The Book of Lost Fragrances

Twenty-nine

4:09 P.M.

Jac was sitting in her old bedroom in front of the windows, looking down at the courtyard garden, trying to think like Robbie and imagine where he’d go and what he’d do if he were in trouble. When her cell phone rang and she saw it was Alice Delmar, she answered it.

“I’m sorry to hear about your Robbie,” Alice offered in her crisp British accent.

Jac nodded, then realized she couldn’t see her and thanked her.

“Any news?” Alice asked.

“No, none.”

There was a moment of transatlantic silence. Jac pictured the kind woman on the other end of the phone sitting in her office overlooking Central Park. Alice and her husband, who owned a large cosmetics company, were old friends of Jac’s father’s. They’d treated her like family, inviting her to their house on holidays. She’d have given anything to be back there with Alice, sitting over dinner in Sant Ambroeus, sipping wine, listening to her complain about overpriced ingredients and perfume sales that had dipped 14 percent in the last year.

“Is there anything I can do? Get on a plane and come and be there with you?” The suggestion was like an embrace, offering momentary solace.

“No, please don’t. The police are doing everything they can.”

“But it’s not enough, is it? Your brother is still missing.”

“That’s true. But there’s nothing I need now. Not right now, honestly.”

“I hear something in your voice. What aren’t you telling me? Is it about the loan? If the damn French bankers are breathing down your neck, we can arrange something.”

Alice ran the company’s fragrance division. She’d been the one to come up with the idea of buying Rouge and Noir in order to solve the House of L’Etoile’s financial crisis.

“Thank you, but we’re fine for a little while longer.” Jac was staring down at the garden. The topiary that was usually shaped into pristine pyramids hadn’t been trimmed in a long time. The shapes were losing some of their form.

“Then what is it?”

“The police think I’m involved in my brother’s disappearance because he was getting in the way of the sale and that I-” she couldn’t finish.

“That’s preposterous,” Alice’s voice blustered. “You? He’s your family. You adore him.”

Jac pressed her forehead against the glass, comforted by its cool smoothness and neutrality. The absence of scent was a relief.

Outside, the wind picked up, the leaves in the trees danced for her, and the sun hit the seven-foot obelisk in the maze’s center. The object supposedly dated back to Egypt at the time of the pharaohs. In yet another family legend, Giles L’Etoile had brought the limestone needle back from Egypt along with the rest of the treasure. Jac knew it was just as likely a nineteenth-century copy. No one had ever bothered to find out. Her family preferred to believe the fantasies that were the cornerstone of the House of L’Etoile. She knew the shaft’s tip was white like the rest of it, but from the window, its top looked like it had been capped with something black.

After finishing the call with Alice, Jac went out to the garden. Walking down the allée created by the centuries-old cypress hedges, she breathed in the refreshing perfume; the spicy, clean scent. She’d traversed this labyrinthine pathway hundreds of times when she was a child. Its smell was as intrinsic a part of its design as the pebbled pathway.

At the maze’s heart, she looked up. So it wasn’t a shadow or a trick of light. The triangular tip of the column was darkened. Standing up on the stone bench, she reached out. Just managed to touch the tip. Her fingers came away black. She smelled them. It was dirt. Probably from the garden. Why would someone have smeared dirt around the needle’s top?

Jac sat down on the bench. It had been misting, and her hair was already curling around her face. The air felt suddenly chilly, as if this new mystery had affected the very atmosphere. She wished she’d brought a sweater, but she wasn’t going back now. She had to figure out what was happening.

Why was there dirt on the obelisk? Jac looked at the ground for some kind of clue. And that’s when she noticed. The black and white pebbles forming the ancient ying-yang symbol had been disturbed. Their separate fields were mixed together. The teardrop shapes bled into each other.

Someone had done this. Deliberately. She stared at the stones as if they had the answer. Clouds rolled across the sun, showing the garden in darkness. Then the sun peeked out again. Something on the ground glinted. Metal? She looked closer. A patch of pebbles were brushed aside, exposing-what was it?

Dropping to her knees, Jac swept away the stones, revealing more and more of what lay beneath them. A large, circular plate came to light. At first she wasn’t sure what it was, then realized: a manhole cover. And it wasn’t fitted tightly into its ring but gapped as if someone had slid it back in a hurry.

After escaping down the shaft?

Jac leaned down and sniffed the space between the metal plate and the edge of the hole. The cool air smelled of vinegar and decay and maybe something woodsy, too. Yes. She could identify the same scent that had filled the workshop a few hours before, when she’d broken the bottle of the Fragrance of Loyalty.