Obsession

17

FOLLOWING THEIR CONVERSATION in the kitchen, Anne-Marie insisted that the first order of business was to scour room 2B. No cleansing ritual could be expected to work while the blood of a dead woman still marred the place, she’d said.

So she and Josie cleaned it. Top to bottom. Placing the stained mattress in the back alley, despite Detective Chevalier’s instructions that neither guest room was to be touched since they’d been deemed crime scenes.

After they’d completed that somber task, Anne-Marie had gone back to her shop, promising to return shortly, while Philippe stayed in the kitchen to make dinner.

Josie, on the other hand, was in her rooms, once her grandmother’s rooms, on the fourth floor.

She stood in the middle of her bedroom, looking around with eyes other than her own. While the additional rooms had always belonged to her grandmother, this one had been hers. It had changed over the years. From a twin canopy bed with pink accents, to a queen-size wrought-iron bed not unlike those in the guest rooms. Except it had a canopy with white sheers draped around the top posts, lending it what was supposed to be a romantic effect, but now only looked ghostly. Especially with the breeze blowing in from the open French doors, disturbing the gauzy fabric so that it billowed out, resembling a phantom.

She’d never had a man up here before. Had never had cause to because all her liaisons had been fleeting, carried out in the guest rooms where her lovers had stayed.

She reminded herself that Drew fell solidly into the same category, even if he was no longer staying at the hotel. Only she knew that the connection to him that dwelled within her, that grew every time he touched her, would be with her till the grave.

Gathering fresh linens from a nearby closet, she stripped the bed and remade it, fluffing the pillows on top. Then she took the white candles on black wrought-iron stands that were placed throughout the room and repositioned them on the nightstands on either side of the bed, careful to tuck the canopy sheers on the back board so they wouldn’t accidentally catch fire.

Narcissus.

She thought she smelled the unique, indigenous fragrance on the night air. The unmistakable scent her grandmother always wore. She turned her head, trying to identify the source of the smell.

Then she did what she’d only done once, very briefly, in twelve months. She stepped out into the main drawing room and stood outside her grandmother’s private rooms.

She’d breached Josephine Villefranche’s sanctuary one other time since saying her final goodbyes a year ago. But she hadn’t stayed long. Hadn’t been able to. She’d only picked up the fan she used at the front desk that had been lying on her grandmother’s rocking chair and then had quickly left.

She sniffed. The scent was stronger here.

Odd that she shouldn’t have sensed it until now.

She gripped the doorknobs of the ornately carved double doors and slowly pushed them inward.

As impossible as it seemed, a gust of fresh air hit her head-on, blowing her black curls from around her face and infusing her with the smell of narcissus, as though an entity not of this world had just traveled through her. She stared unblinkingly at the familiar room, half expecting her grandmother to materialize in front of her, looking for her usual kiss on the cheek.

Of course, she didn’t appear. But Josie felt her presence everywhere. Smelled it. Sensed it.

She slowly stepped from one familiar object to another. From an old oval picture frame that held a shot of Granme with her two young daughters, the girls looking as different from each other as night and day. To the wooden rocking chair that still held Josephine’s favorite shawl. To the bed that Josie had left made as if her grandmother might want to use it some night.

The source of the narcissus came from the wrought-iron dressing table. She stepped to it, picked up a crystal spray bottle and squeezed the decanter so that a fine mist filled the air. Immediately she was enveloped in everything that was her grandmother.

“Remember, always, that you are only as beautiful as you feel,” she’d said to her while Josie had sat in the rocker watching her grandmother get ready for church one Sunday morning. “And smell.”

She sat down on the bed, the same bed that when she’d first arrived at the hotel, she’d spent sleeping in with her grandmother to help chase away the nightmares that abandonment had caused. She ran her hand over the meticulously tatted lace.

It seemed like a long time later when she finally got up and left the room, closing the doors after herself.

And it was only then that she realized she still held the bottle of perfume.

THREE HOURS LATER, Josie again stood alone in her room. Night had long since fallen. Anne-Marie was long gone. But the rituals Josie had helped her perform remained in her mind and likely always would.

She remembered a time long ago when her mother had dabbled in white magic, the voodoo. Lighting candles and sitting for long hours watching the flame grow lower. But while it was rumored her great grandmother had been a witch of sorts, her grandmother had never bought into it and had refused to allow Josie to be tempted down that route. She’d infused the Church in her instead, making sure she went to services every Sunday and that she prayed before going to bed every night when she was younger.

Of course, Josie had been surrounded by voodoo her entire life. Her best friend owned one shop out of the dozens that catered to interest in the occult. And Josie had been in that shop countless times. But she’d always looked upon it as something to make her smile. She’d never taken it seriously, dismissing the rituals as strange, the beliefs as unworthy.

But as she’d watched Anne-Marie bring herself to a oneness with the four elements and, using natural herbs and oils, cleanse the hotel, she saw there was nothing hokey or damaging about the ritual. In fact, the mere act of participating had brought her a sense of peace and awareness of her surroundings that she hadn’t felt in a long, long time.

When Anne-Marie had finished with the hotel, she’d commanded Josie to kneel over the bathtub in her private bathroom and went about pouring an aromatic wash over her hair and head several times before filling the tub and asking her to soak in it.

The final ritual, Anne-Marie had said, was one only Josie herself could perform. Setting up a table in the middle of the private sitting room, Anne-Marie had draped a white cloth over it then placed a single white candle in the middle.

Even now, wearing a loose-fitting, white gauzy dressing gown her friend had given her, Josie sat in front of the table, concentrating on the flame, the scent of sage and various oils teasing her senses, the sweetness of narcissus just beyond.

“Clear your mind of everything,” Anne-Marie had told her. “Focus only on the color white. And imagine yourself pushing that whiteness on everything around you, from the inside out, up to and including the hotel, until you reach the front curb.”

Her friend had smiled at her softly then, a serenity on her face that Josie couldn’t help absorbing. She didn’t have to say aloud that she had gotten it. She suspected that was as obvious on her face as it had been on her friend’s.

She didn’t hope that the rituals would work. She knew they would…

THE HOTEL WAS NOTABLY QUIET given the sound of the raucous jazz streaming from the bar across the street. Drew hesitated in front of the open door, looking up the lit street. The blind horn player had taken up his spot on the corner again, blowing a tune that made its way under Drew’s skin so that the trumpet was the only thing he heard outside his own heartbeat.

He didn’t know how this was going to turn out. Josie had been matter-of-fact on the phone earlier when she’d asked him to come tonight. He stepped inside the lobby, the scent of sage unusually strong. He looked around, finding different-sized white candles burning in every corner and forming a line that went even into the courtyard and the kitchen beyond.

He felt another well of fear that this meeting would be a quiet send-off, a “nice to meet you, too bad you turned out to be a louse” chat that would leave him standing on the street alone wondering what had happened. It didn’t help that even he believed it was no less than he deserved.

But, somehow, the atmosphere inside the hotel also infused him with something else. Hope, perhaps, that he might have a chance to prove that his feelings for Josie went deeper than his deception.

“Josie?” he quietly called.

There was no answer. Not from Josie or Philippe, whom, he assumed, she’d let go for the night.

Drew glanced at the door behind himself, wondering if he should close it. But there was something that urged him to leave it open, a cross breeze he hadn’t noticed before that seemed to flow from the top of the building to the bottom, enveloping him where he stood. The scent of something exotically floral teased his nose, seeming to draw his attention to the stairs.

He squinted at the candles placed on each of the steps, then started to climb, first to the second floor, then following the flickering wicks up to the third, then the fourth, a place he’d never visited before.

All the doors stood open. He wasn’t sure how he knew to walk straight ahead rather than go into either of the open doorways to his right and left, but he halted just outside the third one. He blinked, sure he was seeing things. Seated in front of a table was Josie, her golden skin shiny and beautiful, contrasting against the sheer white dress she wore. She appeared to be in some sort of trance, the planes of her face relaxed and peaceful. She looked exactly like the enchantress he’d once thought her.

Drew stood mesmerized as the flame of the candle on the table in front of her flickered, playing hide-and-seek with the shadows. She blinked, as if having been alerted to his presence, then looked up into his face and smiled.

Drew felt like she’d touched him although she sat a good twenty feet away.

She slowly rose to her feet and rounded the table, seeming to float more than walk. When she stepped in front of the candle, he saw how very sheer the dress she wore was. Her luscious body was clearly outlined and he could make out the dusty rounds of her areolae and the deep V of curls between her thighs.

He swallowed hard as she came to stop in front of him.

“I’m glad you came,” she said quietly.

Glad didn’t begin to cover how he felt about being there, present in her private rooms, gaining a glimpse into a woman who’d fascinated him since the beginning. He felt honored, undeserving and awed.

He thought of all the things that he wanted to say. That he’d put together in his mind over the past four hours since her phone call. There was a proposition that he wanted to make, that covered both personal and business matters. And he’d composed an expanded explanation for his deceptive actions.

He remembered the call he’d made to his client. His final call, because he’d used the opportunity to quit. Something that hadn’t gone over very well and had resulted in a lot of threats that involved him never working in this business again.

He’d expected the reaction, but had never anticipated the venom that had gone along with it. After all, he was dropping a client, not taking one of Rove’s children hostage.

Drew hadn’t realized how very off balance his life had been until that one moment. How much importance he and those he worked for placed on their business pursuits to the exclusion of all else.

A game. That’s what it all was. Some sort of pointless, intense match of wills that required your complete attention. Forget family or home or personal enjoyment or conscience. It was all about the next deal, the next kill, the money involved.

Never mind what you did with the money. Whether you enjoyed the results of your labor. That didn’t matter. What did was getting it. Period.

And Josie, with her soft smile, had made him realize that that was no longer enough.

She held out her hand and he took it, marveling at the smoothness of her skin. No matter how much he wanted to haul her into his arms and kiss the life out her, he found he could do little more than follow her lead, allow her to call the shots.

And he had little doubt that whatever happened tonight would be something he would never forget.