The Book of Lost Fragrances

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.”

“Why is that?”

“I’m afraid you’re a person of interest in your brother’s disappearance and possible death.”

“That’s absolutely ludicrous.” Jac put her hands on the desk and stood up abruptly, accidentally knocking over a small perfume bottle sitting precariously close to the edge. The vial fell and shattered.

An intense scent enveloped her, so powerful that she barely noticed as the inspector excused himself and left. Jac hadn’t smelled it for years but recognized it instantly. This was one of the scents from The Game of Impossible Fragrances. In the scent vocabulary that made up her and Robbie’s secret language, this was Fragrance of Loyalty, Jac’s favorite. Adding notes of bergamot to a rich earthy base of oakmoss, she’d come up with a chypre-a type of warm, woody scent, first made famous by the legendary perfumer François Coty in 1917. Jac’s Fragrance of Loyalty was neither feminine nor masculine, and could be worn by either brother or sister. And that was as it should be, she’d said, so they both could use it to signal when something was wrong and they needed help. Usually that meant they were in trouble with their mother or father and wanted saving. She wound up putting it on far more often than Robbie did.

Jac didn’t even know he’d kept any of those fragrances. Why had this one been sitting on the edge of the desk?

“Did Robbie tell you about this perfume?” Jac asked Griffin as she picked up the broken pieces of glass after Marcher left.

“No.”

“You’re certain?”

“Yes. Why? What is it?”

“I don’t think it was here yesterday. If it had been, I’m sure I would have noticed it or smelled it. I’ve sat at this desk a dozen times since I arrived in Paris. And the bottle-our father stopped using them years ago. He gave the ones he had left to us to play with.”

“I don’t understand. What does a broken bottle of perfume have to do with anything?”

“What if Robbie is alive? What if he was here last night? He could have left me this bottle as a message. Maybe the shoes and the wallet were a message, too. Robbie could have left them by the river hoping they’d be found and I’d be told. It can’t be a coincidence that they showed up somewhere Robbie and I had been before. A place that scared me so much he convinced my grandmother to cut our visit short and get me away from there.”