The Book of Lost Fragrances

Eighteen

After the detective left, Jac sat down at her brother’s desk and began to look systematically though his papers. What else was there to do? She had to try to find out what Robbie had been doing. Whom he’d been seeing. What he’d gotten involved with. The police had probably gone through his things already, but maybe there was a clue to what had happened that they wouldn’t have recognized.

Her brother had to be all right. He had to be somewhere near.

The phone rang. She jumped. Stared at it as if it were a creature, coiled and waiting to spring. It rang again. There was an answering machine. And Marcher had told her his team was monitoring all calls. She didn’t need to answer. Except what if it was Robbie? What if he’d been hurt or injured, had been staying with a friend and was finally well enough to call?

“Bonjour?”

There was no reply.

“Robbie?”

A breath. Then a beat of silence. Then a click. Damn. She never should have said his name. What if he had been reaching out to her? What if he was in trouble and calling for help? He might not want the police to know about it. Might have assumed they’d be listening. Once she’d identified him, he couldn’t have answered even if he’d been desperate to.

No, that was crazy thinking. Robbie didn’t even know she was here in Paris. Whoever had called was expecting to get Robbie, heard her, was confused, and hung up.

She stared at the phone, willing it to ring again. For whoever had called to call back. Silence mocked her magical thinking.

Turning her attention back to her task, Jac opened the desk’s top drawer and was rifling through its contents when a gust of wind blew in through the opened garden doors. Bills, envelopes, letters and notes flew around the room.

After shutting the doors, Jac set to picking up the new mess. Some of the papers had wedged in between the bottles on the perfumer’s organ. She stood on the opposite side of the room from the self-contained antique laboratory and stared at it. Not quite ready to go near it.

When she was a child, the organ was off-limits to her and her brother; the precious essences stored there were too expensive. Forbidden, the organ took on larger-than-life proportions. It was wizardry. And temptation.

Sometimes she would sit far across the room and watch the light play on the small glass bottles. The reflections danced on the walls and ceiling-even on her arms when she held them out. Beautiful for the moment. Until the clouds moved and the organ settled back into shadows. A phantom in the corner of the room. The monster of scent. Giving up ugly and strange and beautiful and powerful smells.

Some of the oils were now so old that Jac doubted her brother could even use them. Some must be nothing but sediment. Others, she knew, were so rare that once he finished them, he could replace them only with synthetics.

The perfume industry was changing. Only the talent required to create a truly worthy perfume was the same. Melding dozens of individual notes into a truly sensuous, memorable bouquet would always require a sorcerer of scent.

Going back over two hundred years, her ancestors had sat there mixing up elixirs from the ingredients in these antique bottles. Now they stood, hundreds of glass tombstones in an alchemical museum, waiting for their wizard to come give them life. Could Robbie be that magician?

She was too old to be afraid anymore. Jac crossed the room and sat down at the organ. The essences here were no different from the ones any perfumer used. But no matter how many labs she’d been in, none smelled the way this room did. She breathed it in: the perfume she hadn’t smelled since her mother had died. Jac folded her arms on the wooden shelf. Rested her head. Shut her eyes.

As a child, Robbie had named it the Fragrance of Comfort. As an adult, he’d tried to recreate it. She said he was crazy and argued that it was anything but comforting. Dark and provocative, it was, for her, the perfume of time long gone. Of regret. Of longing. Maybe even of madness.

It was no surprise that the smell was more intense now that she was on top of it. Overwhelming. Intoxicating.

A headiness that was almost euphoric filled her and threw her off balance. Grabbing the edge of the organ, she held on as the swell took her. With her eyes closed, she saw a blaze of orange-blue light. Then a swath of opalescent darkness. Then a verdant, marshy, churning green.

The kaleidoscope of images swirled, fracturing before she could identify them. Each thread of scent had a color, and she saw them mingling; saw the chemical bonds forming, sending olfactory shivers up and down her spine. It was more than an aroma or an odor. Much more. The scent was a drug of dreams. A vivid magic carpet ride. Suddenly she was sailing over icy mountains of clouds and oceans of forests, lush and beautiful beyond her dreams. Seeing fragments of faces; eyes that spoke to her, lips that watched her.

The images came faster now, breaking apart over her, spilling like mosaics at her feet. Turquoise and lapis lazuli. Gold. Silver. The scents whispered to her. Teasing her. Then a damp cold enveloped her, locking her inside a prison of emotion: heartbreak, sadness, relief. Still spinning, she held on and forced the procession of pictures in her head to slow down so she could see them. All unfamiliar, places she’d never seen, never visited. A riverbank, a stone enclosure, a courtyard with palms. Sound, too. Birds. So many birds. A woman crying. A man whispering comforting words to her there by the river. Fragments of language. French? No, not French. And a million smells. Some familiar, some as foreign as the language the man and the woman were speaking. He was dark skinned, wearing a wrapper around his waist. At first Jac couldn’t see the woman.

Then she realized: she was the woman. Her thighs were covered with a thin linen robe; her feet encased in jeweled sandals. The man was somehow familiar. Not his face, but his smell. It was spiced, exotic amber that wrapped around her and drew her in. Close. Warm. Wanted. Whole. Finally. She belonged here. With him.

Then the fear hit. A wrenching fear of impending separation. What was wrong? What was happening?

Jac tried to open her eyes but couldn’t. And then she was spinning again. The man and the woman were gone. The river was gone. There was no perfume at all. Dark night sky breaking into slivers of glass. Shattering.

And then she was in a new place.

The air was heavy with burning incense. The terror was gone. Here, inside the church, with her parents and her sister, here she was safe. Here, only peace.