The Book of Lost Fragrances: A Novel of Suspense (6 page)

Six months ago, their father had been declared incompetent—due to Alzheimer’s disease—and the two of them had inherited the family business. They’d had no idea it was so close to bankruptcy. Robbie had been working on his own line of niche perfumes. Jac wasn’t in France or part of the day-to-day business. Both were shocked at the state of the company’s finances. They were unable to agree about what path to take, and too often lately, their transatlantic phone calls ended bitterly and without resolution. The critical problems plaguing the House of L’Etoile had driven them apart in a way the ocean between them never had.

“They’re lovely.” Jac nodded toward the apple blossom branches Robbie still held.

He looked over at the urn she’d already filled with the same flowers. “Doesn’t look like there’s any room left for them, though.”

“That one is empty.” She pointed behind him to a second urn.

She watched Robbie take in the rest of the space. As far as she knew, he’d never been here before. He looked at the life-size stone angel, the stained-glass windows and the marble wall with its inscriptions of names and dates carved in neat rows. Scanning them, he reached up and ran his fingers across the crevices and edges of the letters engraved on the middle row, three from the top. Their mother’s name. The gesture tugged at Jac.

“When she was happy,” he said, “there was no one more loving. No one more lovely.” Then he turned back and smiled at his sister. The months of bickering by telephone melted in the face of his deep, soothing calm. Even before Robbie had become a student of Buddhism, he’d been contemplative and centered in a way she wasn’t. She wanted nothing more than for the two of them to stop arguing and stay like this: together, remembering.

“Did you come to sign the papers?” she asked. “There’s really no other solution. We need to make the sale.”

Don’t push him, baby.

The intrusion startled Jac, and she had to force herself not to turn toward the direction of her mother’s voice. She’d thought Audrey was gone.

It was almost as if he was echoing their mother. “Don’t, Jac. Not yet,” Robbie said as he unwrapped his flowers. “We have lots of time to talk. Can we just be us for a while?”

But we haven’t been us for a long time, she thought.

Like their father, when they were children, she and her brother dreamed of doing with fragrance what sculptors did with stone and painters did with pigment. To become poets of scent. Jac had given up the lofty goal when she saw how both her parents suffered for their artistic ambitions.

Their father had been consumed by the idea of creating one true, perfect scent that would capture the imagination. First his determination and then his frustration embittered him. They all suffered for it. Especially their mother. Audrey was a well-respected poet with demons so strong they left her too weak to fend off her husband’s darkness. To escape him, she went jumping from one destructive affair to another, finally throwing her life away over one.

Your father and I might have given up. You might have given up—but not Robbie. He’s never given up. He never will.

Jac felt the sting of the comment. Yes, her mother was right. Jac had abandoned the effort before she’d even started. And Robbie had persevered. He was determined to make up for their father’s failures, their mother’s suffering.

And the burden to save him from that folly was all hers.

An errant blossom was hanging off one of the branches he’d just placed, its white, pink-tinged petals a grayish lavender in the blue light. Jac picked it off, leaned forward, and inhaled its scent.

“How did a man who created complicated and sophisticated fragrances put up with a wife who favored such a sweet-smelling flower?” she asked. “There was an irony to that, wasn’t there?”

“So much about our parents was ironic.”

He hesitated. Took a breath. And then said, very softly—as if whispering would lessen the impact—“I saw Papa yesterday before I left for the airport.”

Jac didn’t respond.

Your father should have been a novelist. At least then, his imagination might have brought him some success. Instead his delusions drained the famous and venerable perfume House of L’Etoile almost to the point of extinction . . .
Audrey laughed. The sound had a bitter cast to it that belied the beauty she’d been with her sparkling green eyes and shining gold-brown hair, with her heart-shaped lips and high, sharp cheekbones.

In these
mausoleum conversations,
as Jac had come to think of them, Audrey never called her husband by his name—never said Louis, or Louie, which was how the French pronounced it. It was always
your father,
as if that distanced him further. As if his being on the other side of the grave did not keep them far enough apart.

From Audrey, Jac had learned that when people hurt or disappoint you, erase as much of them from your memory as you can. Wipe them out. And she’d mastered the technique. She never wondered what had happened to Griffin North. Never imagined what he was doing. Or what he’d become.

Except aren’t you doing that right now?
Audrey teased.
Anyway,
she added,
he wasn’t good enough for you.

Jac and Griffin had met in college. He was two years ahead of her. When she went to graduate school, she was three hours away from the school where he was getting his PhD. Every other weekend, he drove to see her. But Jac wasn’t a good driver. The idea of being alone in a car terrified her. What if the shadows came back while she was behind the wheel? So on alternate weekends, she took the bus to visit him. And, hungry to spend every last second with him, she’d catch the latest bus home—Sunday at seven. She always forgot to eat before she left, and by the time she got back to her school, the cafeteria was closed.

One night, as she stepped onto the bus, Griffin thrust a brown paper bag into her hand. Once seated, she opened it. Inside was a sandwich wrapped in wax paper tied with a white ribbon she must have left at his place. On it he’d written, “I didn’t want you to be hungry because of me.”

Her mother was wrong. Griffin was good enough for her. The problem was he didn’t
think
he was. That’s why he’d left.

Jac had carried the ribbon in her wallet until it started to fray. Then she’d tucked it away in a jewelry box. She had it still.

Her mother’s suicide had started Jac’s education in loss. Griffin—a young man who shared her love of mythology, smelled of ancient woods and touched her as if she was something precious—had been her final lesson.

Robbie had just said something, but Jac had missed it.

“I’m sorry. What?”

“I don’t think the doctors are right about how little he can remember.”

“Of course, you don’t. You’re Count
Tourjours Droit.
” Jac laughed. She’d given him the nickname—Count
Always Right—
and it had caught on with her parents and grandparents. “How could the doctors know what you know?”

Now Robbie laughed. As a kid, he changed rules and regulations so that he was never wrong. It was either endearing or infuriating, depending on the situation. When he was eight and she was eleven, she’d held an elaborate ceremony in the garden courtyard that separated the house from the perfume shop. Knighting him with an umbrella, she’d given him his nickname.

“Did our father know who you were this time?”

“He clearly knows I’m someone who cares about him.” Each word was an effort laced with pain. “But I can’t be sure he knows I’m his son.”

Jac didn’t want to hear this. The image of their father that Robbie was painting was going to haunt her for days, seeping under the wall she put up, through the cracks.

“Despite everything he’s forgotten, he still can recite perfume formulas and remind me about the little secrets involved in mixing the different fragrances,” her brother continued. “He doesn’t remember how to read, but he knows exactly how many drops of rose absolute to mix with essence of vanilla. And when he talks about the formulas, he always says, ‘Mix up one bottle especially for Jac.’” Robbie’s smile was expansive. Her brother’s kindness was his best attribute. But as much as she admired his ability to find some good in everyone, it annoyed her when it came to their father. He’d been a selfish man who’d caused all of them unbearable pain.

“Can we talk about something else?” Jac asked.

“We need to talk about him.”

Jac shook her head. “Not now. Not here. It doesn’t seem respectful.”

“To our mother?” Robbie seemed perplexed.

“Yes. To our mother.”

“Jac, she’s not here listening to us.”

“Thanks for explaining that. Go ahead, then. Finish what you wanted to tell me about our father. He doesn’t know who you are but he remembers my name—”

“I need to talk to you about this.”

She took a deep breath. “Okay, I’m sorry. Tell me.”

“Sometimes, there’s a fierce look in his eyes, like he’s trying to get all his synapses firing at the same time. Using all his concentration to connect to a thought. And sometimes, for a moment, he does. But when he can’t, he’s overwhelmed by his failure. Jac, sometimes he cries.” Robbie whispered the last words.

Jac was quiet. She couldn’t imagine seeing her tough, demanding father weep. “I wish you didn’t have to see that. I wish it wasn’t so hard on you.”

“I’m not talking about how it is for me. It’s how it is for him that I want you to understand. Please come see him. Yours is the only name he still knows. Not mine. Not Claire’s. ‘Don’t forget to make up a bottle of Rouge for Jac,’ he’ll say as I leave.”

Robbie’s smile was one of the saddest she’d ever seen.

“Forgiveness is the greatest gift anyone can offer, please come see him.”

“When did those Buddhists teach you to preach, baby brother?” she said with a too-bright laugh that betrayed her when it caught in her throat. Jac wished she could make him happy. Wished everything he believed in was real and everything he hoped for could come true. That she could forgive their father. That there was an easy way out of their financial crisis. That there really was a book of ancient formulas for incenses and unguents used in the ancient Egyptian rituals and that it had been brought back from Egypt and hidden away somewhere on the family’s property in Paris.

But reality was safer. And above all else, she had to keep Robbie safe. He was the only family she had left.

Jac glanced over at the angel of grief. “She looks as if all the years of missing people have weighed down her wings and they’re too heavy to lift her up again.”

Robbie came over to her, put his arm around her shoulders, and pulled her close. “An angel can always fly.”

She inhaled the complicated cacophony of scents that clung to him. Cool air, rain, the apple blossoms, and more. “You smell,” she said, wrinkling her nose, “of such wonderful things.” She could at least give him this.

“They’re my samples. What I’ve been working on. What I’ve been telling you about on the phone. I set up meetings. Bergdorf. Bendel. Barneys. We have relationships there.”

“For our classic perfumes.”

“They’re interested in seeing what I have, Jac.”

“Even if they are, the House of L’Etoile doesn’t have the money to start up a new division.”

“I’ll find a backer.”

She shook her head.

“I will,” he insisted.

“There are a thousand niche perfumers not succeeding. Consumers aren’t buying any of the new creations twice. And every day there is another report about ingredients being banned for environmental reasons.”

“And in a few years, perfumers won’t even be able to use alcohol because of global warming . . . I’ve heard every argument. There are always exceptions.”

“You’re wasting your time,” Jac insisted. “The marketplace is overcrowded. If the House of L’Etoile was hot and chic right now, maybe, but we’re not. We have a line of timeless perfumes. We can’t afford to experiment with our reputation.”

“No matter what I say, you’re going to argue with me, aren’t you? Can’t you suspend your cynicism for just a little while? What if I have a solution here? What if we don’t have to divest any of our classics?”

“Robbie, please. You have to sign the papers. It’s the only chance we have of saving the company, of keeping the store and the house in Paris, of going on.”

He walked around the angel, resting his hand on the back of her wings as if consoling her—or giving himself ballast. Jac had once seen a photograph of Oscar Wilde taken when he was just twenty-eight years old, Robbie’s age now, wearing a fine velvet jacket and elegant shoes. A beautiful young man sitting on an opulent chair, surrounded by Persian rugs, holding a book, his head tilted and resting on his hand, looking out at the viewer with an expression of intimacy and promise.

Her brother was looking at her like that now.

“We owe the bank three million euros. We can’t mortgage the building on Rue de Saint-Pères. Our father already did that. We have to divest,” she said.

“The House of L’Etoile belongs to us now. You and me. It’s lasted intact for almost two hundred and fifty years. We can’t break it apart. Just smell what I’ve been working on.”

“You’ve spent the last six years in Grasse in a magical kingdom of lavender fields working on crystal vials of scent as if you lived a century ago. No matter how wonderful your new scents are, they won’t raise the kind of money we owe. We have to sell Rouge and Noir. We’ll still own over a dozen classics.”

“Not without you even smelling what I’ve done, not without me trying to get orders and find a backer.”

“We don’t have the time.”

“I have a plan. Please just trust me. Give me the week. Someone is going to fall in love with what I’ve made. The time for these scents is right. The world is aligned with essences like these.”

“You’re not being practical.”