THE LITTLE BURGUNDY
A Jeanne Dark Adventure
BILL JONES JR.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2017 by William E. Jones, Jr.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means – electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise – without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews. Published in the United States and Worldwide by Panthera Press Company.
Panthera Press™ and the Dread Lion™ logo are trademarks of the Panthera Press Company.
Panthera Press Dread Lion™ logo by Maria Jones-Phillips. Book cover design by Panthera Press.
ISBN-13: 978-0-9853366-2-2
Acknowledgments
For Maria, whose synesthetic genius is the sole reason this work was possible.
Hey, honey, I had some free time, so I wrote you this book …
1 - Dark Morning
It was November before I realized she had begun to unravel the stitching from my life. On a bitter morn, before the sun dissipated the frosted shivers of the past night’s air, before the roof-perched crows’ inharmonic chorus unsettled the soundness of my slumber, before I shook the grumbles out of my attitude and the sleep from my eyes, I awoke to the softness of jazz emanating from below me and for a moment, forgot that I no longer lived alone. It could be no one but Jeanne Dark.
I descended the stairs and followed the music to the large room that took up half the ground floor. It was still stark inside—bare, unfinished wood and dingy white walls—but it whispered of history and potential that the romantic in me found irresistible. The great room used to be an old ballroom, the focal point of the oversized house I’d purchased for a pittance owing to neglect and unpaid property taxes on the part of the previous owner. Cheap or no, it was a sizeable enough project that I could ill afford to renovate and furnish the entire house at once. Winter’s brightness streamed through a series of large, arched windows to create a spider’s web of light-and-shadow markings on the old floor. Amid them sat my new partner, her face hidden in the full umbra of shadows with her body in radiant sun. She sat askew in a wooden chair wearing a green t-shirt and a black fedora with a tan leather band and showing long legs that ended in the prettiest feet imaginable. One foot was perched in the chair, forcing her knee skyward, and she held the dainty appendage in both hands. A scar longer than my hand extended from her left hipbone to mid-thigh. My heart skipped, vanished, was lost.
As I stumbled into awakening’s glare, she looked at me, offering the merest glance of a smile, and leaned into the light. Her lips gently caressed her raised knee, and I wondered if she knew, just then, that she’d broken me. Jeanne did not speak, but set her gaze on me as I stood transfixed, wondering if she slept in that ruby lipstick and marveling at how sexy my granddad’s old hat had become. I muttered something akin to a good-morning greeting as I looked around for the source of the music.
She responded with, “I Loves You Porgy.”
“Beg pardon?”
She nodded toward a smartphone in the corner she’d connected to my four-foot tower speakers. “Oscar Peterson, playing Gershwin. The song is a very dark, orange riff. It brings to mind the taste of chai tea. It is soothing, no?” I decided to avoid arguing over the efficacy of jazz blaring at seven o’clock on a Saturday as a mood enhancer and nodded. Besides, it was also way too early to explore all of Jeanne’s colors of music. “Did you know he died at thirty-eight?” she asked.
“Oscar Peterson?”
She gave a small laugh. “No, Gershwin.” Her eyes closed and she swayed to the rhythm of the soft brushes that caressed the drums. “You are thirty-eight, Foss.”
My name’s Foster Cain, but Jeanne always called me Foss. I was going to offer that I knew my age and thanks for the reminder, but her eyes opened again, blinking despite the relative darkness in which she sat. I realized that she was moving not with the beat but in syncopation to it. Her musical sense was complex, colored by the fragrant workings of her Technicolor, synesthetic mind. For Jeanne, there were no such things as five senses. They were all one, entwined, and I was certain that they were bolstered by a few senses the rest of us did not have.
“If you are wondering, I am, in fact, wearing panties,” she announced.
I hadn’t been, but from that moment could think of nothing else, particularly with that French accent of hers tormenting me. With her eyes shadowed as they were, I couldn’t tell if she was trying to make me uncomfortable or aroused. I was both. She was a small woman, around five foot six and thin of frame, barely one hundred ten pounds, I reckoned. Her skin was alabaster except for a rosette flush that gave her a healthy glow rather than an Elizabethan pallor. She wore her hair short, with dark locks ending just below her ears. A pixie cut is what they called it. Rather than diminishing her femininity, it gave her a porcelaneous, Hepburnesque essence that made men want to take her diamond shopping. Her mother should have named her Tiffany.
“Why are you dressed like that, Jeanne?” I didn’t mind, but we had agreed our relationship would be strictly professional. In my experience, work-appropriate attire did not allow one to discern one’s partner preferred pale-lime boy briefs.
“Because if I had come out naked, you would have misunderstood.” She gave me a lingering look that would have been a smile on anyone else. “Besides, this way you can see I intend for us to be comfortable with each other but not sexual.”
“Looks damned sexual to me,” I said.
She broke eye contact and slid a slight smile between that sharp tongue and her knee. “Non, cher, if we had ever made love, then you would know what sexuality feels like.”
I channeled my inner yogi for a full minute while that little tsunami subsided and washed me ashore on the emotional island on which I’d marooned myself. She sat the sixty seconds giving me her non-smile. When my breathing slowed, I said, “I’m not sure it’s a good idea to be so intimate if we’re going to remain professional.” I struggled over the word intimate but it felt closest to what I was feeling. She wanted openness, or at least the Jeanne Dark equivalent, which could be as obscure as a full eclipse. I was far less certain she wanted anything else.
Jeanne sat erect and placed both feet flat on the floor, pulling her t-shirt to mid-thigh. “Would our working relationship be better if we pretended we aren’t attracted to each other?” she asked. I had no answer. “I believe we should deal with the physicality right now. Either we find we can overcome it, or strip me naked and I will make love with you right here on the floor.” She closed her eyes and raised her arms over her head as if waiting for me to remove her shirt.
My heart pounded out an emphatic yes, but my brain knew better. “And then what?”
She let her arms drop and leaned forward into the light. “Then we abandon our working partnership and become only lovers.” A long, anguished silence fell between us. “So, are we ruled by the head or the heart?”
I wanted to answer, Head and heart, both, but her expression suggested she was oblivious that her words had started a clamor considerably lower than either organ. “Jeanne,” I said, sitting on the floor beneath her and taking her foot in my hands, “I don’t understand why this is an either-or situation. People work with their partners all the time.”
She lifted her feet into the chair, out of my reach. The effect was likely the opposite of what she’d intended. She shook her head. “I will happily be your lover, if that is what you desire, but I cannot mix sex with work. You will throw off my intuition and I will be useless.”
“I know you, Jeanne. You would never doubt your intuition. There’s another reason you’re not telling me.” I touched her feet again and she meet my eyes. “Jeanne ...”
“Non.” She closed her eyes and shook her head. “You must choose. We share this space as business partners and roommates or I move out and we can be lovers whenever we have the time.” She opened her eyes, spraying sadness all over me. “It won’t be as often as either you or I wish.”
I withheld the many questions in my mind. Weeks with her had taught me to be patient. She would be miles ahead of me, would have thought of all the angles and possible consequences, and at the end, she would be right. Instead of arguing, I said, “I’d rather have a fulltime partner than a once-in-a-while lover.”
She allowed herself the first full smile of the morning. It made the beige walls seem less drab. “Good. I want to work with you too.”
That wasn’t my reasoning at all. I simply knew that a little Jeanne would never be enough. I’d rather have all of her brain than some of her fractured heart. I sighed, patted her on the knee, and stood. I extended my hand. “Partners, then, Jeanne.”
She took my hand, pulled herself to her feet, tiptoed, and to my surprise, kissed me. Her lips were soft and tongue urgent. Without warning and for but a moment, the world spun into a swirl of dizzying colors, sounds, and disjointed images. There was a kaleidoscopic, sharp-edged swirl of signals wherein I struggled to know which were my thoughts and which ones were hers. It was either my imagination—some surreal chimera based on her warnings—or it was real, coming from Jeanne herself. I couldn’t tell which. Dazed, energized, aroused, I pulled back, gasping for breath.
Jeanne was looking at me, her olive eyes dark with pain. “Now do you understand?” I didn’t, not by a long shot, but I nodded anyway. “Most people I get close to think I am crazy. Do you think so too?”
With those you cherish, a tattered truth is better than a perfect lie. With Jeanne, who could read my lies like others read the paper, it was a requirement. She once told me that lies register in her brain as brown, irrespective of the colors of the words themselves. I had no idea what she meant, but I learned early on it was as accurate as any bellwether for deception detection I’d ever come across.
“If you think me mad, you can say. I need to know,” she said.
“I did when we first met and for almost a month afterward,” I said.
“But you do not now?”
I shook my head. “The rest of us have five senses. You have about a dozen, so you see things using senses we don’t know exist.”
“Most people don’t believe that, Foss. Even my friends think I’m crazy.”
“Not your problem. My grandpa always used to say, ‘If you try to convince an amoeba there’s an entire universe out there, no matter how hard you try, you’ll just confuse him.’”
“Oui.” The word came out as an exhalation: part affirmation, part resignation.
“I’m glad you agree. I never knew what the hell he was talking about.”
She stared at me for an uncomfortably long time before smiling and extending her small hand. I pushed it away, pulled her close, and kissed her again. The images and flashes returned, and my tongue began to tingle as though I’d kissed peppermint. I was blinded by a cacophony of sound and could smell morning coffee coming from the speakers attached to her phone. I released her, and she stood there on her toes, squinting into my eyes. “Should I undress?” she asked. Her weak eyes danced from one of mine to the other, a sense of quiet urgency behind them.
I shook my head no. This was to be a tale of intrigue and not romance. My government contact expected a lot from Jeanne and I wasn’t going to be the thing standing in her way.
“D’accord,” she said. There was a tiny flash of disappointment that made me want to change my mind. Jeanne lowered herself from her tiptoes. The energy between us sank just as quickly. Once again she reached out her hand; this time, I took it. “Partners, Monsieur Cain?” Any trace of regret faded into the sunrise of her smile.
“Partners, Dr. Dark,” I answered. Releasing her hand, I stepped back and gave her a pointed look. “Are you always going to dress like that around the office?”
“Not always.” She turned, favoring her bad hip. Her brief stint in the hard chair had been too much. I reminded myself that the moment for massages had passed. Her back turned, she doffed granddad’s hat then pulled off her shirt and flipped it over her shoulder to me. “Is that better?” It was. I kept my mouth shut, but had she seen my eyes, they would have had a story to tell. She peeked over her shoulder, exposing a glancing view of her soft breast. “A shame, you are a very good kisser.” She started toward her ground-floor bedroom, limping only slightly. “Let’s hope you are a great business partner. I would hate to think we made a bad decision.” She continued on her way, once again wearing that old hat with her little boy-brief-covered buns waggling behind her.
“I hate you,” I muttered. I think I was talking to myself. I stood there holding her T-shirt, trying to resist smelling it. “Who wears a John Coltrane t-shirt anyway?” I yelled after her.
I smelled the damned shirt. I practically inhaled the thing.
“The French. We invented American jazz.”
“How does that even make … ?”
The word “sense” got caught in her slamming bedroom door, while I stood in the middle of the empty room listening to her buzzing about and wondering how the world had come undone so quickly. Six weeks. It had taken her only six weeks to dismantle my life. For the first four weeks of our partnership I believed this was still my story, this life I led. I’d been my own boss for some time and quite successful at it. Then in walked this small woman with the noticeable limp and fearless swagger, and everything began to change. I went from independent contractor to lead investigator to junior partner and then to glorified babysitter and bodyguard almost faster than my once-healthy ego could stumble down each emotional step to the one below. After a few missteps, we hit our stride and decided to make our working relationship a formal partnership under the moniker Cane Investigations. I suppose the name was something of an homage to each of us, but we both knew Jeanne was in charge. Of course Jeanne never lorded any of the changes over me, nor would she ever admit to our being anything but each other’s equal. But we were equal in the way a summer rainstorm is equal to a great, gulping Pacific typhoon. We were equal in the way the moon is equal in brightness to all the stars in the heavens or in the way that hope is equal to prayer or pretense equates to love—which is to say, we were not equal at all.
2 - Crazy Magnet
I wish I could pen a simple paragraph to describe Jeanne Dark or explain her complexities, but my words are lacking and my understanding of the workings of her mind are limited. I am not certain when I began to realize my lot in life was not to be the romantic lead or the action hero in my own story, rather the John Watson to her Sherlock Holmes, but I’m sure my father, the Colonel, would have something to say about that.
I was an Army brat, a third-generation future soldier raised in Stuttgart, Germany; Seoul Korea; and Okinawa, Japan, before my father settled us in Fayetteville, North Carolina in the U.S. I was eleven before I set foot in my homeland and never felt as at home in any one place as I did while traveling to the next one. It was just kind of expected that my brother and I would follow Dad’s footsteps into the military. My grandfather was one of the highest-ranked African American officers in World War Two. The Army became the family business after that. Both my father and his brother entered the service, with Dad reaching the rank of bird colonel and Uncle Frank becoming the family’s first General Officer. I worked my way into Army Intelligence, most of it spent analyzing an
d tracking terrorists. The work was shit, but I was good at it, and the Army didn’t mind that I’d never finished my degree. Ten years in, a close encounter with an Improvised Explosive Device tore down my imagined wall of invincibility and convinced me to retire from active service. Dad was openly angry, but Mom let out a stream of Thank-you-Jesus gratitude that told me I’d made the right decision.
I couldn’t have done much to please Dad short of getting my ass blown off anyway. I remember his words perfectly. “What the hell else do you think a damn Intel staff sergeant is gonna be good for but the military?” Mom pulled him off me before it came to blows, and I haven’t seen the old man since.
My brother, Garret, called me a quitter, until his wife got pregnant with twins, and he followed me out of the service. Dad blamed me for that too. I can’t say I cared much. If my failings convinced Gar to take a six-figure job as a government contractor instead of getting his legs blown off somewhere, then I was happy to be a bad influence.
I’m not trying to paint a weepy story of my existence. In truth, we had been darned lucky growing up. My father had always been a hard case, but he was a good provider to his family, loving to Gar, and Mom seemed happy more often than not. Dad was high enough in the military hierarchy that he could drag us with him to most of his assignments during our childhood. We traveled all over the ass end of the Earth during those years to the point where I stopped trying to make connections. My big brother was my only friend and hero, and I decided early on that would have to be enough. We got to see the world and for the most part liked what we saw. Moreover, such that it was, our family was together. But being a senior officer is substantially different than being a non-commissioned officer, or even a captain like my brother. Gar and I harbored no illusions that we would be afforded the same opportunities from our substantially lower positions in the service as Dad had been given. If we wanted a normal life, whatever that was, the military wasn’t the place for it. Of course, Dad couldn’t see that and was convinced I’d turned his good son against him.
The Little Burgundy: A Jeanne Dark Adventure Page 1
