Whispers of the Flesh (14 page)

Adrien caught Isabel’s eye and gave her a look that said the floor was hers, which was only fair, since this was essentially her doing.

Here goes.
“Um, look, Dad, I know you said no visitors, but—”

“Oh,
bloody
hell,” he growled.

“Dad.” Kneeling next to him, she put her hand on his arm—an unusually physical gesture for the two of them—and said, “It’s Hitch. I told him you didn’t want any visitors, but he insisted, wouldn’t take no for an answer. He was online booking the trip from Chicago even as we spoke. He said he was gonna bring his new wife and stepson, since you hadn’t been able to go to the wedding last spring, and I remembered you saying you wished you’d had the chance to meet them.”

“And you didn’t tell me this because . . . ?”

“
We
didn’t tell you,” Adrien said evenly, “because we knew how you would carry on if you thought there was still time to cancel the visit.”

“Dad, it’s not just anybody,”Isabel said, “it’s Hitch. My God, he saved your life. Now he wants to see you. Don’t you think you kinda owe him?”

“He saved your life?” Grace asked.

Emmett sighed, nodded.

“It was during a heli-skiing trip about three years ago,” Isabel said.

Grace said, “A what trip?”

“Heli-skiing—it’s where you spend a week or two on a mountain, and every day a helicopter takes you from the base camp to a different place to ski.”

“You did this just three years ago?” Grace asked Emmett.

“I haven’t always been a pathetic invalid,” he said.

Isabel said, “He’s always been into that whole ‘sound mind in a sound body’ thing—right, Dad? Remember that RAF exercise routine you used to make me do before school when I was little?”

Adrien said, “The first thing Emmett did when he succeeded his father as
administrateur
was to turn the upper hall into a gymnasium. I didn’t see the point at the time, but now, of course, I use it every day.”

Grace brightened. “There’s a gym here?”

“Yes, indeed,” Adrien said. “Cardio machines, Nautilus, free weights—even a sauna. You are more than welcome to use it. It’s in the west range over the dining room.”

“So, anyway,” Isabel said, “Hitch lives in Chicago—he’s American—so he and Dad would get together a couple of times a year for these macho, testing-the-limits type expeditions. You know, white-water rafting in India, climbing K2, skiing every double black diamond slope in the Canadian Rockies . . . Three years ago, they booked this heli-skiing excursion on Makalu, which is one of the tallest mountains in the world. It’s in the Himalayas, near Everest. One morning, Hitch gets up before dawn, straps on his snowshoes, and sets out on a little prebreakfast solo hike. About ten minutes later, an avalanche comes roaring down the mountain and totally demolishes the base camp—with Dad and their Sherpa guide still asleep in their tents.”

“I woke up with the rumbling, actually,” Emmett said dryly. “Had just enough time to unzip my sleeping bag before it slammed into me.”

“Blimey,” Grace murmured.

“Everything’s just
gone
in, like, a minute,”Isabel said. “Hitch knows my dad and the guide have to be buried under the snow downstream of where the camp had been. If they’d been skiing at the time, they would have been wearing these beeper thingies—”

“Transceivers,” Emmett said.

“Right. You know, so you can be located if you’re buried in the snow—but of course they didn’t have them on, ’cause they were sleeping. So Hitch has to take his best guess as to where they might be, but luckily he’s got this walking stick—”

“Trekking pole,” her father corrected.

“Fine, a trekking pole, and the thing telescopes to, like six feet, and he probes the snow with it and finds my dad. And on his backpack, he’s got this little . . . it’s like a shovel for avalanches.”

“Avalanche shovel,” Emmett said with a snarky smile.

“So he digs my dad out of the snow, then finds the Sherpa and digs
him
out. Dad owes Hitch his life, and he hasn’t even seen him since that trip, ’cause he got sick and stopped traveling after that.”

“Hitch didn’t come here to visit?” Grace asked.

“Dad wouldn’t let him. God forbid his closest friend in the world, the man he’s always said was like a brother to him, should see him when he’s not in tip-top form. He’s like family, Dad, and family should be with you at a time like this.”

“She’s right, pal,” said Robert Hitchens from the doorway.

The peevishness faded from her father’s expression as he took in the old friend he hadn’t seen in three years. Hitch, a retired commercial airline pilot who was exactly her father’s age, had the kind of rangy, sandy-haired, sun-gilded good looks that turned the heads of much younger women. In fact, the pretty honey-blonde standing next to him—his new bride, a lawyer named Karen—looked about half his age; but given her college-age son, looming behind her, she was probably at least forty.

Hitch’s smile didn’t falter for a moment as he greeted Emmett with a handshake and a shoulder pat, despite the shock he must have felt at seeing his surrogate brother and fellow adventurer reduced in such short order to a feeble old man. He shook Adrien’s hand and gave Isabel a big hug, as always, and then everyone got sort of haphazardly introduced to everyone else.

“Were you named after the Henry James character?” Karen asked Isabel.

“Ah, a
brainy
beauty,” praised Emmett. “Looks as if you’ve caught yourself a live one, Hitch. Can’t imagine what she was thinking, throwing in her lot with the likes of you.”

Turning to his wife, Hitch said, “I
told
you he was a pain in the ass.”

Emmett glanced at his watch, a gesture not lost on Adrien, who ordered up a heavily laden tea tray.

“I saw Lili and Elic downstairs,” Hitch said. “I swear they look exactly like they did the last time I was here, which was thirty-something years ago. What is it, something in the water?”

“That’s the theory, actually,” said Adrien, offering the standard, if misleading, reply to that observation. “Auvergne is known for its therapeutic mineral spas. Some visitors to Grotte Cachée have theorized that our cave spring is unusually high in the types of substances that promote longevity.”

Hitch said, “I’m surprised you haven’t become a mecca for the people who are into that kind of thing.”

“Oh, we are very covetous of our privacy,” Adrien said.

Jason, Hitch’s stepson, said, “Is that why your guard confiscated our cameras and cell phones?”

Adrien nodded. “He’ll give them back when you leave. If people started taking photographs of our little valley, others would soon find out about us, and we would be overrun with trespassers looking to rejuvenate themselves in our bathhouse pool.”

“A fountain of youth,” Karen said incredulously. “Didn’t that pipe dream die with Ponce de León?”

“It’s not necessarily a pipe dream,” replied Jason, a bulky, bespectacled young man in a Northwestern sweatshirt and baggy jeans who had a kind of a geeky bear thing going on. With his almost-blond hair and his height, he could have been the natural son of Hitch, who’d never actually fathered any children himself; Katie, his daughter with his first wife, had been adopted from Korea. Twelve years ago Katie moved to New York to study theater at NYU, where Isabel was a senior. The two only children became fast friends, almost like sisters. Katie was a working actor now, with regular roles on the various
Law & Order
s, the soaps, and off-Broadway.

Jason said, “Studies have indicated that certain enzymes, amino acids, and hormones actually do have anti-aging properties. They retard the aging process either by encouraging cells to continue dividing after they should have died, or by preventing them from releasing the free radicals that cause oxidative stress. Who’s to say there aren’t minerals or other components in the water here—or elsewhere in the environment of this valley—that have that effect?”

“My son the know-it-all,” Karen said with a smile of pride and affection. “He’s one of those brainiacs who doesn’t sleep. Stays up till the wee hours of the morning, gets three or four hours of sleep, max, then he’s good to go. He’s majoring in biological sciences, and then he plans to get his Ph.D. in . . . What is it? Molecular biochemistry . . . ?”

“Biochemistry, molecular biology, and cell biology,” he said.

Emmett said, “University of Chicago, isn’t it, Justin?”

“It’s Northwestern, actually. And, um . . . it’s Jason.”

“Of course it is,” said Emmett, looking abashed. “My memory . . . This blasted disease, you know. The lack of oxygen to the brain.”

“Well, and those don’t help,” said Isabel, nodding toward the vials on the desk behind Jason and Hitch.

As Adrien expounded on the importance of keeping Grotte Cachée’s theoretical healing qualities a secret from the outside world, Jason quietly scooped up the three vials and scanned their labels, ignoring his mother’s stern shake of the head. He found one of the vials particularly interesting, judging from his scowl of absorption as he read the label.

Hitch, sitting next to him, leaned close and mouthed, “What?”

Jason held the vial so that his stepfather could see the label. Isabel was probably the only person in the room, aside from Hitch, who heard Jason whisper, “Diamorphine.”

Hitch shrugged, as if to say
So?

“It’s heroin.”

Hitch sat back and fixed his gaze on Grace, who noticed after a few moments and met his eyes. He cocked his head toward the door, Universal Sign Language for
Let’s talk outside.

She nodded and stood.

“Excuse us,” Hitch said as he ushered her out into the hall. “We’ll just be a minute.”

Isabel got up and slipped out the door behind them. Hitch gestured for her to close it, which she did, and then he turned to Grace. “You’re giving him heroin? It’s not even legal.”

“Hitch—” Isabel began, but Grace held up an I’ll-take-care-of-this hand.

“Diamorphine can be prescribed in the UK,” Grace said.

“Is he in that much pain?”

“No. He’s uncomfortable, certainly, but—”

“Then why
heroin
? He hates feeling drugged. He’s never even smoked pot, not once. He likes to be sharp.”

“He also likes to be breathing,” Grace said in the calm, even voice of a woman accustomed to explaining things to her patients’ loved ones. “He’s not taking it for pain, Mr. Hitchens, he’s taking it to help his lungs do their job without seizing up. And it’s actually not the diamorphine affecting his memory, it’s the lorazepam. He takes it for the anxiety caused by the shortness of breath, but unfortunately it is an amnesiac. As for the grogginess, some of that really is the disease, like he said. He’s got too little oxygen in his system and too much carbon dioxide, and that tends to make people sleepy and disoriented. Eventually, he may even slip into a coma.”

“Oh, God,”Isabel said. Hitch patted her back. “How, um . . . how long before . . . ?”

“Without extraordinary measures,” Grace said, “it could be any day now.”

“Any day?”

“He’s putting on a good front because he’s such a self-contained bloke,” Grace said, “but his last bout of respiratory distress was very severe. The next one will probably be his last. I’m sorry, Isabel.”

With tears squeezing her throat, Isabel said, “Don’t let him know.”

“He knows,” Hitch said.

Isabel looked to Grace, who was eyeing Hitch curiously, as if wondering how he came by such prescience—but anyone who’d been through what he had in Vietnam would have acquired more than a passing acquaintance with death.

“I think he does know,” Grace said. “I think he senses it.”

“But . . . then why would he have told me to go home?” Isabel asked. “He said I should fly back to New York, that I’d be called if . . . if . . .”

“Many people don’t seem to want their family members hovering ’round as they . . . depart,” Grace said, “especially people like your father who are used to presenting a certain image and being in control.”

The door to her father’s apartment opened and Jason poked his head out. “Everything okay?”

“Peachy.” Isabel put on her best bearing-up-well mask and followed Grace and Hitch back into the sitting room.

“You’ve been holding out on me,” Karen chided her husband as he took his seat. “How come you never told me Emmett’s ex-wife knew Princess Di?”

Hitch gave her a reproving little smile. “Been cross-examining him, have you, counselor?”

“Not at all,” Emmett said. “We’ve simply been getting to know each other. How
do
you bear him?” he asked Karen.

“I love you, hon, but I really don’t get you sometimes,” Karen told Hitch. “Your best buddy’s ex was friends with one of the most famous women of the twentieth century, and you never think to mention it?”

“Just”—Hitch shrugged—“never came up.” He glanced at Emmett, then away, looking ill at ease. Isabel had always suspected that there was never much love lost between the new age, goddess-worshipping Madeleine Lamb and her ex-husband’s straight-arrow best friend. Even before the divorce, Hitch hardly ever visited them at the London town house in which Isabel spent her early years.

“Don’t be too hard on him, Karen,” Isabel said. “I mean, Mom and Di weren’t even really friends, exactly. Mom read Di’s palm, interpreted her aura, did the Tarot card thing . . . She was a kind of clairvoyant to the rich and famous. Still is, but she moved back to New York when she divorced Dad, so now it’s trust fund babies, rock stars, actors . . . American royalty.”

Isabel’s lifelong embarrassment over having a charlatan for a mother had dissipated with the recent revelation by her father that his ex actually was the “druidess” she claimed to be; she had the Gift. Not that it was properly channeled and mastered—far from it—but underneath all the cliché bullshit fortune-teller trappings were genuine extrasensory abilities.

“She’s American, then?” Karen asked Emmett. “How did you meet? Unless I really am prying, and then you should just tell me to take a—”

“Not at all,” Emmett said, to Isabel’s surprise; he normally disdained personal questions from people he didn’t know well. “Maddy and I met in London in the summer of nineteen seventy-two.”