The Collector of Dying Breaths (11 page)

Jac knew from the edge in his voice he was becoming more distressed as the story progressed.

“I told Melinoe about them. When we flew to England together to see the collection and examine it, we were both fascinated. Obsessed if you will. Drunk on the possibilities that there were still breaths in the bottles and instructions on the silver coverings. And that if we could decipher them, there might be a way to . . . I went to the auction. I was bidding on behalf of the foundation to acquire the collection. The foundation’s money is not my own. The board of directors—which included Melinoe—had voted on a very generous sum to enable me to buy the breaths. Well above the estimate of $60,000. We all thought that was enough. No one even knew if the breaths were still in the bottles. So what were we even buying? What was the collection really worth? What’s a dream worth? It was all legend . . . all myth.”

“Well, you don’t have to tell me how seductive a myth is. What was the estimate?”

“The estimate was $35,000 to $50,000 because of the workmanship of the silver cases that covered each bottle and the connection to Catherine de Medici. No one took the legend very seriously.”

“But it had been authenticated? It must have been for Sotheby’s to be handling it.”

“Yes, the glass and the silver had been dated to 1550 to 1575. It was authentic all right. Just authentic what?”

“So how much did they go for?”

Malachai didn’t give her a simple answer. But then she shouldn’t have expected one. Simplicity and Malachai didn’t go together.

“I went to the auction alone. Melinoe had other business and told me she was certain I’d get the collection—that no one would want it as much as we did. There were quite a few people bidding at first. After all, the pieces were associated with a queen of France. I hadn’t planned on entering the bidding till it got close to my limit—I didn’t want to drive up my own price. But once it reached $30,000, it was just me and a private bidder on the telephone.”

Jac had been to quite a few auctions and could picture the scene, with the auctioneer at the podium and a grouping of auction house employees fielding bids on the phones to the right. Telephone bidders were always a dramatic and mysterious part of an auction.

“What happened?”

“The bidding landed at $60,000. It was with a bidder on the phone. I should have stopped, but I was too far gone by that point. I had convinced myself we would discover something of great importance from the collection. I had to have it. So I decided to add some of my own money to the foundation’s sum. The bidder and I were now locked in a game of one-upmanship. I went to $65,000. The telephone bidder went to $70,000. And so it continued until we had reached $250,000. I was going to have to liquidate part of my retirement fund. But I didn’t care anymore. I had to have the silver bells and the bottles for the promises they held. And the fact that someone else wanted them as much as I did only made me more convinced that they would reveal something astounding.”

“How far did you go?” Jac was fascinated seeing this side of him.

“I bid $300,000, and then the person on the phone bid $1.85 million. A very significant amount.”

“Wow. That’s a crazy jump. But why was it significant?”

“It was $25,000 more than my portfolio plus the foundation’s $60,000. Exactly and to the penny out of my reach. And not by five or ten thousand dollars that I might have been able to raise but by enough that I really had to stop.”

“I see.”

Malachai was silent on the other end.

Jac finished the story for him. “She knew how much you were worth because you were lovers. She was the other bidder, wasn’t she? It was Melinoe who bought the collection out from under you.”

Chapter 13

Jac had never heard Malachai sound vulnerable before, but talking about Melinoe seemed to unnerve him. He was at the same time wounded and angry. And even wistful. Was he still mourning the loss of the collection—or the woman who stole it from him?

“She is without heart. Without honor. Utterly selfish. Why are you asking me about her?”

“She told me it was through you that she had heard about Robbie.”

“Yes, but it would have been back a while. I haven’t talked to Melinoe or seen her since the night after the auction.”

“Did you accuse her of what you suspected? That she had been the bidder on the phone?”

“Yes, of course. That night, at dinner. And she laughed at me. She has a very curious laugh. It’s very childlike. There are aspects of her that have never quite grown up. As if part of her had been frozen at the time of her father’s death. Do you know about that?”

Jac knew only the broad strokes of the story. So Malachai told her.

“Melinoe’s father had a butterfly house and spent hours there taking care of the plants, cataloging the butterflies. She said he always played music in there. Mostly opera, which he loved, especially the Italian grand dramas. When she came home from school, she would always go directly there, and they would spend an hour together. No matter who he was married to, and he had married four times, that hour after school was time she and her father spent alone.

“When she went in that day, Verdi’s
Il Trovatore
was playing. This tragic opera was one of her father’s favorites. She walked through the heavy green foliage toward the back, where he had a grouping of chairs and a workbench and where she often found him repotting a plant or making notes.

“He was sitting in a chair, his head down.
Sleeping,
she thought. And then she noticed there were odd designs on his face and hands. And on his khaki pants. And on the floor around him. A small red pattern made up of tiny red dots. No, not red dots. They were butterfly feet. The butterflies had gotten into something red, and everywhere they’d landed they’d left a stamp. As she watched, a monarch approached her father and landed on his chest, then flew a few feet, landed on a leaf, then flew off, leaving the mark.

“Melinoe looked back at her father. He had been wearing a navy T-shirt so she hadn’t seen the stain at first, but now she did. She also saw that there was a slash on his neck, a gaping wound still bleeding. She ran to him. Shook him. Shouted at him over the music. Touched his face. In her growing panic she never remembered those next minutes with him, but she said it took her a long time to realize or accept that he was dead. And then she noticed that behind her father, partially obscured by a group of potted palms and other foliage, there were two more bloody bodies: her stepmother, Lynda, and Serge. Melinoe tried to rouse them too but couldn’t. By then she was covered in her father’s blood, and when she ran toward the greenhouse exit to get help, she added her own bloody prints to those of the butterflies. Her hands and face—from where she tried to wipe away her tears—were stained too. When she ran into the house—incoherent with panic—the housekeeper thought she had been hurt. For a few minutes, she’d tried to tend to her until she understood what Melinoe was saying.

“It was a murder-suicide. Serge’s mother, who had severe emotional issues, came to believe her new husband of eight months, Melinoe’s father, was trying to seduce Serge. In a rage she attacked Cypros with a knife. Serge tried to intervene and was hurt. When Lynda saw her son bleeding out, she assumed she’d killed him and then killed herself.

“There were many who cheered Cypros’s death because he’d been ruthless and uncaring in business. He often bought up companies and stripped them of their employees as he merged them into larger entities. If economies required people lose their jobs—so be it, he always said. Cypros presented a cold exterior. But to Melinoe, he’d been warm and loving. Trying to be twice the parent since she’d lost her mother at such a young age. Her ‘Poppa,’ she used to call him.”

Malachai had paused, then continued. “Serge’s wound would have been fatal had Melinoe not saved his life by finding him when she did. And so at sixteen she and Serge, who was a year older, became orphans and formed a deep and complicated bond.

“I could tell from the way Melinoe told me the story, from how she talked about her life pre-accident and post, that she integrated her father’s personality into her own. I think what attracted me to her at first was her coldness. She seemed so impervious. It was a challenge to the therapist in me. I’d never met anyone as calculating and capable of control. All traits I shared with her, I’m afraid, but she had perfected them. I was in awe of her power over her feelings. Frightened too, I think, to look at her and see myself. I have often thought since then that my need to seduce her, to find some tenderness in her, was a search to find it in myself.”

In all the years Jac had known him, Malachai had never revealed himself to her like this. And Jac wondered why he was doing it now.

“You were in love with her,” she said.

“I was.”

Jac thought that she had never heard two words spoken with so much sadness before. Malachai didn’t usually elicit empathy from her—he did now.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered into the phone as if she were offering condolences upon hearing that someone had died.

He laughed softly and, understanding the tone in her words, responded.

“I was a fool. But I supposed every man has to play the fool at least once in his life. She is a magnificent narcissist, Jac. A marble statue not quite a woman. I think I believed I could play Pygmalion and, to overuse a cliché, melt the ice in her veins. Instead she turned my blood cold.” He was quiet for a moment.

“She’s asked me to take over and finish what Robbie started,” Jac said. “To work on the collection of breaths and see if I can re-create the elixir that is supposed to be used with them to allow the souls to reincarnate.”

“Wouldn’t it be something if it could?”

“Do you think it’s even possible?”

“I was willing to spend my savings to buy that collection and test the theory. If it is possible to absorb a soul—to host it—to reincarnate someone—it would be . . . If it’s possible we could preserve souls. Not just access them but save them and then reanimate them so people could fully remember their previous lives . . . what an amazing thing that would be.” He was breathless. “Are you considering taking on the project?”

“No, but . . .” She hesitated for a moment as she pictured the test tube she’d hidden in her bedroom where no one would stumble on it. She hadn’t been able to scatter his ashes—how could she discard the container that might actually contain his soul?

“What?”

“Robbie was so immersed in the work he was doing with Melinoe, he had the nurse who was here with us save his own dying breath,” Jac said.

“He did?”

“He did, and I have it . . .” She paused . . . seeing Robbie . . . her beautiful vibrant brother . . . so ill . . . She shook her head trying to make the image disappear. “But don’t worry, I’m not going to accept Melinoe’s offer.”

“I wasn’t going to ask you to refuse her,” Malachai said.

“You weren’t?”

“No, I think you should accept.”

Jac was shocked. She’d fully expected him to warn her off the idea. “You’re always so worried about me, though. As if I’m one of the figures you collect—that someone might jostle the shelf and break me.”

“I’m not worried about you spending time with her. Melinoe’s not a murderer, Jac. She’s just a thief.”

When she got off the phone, Jac was puzzled. Last year he’d tried to talk her out of taking on a project on the Isle of Jersey for her TV show, but she’d gone anyway. Was Malachai using reverse psychology now so that she wouldn’t go? She wouldn’t put it past him. As much as she loved him, she wasn’t oblivious to the fact that he was manipulative and Machiavellian.

But wouldn’t this elixir be critical to his studies? Wouldn’t he sacrifice anything to get it?

Now there were two puzzles. What did Malachai really want her to do? And if she went back to Belle Fleur, what was she going to find?

Jac needed to clear her head. She shrugged on a jacket and left the house. It had rained while she was on the phone, so the streets were wet and there was a fresh smell in the air that suggested spring was coming. She stuck her hands in her pockets, walked the two blocks to the Quai Voltaire and then over the bridge and through the entrance to the Louvre. Here kings and queens—including Queen Catherine—had lived for centuries before it was conscripted into a museum. Turning left, she walked into the Tuileries.

It was five thirty and dusk was falling, but Jac wasn’t alone. There were people milling about, walking their dogs, strolling with baby carriages or young children. Others hurrying across the park. There was a group of teenagers in soccer clothes, sweaty and high on the excitement of the game they’d obviously just played. And then there were the lovers. She avoided looking at them. Or tried to. But Jac was always drawn to watching lovers in Paris. She believed that it was an homage to the city to declare your love, and that if you lived in Paris and you were in love—whether you were seventeen or seventy—that it was your duty to show your passion. That it gave you entry to a different kind of city. Almost like a magic ticket that allowed you to leave the Paris of traffic and noise and tourists and enter into the city of lights and sights and scents and for a time exist on another plane. Jac had never fallen in love in Paris. But once, for a week, she’d been there with Griffin. When he had come to help Jac find Robbie. They hadn’t enacted all the rituals, though. They’d never kissed on the bridge. Never walked hand in hand through the gardens. Hadn’t strolled by the Seine at night and listened to strains of “La Vie en Rose” that played on the sightseeing boats cruising the river. They’d never bought one of those silly locks and locked their love on one of the bridges.

Their passion had erupted in the dark. In the few minutes stolen between searching for Robbie, bursts of momentary escape from worry.

By the time Jac reached the allée of chestnut trees, there were fewer people in the park and twilight had descended. She kept walking, hearing the gravel crunch underfoot. All sounds of the traffic were muffled, and there was a stillness in the park that was reassuring. Until she realized someone was following her.