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

  Since then, there had been rioting in the streets of all of Tibet’s cities, and heavy-handed and merciless police tactics had pushed the situation into a full-scale crisis more violent than any since the horrific protests and killings during the 2008 Olympics.

  “This is the same thing that happened before, isn’t it?” Cali asked.

  “Yes, almost exactly.”

  More than twenty years before, days after a four-year-old Tibetan child was identified as the new Panchen Lama, the boy, along with his entire family, had disappeared.

  For hundreds of years, the Panchen Lama helped to identify the next Dalai Lama. The Chinese government still officially claimed that boy was alive and well and was working as an engineer in Beijing. Unofficially, most people assumed that he’d been killed. Only a few held out hope that, one day, he’d resurface.

  The two friends were quiet as they walked the last few blocks back to the Nanjing Arts Institute, where both were graduate students and teaching assistants.

  At the entrance to the building, Xie kissed Cali good-bye on the cheek. “I’ll see you tomorrow?”

  She nodded.

  He took her arm gently, speaking in a low and determined voice. “I know how upset you are, but please don’t talk to anyone about what you saw. It’s dangerous, and I want you to stay safe.”

  “I wish you were just a little bit brave.”

  There was so much he wanted to say. Of all the sacrifices required of him, none made him ache more than not being able to explain the truth to Cali.

  “I need you to stay safe,” he repeated.

  Four

  SLEEPY HOLLOW CEMETERY, NEW YORK

  9:30 A.M.

  Jac was shocked to see her brother standing in the doorway. It was a long trip from the Rue des Saints-Pères in Paris to a limestone mausoleum in a cemetery thirty miles outside of New York City.

  “You frightened me,” she said instead of telling him how happy she was he’d come.

  “I’m sorry,” Robbie said as he stepped inside. He was smiling at her in spite of her greeting.

  Water dripped off the extravagant bunch of apple blossom branches he cradled in his left arm and streamed off the burl-handled umbrella that had once belonged to their grandfather. Despite the rain, he was wearing his signature handmade leather shoes. Her brother was always meticulously dressed but wore his clothes with a lack of concern. Robbie was comfortable with himself in a way that Jac had always envied. Too often she felt as if she wasn’t living in her own skin.

  Like Jac, Robbie had almond-shaped light green eyes, an oval face and wavy mahogany hair, but he wore his slicked back in a ponytail. In his left ear, an emerald stud sparkled, and raindrops glinted on the platinum rings he wore on nearly all of his fingers except his thumbs. When Robbie entered a room, something magical always happened. The light took notice. The air became redolent with new smells.

  They never used to fight, but that had changed in the last few months, and she hadn’t forgotten the argument they’d had on the phone three days ago—their most serious to date. She watched her brother, whose presence had filled up the small space. From the smile still on his lips, she knew he wasn’t thinking about the fight any longer. He just looked quietly pleased to see her.

  She waited for him to say more. But like their father, Robbie often preferred to communicate with gestures rather than words. It sometimes frustrated her as much as it had Audrey. Jac glanced over at the marble bench. The apparition was gone. Had Robbie chased Audrey away? She looked back at her brother.

  Jac used to resent that of the two of them, she was merely handsome, while Robbie was beautiful. They had similar features, but his were too refined for a man, and hers, she felt, were slightly too coarse for a woman. Looking at him was like looking into a mysterious mirror and seeing another version of herself. Their androgyny, she thought, made them closer to each other than most brothers and sisters. That and their shared tragedy.

  “I’m surprised you came,” she finally said. Instead of being glad that Robbie was here now, she was resenting all the times he’d left her to do this alone. “Aren’t you the one who always tells me that we shouldn’t commemorate the anniversary of anyone’s death? That you don’t even believe Maman is really dead?”

  “Oh, Jac, of course I believe she’s dead. Of course I do. The mother we had is gone. But what I believe . . . what I know . . . is that her spirit isn’t gone and never will be.”

  “It’s a charming sentiment,” she said, unable to keep the sarcasm out of her voice. “It must be comforting to have such a life-affirming belief system.”

  For a few seconds, he searched her eyes, trying to communicate something that she couldn’t read. Then Robbie walked over to her, bent down, and gently kissed her on the forehead. “I thought I’d keep you company. It’s always a sad day, isn’t it?”

  Jac closed her eyes. It was a relief to have her brother here. She took his hand and squeezed. It was hard to stay angry at Robbie for long.

  “Are you all right?” he asked.

  Robbie spoke to her in French, and Jac automatically responded in the same language. Both were bilingual—with an American mother and a French father—but she preferred English, and he, French. For better, but mostly for worse, she was her mother’s daughter, and he was his father’s son.

  “Fine.”

  She’d never told him about hearing their mother’s voice, though for most of her life she’d shared everything else with him. Despite being so different, they’d always been desperately connected, the way children of damaged parents can be.

  Robbie tilted his head again, and Jac saw the doubt in his eyes. He didn’t believe her, but she knew he wasn’t going to press her. It wasn’t her brother’s style to push. He was the patient one. The calm one. The one who never argued.

  Or at least he had been until recently.

  Jac was fourteen and Robbie was eleven when Audrey died. The next year was the lost year, when her delusions had become even more serious and she’d been shuffled from doctor to doctor, first diagnosed as delusional by one, then as schizophrenic by another. Finally, she’d gone to a clinic in Switzerland that did help, and a year later, she emerged almost whole. After that, at fifteen, she’d come to live in America with her mother’s sister and her husband, while Robbie had stayed in Paris with their father. But every summer, brother and sister each traveled to Grasse in the south of France and spent twelve weeks together at their grandmother’s house, where their bonds were renewed.

  Six months ago, their father had been declared incompetent—due to Alzheimer’s disease—and the two of them had inherited the family business. They’d had no idea it was so close to bankruptcy. Robbie had been working on his own line of niche perfumes. Jac wasn’t in France or part of the day-to-day business. Both were shocked at the state of the company’s finances. They were unable to agree about what path to take, and too often lately, their transatlantic phone calls ended bitterly and without resolution. The critical problems plaguing the House of L’Etoile had driven them apart in a way the ocean between them never had.

  “They’re lovely.” Jac nodded toward the apple blossom branches Robbie still held.

  He looked over at the urn she’d already filled with the same flowers. “Doesn’t look like there’s any room left for them, though.”

  “That one is empty.” She pointed behind him to a second urn.

  She watched Robbie take in the rest of the space. As far as she knew, he’d never been here before. He looked at the life-size stone angel, the stained-glass windows and the marble wall with its inscriptions of names and dates carved in neat rows. Scanning them, he reached up and ran his fingers across the crevices and edges of the letters engraved on the middle row, three from the top. Their mother’s name. The gesture tugged at Jac.

  “When she was happy,” he said, “there was no one more loving. No one more lovely.” Then he turned back and smiled at his sister. The months of bickering by telephone melted in the face
of his deep, soothing calm. Even before Robbie had become a student of Buddhism, he’d been contemplative and centered in a way she wasn’t. She wanted nothing more than for the two of them to stop arguing and stay like this: together, remembering.

  “Did you come to sign the papers?” she asked. “There’s really no other solution. We need to make the sale.”

  Don’t push him, baby.

  The intrusion startled Jac, and she had to force herself not to turn toward the direction of her mother’s voice. She’d thought Audrey was gone.

  It was almost as if he was echoing their mother. “Don’t, Jac. Not yet,” Robbie said as he unwrapped his flowers. “We have lots of time to talk. Can we just be us for a while?”

  But we haven’t been us for a long time, she thought.

  Like their father, when they were children, she and her brother dreamed of doing with fragrance what sculptors did with stone and painters did with pigment. To become poets of scent. Jac had given up the lofty goal when she saw how both her parents suffered for their artistic ambitions.

  Their father had been consumed by the idea of creating one true, perfect scent that would capture the imagination. First his determination and then his frustration embittered him. They all suffered for it. Especially their mother. Audrey was a well-respected poet with demons so strong they left her too weak to fend off her husband’s darkness. To escape him, she went jumping from one destructive affair to another, finally throwing her life away over one.

  Your father and I might have given up. You might have given up—but not Robbie. He’s never given up. He never will.

  Jac felt the sting of the comment. Yes, her mother was right. Jac had abandoned the effort before she’d even started. And Robbie had persevered. He was determined to make up for their father’s failures, their mother’s suffering.

  And the burden to save him from that folly was all hers.

  An errant blossom was hanging off one of the branches he’d just placed, its white, pink-tinged petals a grayish lavender in the blue light. Jac picked it off, leaned forward, and inhaled its scent.

  “How did a man who created complicated and sophisticated fragrances put up with a wife who favored such a sweet-smelling flower?” she asked. “There was an irony to that, wasn’t there?”

  “So much about our parents was ironic.”

  He hesitated. Took a breath. And then said, very softly—as if whispering would lessen the impact—“I saw Papa yesterday before I left for the airport.”

  Jac didn’t respond.

  Your father should have been a novelist. At least then, his imagination might have brought him some success. Instead his delusions drained the famous and venerable perfume House of L’Etoile almost to the point of extinction . . . Audrey laughed. The sound had a bitter cast to it that belied the beauty she’d been with her sparkling green eyes and shining gold-brown hair, with her heart-shaped lips and high, sharp cheekbones.

  In these mausoleum conversations, as Jac had come to think of them, Audrey never called her husband by his name—never said Louis, or Louie, which was how the French pronounced it. It was always your father, as if that distanced him further. As if his being on the other side of the grave did not keep them far enough apart.

  From Audrey, Jac had learned that when people hurt or disappoint you, erase as much of them from your memory as you can. Wipe them out. And she’d mastered the technique. She never wondered what had happened to Griffin North. Never imagined what he was doing. Or what he’d become.

  Except aren’t you doing that right now? Audrey teased. Anyway, she added, he wasn’t good enough for you.

  Jac and Griffin had met in college. He was two years ahead of her. When she went to graduate school, she was three hours away from the school where he was getting his PhD. Every other weekend, he drove to see her. But Jac wasn’t a good driver. The idea of being alone in a car terrified her. What if the shadows came back while she was behind the wheel? So on alternate weekends, she took the bus to visit him. And, hungry to spend every last second with him, she’d catch the latest bus home—Sunday at seven. She always forgot to eat before she left, and by the time she got back to her school, the cafeteria was closed.

  One night, as she stepped onto the bus, Griffin thrust a brown paper bag into her hand. Once seated, she opened it. Inside was a sandwich wrapped in wax paper tied with a white ribbon she must have left at his place. On it he’d written, “I didn’t want you to be hungry because of me.”

  Her mother was wrong. Griffin was good enough for her. The problem was he didn’t think he was. That’s why he’d left.

  Jac had carried the ribbon in her wallet until it started to fray. Then she’d tucked it away in a jewelry box. She had it still.

  Her mother’s suicide had started Jac’s education in loss. Griffin—a young man who shared her love of mythology, smelled of ancient woods and touched her as if she was something precious—had been her final lesson.

  Robbie had just said something, but Jac had missed it.

  “I’m sorry. What?”

  “I don’t think the doctors are right about how little he can remember.”

  “Of course, you don’t. You’re Count Tourjours Droit.” Jac laughed. She’d given him the nickname—Count Always Right—and it had caught on with her parents and grandparents. “How could the doctors know what you know?”

  Now Robbie laughed. As a kid, he changed rules and regulations so that he was never wrong. It was either endearing or infuriating, depending on the situation. When he was eight and she was eleven, she’d held an elaborate ceremony in the garden courtyard that separated the house from the perfume shop. Knighting him with an umbrella, she’d given him his nickname.

  “Did our father know who you were this time?”

  “He clearly knows I’m someone who cares about him.” Each word was an effort laced with pain. “But I can’t be sure he knows I’m his son.”

  Jac didn’t want to hear this. The image of their father that Robbie was painting was going to haunt her for days, seeping under the wall she put up, through the cracks.

  “Despite everything he’s forgotten, he still can recite perfume formulas and remind me about the little secrets involved in mixing the different fragrances,” her brother continued. “He doesn’t remember how to read, but he knows exactly how many drops of rose absolute to mix with essence of vanilla. And when he talks about the formulas, he always says, ‘Mix up one bottle especially for Jac.’” Robbie’s smile was expansive. Her brother’s kindness was his best attribute. But as much as she admired his ability to find some good in everyone, it annoyed her when it came to their father. He’d been a selfish man who’d caused all of them unbearable pain.

  “Can we talk about something else?” Jac asked.

  “We need to talk about him.”

  Jac shook her head. “Not now. Not here. It doesn’t seem respectful.”

  “To our mother?” Robbie seemed perplexed.

  “Yes. To our mother.”

  “Jac, she’s not here listening to us.”

  “Thanks for explaining that. Go ahead, then. Finish what you wanted to tell me about our father. He doesn’t know who you are but he remembers my name—”

  “I need to talk to you about this.”

  She took a deep breath. “Okay, I’m sorry. Tell me.”

  “Sometimes, there’s a fierce look in his eyes, like he’s trying to get all his synapses firing at the same time. Using all his concentration to connect to a thought. And sometimes, for a moment, he does. But when he can’t, he’s overwhelmed by his failure. Jac, sometimes he cries.” Robbie whispered the last words.

  Jac was quiet. She couldn’t imagine seeing her tough, demanding father weep. “I wish you didn’t have to see that. I wish it wasn’t so hard on you.”

  “I’m not talking about how it is for me. It’s how it is for him that I want you to understand. Please come see him. Yours is the only name he still knows. Not mine. Not Claire’s. ‘Don’t forget to mak
e up a bottle of Rouge for Jac,’ he’ll say as I leave.”

  Robbie’s smile was one of the saddest she’d ever seen.

  “Forgiveness is the greatest gift anyone can offer, please come see him.”

  “When did those Buddhists teach you to preach, baby brother?” she said with a too-bright laugh that betrayed her when it caught in her throat. Jac wished she could make him happy. Wished everything he believed in was real and everything he hoped for could come true. That she could forgive their father. That there was an easy way out of their financial crisis. That there really was a book of ancient formulas for incenses and unguents used in the ancient Egyptian rituals and that it had been brought back from Egypt and hidden away somewhere on the family’s property in Paris.

  But reality was safer. And above all else, she had to keep Robbie safe. He was the only family she had left.

  Jac glanced over at the angel of grief. “She looks as if all the years of missing people have weighed down her wings and they’re too heavy to lift her up again.”

  Robbie came over to her, put his arm around her shoulders, and pulled her close. “An angel can always fly.”

  She inhaled the complicated cacophony of scents that clung to him. Cool air, rain, the apple blossoms, and more. “You smell,” she said, wrinkling her nose, “of such wonderful things.” She could at least give him this.

  “They’re my samples. What I’ve been working on. What I’ve been telling you about on the phone. I set up meetings. Bergdorf. Bendel. Barneys. We have relationships there.”

  “For our classic perfumes.”

  “They’re interested in seeing what I have, Jac.”

  “Even if they are, the House of L’Etoile doesn’t have the money to start up a new division.”

  “I’ll find a backer.”

  She shook her head.

  “I will,” he insisted.

  “There are a thousand niche perfumers not succeeding. Consumers aren’t buying any of the new creations twice. And every day there is another report about ingredients being banned for environmental reasons.”