights ago, who’d be able to sift through the mess to find them?

Robbie had described the confusion and clutter he’d inherited, but she hadn’t understood how horrific it was. “A visual metaphor for the state of the family business,” Robbie had warned her. “For the state of our father’s mind.”

He’d said Louis had become a hoarder in the past few years. Kept every piece of notepaper, every bill, every piece of mail, every bottle and box. The visible evidence spilled from cabinets and shelves. Robbie complained that every time he opened a drawer, he confronted yet another set of problems.

“Mademoiselle L’Etoile?” The male voice was muffled by the thick hedges.

“Yes,” she called. “It’s a small labyrinth but easy to get lost in. Stay where you are; I’ll find you.”

After making her way back through the twisting green corridors, Jac found a well-dressed, middle-aged man frowning at the maze.

“I realized right away I wasn’t going to make it through.” He extended his hand. “I’m Inspector Pierre Marcher.”

There was something oddly familiar about him; something in his face that she recognized. “Have we met?” she asked.

“Yes, we have,” he said. “Long ago.”

She couldn’t place him. “I’m sorry, I don’t—”

“I’ve been assigned to this district for the past twenty years.”

Now Jac nodded, understanding his shorthand.

“So you were here that day?”

“Yes, and I spoke with you,” he said gently. “You were so young. It was a terrible shame you had to be the one to find her.”

Audrey had killed herself in her husband’s workshop, expecting he’d be the one to discover her body. It was the weekend. Robbie was at their grandmother’s. Jac was staying with a friend and her family in the country. But the other girl had gotten sick, so they’d returned early and dropped off Jac. The house had been empty. Jac saw the lights on in the workshop and went to see if her father was there.

Jac’s grandmother had been the one to crawl under the organ. She’d unwrapped the girl’s arms from her dead mother’s legs. Pulled her head up from her mother’s unmoving lap. Jac was soaking wet with tears and the spilled tincture from a hundred broken bottles. Bloody ribbons of flesh hung off her fingers. Angry red scratches encircled her wrists and arms like piles of bracelets.

Because Jac had been the one to find her mother’s body, the inspector had to ask her some questions. But it had taken hours for him to get answers. In her confused state, she couldn’t make sense of what she’d seen.

There had been a screaming crowd in the workshop with her. An angry mob. They’d been the ones to break the glass and smash the bottles. To get away from them, Jac had hidden under the perfumer’s organ at her mother’s feet. What if the intruders found her? They’d killed Audrey. Would they kill her too? Why did they want to destroy the workshop? Why were they dirty? Why were they dressed in such old, ragged clothes? And why did they smell so bad? Not even the bottles of scent they broke disguised their stench.

No. She didn’t know how long she’d been there. No, she hadn’t made the mess. No, she didn’t know what was real or imagined. Not anymore. And maybe never again.

Marcher pulled out a pack of cigarettes. “Do you mind,” he asked, “as long as we’re outside?”

Even though she didn’t smoke anymore, she asked him for one. He shook the pack toward her, and she extracted the cigarette that slid forward. She put it between her lips, and he lit a match, extending it. The mixture of tobacco and sulfur was a delicious distraction.

Jac sensed that the inspector’s quiet demeanor represented almost an apology, an acknowledgment of the regret that came with having witnessed the tragedy of her early life.

Even one puff of the strong cigarette was too much. Jac threw it on the pebbled path and ground it out with her heel, noticing the yin-yang pattern in black and white pebbles circling the obelisk. She’d forgotten about that too. All that Eastern influence. “Let’s go back,” she said, and as they walked, she questioned him.

“Have you found out anything at all to suggest where my brother may be?”

“We haven’t, no.”

“And what of the man who you found here; do you know who he is?”

“We’re having a bit of a hard time with him too.”

“What do you mean?”

“In your brother’s diary, there’s a notation of a meeting with Charles Fauche, a reporter with the
International Journal of Fragrance
. And while there is indeed a man with that name who’s affiliated with the journal, he’s currently in Italy on an assignment and has been for the last five days.”

“So you have no idea who you found here?”

“That’s correct. We know only that whoever he is, he doesn’t have a criminal record. His fingerprints aren’t on file with us or Interpol.”

They’d reached the workshop. The French doors were still opened.

“Inspector, do you have Robbie’s diary?”

“Yes, I do.”

Marcher gestured for Jac to go inside first. He followed her and shut the doors behind him. Jac reopened them. She didn’t want to smell all those warring scents.

“Could I have it back?” she asked.

“It’s evidence.”

“Take down any information you need. Xerox it if need be, but I’d like to have my brother’s—” she broke off, confused. “Evidence?”

“Yes.”

“Robbie’s missing. I thought you were looking for Robbie because you think he might be in danger.”

“Yes. And because he is also at this point in time a person of interest in this case.”

“I don’t understand. On the phone, you said that Charles Fauche—or whoever he is—died of natural causes. That he’d had an asthma attack.”

“That’s right. He did. Brought on by what he breathed.”

“But that can’t be Robbie’s fault. The man knowingly came to a perfume workshop.”

“It appears your brother was burning a toxic chemical in here that brought on the attack.”

“My brother is a perfumer. He works with all kinds of toxic chemicals. Surely you can’t—”

Marcher bowed his head in deference to what she was saying, but his words belied the action. “We don’t know anything, mademoiselle. Not yet. But you might be able to help us learn more. Could you look around at what’s on the table here and tell me what kind of perfume your brother was working on that would have required him to burn benzyl chloride?”

“Inspector, someone came here to see Robbie. Someone who wasn’t who he said he was. Now my brother is missing—for all we know, he was kidnapped. How can you jump to the conclusion that he committed murder?”

“Mademoiselle, I am not jumping to any conclusion. Far from it. What I am doing is considering all possibilities. One man is dead. Another is missing. Objects from the workshop appear to have been taken. Whether they have been stolen or not isn’t clear. We don’t yet know anything, but let me assure you, I intend to find out everything.”

Eighteen

After the detective left, Jac sat down at her brother’s desk and began to look systematically though his papers. What else was there to do? She had to try to find out what Robbie had been doing. Whom he’d been seeing. What he’d gotten involved with. The police had probably gone through his things already, but maybe there was a clue to what had happened that they wouldn’t have recognized.

Her brother had to be all right. He had to be somewhere near.

The phone rang. She jumped. Stared at it as if it were a creature, coiled and waiting to spring. It rang again. There was an answering machine. And Marcher had told her his team was monitoring all calls. She didn’t need to answer. Except what if it was Robbie? What if he’d been hurt or injured, had been staying with a friend and was finally well enough to call?

“Bonjour?”

There was no reply.

“Robbie?”

A breath. Then a beat of silence. Then a click. Damn. She never should have said his name. What if he had been reaching out to her? What if he was in trouble and calling for help? He might not want the police to know about it. Might have assumed they’d be listening. Once she’d identified him, he couldn’t have answered even if he’d been desperate to.

No, that was crazy thinking. Robbie didn’t even know she was here in Paris. Whoever had called was expecting to get Robbie, heard her, was confused, and hung up.

She stared at the phone, willing it to ring again. For whoever had called to call back. Silence mocked her magical thinking.

Turning her attention back to her task, Jac opened the desk’s top drawer and was rifling through its contents when a gust of wind blew in through the opened garden doors. Bills, envelopes, letters and notes flew around the room.

After shutting the doors, Jac set to picking up the new mess. Some of the papers had wedged in between the bottles on the perfumer’s organ. She stood on the opposite side of the room from the self-contained antique laboratory and stared at it. Not quite ready to go near it.

When she was a child, the organ was off-limits to her and her brother; the precious essences stored there were too expensive. Forbidden, the organ took on larger-than-life proportions. It was wizardry. And temptation.

Sometimes she would sit far across the room and watch the light play on the small glass bottles. The reflections danced on the walls and ceiling—even on her arms when she held them out. Beautiful for the moment. Until the clouds moved and the organ settled back into shadows. A phantom in the corner of the room. The monster of scent. Giving up ugly and strange and beautiful and powerful smells.

Some of the oils were now so old that Jac doubted her brother could even use them. Some must be nothing but sediment. Others, she knew, were so rare that once he finished them, he could replace them only with synthetics.

The perfume industry was changing. Only the talent required to create a truly worthy perfume was the same. Melding dozens of individual notes into a truly sensuous, memorable bouquet would always require a sorcerer of scent.

Going back over two hundred years, her ancestors had sat there mixing up elixirs from the ingredients in these antique bottles. Now they stood, hundreds of glass tombstones in an alchemical museum, waiting for their wizard to come give them life. Could Robbie be that magician?

She was too old to be afraid anymore. Jac crossed the room and sat down at the organ. The essences here were no different from the ones any perfumer used. But no matter how many labs she’d been in, none smelled the way this room did. She breathed it in: the perfume she hadn’t smelled since her mother had died. Jac folded her arms on the wooden shelf. Rested her head. Shut her eyes.

As a child, Robbie had named it the Fragrance of Comfort. As an adult, he’d tried to recreate it. She said he was crazy and argued that it was anything but comforting. Dark and provocative, it was, for her, the perfume of time long gone. Of regret. Of longing. Maybe even of madness.

It was no surprise that the smell was more intense now that she was on top of it. Overwhelming. Intoxicating.

A headiness that was almost euphoric filled her and threw her off balance. Grabbing the edge of the organ, she held on as the swell took her. With her eyes closed, she saw a blaze of orange-blue light. Then a swath of opalescent darkness. Then a verdant, marshy, churning green.

The kaleidoscope of images swirled, fracturing before she could identify them. Each thread of scent had a color, and she saw them mingling; saw the chemical bonds forming, sending olfactory shivers up and down her spine. It was more than an aroma or an odor. Much more. The scent was a drug of dreams. A vivid magic carpet ride. Suddenly she was sailing over icy mountains of clouds and oceans of forests, lush and beautiful beyond her dreams. Seeing fragments of faces; eyes that spoke to her, lips that watched her.

The images came faster now, breaking apart over her, spilling like mosaics at her feet. Turquoise and lapis lazuli. Gold. Silver. The scents whispered to her. Teasing her. Then a damp cold enveloped her, locking her inside a prison of emotion: heartbreak, sadness, relief. Still spinning, she held on and forced the procession of pictures in her head to slow down so she could see them. All unfamiliar, places she’d never seen, never visited. A riverbank, a stone enclosure, a courtyard with palms. Sound, too. Birds. So many birds. A woman crying. A man whispering comforting words to her there by the river. Fragments of language. French? No, not French. And a million smells. Some familiar, some as foreign as the language the man and the woman were speaking. He was dark skinned, wearing a wrapper around his waist. At first Jac couldn’t see the woman.