Scent of Roses & Season of Strangers

by Kat Martin

  Val felt a shot of guilt, a feeling he had never really known. When he’d made the difficult decision to bring the older sibling back aboard, he had known there might be complications. He wished he could explain, reassure her that the headaches would soon disappear. But he wasn’t exactly certain that would happen. It was one of the things he’d been sent here to observe. Grabbing his coat off the wooden valet in the corner of his office, he started for the door.

  In the meantime, he knew the cause and what to do to treat them. At least he could ease some of her pain.

  Shoving open the office door, he walked down the sidewalk toward the pudgy young man in front of Spago’s who parked Patrick’s car, and handed him a couple of dollar bills. He had driven the shiny black Porsche for the first time that morning—an antique mode of transportation he found fascinating. He was grateful Patrick knew how to handle the car and had enjoyed every second behind the wheel.

  Patrick was a very good driver, he had discovered, with what seemed a natural ability to handle the vehicle on the route through Laurel Canyon. Later he had cruised Mulholland Drive.

  All along the way, a fierce blue sky curved above him, brightened by clouds so white and incredibly lovely it made him feel funny inside. At the top of the hill he’d parked the car for a while and simply stared out over the landscape. Wildflowers in vivid purple and saffron gold, poppies in scorching red-orange. A large brown bird, a goshawk, his memory recalled, spiraled down off the mountain, coasting on the currents of the wind.

  Afterward, he jotted down the experience in the journal he was keeping, filling the pages with words written in Patrick’s bold hand. It was the only way he could think of to capture the unfamiliar feelings, the subtle nuances of his thoughts. He had been making reports to his superiors, of course, communicating with the Ansor team through normal space channels.

  But there was just no Torillian way to describe what was actually going on.

  The journal would have to do that. When he returned to the ship, the pages could be scanned, translated by computer into words and images far more detailed than his logical, straightforward mind could manage.

  Val tipped the valet for the second time that day, vowing to start parking the car himself in the office parking lot, then slid into the deep red leather seat of the softly purring sports car. He stepped on the gas, relaxed his mind, and let Patrick’s well-honed driving skills take over. He knew the way to Julie’s house and the fastest way to get there. Avoiding as much of the traffic as he could, he pulled onto Pacific Coast Highway and roared along the beach to Julie’s batten-board, ranch-style beach house.

  He spotted it clinging to the side of a cliff, a two-car garage on the bottom, forming a two-story structure, the walls of the house draped with shocking-pink azaleas. If he hadn’t been so worried, he might have smiled.

  Instead he parked the car in the driveway, knocked on the door, and a few minutes later, Julie Ferris let him in.

  “This is silly, Patrick. You shouldn’t have come.”

  But she looked so pale he was glad he had. He felt responsible for what was happening to her. Was responsible. There was just no way around it. Still, science was all-important. The Ansor’s mission was all-important.

  And yet when he looked at Julie, he wished there could have been some other way.

  “Why don’t you lie down on the couch?” he said gently. “I give a great massage. Why don’t we see if it will help?”

  “I don’t know, Patrick….”

  “Come on, Julie, please. Do it for me?”

  A hint of uncertainty appeared in her face. She had always been wary of Patrick and yet they were friends of a sort. “All right. What have I got to lose?”

  A few minutes later, she was lying on her stomach on the sofa, her pale blue terry-cloth robe covering her primly from neck to ankle. Val knelt beside her, began to massage her shoulders.

  “I must be crazy,” she mumbled when his hands moved a little bit lower, kneading the muscles across her back. “If you try anything, Patrick, I swear I’ll never forgive you.”

  He flushed a little at that. Partly because he had begun to like the feel of her small woman’s body beneath his hands and partly because the heavy male part of his anatomy was coming to life again.

  Val swore something Patrick would have said. “I promise my intentions are completely aboveboard.”

  “They’d better be.”

  He continued his deep massage, working upward again, toward the muscles in her neck, reaching the area at the base of her skull that had been his objective from the start. His fingers sifted through her hair. He couldn’t believe how soft and silky it felt, while at the same time it was bouncy and vibrant, shimmering with life and substance.

  Her skin was soft and smooth to the touch. When he had seen her that night onboard the ship, he had never noticed the satiny texture. But Patrick must have noticed it at least a hundred times, and because he had, now, so did he.

  His hand shook, felt a little unsteady. The blood pumping through him seemed to thicken, pool low in his belly. He forced himself to ignore it.

  Beneath his hands, a tiny vessel throbbed under an obscure layer of flesh. He searched it out, applied a gentle pressure, and felt the tension begin to ebb from Julie’s body.

  “Better?” he asked, feeling a little more in control.

  She made a purring sound and nodded. “I can’t believe how much.”

  He continued to work on the vessel, knowing exactly how much blood to let flow and when to cut back.

  Julie’s body relaxed even more. “How on Earth did you learn to do that?”

  It wasn’t on Earth, he thought. But he just smiled and didn’t say it. “I’m just glad it’s working.”

  “Uhmmm, it’s working, all right. My headache is almost gone.” She yawned hugely and her eyes drifted closed. Her breathing smoothed out, grew deeper. A few minutes later, she was asleep.

  Val eased away from her, oddly reluctant to leave. He crossed the room to a serape-draped chair several paces away and sat down to watch her, taking advantage of the chance to study her unobserved. He made mental notes of her posture, the way she curled up in the robe like some small warm-blooded animal. He studied her breathing, watched the way it caused a strand of dark red hair to float beside her ear.

  He assessed her small feet and hands, the soft pink polish on her fingernails and toes. He knew what she looked like beneath the robe, but he tried very hard not to think of it. When he did, his stomach muscles tightened and he started to grow hard again. Eventually he drew out the journal, began to use Patrick’s words as well as his own impressions to describe what he’d learned—and how watching her sleep made him feel.

  He wasn’t at all happy with that discovery. He felt warm all over, somewhat sexually aroused, and precariously close to losing some of his precious control. Since control was the thing he needed most, he vowed to be more careful in the future.

  In the end, he left Julie a note on the rough-hewn bleached pine coffee table in front of the sofa, then let himself out, pushing the button on the doorknob to lock it behind him. All the way home he wondered if his reactions to Julie belonged wholly to Patrick—or if some part of them could have belonged to him.

  * * *

  Brian Heraldson, Doctor of Psychiatry, sat behind the desk in his walnut-paneled, book-lined office on Galey Avenue in Westwood. He leaned back in his chair, his long fingers steepled in front of him, his thick brown eyebrows drawn together in a frown. Brian was thirty-five years old, divorced three years ago, over it now but wary of relationships that involved any form of commitment. His practice was everything—employer, friend, mistress—and he was good at what he did.

  He was open, objective and concerned. To him psychiatry wasn’t just a job. It was a guideline of how to live and a deep responsibility. And so he pondere
d his newest patient, Laura Maxine Ferris. The most beautiful woman he’d ever seen.

  He was uncomfortable thinking of that. It was highly unethical to become involved with a patient. And he staunchly believed in those ethics. He wouldn’t allow the physical attraction he felt for Laura to stop him from giving her the help she so desperately needed.

  Unconsciously, Brian stroked his neatly trimmed beard. He had grown it ten years ago, when he had first gone into practice. It had made him look older, more mature, gave his patients more confidence in his ability to help them. Since that time, he had grown so used to his bearded appearance, he couldn’t imagine how he would look without it. He wondered if Laura Ferris was attracted to men who wore beards, then prayed most sincerely that she wasn’t.

  Leaning forward, he pressed the button on the small, digital tape recorder sitting on his desk and Laura’s soft feminine voice floated out through the speakers in the compact machine.

  She was telling him about her childhood, describing the day her father had left them, how terribly sad they all had been. “Mama cried the most,” she said. “I held onto Daddy’s leg when he opened the door and begged him not to leave. I said, ‘Don’t go Daddy, please,’ but he only shook his head. I remember the way his hand stroked through my hair. It was exactly the same light blond as his and his eyes were brown like mine. I started to cry and he looked like he might cry, too.”

  “What about your sister? What did she do?”

  “Julie just stood there and watched him pack his things. She was leaning against the wall in the corner, staring at Mama and me. She saw us crying and for some reason it made her really mad. She started shouting at Mama and me, telling us to let him leave. She said, ‘Let him go! He doesn’t want us anymore—let him leave!’ She ran over to Daddy and told him to go away. She said she didn’t care if he ever came back. I don’t think Mama ever forgave her for that.”

  The chair squeaked as Brian sat up straighter. “Your mother thought it was Julie’s fault your father left you?”

  A sad look crossed her face. “Not really. She just wanted someone besides herself to blame for driving him away.”

  “What about you? Did you blame your sister?”

  Laura smiled faintly. “No. I knew Julie loved Daddy more than any of us. That was the reason she didn’t cry. She was afraid if she started, she’d never be able to stop.”

  Brian punched the stop button on the recording machine, bringing the tape to a whirring halt. He felt Laura’s pain a second time as he listened to her story, felt sorry for the lonely little girls who had only each other to love.

  He’d been seeing Laura three times a week since she had been coming in for treatment. There was lots of ground to cover but she seemed to be responding very well and they had developed a nice rapport.

  He fast-forwarded the tape, coming to the hypnosis session she had finally agreed to that had taken place yesterday afternoon. He had wanted to start with her childhood, hoping to pinpoint the catalyst responsible for her recent paranoia, which had apparently started only a short time ago.

  He wanted to know if something frightening had actually occurred, something Laura had suppressed, something perhaps she was afraid to remember. Had she been assaulted, raped, or in some other way abused? Or was the paranoia a result of some earlier problem that had only just now begun to surface?

  In either case, a single incident might have occurred which could have brought her fears to a head. He pushed the play button and leaned back in his chair, listening carefully to the final part of the session. Under deep hypnosis, he had taken Laura backward through time to the day several weeks ago when she had first become frightened.

  He knew when she had reached it by her sudden rigid posture, the long slim fingers clawing into the arms of her chair.

  “Where are you, Laura?” he asked gently.

  She only shook her head.

  “Where are you? Laura, you don’t have to be afraid. Just tell me where you are?”

  Her face grew pale. Her eyebrows drew tightly together. Her hands were shaking, her knees trembling beneath the folds of her loose-fitting paisley cotton skirt. “Hospital,” she whispered.

  “You’re in the hospital?”

  She nodded stiffly, her arms still gripping the chair.

  “When, Laura?”

  “June. I went to Julie’s house. We took a day off from work to lay on the beach.”

  It didn’t make sense. As far as he knew, no accidents, no emergencies, nothing like that had occurred. “Did Julie take you to the hospital?”

  She shook her head. “No.”

  “How did you get there?”

  “I don’t…I don’t know.”

  This wasn’t going the way he planned. He took another tack. “All right, Laura. You’re in the hospital. Tell me about it. Tell me why you’re afraid.”

  She chewed her bottom lip. For the longest time she didn’t speak, just stared straight ahead as if she were there again. “They took off my clothes,” she finally said. “I was naked. It was cold in there…so cold.” She started to shiver.

  “Go on,” he softly urged.

  “They washed my body with something like alcohol, but it was slimy and it didn’t have much smell. When they washed between my legs, I started to cry.”

  Brian stared at his patient in silence, turning over what she had said. “What happened next?” he asked, suddenly not sure he wanted to hear.

  “I tried to fight them, but I couldn’t move. I couldn’t lift my arms. They bent my knees, pushed up my legs. They shoved something cold and hard up inside me. I tried to scream, but nothing came out.”

  Brian’s own hands started to shake. “Go on, Laura.”

  “I begged them not to hurt me. ‘Please don’t…please don’t hurt me.’ But they couldn’t hear. They pulled the metal things out from inside me and stuffed something rubbery into my mouth. I could feel it tickling the back of my throat and I started to gag. I was afraid I’d choke if I threw up. I closed my eyes as tight as I could, tried not to think about the thing in my mouth, tried to ignore the crunching sound inside my head when they shoved a little hard thing up my nose.”

  Brian rubbed the back of a hand across his lips. “What else do you remember, Laura?”

  She didn’t answer. Just sat there shaking.

  “Laura? Tell me what else you recall.”

  She shook her head. “Nothing else. I don’t remember why I went there. I don’t know how I got home.” She started to cry then, soft little sobs that jabbed at his insides. He knew he should press her, try to discover how this wild delusion had gotten started, but he was fairly certain he knew.

  Her medical history said Laura hadn’t been inside a hospital in years, not since she was seventeen years old, pregnant, and unmarried. Her boyfriend had convinced her to have an abortion, but his choice of practitioner wasn’t the greatest. Complications had set in. Fortunately, her sister found out what had happened and had taken her to a reputable doctor, who had seen she got the proper care.

  It was all in her medical files.

  All but the trauma the incident must have caused.

  Brian turned off the tape and leaned back in his chair. Two more days until her next appointment. Another hypnosis session might prove interesting. Then again, it was certain to be hard on her. Perhaps it was too early in the treatment for any more trauma. He would have to give it some thought.

  Then again, more time spent thinking about Laura Ferris might be the last thing he ought to do.

  * * *

  Julie checked the time on her Rolex watch. It was only 10:00 a.m. She was feeling pretty good this morning—no headaches for the past two days—and there was a two-hour break in her schedule before her luncheon with Evan Whitelaw and his wife, a meeting to discuss the escrow instructions on the Beverly Hi
lls estate they had just purchased.

  Julie smiled to think of the sale she had made. True, the house was bordered by Bel-Air, but it wasn’t technically in Bel-Air, as Jane Whitelaw had insisted. Her smile broadened as she thought of how glad she was she had talked the woman into a quick look at what had turned out to be the Whitelaws’ perfect home.

  Heading out of her office, she walked past where Shirl Bingham sat filing her nails at the reception desk.

  “If anyone’s looking for me, I’ll be upstairs in the fitness center. I’ll be back before lunch to check my messages.”

  Shirl just nodded and continued filing her long red nails. Julie thought of the fit Alex Donovan would have pitched if he had caught her, but company image was hardly a concern his son would have.

  Julie walked out the front doors, into a different entrance of the same building, and stepped into the elevator. She got off on the third floor and went into the health club. For a number of people who worked nearby, the place was well maintained and convenient and not too overly large. Julie had been attending aerobics classes with a fair amount of regularity for the past three years.

  She went into the locker room, changed into a pair of black shorts and a tank top, tied the laces on her Reeboks, then went into the weight room to warm up on one of the five stationary bikes. She stopped dead in her tracks when she looked over and saw Patrick on the treadmill, his tall frame drenched in sweat.

  “My God, will wonders never cease.” She stopped beside the machine, grinning with disbelief.

  “Hi,” he simply said. His face glistened with perspiration. A curl of damp black hair clung to his forehead. She had the strangest urge to reach out and brush it back out of the way.

  “I didn’t know you were a member here,” she said.