The Book of Lost Fragrances: A Novel of Suspense Read online

  “The two of you can keep each other company.” Griffin grabbed his knapsack and returned to the edge of the well. He unzipped the flap and stuck his hand in. “Here’s some water to keep you alive.” He threw in one bottle and then another. “Once we’ve delivered our package, we’ll let the police know where you are. In the meantime, enjoy yourselves. Especially you, Sister. It looks like a peaceful place to meditate.”

  Fifty

  8:15 P.M.

  The L’Etoile living room never seemed so lovely to Jac as it did now. The old faded fabric and worn rugs, strains of Prokofiev, and the scent of sweet tea welcomed Jac home.

  Malachai stood as they walked in.

  “What happened? Are you both all right? Is Robbie all right?”

  “My brother is fine.” She shook her head, remembering the argument. Robbie had insisted he remain underground, assuring her that he knew a hundred hiding places. They planned to rendezvous in two hours, which would give Griffin time to get to the Buddhist center and see if he could arrange for the meeting Robbie was willing to risk his life to keep. “But he wouldn’t come up.”

  As Griffin explained what had occurred in the catacombs, Jac sank down on the couch. Her hand brushed the book Malachai had been reading, and she looked down at it. One of the Moroccan-leather-bound books from her grandfather’s library: Tales of Magic in Ancient Egypt, part of his extensive collection devoted to magic.

  When she was growing up, they had a ritual. The first of every month, he’d handpick a new title for her to read and give it to her after dinner with great ceremony. As if it were yet one more step in an initiation into a secret society. Religiously, each evening after she’d done her schoolwork, she’d go down to the library and read a section with him.

  Some of the books were very old, and she needed to be especially careful not to rip the pages. He’d noticed how cautious she was. “Yes, the books are rare, Jacinthe,” he’d said—he and her father were the only ones to ever use her full name—“but the real value is the knowledge they hold.”

  She read sitting at a fine mahogany and brass partners desk, in the light cast by a Daum Nancy art glass lamp—rose flowers against a light-green background. Then she and her grandfather would sip hot chocolate from the family’s antique Limoges china and discuss the passage.

  Grand-père was very serious about the lore on those pages. Believed there was an important science buried with the Egyptians that needed to be rediscovered.

  Her favorite book, the one she’d asked to read again, was about Djedi, the ancient Egyptian magician renowned for bringing the dead back to life. It had been written in 1920, when the world was obsessed with Egyptology and the great archaeologist Howard Carter’s finds. The book was heavily annotated. She studied her grandfather’s notes as well as the text. He’d marked every mention of an herb, oil, spice or flower—as if he might figure out the soothsayer’s life-reversing formula himself.

  Jac remembered something else: Grand-père’s black calfskin notebook. It was filled not just with Djedi’s possible magical formulas but also all kind of alchemical possibilities. Formulations from all of ancient history. There was a heavy glass inkwell on the desk. She could picture him filling his fountain pen with its coal-black ink. His hand crawling on the page, leaving spidery possibilities. Where was that notebook?

  Griffin was still explaining what had happened in the underground maze.

  “Are the woman and her accomplice dead?” Malachai asked.

  “Not dead. Not even hurt,” Griffin said. “Except for a dislocated shoulder.”

  “They were willing to kill you,” Malachai said solemnly.

  Jac shivered.

  Malachai turned to her. “I’m so relieved you’re all right.” Then, almost as an afterthought, he asked, “And what happened to the pottery?”

  “Robbie wouldn’t let go of it,” she said. “He has it still.”

  Malachai leaned toward Jac. Put his hand on her wrist. Felt for her pulse and then concentrated. His touch was welcome. She didn’t mind at all that someone was concerned about her and wanted to take care of her. She could still feel Ani struggling beneath her, still see the random images of their trek through the tunnels. The shifting bones. The wall of names.

  Letting go of her hand, Malachai said, “You’re still stressed.” He stood and walked toward the kitchen. “Let me get you some hot tea laced with some of your brother’s fine brandy.”

  “My father’s brandy,” Jac corrected. “Robbie likes wine.”

  “Well, your father has excellent taste in brandy.”

  Jac didn’t answer.

  As Griffin watched Malachai leave the room, he was frowning.

  “What’s wrong?” Jac asked.

  “Nothing.” He shook his head.

  “I wish we hadn’t left Robbie down there alone. Are you sure they can’t get out of that well?”

  “I can’t imagine how they could. But even if they did, Robbie’s long gone. Hiding deep in some cavern. He’s safer there than anywhere else.”

  “Because of you. Because of what you did. You saved our lives down there.”

  Jac still felt the ache across her torso where Ani had held her. The woman would not have hesitated to kill her. Jac knew that without doubt. From the way she’d looked at her. Talked to her. Strangely, from the way the woman had smelled. She’d had no humanity. Her scent was cold. It was the same scent as the rapist’s scent.

  The nun’s accomplice would have killed them, too. Thinking of him, she remembered something else. Wincing, she pulled her knapsack off the floor and up on the couch. She took the napkin from beside Malachai’s cup and saucer, reached into her bag, and pulled out the gun. She held the butt carefully away from her. As if it were alive and might spring back on her and strike. “There are fingerprints on this that could help the police figure out who was following us.”

  “The police?” Malachai said as he came in carrying the tea things and a bottle of brandy. “Are you going to call in the police?”

  “There are fingerprints here. Clues to who those people are.” She got up and walked to the bombay by the fireplace. Opening the top drawer, she placed the gun inside.

  “If only Robbie would sell me the pottery. We could bring this dangerous adventure to an end.”

  “After tonight? I’m convinced nothing is going to change his mind. The closer he gets to delivering it to the Dalai Lama, the less likely that becomes,” Jac said. “He believes so strongly in what he’s doing.” She heard how wistful her voice sounded. “I’m afraid you came all the way here for nothing,” she said to Malachai.

  “I came to help you.”

  She was going to argue, but there was a sincerity in his voice that stunned her.

  “You know what I don’t understand,” Griffin asked Malachai. “Don’t you already have methods to regress patients? Even if the shards were impregnated with enough fragrance to induce a past-life experience, why would another method be so valuable?”

  “We use hypnosis, and it does indeed work most of the time,” Malachai replied. “But the memory tools are more than a way to regress someone. They’re a piece of the history of reincarnation. The stuff of legends. Surely you, Griffin, of everyone, would understand why that is so enticing.”

  “Knowing the past, knowing who you were—you can make it too important, can’t you?” Jac asked.

  “Too important? We live in darkness. We stumble and fall. We don’t know which way to go. Memories of the past would light the path to the future . . .”

  As he spoke, Jac was seeing the labyrinthine corridors they’d been trekking through all afternoon. Smelling the shadowy corners and dry dust of millions of bones. The damp, dead world. The false exits. The cave-ins. Edges falling off into darkness.

  “If someone said, ‘This is who you were, and this is the mistake you made then,’ you’d have a choice not to make that mistake again,” Malachai continued. “And by not making it again, you will be freed from the burden of it in y
our next life. If somebody offered you that chance at peace, wouldn’t you take it?”

  His voice was soothing. She remembered how he used to sit and talk to her at Blixer Rath and how much he’d helped her. She didn’t believe in reincarnation. Didn’t care about past-life karma. But she wanted his assistance. Desperately. Maybe if she told him that the terrible psychotic episodes had returned, he would save her again. Guide her to understand what the hallucinations symbolized. But if she admitted what was going on, she’d return to the person she’d been then. Different from everyone else. Never fitting in. The girl on the outside looking in.

  Malachai was studying her. “Jac, you’ve had moments of envisioning the past, haven’t you?”

  “So you think we’re absolutely fated to repeat our past?” She asked a question instead of making a confession.

  “No. We have free will. We have choices. But if we had a map, we could make more educated choices. We could help ourselves to make this turn rather than that turn. We could do better in each life.”

  The images that had flown at Jac while she was with her brother and Griffin in the underground caverns were returning now with no inducement. Brushing up against her, their ghostlike wings grazing her skin.

  Jac shut her eyes.

  “You must be exhausted,” Malachai said. “That’s not good for you. It’s a trigger.”

  She glanced over at Griffin. He’d picked up on the comment. Damn. “Is there something wrong, Jac?”

  “No,” Jac answered before Malachai could say anything.

  “What did Robbie mean when he asked you if you saw something in the tunnel?” Griffin asked.

  “Saw things? In the catacombs? What happened, Jac?” Malachai’s tone was urgent. When Jac didn’t answer him, he asked Griffin. “What happened down there?”

  “When Jac took the pottery from Robbie—she had a reaction. Her eyes went glassy. She didn’t hear what I was saying for about thirty or forty seconds. She was just looking off into space as if she were looking at someone or something that wasn’t there.”

  “Stop it!” Jac screamed as she stood, stunning everyone in the room. “Nothing happened to me! I’m no different from you.” She turned from Griffin to Malachai. “Or you. I’m fine. It was just frightening. Robbie’s used to it—he’s been exploring those caves since he was a teenager.” She turned back to Griffin. “You’ve been crawling around in Egyptian tombs most of your adult life.” Now her gaze returned to Malachai. “You see the machinations of my brain as clues to some mystery you’re forever trying to figure out. There’s nothing going on. Nothing is wrong with me except for the horrible fact that my brother’s life is in danger. Someone who no one can identify died here five days ago, and two people just attacked us and tried to steal some worthless ancient pottery Robbie found in the mess my father made of our lives.”

  Griffin and Malachai were both watching her with concern and care. She hated their intensity. Their scrutiny. Her father used to look at her just like that when she was young. When she saw things and heard things that weren’t there. When she was, to use her mother’s word—the word she used to describe both of them—“ca-ra-zy.” Audrey would laugh when she said, it too. “Ca-ra-zy.” Making three syllables out of a two-syllable word and laughing. As if it were wonderful to be different. Not the disaster of her life.

  “I have to take a bath.” She drained the teacup. “We need to go to the Buddhist Society tonight,” Jac said. “Robbie gave us the name of a lama there. The man Robbie’s been studying with. He’d been in the process of setting up the meeting. He’ll make it happen. And then we can all go back to our normal lives.”

  She left the room and headed for the staircase. She was fine, she told herself. In control. She just didn’t know why her voice had cracked on the word normal.

  As Jac walked upstairs, her legs felt so heavy each step was an effort. Her back ached. She gripped the handrail like an old woman.

  In the bathroom, she turned on the faucets and added a healthy dose of scented bath salts. Then added more. She had to get the stink of the catacombs and the perfume from the pottery off her skin.

  As the crystals hit the water, their fragrance slowly rose up to envelop her like a caress. She hadn’t looked at the bottle. It was Rouge. Her mother favored Noir. But Jac loved Rouge. The first important fragrance from the House of L’Etoile. Created by Giles L’Etoile. Inspired, her grandfather told her, by his trip to Egypt in the late 1790s. Rose and lavender mixed with of one of the most mystical scents that existed, civet.

  For thousands of years, the musky ingredient had been harvested from the small mammals of the same name. Recently, animal rights groups protested, and perfume companies switched to a synthetic version. Most people couldn’t smell the difference. Jac could. But not in the bath salts.

  Then something curious occurred to her. In her hallucinations, Giles L’Etoile died in Egypt. Marie-Genevieve had been heartbroken. It was why her father tried to arrange another marriage. Why she’d run away. Why she’d gone to the convent. So how could this scent have been created by Giles after he came back from Egypt?

  Jac sat on the edge of the tub. She took off her shoes and socks. Why was she giving any credence to these daydreams? She was sick. The illness was back. She couldn’t trust what she imagined now any more than when she was fourteen. She slid out of her pants. Pulled her shirt over her head. Stripped off her underwear and then bunched up the whole pile. Shoved it in the knapsack, zipped it up, threw it in a corner of the bathroom and then sniffed the air.

  She could still smell it. Under the odors of the dust and the stone, and Ani’s juniper, under the smell of mold and mud, she could still catch the ancient perfume from the pottery shards.

  Naked, she pulled on a robe and grabbed the knapsack. Opening the door, she walked out into the hall and bumped into Griffin.

  “What are you doing? What’s wrong?” he asked.

  “I have to take these filthy things out of here. To the kitchen. I can’t stand the stink of them. Of those tunnels. It’s in my skin, my hair . . .”

  Griffin took the knapsack from her hands and headed down the stairs. “Take your bath—I’ll get rid of it for you.”

  Jac returned to the bathroom, steamy with the hot, fragrant water. She breathed in deeply as she slipped into the tub. Breathed in again. She smelled what was here now. She took the scents deep into her nostrils. Wisps of myrrh. Tempered by benzoin. And roses. Lush blossoms of immeasurable sensuality.

  The water would have been too hot if not for the long day and the dirt and the stench.

  Jac shut her eyes and soaked, hovered in a half-asleep state that deep exhaustion and sudden relaxation can bring on. And she kept her eyes shut even when she heard the bathroom door open and close and felt his hand on her skin, soaping her hair, massaging her scalp, then her neck and her shoulders. Kneading all the tension out of her muscles.

  Griffin’s hands were like silk on her body. Wet silk that stroked her. Replacing the exhaustion with exhilaration. The mysterious incense-imbued rose was all she could smell. The steam was all she could see. It was as if Griffin wasn’t real. He was mist and memory and scent and sorcery.

  He wasn’t one man making love to her—but several. Griffin, yes, but also the men from her hallucinations. The young French perfumer with whom Marie-Genevieve had been in love. And Thoth, the strong Egyptian priest who worked in Cleopatra’s perfume factory.

  Jac couldn’t be sure whose hands she was feeling, whose breath was on her neck. It was all sensation now and an intoxicating mixture of exhaustion and intense pleasure and excruciating longing. A desperate need to stay with him longer. Destiny or circumstance—it didn’t matter which—had kept them apart again and again. Yet they were complete only together. As they were in this beautiful moment.

  He was in the water with her now. His hands holding hers. Their fingers intertwined. She’d never let go. Never again. Nothing could force them apart anymore. Jac was melting in his heat, in the heat
of the water. They would be melded together forever. Their lifelines commingling in her blood. They could die like this: wrapped up in each other, surrounded by each other . . .

  In the midst of the waves of pleasure, she suddenly saw the Egyptian priest, with his lover, in a tomb, holding each other, fighting off sleepiness. Saw how they had drugged themselves. A joint suicide. Dying in each other’s arms, sharing a last kiss and all without fear because Thoth had promised . . . he had promised her . . . in their next life they would know each other again. And again and again and again.

  “Jac . . .” Griffin whispered.

  Her name sounded foreign. It brought her out of her dream. Sent shivers down her spine and sparks off inside her.

  “Jac . . .” He said her name again, and then there was nothing, not air and not water, between them. They were together in a timeless dance that their bodies knew and their souls embraced. This was who they were. Even if it brought disaster. Or death. This was worth all of that. This was worth all.

  Fifty-one

  10:17 P.M.

  Robbie sat in the dark cavern, leaning against a rock wall. He had turned off his helmet light. His eyes were shut. His mind was opened. Tired. Worried. Nervous. He listened to droplets of water hit a pool in the distance. Adjusted his breathing to the steady, even rhythm.

  The well was eight feet away. The two people inside of it were quiet. He didn’t think they knew he was here.

  Ani had obviously told them the truth about marking her passage through the catacombs with infrared ink. Her companion had followed the identifying marks.

  “That means,” Griffin had cautioned before they’d all split up two hours ago, “that there could be someone else following the trail. Don’t go back. All right?”

  Even before Robbie could agree, Jac had made him promise he’d stay away from the area near the well.

  He’d promised he wouldn’t come back here. But he had. It was all right, though: he had an exit path mapped out. He was only two yards away from the warren hole that would provide passage away from this chamber.