The Collector of Dying Breaths Page 3

  “Jac, you have to get up now,” Luc said.

  She had not moved from the chair beside Robbie’s bed since the nurse had woken her up to tell her Robbie was dead. Had not looked away from his still, quiet face at all.

  “Doesn’t he look like he is sleeping?” she asked Luc.

  “Yes, darling, but he isn’t.” Luc pulled up a chair and sat down beside her. “Days ago Robbie called and told me how he wanted everything handled,” he said, “so let me see to it while you take a nap. Nurse said you barely slept last night. The next few days are going to be trying, so you need to rest.”

  After even more effort on Luc’s part, Jac finally agreed to leave Robbie’s bedside. She was sure she’d never be able to sleep, but for the rest of that afternoon and for most of the next few days that was all she really did. Meanwhile Luc arranged for the cremation, invited guests to the memorial and hired caterers and florists and musicians. All to Robbie’s specifications. And then on Wednesday, it was Luc who hosted the celebration downstairs in the formal rooms of the house—the memorial Robbie had requested instead of a funeral.

  That morning Jac showered and then dressed in a simple black sheath with black pumps, her grandmother’s pearls and the watch she always wore, her mother’s. Ready far too early, she sat in her rocking chair and stared out her window at the courtyard with its barren trees and sleeping flower beds. She heard the first guest arrive. Was aware from the growing noise level that more guests had gathered. Finally it was time for her to go downstairs. But she couldn’t. Instead she rocked back and forth in the antique rocker, staring at the naked tree branches swaying in the March wind. At some point Luc knocked on her door and told her everyone was there and waiting for her. In a quiet voice, she told him to start without her. That she’d come down soon.

  But she never did. She never left her room. Never stopped staring at the lonely courtyard. Jac didn’t want to hear them eulogize her brother. Didn’t want to interact with the people who’d offer her condolences and try to reassure her with all kinds of meaningless platitudes.

  Robbie had promised he wouldn’t leave, and he’d never broken a promise to her before. Maybe if she just waited, stayed in that rocker long enough, he’d come back to her.

  That evening, when the house was finally still and quiet, Jac attempted to meditate herself into one of the hallucinations that had plagued her since childhood. These fugue states took her out of the present and into dreams of unknown origin where she was someone else, living another life in another time.

  If she could go there now, she could escape the pain of missing her brother for just a while. She longed to disappear into someone else’s life, someone else’s history, and get some relief from this unrelenting loss.

  She closed her eyes. Slowed her breathing. Imagined a dot of light between her eyes. Her third eye. Focused on the place ancient mystics believed was the portal to altered states.

  Jac waited for the warm air and infusion of scents that accompanied what Malachai called “memory lurches.” But she couldn’t summon one any better than she could prevent one when it came unbidden.

  On the Monday following Robbie’s funeral, Jac began attending to business. In the morning she dealt with the bank and at noon sat down for lunch with Luc, his two brothers, George and Marcel, as well as Monsieur Corlaine, the family solicitor. It was the first meal she’d shared with anyone since her brother had died.

  Jac had asked the cook to make a simple lunch of cold soup, roast chicken and salad with a fruit tart for dessert. Just choosing the menu had been an arduous effort. Even the most mundane tasks were suddenly more difficult.

  She met her guests in the living room, where navy silk jacquard curtains with white stars and moons and gold suns draped windows that looked out onto the courtyard. Created in the early 1900s for her great-great-great-grandparents, the motif was repeated all over the formal downstairs rooms. There were gold stars painted on the night-sky-blue ceiling. Astrological signs woven into the gold carpet. The furniture was a mix of pieces from different eras arranged artfully. Classic but comfortable.

  As she was about to lead everyone into the dining room, Jac’s cell phone rang. Glancing at the LED screen, she asked her guests if they would mind waiting a moment. The call was from Detective Marcher of the Paris police department.

  Almost two years before, a journalist had come to the L’Etoile workshop to interview Robbie about a new perfume line. Robbie quickly realized the reporter wasn’t who he purported to be. He knew nothing about the industry. Robbie guessed the man was there to steal fragments of ancient Egyptian pottery that Robbie had found, artifacts that contained a clue to a fragrance formula that might enable people to access their past lives.

  Through the ages mystics had used incense to access memories of previous lives, including Tibetan monks, who believed each new Dalai Lama was a reincarnation of the previous one. If there was a fragrance to aid in regressions, it could be a powerful weapon. A memory tool could help Tibetans foil China’s efforts to control who became the next Buddhist leader. China had incentive to prevent Tibetans from getting the formula.

  Being a practicing Buddhist, Robbie deduced the Chinese had sent an operative to steal the potential reincarnation aid.

  So he’d played along with the charade until he was able to trick the impostor into smelling a toxic essence designed to cause him to pass out. Then Robbie planned to call the police and get help.

  But what Robbie couldn’t have known was that the thief was an asthmatic; the fumes caused an attack that led to his death. Robbie fled in order to protect the pottery shards, but his disappearance suggested the possibility that Robbie had committed murder.

  Marcher was called in. Eventually Robbie’s name was cleared. Though it was proved he had acted in self-defense, her brother still had precipitated the death of a Triad member. Detective Marcher had warned them at that time that the powerful Chinese Mafia might seek revenge.

  Over the next year and a half nothing suspicious had occurred. Then Robbie got sick. The doctors couldn’t find any reason for why his body was failing, and failing so quickly. That’s when Jac had called the detective, and he’d begun looking into the possibility of a connection. Several times he’d reported in, but without any information. The last time he’d called was to offer condolences.

  “Mademoiselle L’Etoile, would it be possible to see you this afternoon?” he asked now.

  This task too would be a welcome distraction, and she agreed to a time and then returned to the dining room.

  The purpose of today’s luncheon was to plan for the future. The House of L’Etoile didn’t have a second in command. Jac and her brother owned the company jointly, but Robbie had been running it on his own. When they’d first inherited it, Jac and Robbie, having no heirs of their own, had decided they’d each leave their respective shares to their three cousins to ensure the company stayed in the family. At the time it had seemed a decision for the faraway future. It was impossible to Jac that future was now.

  She went into the dining room to rejoin her cousins. “I’ve heard the rift between our grandfathers was over a perfume,” Jac said as she poured wine for her cousins. She really only knew a few facts—that in 1941 the House of L’Etoile had been owned by Jac’s grandfather and his brother, Pierre L’Etoile. After a falling-out, Pierre sold his share of his firm to Jac’s grandfather, moved to Grasse and started his own company. Playing on the family name, L’Etoile—which meant “star”—Pierre called his firm Luna Parfums.

  “A perfume and a woman,” Marcel L’Etoile said as he buttered a piece of a roll. “Our grandfather was seeing a woman he was very much in love with. So of course he created a perfume for her. And of course she always wore it. One day he ran into her in the street, it was a day when they had no assignation planned, and she was wearing a different perfume. One that Pierre knew all too well. He’d watched your grandfather create it
for a supposed wealthy client. The discovery that they were both in love with the same woman destroyed the brothers’ relationship, and ultimately Charles bought Pierre out.”

  “Who was the woman?” Jac asked.

  “Your grandmother,” Luc said with a rueful smile. “She’d met Pierre first and liked him well enough. But when she met Charles, she fell in love.”

  “She was seeing them both?” Jac pictured her grandmother in the photographs of when she was young. Lovely with almond-shaped eyes and high cheekbones, the very essence of chic. Even as an older woman, Grand-mère was a bit of a flirt in that utterly charming way French women had. Jac remembered being at the beach in the South of France with her grandmother and Robbie when a gentleman—

  Her cousin Luc was talking to her. Jac came out of her reverie and asked him to repeat himself.

  “We don’t want you to feel obligated to the House of L’Etoile. If you want to sell us your shares of the company, we’ve discussed it and we would be interested.”

  “I’m not sure how I want to arrange my life right now,” she said. And she wasn’t. In New York she had an apartment and a successful career as a mythologist with a cable show that examined the origins of myths. It was on hiatus now, and she had until June to decide whether or not to sign another contract. In Paris she had this house and the family business. She’d spent all her time off this year with Robbie, being a full-time perfumer for the first time in her life, and she’d loved it. But how much of that feeling came from working with Robbie?

  “I don’t want to sell my shares.” She shook her head. That would be akin to voluntarily amputating a limb.

  “We’re glad about that,” Luc said warmly. “We don’t think that would be the right direction for the company.”

  “Neither did your brother,” the lawyer interjected. “Robbie’s wish was that you take a leave of absence from your job in New York and run L’Etoile with your cousins for at least two years.”

  It was like Robbie to advise.

  “We can discuss having an office in New York if you preferred to work from the States,” George suggested.

  Jac had rarely seen her cousins in the last twenty years until recently because she’d spent so little time in France. And now she was surprised how easy it was to be with them. They had the classic L’Etoile family features—mahogany hair, aquiline nose, light-green eyes—that reminded her of her father, her grandfather and her brother.

  “Robbie hoped you might all merge the running of both perfume companies,” the lawyer said. “He outlined a scenario that he thought would work.”

  Jac nodded. It made sense. “I like that idea. While our grandfathers might have had their problems, we don’t.” She looked at her cousins. “Your fragrances are wonderful, and Luna seems to be well run. It would be a much stronger company if both halves were reunited.”

  For the next hour they discussed Robbie’s suggestions about how the merger might be financially arranged. Jac thought her brother would be pleased by the solutions they chose.

  She felt an odd peacefulness. A cessation from the grief. Almost as if the last week and a half had been a bad dream and Robbie was just in the workshop and about to join them any moment. Once she’d even turned around, thinking she heard his footsteps, but there was, of course, no one there.

  At four o’clock one meeting ended and another began. Jac greeted Detective Marcher and ushered him into the L’Etoile workshop. The detective looked tired, and Jac offered him coffee.

  While she waited for the water to boil, she filled the French press with ground espresso beans. The smell of coffee was always welcome here. It cut through the mélange of scents that hovered in the air. Coffee beans were to a perfumer like the lemon sorbet a gourmand eats between courses or the crackers wine tasters munch between flights. When a nose was building a fragrance, it was important to stop and cleanse the olfactory palate.

  “We have the preliminary results of the autopsy,” Marcher said

  She was surprised. “An autopsy? I hadn’t realized, but of course . . .”

  “I’m sorry. I know how painful this is for you, Jac.”

  “Thank you.” She nodded.

  Marcher’s face seemed to bear an aspect of perpetual melancholy, as if all the years he’d been on the job and all he’d witnessed had worn him down. More than once Jac had wondered if, when he was with his wife and family, the expression in his face lightened and his shoulders lifted. She hoped so.

  It occurred to her now that her own expression was dark too. Since Robbie’s death, whenever she caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror, she didn’t quite recognize the lost soul who glanced back.

  Jac poured coffee into two white porcelain espresso cups and brought them over to where Marcher was sitting.

  He sipped the coffee. Smiled at her. “This is excellent. Thank you.”

  She nodded. To her it was hot and distracting, and that was enough for now. Both her sense of smell and taste seemed dulled since Robbie had died. Grief had numbed her.

  “Would you mind turning that on?” He pointed to Robbie’s stereo system.

  Jac was startled by the request but turned it on. Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony filled the air. The last time she’d heard it was when they’d been here working on a new fragrance. This was the music her brother had chosen. How many of these last time moments would she have to endure?

  “Based on the rapid onset of organ failure and how healthy your brother was prior to the attack, they still suspect poison.”

  “But the doctors tested his blood for poisons when he was in the hospital and didn’t find anything.”

  “And they still haven’t.”

  “So how is that possible?”

  “Certain poisons clear the system after a particular amount of time. The complication here is that even so, there’s no known poison that presents in the manner of Robbie’s reaction.” He shook his head. “I’m sorry, I know uncertainty isn’t helpful. The bottom line is they don’t know the root cause yet, but poison remains the most logical answer. Especially because, being a perfumer, your brother was always working with foreign substances and could have easily inhaled or ingested something that he reacted to this way.”

  “An accidental death then?” she asked.

  “No, Jac, not necessarily accidental. Someone might have come to see him and asked him to smell some new fragrance, sold him something tainted. Perhaps switched one of his ingredients with an exotic substance.”

  Marcher gestured to the eighteenth-century perfumer’s organ that took up a full quarter of the room. Where every nose in the L’Etoile family had composed fragrances, drop by drop. Lined up on three tiers were more than five hundred bottles filled with essences and absolutes of flowers, plants, spices, woods and chemicals.

  “With your permission, we need the lab to come in and take samples of all these ingredients.”

  “Of course.”

  “If it’s not a substance typically used in perfume making and we can’t prove that your brother purchased it, that will suggest foul play. And in the meantime, I don’t want you using any of these ingredients.”

  She told Marcher she had mixed up a fragrance just before Robbie died. And she was fine.

  “All right, but don’t mix up any more until the lab runs their tests. Okay?”

  Jac nodded.

  Marcher drank more of his coffee. The antique cup’s gold rim glinted in the light. Limoges from the late eighteenth century was very valuable. Once she’d asked Robbie if they should be using it as everyday china.

  “Never put treasures away in a cabinet,” he’d said. “You need to surround yourself with beauty, be aware of it and enjoy it—allow your soul to feed on it—gorge on it.”

  “So the case isn’t closed.” Jac had expected this visit to be the detective’s last.

  “No, not closed, not at all
,” Marcher said and placed the tiny cup in the saucer.

  “Would you like more?” Jac asked.

  “Yes, perhaps I would.”

  She brought the French press over to where he was sitting and poured more of the fragrant brew.

  “These findings have me most concerned,” he said as he watched her, “because if it was poison, then your brother’s death mimics the pseudo journalist François Lee’s.”

  Jac shivered at hearing the name of the man who had died here almost two years ago.

  “And I don’t like coincidences,” Marcher said.

  In the midst of pouring herself more coffee, Jac looked up quickly, and a drop spilled onto the desk. She reached for a cloth—there was always a stack of them nearby in the workshop. L’Etoiles sprayed their creations on cloth to test them, not on the cheaper paper strips so many perfumers used.

  The coffee leeched into white cotton, staining it.

  “Robbie didn’t believe in coincidences either,” Jac mused as she wiped up the rest of the spill. “He always told me—”

  The now familiar threat of tears stung her eyes, and she felt her throat constrict. Crying, especially in front of Marcher, was not an option.

  The detective sat farther forward in his chair and put his hand on her arm. “Jac, my concern now is for you.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “One of the most powerful crime syndicates in the world lost one of its members because of your brother, and the episode didn’t just involve Robbie but—”

  “It involved me too,” Jac interrupted. Even though she’d had help from her ex-lover Griffin North, Jac had been the one to save her brother by exposing the spies.

  She and Marcher were both silent for a moment.

  “I don’t want to scare you, but we need to take precautions,” he said finally.

  “Except you are scaring me.” Some part of her was surprised she could feel enough to be scared.

  “It’s unlikely you are a target, but until we know more about your brother’s death, I’d like to have someone watching the house and discreetly following you when you go out. Logic tells me that if there was a vendetta, it was with Robbie—” Marcher stopped talking. He was looking out into the courtyard and frowning. Jac followed his glance.