The Book of Lost Fragrances: A Novel of Suspense (23 page)

“You’re still here?” she asked him, momentarily disoriented.

“I never left,” he answered.

His presence was more reassuring than she was comfortable with. How could they have been apart for so long and slip back into this kind of intimacy so quickly?

“Are you all right, Jac? For at least a minute, you didn’t seem to hear a word the inspector or I said.”

A minute? That was all? What to tell him? Until she understood what was happening, she decided to keep it to herself. She especially didn’t want to talk about it with Marcher there.

Thursday morning, Jac was showered and dressed and back in the studio by eight o’clock. Overnight the room’s scent had built up to a disturbing intensity. Despite the morning chill, she flung open the French doors, welcoming in the fresh air. She wanted coffee and remembered that her father always kept an electric kettle and French press here. But where? Everywhere she looked were boxes of papers and paraphernalia. If this was how the workshop looked after months of Robbie’s trying to clean it up, how had it looked before? She finally found the coffee accouterments tucked away in a corner of a shelf with a tin of ground beans that smelled fresh enough. The same brand her father had always favored.

Usually she thought very little about her father, but it was impossible to put him out of her mind here. His personality before the disorder descended was evident in a hundred ways, from his collection of spy novels shelved two and three deep, to the dozens of framed photographs of his second wife, Bernadette, and her two children. Behind them, Jac and Robbie were equally represented in ornate frames. Ten snapshots. One even had their mother in it. Jac pulled it out, placed it up front. Wiped the dust off the glass. Then gently touched her mother’s cheek.

The picture had been taken so long ago. A lovely, dark-haired woman sitting under a big red umbrella on the beach in Antibes with a sweet smile on her lips. The baby in her lap was Robbie. Jac, a three-year-old with a mop of the same dark hair, was standing beside her mother, leaning over, whispering in her ear.

Jac didn’t remember the trip. Or the day. Couldn’t pull up that moment.

She poured herself a cup of coffee and looked back at the photo. Where were memories stored? Why could she conjure imagined moments from lives of people long dead but not dredge up actual instances of her very own life?

When the inspector arrived at nine, Jac was feeling the jittery addition of too much caffeine to her anxiety over Robbie.

She and Marcher sat on opposite sides of a Louis XIV desk that had been in the family since it was made. Her father had auctioned off the truly valuable antiques trying to stave off financial disaster over the years. What was left—a few pieces like this desk—were in such poor shape that they weren’t worth selling.

“Can you tell me a little about the argument you and your brother were having?” Marcher asked. “We know the two of you weren’t getting along. That your plans for the company didn’t match his.”

“How do you know about that?” Jac looked over at Griffin.

She’d been surprised he’d phoned early that morning. Even more surprised at how glad she’d been to hear his voice. When she told him that Marcher wanted to talk to her again, he volunteered to come over. She had been too exhausted and upset to argue.

Now he shook his head in answer to the question she hadn’t voiced.

No, he wouldn’t have told Marcher something like that. So how had he found out?

Jac’s eyes rested on the photos she’d just been looking at. Ahh, she thought. Marcher must have talked to Bernadette. The witch, who once upon a time had been her father’s lovely assistant, bringing them presents of chocolates and fresh madeleines. Then Bernadette had stumbled upon evidence of Jac’s mother’s affair and exposed her. Audrey’s indiscretion would have ended eventually, and perhaps her parents would have stayed together had Bernadette not presented proof of the transgression to Jac’s father. Instead she started a spiral that ended in Audrey’s suicide.

“And what did the current Madame L’Etoile have to say about my brother and me?”

The inspector glanced down at his notepad for a moment. Jac liked him a little more for having the decency to look away.

“I’m not at liberty to discuss that, mademoiselle. Can you help me understand this feud between you and your brother?”

“Feud? What century are you living in? It’s an ongoing business discussion about how we are going to solve our financial problem.”

“That reached the point where the two of you rarely saw each other.”

“I live in New York and travel all the time. Robbie lives in Paris. We both have jobs. How often could we see each other? And besides, what does any of this have to do with what’s going on? With where he is? With what happened here?”

“About the feud?” the inspector prompted.

“Fine,” she said, realizing he wasn’t going to give. “I’ve found a buyer for the rights to two of our signature perfumes. The purchase price will bring in enough cash to pay off our debt, allow us to restructure our loans, and infuse the company with the capital we need.”

“Your brother didn’t like the idea?”

“Doesn’t. He doesn’t like the idea. He has some misguided belief that our signature scents are our lifeblood. That if we sell even two we will be defaming the house.”

“But you need his vote to make the sale?”

“Yes, we own the company equally.”

“Except you’d own the company completely in the event of your brother’s death, wouldn’t you?”

A sound escaped from Jac’s throat. Like the cry of an animal caught in a trap.

Griffin stood up. “Inspector, I think that’s enough.”

Marcher ignored Griffin. “We’re going to have to ask you not to leave the country, mademoiselle.”

“Why is that?”

“I’m afraid you’re a person of interest in your brother’s disappearance and possible death.”

“That’s absolutely ludicrous.” Jac put her hands on the desk and stood up abruptly, accidentally knocking over a small perfume bottle sitting precariously close to the edge. The vial fell and shattered.

An intense scent enveloped her, so powerful that she barely noticed as the inspector excused himself and left. Jac hadn’t smelled it for years but recognized it instantly. This was one of the scents from The Game of Impossible Fragrances. In the scent vocabulary that made up her and Robbie’s secret language, this was Fragrance of Loyalty, Jac’s favorite. Adding notes of bergamot to a rich earthy base of oakmoss, she’d come up with a chypre—a type of warm, woody scent, first made famous by the legendary perfumer François Coty in 1917. Jac’s Fragrance of Loyalty was neither feminine nor masculine, and could be worn by either brother or sister. And that was as it should be, she’d said, so they both could use it to signal when something was wrong and they needed help. Usually that meant they were in trouble with their mother or father and wanted saving. She wound up putting it on far more often than Robbie did.

Jac didn’t even know he’d kept any of those fragrances. Why had this one been sitting on the edge of the desk?

“Did Robbie tell you about this perfume?” Jac asked Griffin as she picked up the broken pieces of glass after Marcher left.

“No.”

“You’re certain?”

“Yes. Why? What is it?”

“I don’t think it was here yesterday. If it had been, I’m sure I would have noticed it or smelled it. I’ve sat at this desk a dozen times since I arrived in Paris. And the bottle—our father stopped using them years ago. He gave the ones he had left to us to play with.”

“I don’t understand. What does a broken bottle of perfume have to do with anything?”

“What if Robbie is alive? What if he was here last night? He could have left me this bottle as a message. Maybe the shoes and the wallet were a message, too. Robbie could have left them by the river hoping they’d be found and I’d be told. It can’t be a coincidence that they showed up somewhere Robbie and I had been before. A place that scared me so much he convinced my grandmother to cut our visit short and get me away from there.”

Twenty-eight

PARIS, FRANCE
THURSDAY, MAY 26, 3:00 P.M.

It was misting when Griffin came out of the Porte Dorée metro station. The afternoon sun had disappeared behind a bank of clouds and the entrance to the Bois de Vincennes was shrouded in fog. Through the vapor, he saw glints of gold, but it wasn’t until he was right beneath her that he could make out the towering sculpture of Athena shining like a warning beacon through the haze. The fountain at her feet spilled down into a long reflecting pool that mirrored the gray sky, and the royal palm trees that flanked the fountain stood like masts in the miasma.

On a weekend, he imagined, this park would be crowded, but now, in the rain, there were long stretches where he didn’t see a soul.

Suddenly a large black dog burst out of the mist, racing right toward him, followed by a pack. Within seconds, sniffing dogs surrounded Griffin, inhaling his scent and snarling.

Griffin knew he could take on one dog but not a pack, so he stood still and silent, readying himself for a possible attack. After a few long seconds, however, the alpha male seemed to lose interest. He turned away and took off, with the rest of his pack following. Once the dogs were gone, Griffin realized his heart was racing.

If he’d known how big the park was—how long it would take to get here or how deserted it would be—he’d have suggested an alternate meeting place. But the lama hadn’t explained much on the phone, just that he was a friend of Robbie’s and wanted to set up a meeting.

And to please be discreet.

Griffin had wanted to ask the lama how he’d found him. But the lama had hung up too quickly. It wasn’t a secret that Griffin was in Paris working on the Egyptian artifact. A few nights before, Robbie had invited the curator from Christie’s to dinner with Griffin. The archaeological community was fairly small. Maybe Robbie had shared what the curator had said with the lama

By the shore of the Lac Daumensil, Griffin finally found the temple he’d been told to look for and walked around to the entrance. Inside he was confronted by a gleaming Buddha at least twenty-five feet tall. The icon was so dazzling, its stature was so commanding, that Griffin didn’t even notice the Buddhist nun, wearing saffron robes, who sat at the sculpture’s feet.

“Mr. North, thank you for being so prompt,” she said, startling Griffin. “I’m Ani Lodra.” She extended her hand.

“I was expecting to meet the lama. Is he here?”

“No, he offers his apologies. He’s been detained and asked me to conduct the meeting.”

Griffin nodded.

“Time is of the essence.” The small, wiry woman with a shaved head gestured to a cushion next to her own. “Will you have a seat, please?”

Incense permeated the air, and votive candles flickered in their red glass holders.

“I feel as if I’ve left France and crossed over into India,” Griffin said as he sat down.

“Yes, it’s very much like home. It’s nice for those of us when traveling to come here for a respite and to meditate.”

“You’re from India?” Her features didn’t fit. She was slight, with yellow skin and slightly oblique brown eyes.

She nodded. “Most who followed His Holiness into exile live now in McLeod Ganj, India. There are over one hundred thousand of us there.”

“You hardly seem old enough to have fled Tibet in 1959,” Griffin said with surprise. The nun looked to be about twenty-eight or thirty.

“My parents were followers. I was born there. My envelope is twenty-eight years old.”

Griffin had met other Buddhists who considered their bodies to be hosts for reincarnated souls.
Envelope
: there was something intriguing about how this woman phrased it.

“Let me explain why we’ve dragged you to the middle of this park. We assume you must be as concerned as we are about Mr. L’Etoile.”

“I am, of course.”

“His Holiness has been looking forward to meeting with Mr. L’Etoile when he visits next week,” said the nun. “So when we read the news that he was missing, we became concerned. Were you able to see the ancient artifact before Mr. L’Etoile disappeared?”

So Robbie really had been keeping the lama updated. “Yes, I’ve been working on it for several days.”

“And were you able to finish your translation?”

“Not completely. There are still phrases I hadn’t pieced together and nuances I hadn’t worked out.”

“But what you did translate suggests the fragrance in the pot was a memory aid to help one remember a past life?”

“It mentions specifically finding a romantic interest in a past life, yes. A soul mate.”

“That’s interesting but not that surprising. There is much attention to soul mates in reincarnation literature.”

At the sound of a kettle whistling, the nun stood. “Excuse me. I prepared some tea.” Walking around to the side of the statue, she took the kettle off an electric burner and arranged a tray.

“In a temple?”

“There is a Buddhist tea ceremony,
Chan-tea,
that dates all the way back to the Western Jin Dynasty, where the tradition began at the Tanzhe Temple to help enlighten and reveal the truth.” She poured the steaming liquid. “Monks there picked and dried the leaves, then brewed the tea, which they discovered helped during long meditations.”

Griffin sipped the hot, fragrant beverage. “It’s very good.”

“Yes, it is. But I miss the buttered tea my mother used to make,” the nun said as she lowered her own cup.

Griffin nodded. “I’ve had yak butter tea.”

“It is superior. In the same way that butter candles have a softer and warmer light than these,” she said wistfully.

“Tibet is a wonderful country.”

“It was. It could be again. It’s being destroyed by the political situation. Which is a travesty.”

“I agree,” Griffin said, sensing they were getting to the heart of the reason for this meeting.

“Mr. North, we have only two days before His Holiness arrives in Paris. This memory tool is something that he would very much like to share with his followers. If there is any chance of finding it—of finding Mr. L’Etoile—we’d like to offer our services.”