The Book of Lost Fragrances: A Novel of Suspense

by M. J. Rose

  “There is no way that this is going to slip through my fingers.” Malachai was talking about a piece of pottery. He was picturing a woman.

  “I understand.”

  “It’s going to require a trip to Paris,” Malachai said.

  “I can go tonight.”

  “Not you. I’m going.” He didn’t like leaving his practice on short notice. The children he helped were sacrosanct. But if the pottery shards were a memory tool, and if they were missing, that took precedence. He could arrange for another therapist to take over his cases for a few days. He couldn’t trust anyone else to go to France.

  “I’ll be flying out tomorrow. Fire whoever you had working for you over there. Find me someone who doesn’t know the meaning of the word impossible. In French. Or in English.”

  Twenty-five

  PARIS, FRANCE

  WEDNESDAY, MAY 25, 3:45 P.M.

  When Jac and Griffin arrived back at the workshop—so he could show her photographs and read her his translation of the story on the pot—Inspector Marcher was waiting.

  “I’ve received a call from the police in the Loire Valley,” he said without preamble.

  “Yes?” Jac asked. She hadn’t realized how much tension she’d expressed with the single word until she felt Griffin gently take her arm.

  “Your brother’s wallet and his shoes were found by the shore of the river,” the inspector informed her in an even, unemotional voice, as if he were describing the weather.

  Jac had been standing; now she found the first place to sit and crumpled into the chair in front of the perfumer’s organ. “What does that mean, exactly?”

  “Nothing definitive. Someone might have stolen these things from him and thrown them in the river.”

  “Stolen his shoes?” Trying to ward off the rising panic, Jac took a deep breath. Then another. And despite the fact that they were discussing the disappearance of her only brother, Jac’s attention was averted by her sudden awareness that she was again inhaling the same mysterious scent that had so transported her earlier in the day. A scent that hovered in a cloud around the organ. That faint wave of dizziness she’d experienced before returned.

  “Why would someone have stolen his shoes?”

  “We don’t know what happened yet. That’s why we are actively engaged in doing a search of the whole area,” the inspector explained.

  Jac was looking at the tiny glass bottles gleaming in the afternoon sunlight. There was no dust anywhere. Robbie kept everything here so clean.

  “His wallet and shoes? Are you certain they are his?”

  “I’m sorry, but I am sure.”

  Some of the labels on these bottles had been handwritten by her grandfather. Others by her father. Robbie must have written some of them too. He’d been working here for the last three months. Surely he had brought in some new synthetics. But she couldn’t find a single label with her brother’s handwriting. There was no proof of his existence in the place where he’d last been.

  “Are you saying that you think he’s drowned?” She took another deep, deep breath. The air was getting stuffy again. “He can’t be. My brother is a very good swimmer.”

  Griffin came up behind her and put his hands on her shoulders. For an instant, it felt as if he were the only thing keeping her from floating up and disappearing into the scent cloud.

  “The river is famous in that area for its strong currents. I’m hoping he’s nearby, perhaps only slightly hurt. If he’s there, we’ll find him. We have teams searching from above the point where we found his items all the way down to where the Loire opens to the sea.”

  Jac rubbed her eyes. One summer, their grandmother had taken Robbie and Jac to stay in a cousin’s chateau in the Loire Valley near Nantes. Despite the beautiful countryside and the ambling river, Jac had been unusually restless. Physically uncomfortable. During their first night there, she suffered terrible nightmares. Woke up with Robbie shaking her. “It’s only a dream,” he reassured her. “Only a dream.” That night he sat with her, talking, keeping her distracted until the sun rose. At breakfast, he convinced their grandmother they should leave earlier than scheduled. “Something about this place and Jac didn’t like each other,” he’d said at the time.

  “Where in the valley?” Jac asked now. “Where exactly were his things found?”

  “In Nantes.”

  Jac understood what Marcher said, but it was too confusing. Nantes? It was such a peculiar coincidence.

  She needed to let in the fresh air. She stood and started toward the French doors. But before she got to them, the scent drug started to pull her away.

  The last thing she remembered, from a distance, was Griffin’s voice.

  “Jac, are you—”

  Twenty-six

  NANTES, FRANCE, 1794

  Marie-Genevieve Moreau stood in the bright sunlight and felt the sweat run down her neck. Despite the beauty of the shore and the river, the scene was hellish. Hieronymus Bosch’s twisted, turned-inside-out hell. That was where she was. That was what she was living.

  “You, next.” The soldier with the wart on his nose pulled her roughly toward him. His counterpart, a short man with a brilliant red scar on his chin who stunk of rotting teeth, tore her habit off of her, as she knew he would. As he’d done to the other victims before her.

  After the wool of her habit was ripped free, he yanked loose her underthings. Naked, she covered her breasts, but that left the triangle between her legs bare. She didn’t have enough hands. She tried turning her back, but they wouldn’t have that.

  “Not while we’re enjoying the sight of you so much, Sister,” the stinking one laughed as he yanked her upright. The other stepped close, groping her breasts with his filthy hands.

  “I hope you weren’t thinking you were going to meet your maker still a virgin.” He laughed, pushing her to the ground and unbuttoning his trousers. “Have much of this in the convent?”

  Marie-Genevieve forced her mind to escape as he lowered himself on top of her. At least this monster would not be taking her virginity. No. She’d shared that willingly with someone who hadn’t abused it.

  Her attacker was clumsy and nasty. His stench made her gag, but he finished blessedly quickly. Once he was off her, she tried to prepare herself mentally for his counterpart’s assault. But there was no second attack.

  She was lifted up off the ground and then felt smooth cold skin, just as naked as hers, pressed up against her back. From her calves to her buttocks to her shoulders. But this man wasn’t pushing or groping. He was praying. Marie-Genevieve, who hadn’t entered the convent because of her love of God but because of her love of one man, listened to the soft words.

  “Pray with me, my child,” the priest said as the soldier pushed the two of them even closer together. “Our Father, who art in heaven . . .”

  If she could let go, the way she sometimes did during mass at the convent, and not hear the words but move with the sounds, she could lull herself into a state of almost sleeping while standing. Of dreaming somehow outside of her body. She didn’t know what to call it and had been afraid to tell any of the other sisters. Not sure if this mind escape she was capable of was a great gift or something heretical.

  The soldier with the stinking breath wound a length of coarse rope around her wrists, binding her to the man behind her. So the rumors were true. They were bringing priests and nuns down to the river. Tying them up. Torturing them. Killing them.

  “Get moving,” the soldier said as he pushed her. “Time to take a boat ride, down there.” He pointed to the riverbank.

  It was a struggle to walk in tandem, but she and the priest managed without falling.

  “What is your name, Sister?” the priest asked her.

  She started to answer, but the soldier smacked her face. “Keep moving!” he barked. “No conversation.”

  Around her the air was filled with crying and shouts—and yet, coming through the other noises were the persistent reassuring sounds of prayers and
birdsong.

  Her executioners—she had no doubt now that’s who they were—pushed her and the priest into a small boat. He got the worst of it, falling on his face, yelling out in pain, while she only hit the side of her head.

  With a grunt from one and a laugh from the other, the soldiers pushed the boat out into the river. The current was strong here and the little skiff moved rapidly. For a few minutes, Marie-Genevieve was hopeful. Maybe they’d figure out a way to untie each other. Maybe the boat would go aground. Then she noticed the water seeping into the wooden vessel.

  When Giles’s death had been reported from Egypt, her father had arranged an alternate marriage for her. Marie-Genevieve begged him not to thrust her into a union so fast. Give her time to grieve; to get used to the idea. But Albert Moreau was a businessman; if the son of the man who bought the finest skins from his tannery was no longer able to marry his daughter, he would marry her off to the manufacturer who bought his second-finest skins.

  The shoemaker was a recent widower. No, he wasn’t young and good-looking like Giles, but Albert told his daughter none of that mattered.

  “You don’t have the luxury of falling in love again. The right marriage and a marriage of the heart—the best of all worlds. But it is not to be. You’re not any younger, and I don’t want you to wait and risk the widower finding someone else. Besides, he has ties to the revolutionaries. If this unrest erupts into the war that we expect is coming, he will be able to aid us all.”

  When Marie-Genevieve could not be consoled, her mother helped her run away to the convent of Our Lady of the Sacred Heart.

  Now as she sat in the boat in the river, unable to do anything to stop the leak, she watched the water rising and considered the irony of what she’d done. Given the revolutionaries’ greed and lust to destroy the Church and everything connected to it, the safety of the church proved no safety at all.

  The water rose around them, and still the priest prayed. She was submerged up to her knees. Then her shoulders. Then her chin. She thought of Giles and how he’d once dipped his handkerchief in water to wipe away the tracks of her tears. It was the day he’d told her he was going to Egypt to learn about ancient scents so he could enhance the perfumed gloves and soaps and candles and pomades and make the House of L’Etoile the talk of Paris. He had been excited by the adventure, but she’d been afraid for him to go; had a premonition that he was not going to come back.

  But now she was going to meet him again. This cold, cold water was taking her to him. It was closing over her and washing away the stain of the stinking soldier and the touch of his greedy fingers. Giles was waiting. She knew he was. He’d promised her, before he left, they’d be together always. They belonged together, he’d said. They were âmes soeurs.

  Twenty-seven

  PARIS, FRANCE

  WEDNESDAY, MAY 25, MIDNIGHT

  Plagued with fears about her brother, confused by her hallucinations—the most recent transpiring while Inspector Marcher there—and thrown off balance by Griffin’s sudden presence, Jac didn’t even try to sleep that night. She went through the motions of undressing and getting into her childhood bed, but she didn’t fight the hours of wakeful worry that followed.

  Terrible scenarios of what might have befallen Robbie plagued her. Was her brother all right? Had he really been in Nantes? He must have been, or else how would his shoes and wallet have been found there? And why, of everywhere, in that place where she’d been so uncomfortable years ago? And how could just hearing the city’s name trigger such a horrible hallucination?

  Over and over, she relived what had been happening to her in the workshop. Trying to make sense of why her illness had returned with two episodes now, after so many years. It made her so anxious to think the plague had returned; that she would go back to living split apart, nervously waiting for the next break. Waiting for the awful first symptoms. Carrying the dread with her.

  This last hallucination had seemed to last at least an hour, but when she broke from its grip, Griffin still had his hands on her shoulders. This had been worse than any episodes she’d suffered as a child, and she came out of it in a panic.

  “You’re still here?” she asked him, momentarily disoriented.

  “I never left,” he answered.

  His presence was more reassuring than she was comfortable with. How could they have been apart for so long and slip back into this kind of intimacy so quickly?

  “Are you all right, Jac? For at least a minute, you didn’t seem to hear a word the inspector or I said.”

  A minute? That was all? What to tell him? Until she understood what was happening, she decided to keep it to herself. She especially didn’t want to talk about it with Marcher there.

  Thursday morning, Jac was showered and dressed and back in the studio by eight o’clock. Overnight the room’s scent had built up to a disturbing intensity. Despite the morning chill, she flung open the French doors, welcoming in the fresh air. She wanted coffee and remembered that her father always kept an electric kettle and French press here. But where? Everywhere she looked were boxes of papers and paraphernalia. If this was how the workshop looked after months of Robbie’s trying to clean it up, how had it looked before? She finally found the coffee accouterments tucked away in a corner of a shelf with a tin of ground beans that smelled fresh enough. The same brand her father had always favored.

  Usually she thought very little about her father, but it was impossible to put him out of her mind here. His personality before the disorder descended was evident in a hundred ways, from his collection of spy novels shelved two and three deep, to the dozens of framed photographs of his second wife, Bernadette, and her two children. Behind them, Jac and Robbie were equally represented in ornate frames. Ten snapshots. One even had their mother in it. Jac pulled it out, placed it up front. Wiped the dust off the glass. Then gently touched her mother’s cheek.

  The picture had been taken so long ago. A lovely, dark-haired woman sitting under a big red umbrella on the beach in Antibes with a sweet smile on her lips. The baby in her lap was Robbie. Jac, a three-year-old with a mop of the same dark hair, was standing beside her mother, leaning over, whispering in her ear.

  Jac didn’t remember the trip. Or the day. Couldn’t pull up that moment.

  She poured herself a cup of coffee and looked back at the photo. Where were memories stored? Why could she conjure imagined moments from lives of people long dead but not dredge up actual instances of her very own life?

  When the inspector arrived at nine, Jac was feeling the jittery addition of too much caffeine to her anxiety over Robbie.

  She and Marcher sat on opposite sides of a Louis XIV desk that had been in the family since it was made. Her father had auctioned off the truly valuable antiques trying to stave off financial disaster over the years. What was left—a few pieces like this desk—were in such poor shape that they weren’t worth selling.

  “Can you tell me a little about the argument you and your brother were having?” Marcher asked. “We know the two of you weren’t getting along. That your plans for the company didn’t match his.”

  “How do you know about that?” Jac looked over at Griffin.

  She’d been surprised he’d phoned early that morning. Even more surprised at how glad she’d been to hear his voice. When she told him that Marcher wanted to talk to her again, he volunteered to come over. She had been too exhausted and upset to argue.

  Now he shook his head in answer to the question she hadn’t voiced.

  No, he wouldn’t have told Marcher something like that. So how had he found out?

  Jac’s eyes rested on the photos she’d just been looking at. Ahh, she thought. Marcher must have talked to Bernadette. The witch, who once upon a time had been her father’s lovely assistant, bringing them presents of chocolates and fresh madeleines. Then Bernadette had stumbled upon evidence of Jac’s mother’s affair and exposed her. Audrey’s indiscretion would have ended eventually, and perhaps her parents would have stayed
together had Bernadette not presented proof of the transgression to Jac’s father. Instead she started a spiral that ended in Audrey’s suicide.

  “And what did the current Madame L’Etoile have to say about my brother and me?”

  The inspector glanced down at his notepad for a moment. Jac liked him a little more for having the decency to look away.

  “I’m not at liberty to discuss that, mademoiselle. Can you help me understand this feud between you and your brother?”

  “Feud? What century are you living in? It’s an ongoing business discussion about how we are going to solve our financial problem.”

  “That reached the point where the two of you rarely saw each other.”

  “I live in New York and travel all the time. Robbie lives in Paris. We both have jobs. How often could we see each other? And besides, what does any of this have to do with what’s going on? With where he is? With what happened here?”

  “About the feud?” the inspector prompted.

  “Fine,” she said, realizing he wasn’t going to give. “I’ve found a buyer for the rights to two of our signature perfumes. The purchase price will bring in enough cash to pay off our debt, allow us to restructure our loans, and infuse the company with the capital we need.”

  “Your brother didn’t like the idea?”

  “Doesn’t. He doesn’t like the idea. He has some misguided belief that our signature scents are our lifeblood. That if we sell even two we will be defaming the house.”

  “But you need his vote to make the sale?”

  “Yes, we own the company equally.”

  “Except you’d own the company completely in the event of your brother’s death, wouldn’t you?”

  A sound escaped from Jac’s throat. Like the cry of an animal caught in a trap.

  Griffin stood up. “Inspector, I think that’s enough.”

  Marcher ignored Griffin. “We’re going to have to ask you not to leave the country, mademoiselle.”