The Book of Lost Fragrances

Seventeen

PARIS, FRANCE

WEDNESDAY, MAY 25, 7:30 A.M.

Traveling all night and constant worrying had exhausted her. Jac closed her eyes, but the taxi was no more conducive to sleep than the plane had been. The closer they got to the city, the more her anxiety escalated. Jac hadn’t been back home to Paris since she’d left sixteen years before. Her grandmother lived in the south, in Grasse, along with the rest of her French family. Aunts, uncles, cousins. Even Robbie had moved there. Everyone except her father. And she’d had enough of him. Before his illness and since.

Robbie.

Where was Robbie?

Even as children, they’d been emotional opposites. Somehow she found melancholy at the edge of things in which he delighted. But they shared so much. Cared so much. Despite their age difference, they’d been each other’s best friend. She was young for her age; he was old for his. Together alone in the mansion, they invented worlds to conquer and games that kept them busy during the long, dreary periods when their father was preoccupied with work and their mother was lost in her unhappiness.

One game they invented, The Game of Impossible Fragrances, had become an obsession. Sitting at the child-size perfumer’s organ their father had built for them in the playroom, they cooked up fragrances to use as words. An entire vocabulary of scents they could use as their secret language. There were juices for laughter, fear, happiness, anger, hunger and loss.

Looking out the window, Jac noticed more and more familiar sights. By the time the driver reached the sixth arrondissement, she could hear her own heartbeat.

They turned down Rue des Saints-Pères. A police car was parked crazily-half on the sidewalk, half off. Two gendarmes stood outside the boutique’s entrance. She’d anticipated the scene, but its reality was chilling.

Even though the police were expecting her, first one officer and then the other examined her passport. Finally, Jac was allowed to open the front door with her own keys. It had been over sixteen years since she’d used them.

Holding her breath, Jac crossed the threshold. Looked around. Everything in her life had changed since she’d last been here, but nothing seemed different. The same antique mirrors reflected her face back at her-so tired, with deep circles under her eyes. The familiar mélange of the house’s classic scents greeted her. She looked up. The charming, lighthearted Fragonard-style cherubs in the ceiling mural welcomed her. This morning their cheerfulness was an affront to the seriousness of the situation.

The sound of her footsteps echoed in the crystalline showroom. She stooped at the counter. Ran her fingers over the cool glass top. Her father had sold perfumes here. And his father before him, and on and on, going all the way back to the first L’Etoile, who’d opened this store in 1770. Like all early perfumers, he’d been a glove maker who used scent in order to imbue the kidskins with a more pleasant aroma. When he saw how well his efforts pleased his clients, he added other scented products to his wares: candles, pomades, soaps, sachets, powders, skin oils and creams.

Robbie loved all those old stories. Knew every ancestor by date and which fragrances he had created.

Robbie.

No matter how long Jac postponed the inevitable, she couldn’t avoid it. If there were clues to where he was and to what happened, she wasn’t going to find them in the showroom. How foolish she’d been to think that she’d never have to confront the workshop again.

With a trembling hand, Jac pushed on a mirrored panel behind the counter. The secret door opened. The corridor lay before her. Dark and uninviting. She stepped into the void.

The heavy wood-paneled door at the end of the hallway was closed. She put her hand on the knob but didn’t twist it open. Not yet. If she ever lost her mind anywhere, Jac thought, it would be here.

The old sadness settled on her shoulders as she stepped inside. Looking around for some evidence of what had transpired, she was aware only of the familiar, ghostly fragrance. Spices, flowers, woods, rain, earth-a million extracts and distillations-combined to create this room’s own particular and unique odor. Sometimes she woke up from dreams, her cheeks wet with tears and that smell in her nostrils.

Jac rarely cried except in those dreams. Even as a child, when she felt the sting of tears, she blinked them back. Her mother was just the opposite. Jac often found her sitting at her desk in her turret office, her head bowed over her papers, tears sliding down her face.

“Please don’t cry,” Jac would whisper. Seeing Audrey so sad made the little girl’s stomach cramp. Reaching up, she’d stroke her mother’s cheek dry. The child comforting the mother. The opposite of how it should be.

“Stop crying, please.”

“It’s not bad to cry, sweetheart. You can’t be scared of feeling.” What contradictory advice that had turned out to be-coming from a woman who ultimately surrendered to her own feelings. Became their victim.

Suddenly Jac couldn’t catch her breath. The cacophony of scents in the workshop was even more overwhelming than she’d remembered.

It had been so many years since Jac had suffered an episode, she’d believed she was cured. But here, for the first time since she was fifteen years old, she felt the never-forgotten shivers run up and down her arms. Painful pinpricks of cold. The smells around her intensified. The light dimmed. Shadows descended. Her thoughts threatened to wave away.

No. Not now. Not now.

At the clinic, Malachai had taught her an exercise using her own innate abilities to help control the visions. Her “sanity commandments,” she called them. Now, effortlessly, she remembered and followed the string of instructions:

Open a window. A door. Get fresh air. Take long, concentrated breaths. Stop your mind from spiraling by giving it a task. Identify the scents in the air.

Without being conscious of having left the workshop, Jac found herself standing outside in the courtyard. Breathing in the cool morning garden air. Grass. Roses. Lilacs. Hyacinth. She almost smiled at all the deep-purple hyacinths planted along the pathways.

Jac kept breathing. Walked past boxwood pyramids and into the labyrinth.

Now she was home. Here. Hidden by the two-hundred-year-old cypresses pruned into impenetrable walls so tall that a man couldn’t see over them. This complicated puzzle of warrens and dead ends. Anyone who didn’t know how to navigate the maze was lost. But Jac and her brother knew the route by heart. At least, they had as children.

At the maze’s center, two stone sphinxes waited for her. In a fit of laughter, she and Robbie had named them Pain and Chocolat-after their favorite breakfast croissant.

Between them a stone bench. In front of the bench, a stone obelisk covered with hieroglyphics. Jac sat down in its shadow.

No one in the house liked coming inside the maze. So to escape an angry parent or nanny, this green room was her hiding place. Here she was safe from everyone but Robbie.

And she never minded when he came to keep her company.

Where was he?

Jac felt panic threatening. That wouldn’t help. She needed to stay focused; try to find some answers. She inhaled the sharp, clean smell. Forced her mind to return to the state of the workroom. It was chaos. Even if there were clues to what had happened there two nights ago, who’d be able to sift through the mess to find them?

Robbie had described the confusion and clutter he’d inherited, but she hadn’t understood how horrific it was. “A visual metaphor for the state of the family business,” Robbie had warned her. “For the state of our father’s mind.”

He’d said Louis had become a hoarder in the past few years. Kept every piece of notepaper, every bill, every piece of mail, every bottle and box. The visible evidence spilled from cabinets and shelves. Robbie complained that every time he opened a drawer, he confronted yet another set of problems.

“Mademoiselle L’Etoile?” The male voice was muffled by the thick hedges.

“Yes,” she called. “It’s a small labyrinth but easy to get lost in. Stay where you are; I’ll find you.”

After making her way back through the twisting green corridors, Jac found a well-dressed, middle-aged man frowning at the maze.

“I realized right away I wasn’t going to make it through.” He extended his hand. “I’m Inspector Pierre Marcher.”

There was something oddly familiar about him; something in his face that she recognized. “Have we met?” she asked.

“Yes, we have,” he said. “Long ago.”

She couldn’t place him. “I’m sorry, I don’t-”

“I’ve been assigned to this district for the past twenty years.”

Now Jac nodded, understanding his shorthand.

“So you were here that day?”

“Yes, and I spoke with you,” he said gently. “You were so young. It was a terrible shame you had to be the one to find her.”

Audrey had killed herself in her husband’s workshop, expecting he’d be the one to discover her body. It was the weekend. Robbie was at their grandmother’s. Jac was staying with a friend and her family in the country. But the other girl had gotten sick, so they’d returned early and dropped off Jac. The house had been empty. Jac saw the lights on in the workshop and went to see if her father was there.

Jac’s grandmother had been the one to crawl under the organ. She’d unwrapped the girl’s arms from her dead mother’s legs. Pulled her head up from her mother’s unmoving lap. Jac was soaking wet with tears and the spilled tincture from a hundred broken bottles. Bloody ribbons of flesh hung off her fingers. Angry red scratches encircled her wrists and arms like piles of bracelets.

Because Jac had been the one to find her mother’s body, the inspector had to ask her some questions. But it had taken hours for him to get answers. In her confused state, she couldn’t make sense of what she’d seen.

There had been a screaming crowd in the workshop with her. An angry mob. They’d been the ones to break the glass and smash the bottles. To get away from them, Jac had hidden under the perfumer’s organ at her mother’s feet. What if the intruders found her? They’d killed Audrey. Would they kill her too? Why did they want to destroy the workshop? Why were they dirty? Why were they dressed in such old, ragged clothes? And why did they smell so bad? Not even the bottles of scent they broke disguised their stench.

No. She didn’t know how long she’d been there. No, she hadn’t made the mess. No, she didn’t know what was real or imagined. Not anymore. And maybe never again.

Marcher pulled out a pack of cigarettes. “Do you mind,” he asked, “as long as we’re outside?”

Even though she didn’t smoke anymore, she asked him for one. He shook the pack toward her, and she extracted the cigarette that slid forward. She put it between her lips, and he lit a match, extending it. The mixture of tobacco and sulfur was a delicious distraction.

Jac sensed that the inspector’s quiet demeanor represented almost an apology, an acknowledgment of the regret that came with having witnessed the tragedy of her early life.

Even one puff of the strong cigarette was too much. Jac threw it on the pebbled path and ground it out with her heel, noticing the yin-yang pattern in black and white pebbles circling the obelisk. She’d forgotten about that too. All that Eastern influence. “Let’s go back,” she said, and as they walked, she questioned him.

“Have you found out anything at all to suggest where my brother may be?”

“We haven’t, no.”

“And what of the man who you found here; do you know who he is?”

“We’re having a bit of a hard time with him too.”

“What do you mean?”

“In your brother’s diary, there’s a notation of a meeting with Charles Fauche, a reporter with the International Journal of Fragrance. And while there is indeed a man with that name who’s affiliated with the journal, he’s currently in Italy on an assignment and has been for the last five days.”

“So you have no idea who you found here?”

“That’s correct. We know only that whoever he is, he doesn’t have a criminal record. His fingerprints aren’t on file with us or Interpol.”

They’d reached the workshop. The French doors were still opened.

“Inspector, do you have Robbie’s diary?”

“Yes, I do.”

Marcher gestured for Jac to go inside first. He followed her and shut the doors behind him. Jac reopened them. She didn’t want to smell all those warring scents.

“Could I have it back?” she asked.

“It’s evidence.”

“Take down any information you need. Xerox it if need be, but I’d like to have my brother’s-” she broke off, confused. “Evidence?”

“Yes.”

“Robbie’s missing. I thought you were looking for Robbie because you think he might be in danger.”

“Yes. And because he is also at this point in time a person of interest in this case.”

“I don’t understand. On the phone, you said that Charles Fauche-or whoever he is-died of natural causes. That he’d had an asthma attack.”

“That’s right. He did. Brought on by what he breathed.”

“But that can’t be Robbie’s fault. The man knowingly came to a perfume workshop.”

“It appears your brother was burning a toxic chemical in here that brought on the attack.”

“My brother is a perfumer. He works with all kinds of toxic chemicals. Surely you can’t-”

Marcher bowed his head in deference to what she was saying, but his words belied the action. “We don’t know anything, mademoiselle. Not yet. But you might be able to help us learn more. Could you look around at what’s on the table here and tell me what kind of perfume your brother was working on that would have required him to burn benzyl chloride?”

“Inspector, someone came here to see Robbie. Someone who wasn’t who he said he was. Now my brother is missing-for all we know, he was kidnapped. How can you jump to the conclusion that he committed murder?”

“Mademoiselle, I am not jumping to any conclusion. Far from it. What I am doing is considering all possibilities. One man is dead. Another is missing. Objects from the workshop appear to have been taken. Whether they have been stolen or not isn’t clear. We don’t yet know anything, but let me assure you, I intend to find out everything.”