Claustrophobia clutched me suddenly—the walls seemed closer, the air staler, the light dimmer. I stepped away from Patrick to catch my breath.
“You okay?” He’d asked the question a hundred times—more—since he’d found me in the hospital.
I gave him the usual response. “I’m fine.” He watched me make my way back to the ladder and descend it on shaky legs. I glanced down to see how much farther I had to go, and a small wooden box perched on top of an oak wardrobe caught my eye. It would have been invisible from below, but it was clearly defined from this angle in the glow of a bare lightbulb. There was something about it that arrested my attention and distracted me from the discomfort that had caused my descent. I went down two more rungs and reached out, pulling it nearer by the small brass handle attached to its side.
There was no way to lift it with just one hand, but I knew, from what I could see of it, that I wanted to take a closer look. I clambered to the floor and located a wooden chair sturdy enough to stand on. Then I lifted the box from the top of the wardrobe and blew the dust off its lid. It was made of dark walnut—a rectangular base topped by a sloping lid in which a frayed pincushion was embedded.
I turned it from side to side, holding it directly under the dirty bulb. There was a hint of design in the wood, nearly imperceptible for the gray of age and mildew. I reached for a piece of newspaper in a box of wrapped china and used it to clear some of the dust from the front of the piece, where the porcelain knob of a small drawer extended.
“Patrick,” I said loudly enough for him to hear me from above.
The barn’s owner looked up. “Ça va?”
I waved him off. “I’m fine! Thank you.”
Patrick’s head poked over the edge of the second floor. “Found something?”
“Come see this.”
He made quick work of descending the ladder while I turned to lay the box on a vintage dresser. Patrick leaned in to get a better look at it. “You see the detail in the wood?”
I tilted the box back and looked more closely at the portion I’d cleaned with the newspaper. “Is it parquetry?”
“And top-notch too.”
“It’s a sewing box, right?”
“What gave you the first clue?”
I ignored his sarcasm and used the pincushion embedded in the top to lift the lid, exposing the partitioned shelf beneath. “Probably held all kinds of sewing paraphernalia in its day,” Patrick said, leaning in close. “Thread, needles, scissors, embroidery yarn.”
I pulled out the small, shallow drawer and found it empty too. There was something about the box that spoke to me. “I like it.”
Patrick nodded. “You’ve got a better eye than you realize. What era do you think it is?
“I don’t know. Maybe seventeenth or eighteenth century?”
“More likely seventeenth. And a couple steps above provincial, which is good. Check the bottom . . .”
I turned the box over, careful not to let the drawer slide out, and found the artisan’s stamp burned into the wood. “Looks like a C, an S, and an F.”
“The mark increases the value.”
I realized I was smiling and felt an impulse to smother the sign of happiness.
“Don’t,” Patrick said.
There was something so loving in his gaze that I felt tears come to my eyes. I looked back at the sewing box. “I want it.”
“Then buy it.” He nodded toward the barn’s owner, still hunched over a pile of buttons by the door. “Guido over there might even give you a deal.”
“His name isn’t Guido.”
“Fini?” the man asked, sensing our attention. “Finished?” It took him three syllables to say the word.
I glanced at Patrick. “Can we call it a day?”
“Yep. Let’s get some dinner and come back tomorrow.”
I tucked the box under one arm as our host lifted our basket and carried it toward his old-fashioned cash register. “We’ll come back,” I said to the back of his head. “Demain,” I said in French, proud of myself for remembering the word for tomorrow.
“Avec plaisir!” he said loudly, waving a hand in the air.
SEVEN
WE BROUGHT CRÊPES FROM BALAZUC’S CRÊPERIE home to the B&B and settled in for the evening. There was a honk outside the door just as we were finishing dinner. At first I thought it was Connor playing in the courtyard, but when it came again, then again, I opened the door to find him sitting by the door in his Cozy Coupe.
“Hello,” I said, a bit tentatively. I looked across the courtyard and saw Grant standing at the doorway to the manor house. He nodded and smiled, and I turned my attention back to his son. “Did you drive your car all the way over here?”
“I’m a devivery man.” The word seemed too big for his mouth.
“A delivery man?”
He reached down for a plastic container and handed it to me out the Cozy Coupe’s window. “It’s leftover stew,” he said with a bit of a lisp. “Mom says you can have it for lunch tomorrow.”
“Well . . . thank you, Connor.”
He pushed his car forward a bit and leaned sideways to glance into the cottage. “Does your friend like stew?” he asked.
It took some self-control to refrain from saying “thtew” the way he did. “I think he does like stew.”
Connor smiled, exposing a gap where one of his front teeth should have been.
“Did you lose a tooth?” I asked.
He gave me a look, as if I were asking an obvious question. “The p’tite souris has it,” he said.
“The p’tite . . . ?”
“The little mouse, silly.” He honked his horn again and pushed the Cozy Coupe around so he was facing home.
“Thanks for the delivery,” I said, probably too quietly, as he rolled away over uneven cobblestone. Unsure of what to do, I gave a little wave to Grant, who nodded before descending the three steps to the courtyard. He grabbed the edge of Connor’s plastic car and dragged it the rest of the way to its usual parking spot next to a watering can and a pair of rubber boots.
“What was that about?” Patrick asked, coming out of the bedroom. He plopped down on the couch and reached for the sweating glass of artisanal beer he’d left on the coffee table.
“Delivery from Connor. Stew for tomorrow.”
“Catering isn’t mentioned on the website, but I’ll take it.” A squeal reached us from the courtyard as I stowed the stew in the fridge.
“Cute kid,” Patrick said.
“He is.” I’d always found children a bit intimidating, and Connor, endearing as he was, was no exception.
“Please,” Patrick said, sarcasm dripping. “Contain your enthusiasm.”
I went to the bench just inside the front door where we’d left the sewing box and brought it into the living room, placing it between us on the coffee table and tilting it back to see the carpenter’s mark again.
“So,” I said, “do we try to find out who CSF is?”
“We can try, but if he was a local artisan he wouldn’t be listed with the greats.” He frowned. “Three initials is unusual—it’s normally just two. That might actually be helpful.”
I opened the lid and peered inside again.
“Remember what I told you about the mystery of picking?” he asked.
I looked at him.
“We don’t find our treasures—they find us,” he said.
It certainly felt true. This box with the parquetry and slanted lid had called to me the moment I saw it. “I think I believe you,” I murmured.
Patrick leaned forward. “It may not be worth a whole lot,” he warned. “More in the States than here, for sure, but . . .”
“It is,” I said with unusual certainty. “It’s worth something to me.”
I pulled the small drawer open and it slid easily. There were small bits of debris loose in the bottom. I turned it upside down over the coffee table and most of it fell out. “There’s something in the corner,” I said, wondering i
f it was a remnant of its contents centuries ago.
Patrick leaned closer as I picked at it. It was some kind of reddish yarn that seemed anchored to the wood. When I grasped it with the tips of my fingers and pulled lightly, it broke off, frayed and frail from age. Just a hint of it remained in the crack between the edge and the bottom of the drawer. I tried to get ahold of it with my fingernails, but it was too short to grasp.
I went into the bathroom under Patrick’s watchful eye and retrieved the tweezers from my toiletry bag. Back at the coffee table, I used them to grab the tiny piece of yarn and pulled. The bottom of the box bent a little as the yarn came loose. I squinted at the knot that had been hidden under the wood until I pulled it free. Then I looked at Patrick, something I couldn’t quite identify scratching at my mind. “There’s a knot. It was under the edge of the . . .”
He leaned back. The look on his face—the calm, knowing, melancholy expression—somehow felt frightening to me. “Patrick.”
He smiled. “It found you.”
I frowned. “What are you—?”
“So,” he interrupted, “your job now is to figure out why it did.”
I looked more closely at the knotted yarn still pinched between my tweezers, and that vague intrigue I’d felt a moment before crystallized into suspicion. “You think it’s a . . . ?”
“Remember the rolltop we found at the flea market in West Virginia?”
I held his gaze, perplexed and still a bit disquieted by his serene and expectant countenance. I remembered the desk. We’d had to cancel airline tickets and rent a U-Haul to get it home. It was one of his most prized possessions. He’d spent months restoring it to its former noblesse, meticulously refinishing it, repairing its locks and the mechanisms that operated its hidden compartments.
Hidden compartments. “Do you think . . . ?”
He just raised an eyebrow and smiled a bit more deeply. I hurried to the kitchen for a knife with a thin blade and returned to the sewing box. It took a bit of pressure to insert the tip into the corner where the red thread had extended and pry it up. It gave just a bit before the knife slipped out—just enough to make me wonder if there really was a secret space below.
I tried again, moving the blade a bit farther from the corner this time. The wood arched up, but it snapped back into place when I pulled out the knife to move it down the seam. I continued to loosen the thin layer that seemed to be more of a veneer than a structural piece, returning to the corner and working the knife along the other edge. Inserting and prying up. Inserting and prying up.
I could feel anticipation coming off Patrick like electrical energy. He watched my every move in silence, the master observing the apprentice.
I wedged a pen under the veneer when the gap was large enough to allow it, preventing the false bottom from snapping down again, and continued to loosen the edges. I glanced up at Patrick when there was enough give for me to grasp the wood with my fingers. He smiled. I smiled back. “Pull it up?” I asked.
He hunched a shoulder. “Only if you want to.” The excitement in his eyes belied the nonchalance in his tone.
I pulled on the thin layer of wood and heard it groan against the edges restraining it. Then it was in my hand.
I looked into the inch-deep space, not really expecting to find anything there—maybe more dust or remnants of sewing items.
“Oh—my—gosh.” The words were barely a whisper. I looked up at Patrick and said them again. “Patrick. Oh—my—gosh!”
His expression gave me pause, but only for a moment.
With shaking hands, I lifted a small notebook from the drawer—yellowed, handwritten pages bound together by a string inserted through two holes at the top of the sheaf. There were a couple loose sheets still in the bottom of the drawer.
“This is . . .” My words trailed off. I looked at Patrick again, and he laughed at the amazement on my face.
“Excitement looks good on you.”
“We found a treasure . . .”
“Well, it could be some middle-school girl’s idea of a practical joke, but . . .” He laughed. “Yep, there’s a chance a treasure found you.”
I ignored his subtle correction and stared at the pages in my hand. The writing was in ink. Though it looked brownish, I guessed it had been black at the time the words were written. Some of them looked like French, but others seemed foreign. I moved closer to Patrick so he could take a look and was surprised when he seemed to shift away. I looked at him, frowning. That melancholy was there in his face again. The melancholy and the peace. And maybe a hint of pain.
I felt fear coiling in my stomach but couldn’t identify its source. “Patrick . . .” I reached out to touch his arm, then pulled back, dread and panic surging.
He shook his head.
“Patrick,” I said again, questioning and begging. “What’s—?”
It was as if he was fading—like old-fashioned slides, whitening and dissolving from the heat of a bulb. My voice was low and shaky. “Patrick—what’s happening?” I leaned in to touch his shoulder, his face, to convince myself that he was here. That I was not alone. And I cried out when my hands felt only air.
Though he hadn’t moved, an agonizing space broadened between us. “It found you,” he said, his eyes settling on the box for a moment before making contact with mine again. His voice sounded muffled. Distant. But there was certainty on his face. Courage too. “Now you need to figure out what it’s trying to say.”
“Patrick!” I heard the scream through the cacophony of incomprehension and agony in my mind. It took me a moment to realize it was mine. “Patrick,” I screamed again as he seemed to recede farther, to grow dimmer, to disintegrate. His smile was soft. Sad. Hopeful. The smile I’d seen that first night in the hospital, when I’d woken to find him there. Watching me. Shielding me.
A reality too unbearable to process descended over me like an inexorable weight. I felt it push me further into myself, deeper into a void that gaped, threatening and inscrutable, beyond my consciousness.
“No!” I screamed as Patrick’s form faded even more. I clawed my way to the other side of the couch, where he’d been sitting—where he’d been talking—where he’d been smiling just moments ago, but he drifted farther yet. “Patrick!” I could see only his eyes now. Everything else had faded from sight. Then they disappeared too.
I felt a hollowing. A searing, insufferable hollowing. My body collapsed. My spirit reeled and spun apart. The air around me quaked and pummeled, seethed and roared.
Then darkness.
EIGHT
REALITY SURFACED SLOWLY WHEN CONSCIOUSNESS RETURNED. I lay on the couch, my legs drawn up, my arms crossed over my stomach. There was static in my mind. Loud and numbing and pervasive.
The room’s swirling slowed. I took one deep breath after another and tried not to remember—not to think. But truth pierced through my defenses. “No!” I said, loudly enough to startle myself, willing the thoughts away.
But they returned larger and stronger, hurling themselves at my resistance until I could forestall them no longer. Grief breached its barriers and overflowed the levees of denial in my mind. I groaned and sobbed and screamed and pled.
When I could breathe again—when the onslaught of emotion and disbelief had passed—I rolled off the couch onto the floor, knocking the coffee table so hard that the sewing box fell off and the string holding the sheaf of papers snapped. Incomprehension and panic fueled irrational anger. I kicked at the pages and watched them scatter across the floor.
Then I lay there, paralyzed, mindless, emptied out, as the sunlight angling through the kitchen window crawled across the floor, then up the wall, then faded into dark. I pulled myself upright in the wee hours of the night. My eyes skimmed the surface of the room, barely lit by a single lamp. The coffee table. Patrick’s beer glass wasn’t there. The sink. Only one plate rested in the drying rack. The bedroom. Only one bed was unmade. Only my suitcase lay open on the floor.
I pulled myself u
p to a standing position and fought the nausea clawing at my gut. I stumbled toward the bathroom and dry-heaved over the commode. There was no razor on the vanity. None of Patrick’s fancy soap on the shower’s ledge. Tears fell silently from shell-shocked eyes and burned the chapped skin of my face.
I moved into the bedroom and felt loss liquefy my limbs, then I fell onto the bed—onto Patrick’s bed, where neither sheets nor pillow had been disturbed. Despite my supplications, my mind rolled back over the days since the attacks, replacing what I’d known with a reality I couldn’t bear. It was all there. All the absences imprinted on the fabric of my grief. Survival’s masquerade.
I saw Vonda again. When she’d come to say good-bye. I heard the bustle of the hospital ward. “Stay until Patrick comes back,” I’d begged.
“Until . . . ? Jess. Honey. What are you talking about?”
“He was just here and went out to get some coffee. He’ll be back in . . .”
“Jessica.” Her voice was broken and resolute. “Jessica, he wasn’t here.”
“He was. He’s been here off and on since the—”
“Jess . . .” She was battling for composure. For words. “Jess . . . he’s gone.”
I laughed—shrill and desperate. “Vonda, I assure you that—”
Tears gathered in her eyes. “He left the exhibit early . . . came to find us at the Bataclan. Because it was our last night. That’s what I think. Because we were supposed to spend it together. The police . . .” She halted. Swallowed hard. Took a deep breath. “The police called the apartment after I got back. He was—he was at the doors when the shooting started and—”
“No.”
“He was one of the first to be killed, Jess.”
“No!”
“I had to identify his body. I had . . .” She gripped the rail at the bottom of my bed. “I had to find his parents and tell them over the phone . . . They’re trying to . . . The embassy is helping them get his body home. They’ll come later. I don’t know when. They transferred money so I could pay ahead on Patrick’s rent until they can get here to take care of his studio and his things and . . .”
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