Wildest Dreams (The Contemporary Collection) (6 page)

Such shock at her aunt’s animosity crowded in upon Joletta that she couldn’t think what to say. She hadn’t known her aunt felt that way about her.

It was Timothy who broke the taut silence. “Now, Mom, don’t upset yourself,” he said, drawing his lanky legs nearer his chair as he sat up straighter and brushed his hair back with a quick, nervous gesture. “I’m sure Joletta wouldn’t want to take anything from us.”

His mother glared at him. “When I want your opinion, Timothy, I’ll ask for it. In the meantime I will remind you that your loyalty should be to me.”

“I was just saying—”

“I heard you,” his mother replied in quelling tones. “Please be quiet unless you have something to say to convince Joletta to see things my way.”

Hot color rose under Timothy’s fair skin. He met Joletta’s gaze with a look of apology as he gave a light shrug.

Joletta sent her cousin a small smile in return. She had always felt closer to Timothy than to Natalie; he was nearer her own age and had something of her own uncertain disposition. It had been good of him to brave his mother’s ill humor. His father, when Timothy was younger, before his parents divorced, had sent him to boys” camps and on Outward Bound excursions to toughen him up, make him more self-reliant. Timothy had always come back tan and fit, but no less dependent on his mother’s approval.

Her cousin’s intervention had allowed Joletta the time to marshal her thoughts once more. Keeping her voice as calm as possible, she said, “I really think we all need to think about this.”

“There’s nothing to think about,” her aunt said with precision. “I happen to have a few contacts in the cosmetics industry. Lara Camors herself is interested; she’s ready to put the marketing division of Camors Cosmetics behind Le Jardin de Cour. She wants to run a huge ad campaign touting the old legends about Napoléon, Joséphine, and Cleopatra, calling it the perfume of women who want to get ahead, the perfume that increases a woman’s power and influence.”

“You’ve already discussed marketing?” Joletta couldn’t keep the dismay from her voice.

“You needn’t make it sound as if I couldn’t wait for my mother to be buried. The possibilities in the perfume came up some time ago, when Lara and I were guests at a house party. That woman started with a cleansing cream and developed a company that is an industry giant, a billion-dollar conglomerate; there’s no telling what she and Camors Cosmetics can do with the formula. Of course, there was no use saying a word about it while Mimi was alive.”

“But — doesn’t it bother you, the thought of ending everything, closing the shop?” Joletta reached out in a gesture of appeal.

“I never cared for the place, and I certainly don’t intend to spend my days pouring perfumes together. Lara will pay at least two million, maybe more, for complete rights to the Fossier’s Royal Parfums name and the formula for Le Jardin de Cour. I don’t intend to lose out on that money.”

Joletta had always wondered why Mimi had never trusted the perfume formula to her eldest daughter. Perhaps she had had good reason.

Estelle had left New Orleans when she was in her early twenties, taking a job in Houston. It was only a few hours away on the interstate highway, but to a New Orleanian of Mimi’s generation and insular outlook, it might as well have been the moon. A short time later Estelle had married a Texan, a man too tall, too loud, too wealthy, and too obviously sure of himself for Mimi’s liking. Mimi had never gotten along with Errol Clements and had forgiven her daughter for marrying him only when Estelle had had the good taste to divorce him while Natalie and Timothy were small.

Afterward, Estelle had not come home, but had divided her time between Houston and the East and West coasts. She had grown extravagant and too much in thrall to designer labels, at least in Mimi’s eyes. The excellent French-style taste instilled in her in her childhood had been corrupted, so that her appearance was regrettably overstated.

This was all bad enough, but Mimi’s older daughter had also proven that she lacked the perfumer’s nose, as shown by her deplorable taste in perfumes for her own use.

They were all waiting for her to say something more, her aunt and her cousins, even the lawyer who watched the byplay with an air of weary impatience, as if he had seen such family disagreements before and feared he would again.

Natalie, tall and blond, with the pouting expression of a runway model, appeared a little uncomfortable, but no less interested in the situation because of it. Joletta could not imagine why she should be concerned; her life-style could only be described as glamorous, filled with parties and jaunts to the Caribbean and the Riviera. She had married well, and divorced better, at least twice. Money could hardly be a problem, judging by her suit of silky-smooth black leather, the Fendi handbag she carried, and her Ferragamo shoes. Joletta studied Natalie’s carefully made up face with the delicately wrinkled skin around her eyes from the sun exposure necessary for a constant tan. There was nothing in her cousin’s expression to indicate that family feeling held any interest for her; still, there was always the chance.

“What about you, Natalie? Wouldn’t you like to try running the shop?”

“You must be joking,” Natalie said with the nasal vowels of New York grafted to a broad Texas drawl. “Where would I find the time?”

“You don’t work that I know of; why should it be a problem? You might even enjoy having some worthwhile use for your energy.”

“Oh, right. Can you see me peddling perfume to grubby tourists in T-shirts and rubber thongs? Thanks, but I prefer to direct my energy, as you put it, to better things. Such as the marvelous man I met last week. You wouldn’t believe him — stunning to look at, and the most darling manners. Money, of course. He’s my idea of a career.”

“Besides that,” Aunt Estelle interrupted in resentful tones, “Natalie knows nothing about the shop; Mimi never saw fit to discuss it during her visits.”

Joletta studied her aunt for long moments before she said quietly, “But I know about it.”

“And just what does that mean?” The words carried a threatening edge.

“It means,” Joletta answered, her gaze steady, “that I might run the shop myself.”

An odd look crept into her aunt’s eyes, one of half-concealed cunning. “You could do that, for what good the shop would be without Le Jardin de Cour.”

“You’re forgetting something,” Joletta said. “If Violet’s journal is mine, and the formula is in it, then Le Jardin de Cour also belongs to me.”

“And you’re forgetting that there is another way to find out what is in a perfume.”

Joletta shook her head. “Chemical analysis? You know what Mimi thought of that.”

A method without soul or accuracy, her grandmother had called it. Like most creative perfumers, Mimi had nothing but scorn for a process that was used, most notably, for making cheap copycat blends of famous fragrances. No machine, she said, could capture the finer nuances of a scent, could identify those minute quantities of rare oils that gave a great perfume its subtlety of character, its true essence and secret heart.

“It will serve the purpose,” Aunt Estelle said shortly.

Joletta considered her aunt. At last she said, “I don’t think it will, not without the journal.”

Aunt Estelle made no answer, though the high color in her face took on an alarming darkness. Natalie stared for brief seconds at her mother before she turned toward Joletta. Her voice sharp, she said, “What are you saying?”

“It sounds to me as if Camors Cosmetics is interested in the whole package, journal as well as formula. Even if a chemical analysis should come close to the original, Le Jardin de Cour is just another perfume without the background that goes with it. More than that, the government is picky these days about unsubstantiated advertising claims. Camors needs the journal to back up the legends.”

Her aunt gave a humorless laugh. “Bright girl. But you know, I don’t think you’ve found the formula yet, or you would be a lot more interested in the money.”

Joletta made no answer, since she did not want to admit the truth.

“There’s another thing,” the older woman went on with hardly a pause. “If you want to own the shop, you’ll have to buy out my interest in it and the house. Where do you think you’re going to get the money? Who do you think will lend it to someone your age, with no business experience, no credit record to speak of, no collateral? You’ll soon see how hopeless it is, then you’ll come begging me to help you sell.”

“I’ll find a way.”

Those words echoed in Joletta’s mind long after she left the lawyer’s office. Where they had come from, she had no idea. She had a little money saved, the money that was supposed to have gone on a house. Even if she added what would come to her from Mimi, it would not be nearly enough.

More than that, the thought of running Fossier’s Royal Parfums, stepping into her grandmother’s shoes, had never crossed her mind. Somehow, she had always assumed her aunt would do something, maybe bring in a manager, when the time came.

It wasn’t going to happen. She would have to take over. But was it what she really wanted?

She had so recently taken charge of her own life, so recently stopped allowing things to happen to her instead of making them happen herself, stopped letting the people around her do what they wanted, walk in and out of her life without protest. Was it actually a decision, then, declaring that she meant to run the shop, or was she letting circumstances control her actions again?

She couldn’t tell. And yet, what other choice was there?

It was the next morning that she was called to Mimi’s house. The three women who worked in the perfume shop, and who had been keeping it going for the last few days, were upset; two of them were in tears. The shop and Mimi’s quarters above had been ransacked during the night. Glass cases had been broken, perfume spilled, and pages ripped from the formula ledgers. Upstairs, antiques had been overturned, upholstery slashed, and the contents of drawers and cabinets thrown into a heap like so much trash. The destruction looked deliberate, the result of frustrated rage. The explanation seemed obvious also. Someone had been searching for the formula, but had not found it.

Who could it be, except her aunt?

Joletta acquitted the older woman of doing the actual damage. She must have hired someone to come in the night while the shop was empty, professionals with special knowledge of where things could be hidden and no sentimentality about fine old furnishings. That Aunt Estelle could set such people loose on her own mother’s belongings was sickening.

Joletta, standing in the middle of the mess, looked down to see the miniature of Violet Fossier at her feet. She knelt slowly to pick it up. The frame was bent; the canvas had buckled and the oil paints were cracked and flaking. As she stared at the face of the woman in the small portrait, it seemed she could see gentle reproof in the painted gaze, and also a challenge.

Pain shifted under the anger that simmered inside Joletta, almost as if a real person had been injured. She felt such a kinship with Violet since reading her journal. She had devoured the closely written pages in a few short hours, and wished for more than the brief chronicle of desire and deception, love and loss.

As she stood there with the miniature in her hands, an idea began to form in her mind.

Violet had found the perfume she had named Le Jardin de Cour in Europe; the journal detailed how she had come to own it and even how she happened to begin making it. Was there a chance that by visiting some of the same countries and scenes that Violet had seen, Joletta might be better able to make sense of any formula that was hidden within the journal’s pages? Could it be possible that by following in Violet’s footsteps, using the journal as a guide, she might see a pattern, some arrangement of scented flowers and numbers that bore a resemblance to what she knew of the ingredients in the old perfume?

Violet had been religious about describing the particulars of her journey. She had set down the exact distance covered each day and the time spent moving from one destination to another, had recorded the heights of buildings and bridges and mountains and the lengths of rivers and streams. She had given the sizes of ships and carriages and trains, of rooms and pieces of furniture, and the number and descriptions of paintings and statuary viewed in famous churches and old houses. In addition, she seemed to have mentioned every flower she saw blooming in every garden in five different countries, and had made drawings of most of them.

Joletta had not been able to decide if Violet simply enjoyed minute detail, if she had been afraid she was going to forget everything if she didn’t write it down, or whether there was some significance to it all. However, the fact was that numbers were vital to the notation of perfume formulas. Most perfumers referred to separate essences, or their own special combinations of essences, by number rather than name, while the formulas themselves were set down in ratios or percentages.

The urge to travel, to get away, had been strong in Joletta since she had read the first few pages of the journal, pages where her great-great-great-great-grandmother spoke of her fervent joy at the prospect of leaving the numbing routine of her days behind and seeing new places and beautiful new things. The words had struck a response inside Joletta. As the pain and loss of Mimi’s death sank in, she felt a growing need to get away from all reminders of it. At the same time all the things she knew — her job, her apartment, the unvarying cycle of her days — seemed dull and without interest. She was desperate for a change. More than that, she had been cheated of her promised honeymoon trip.