by M. J. Rose
Once a week the senior staff of the Phoenix Foundation met for lunch to discuss their patients, share insights and keep abreast of developments in the field. Now, as Malachai continued to describe the new librarian’s discoveries, Iris Bellmer and Beryl Talmage listened and ate the sesame chicken salad that had been served with soft potato rolls and tall glasses of lemon-and peach-infused iced tea.
“We have the receipts for everything in this room,” he said, gesticulating toward the matching stained-glass windows on either side of the fireplace. Also created by Tiffany, the jeweled interpretations of an elaborate trellis intertwined with more wisteria prevented anyone outside from looking in but allowed for soft daylight to filter in, casting the room in a luminous old-world glow. “You know, if not for our clothes we could be sitting here in 1889. It’s not only the visible aspects of the room that have changed so little but we lament the same issues that plagued our intellectual ancestors. According to the letters, they also debated how best to present their astounding findings to the public and scientific societies in order to be taken seriously.”
Olga, the woman who cooked their lunch every day and kept the kitchen stocked, came in and removed their plates. Malachai was still talking about Elgin’s discoveries when Olga returned with a silver coffee service and plate of cookies. As Beryl poured for each of them the conversation moved on to a discussion of their individual caseloads, starting with Iris, who began by talking about James Ryan.
“I’m convinced that each of the women he’s drawing is someone he harmed in a previous life.”
“How many lives have you touched on?” Beryl asked.
“So far two.”
“And how do they relate to his drawings?”
Iris recounted the story James had told her about Telamon and then moved on to Fouquelle. “He discovered a cache of treasures under a home in the Persian ghetto in the late 1880s and was responsible for the death of the man who owned the house and his wife. He killed her himself.”
Malachai pushed his coffee cup away and the china clattered noisily. “In Persia?”
“Yes. Shush.”
“Are you sure?”
“What is it?” Beryl asked her nephew.
Malachai was leaning toward Iris. “This story that James Ryan told you about the old man and his wife in the crypt. Did he tell you their names?”
“Yes, they were—”
“Wait,” Malachai interrupted. From the inside pocket of his jacket, he withdrew a silver and lacquer pen, uncapped it and wrote down two words on a pad by his place setting.
“What are you doing?” Beryl asked.
“I don’t want there to be any questions afterward about who said what and when they said it.” Tearing off the sheet, Malachai folded it and handed it to his aunt.
Malachai looked back at Iris. “All right. What were their names?”
“Hosh and…”
“Bibi,” Beryl read the name Malachai had just written at the same time as Iris said it.
“How did you know?” Beryl asked.
Malachai stood up, walked over to the window and stared into the glass that offered no view. In his calm, elegant voice, he proceeded to tell the two women about Nina Keyes’s granddaughter, the seven-year-old who had been coming to see him since Beryl had asked him to take on her case a few weeks before.
“She has a lot of unresolved guilt about what happened to her in her previous life when she was a Jewish woman living in Persia with her husband and four sons. They had a crypt under their house full of ancient treasures her husband’s family had safeguarded for centuries.”
“Are you saying…” Iris asked, incredulous, “that in a past life your patient was a woman killed by a man who in this life is my patient?” She shook her head. “It’s not possible, is it?” She looked over at Beryl.
“Why not? We come back in the same soul circles.” Beryl poured herself more coffee. “So you each have patients who were connected in a prior life. This will make for an amazing case study but brings up a few ethical issues.”
Malachai glanced over at her warily. “Let’s table the ethical issues for the moment. This is an astonishing development. Our patients aren’t just connected, Beryl. The archaeologist killed Bibi and was responsible for her husband’s death.”
No one spoke for a moment. Then Malachai asked, “Do you know his name, Iris?”
“His name is James Ryan.”
“His name in his past life. Did he tell you the archaeologist’s name?”
Chapter
FORTY
Lucian opened the door. Emeline was wearing jeans and a white boat-necked T-shirt that had slipped off one shoulder, leaving it bare and making her look more vulnerable than sexy. Her eyes seemed bigger than usual, and the circles under them were too deep. Her pale blond hair was pulled back in a ponytail and wisps had escaped, falling around her face, which was even paler than he remembered. She looked as stressed as she’d sounded on the phone a half hour before when she’d called and asked if she could please come over and talk to him, just for a few minutes.
Only after he’d closed the door behind her and she was standing inside did he realize she was carrying a package: a rectangle about eighteen inches wide by two feet long, wrapped in brown paper.
She walked into his large, sparsely decorated loft and gravitated to the table where his sketchpads, cans of pencils and piles of drawings were.
“I didn’t know you still painted,” she said.
“Still?”
“My father told me he’d read you quit school after the accident.”
“I don’t paint anymore. Do you want something to drink?”
“A glass of wine?”
“Red or white?”
“Whatever’s open.”
In the kitchen he poured two glasses of red and when he returned, saw she’d put the package down beside the table and was looking at the drawings he’d done early that morning.
“Here you go,” he said, offering her a glass.
She took it, thanked him and then said, “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to snoop.”
He smiled, shrugged. “My fault for not putting them away.”
“Who are these women?”
“My nightmares.”
Emeline searched his eyes. “What do you mean?”
He led her to the couch, where they sat down and he told her about his trip to Vienna, the attack, its aftermath and the dreams that woke him up, surprising himself that he was revealing so much. He’d only shared one part of the story with Dr. Bellmer, and a different part of it with Doug Comley. She was the first person he’d told everything to.
While Emeline listened, she nodded every few minutes and took sips of her wine. When he got to the part about seeing a therapist and trying to access his unconscious to find the women there, she took his hand. He wasn’t sure when it happened, but there was a moment when he was a separate individual talking to her and then he was connected to this ethereal woman who was, without even saying a word, offering a level of understanding unlike anything he’d known in too long a time.
“Do you believe what you’ve found out in the sessions?”
“I’ve racked my brain thinking about every book I’ve ever read and every movie I’ve seen—trying to remember where I first heard the stories my unconscious is offering up.”
“You want that badly not to believe it?”
“You’ve had to deal with the same thing, and you haven’t wanted to believe it either, have you?”
“Something has always stopped me. There’s a leap of faith I just can’t seem to make. The ramifications if it’s true…I don’t know…” She reached up and brushed her hair off her face. For a moment Lucian could see her scar, and then her hair fell back across her forehead and it was hidden again. “What I did…running away from you in the park the other day…it was very childish. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t let it bother you.”
“But it does. I wanted you to kiss me. I wan
ted everything that happened. It just seemed as if…I’m not sure…I got scared. I never get scared. But nothing is the same anymore.”
“It’s all right. You’ve been bombarded with bullying e-mails, there’s a chance someone is following you…you don’t have to explain anything to me. I know how stressful and frightening the threat of danger can be. At least Broderick finally okayed the detail and you’re under police protection now. They downstairs?”
She nodded. “My shadow army? Yes. And thank you. But none of that is an excuse.”
“I think it is.”
“Lucian, do you think I’m Solange? That her soul is in me?” Her voice was on the edge of cracking.
“I don’t know,” he said finally.
“That’s the best you can do?” She laughed. But it was a weak sound without any joy. In that moment everything about her looked breakable, and he had to hold back from reaching out for her.
“I’ve seen the wish for the reincarnation to be real in Andre’s eyes so often that I’ve wanted it to be true so I could bring back whoever he’d been before the accident. I’ve only seen a shimmer of that man, and only for a few seconds at a time. He rescued me…I wanted to rescue him…him and my aunt—” She broke off.
“But what do you believe?”
“I know things that I can’t possibly know. I know about you…” She was whispering, and when he leaned forward so he could hear her better he smelled her scent, vanilla with a twist of amber. Her lower lip was trembling and another lock of hair had fallen into her face. Reaching up, he moved the hair away from her eyes, this time not noticing the scar as he kissed her. He wasn’t thinking about who she was or wasn’t; only that she was someone he wanted to be with, someone he shared the unknown with.
When Emeline pulled away she was almost smiling. She reached out for the package and handed it to him. “This is for you.”
Ripping away the brown paper, Lucian looked down at a painting in a simple black matte wood frame, and the memory came back to him as sharp as a slap. It was the day before Solange had been killed. They’d spent the night together and he’d woken up with her smell all over him to find her standing behind his easel. He’d done a dozen portraits of her, but this was the first time she’d tried to paint a portrait of him. Not at all a realist, Solange created lush, dreamlike landscapes and was struggling to capture him. She had paint on her face and hands and in her hair and was clearly frustrated. He’d laughed at how hard she was trying and she got angry with him. They’d had an argument over him not taking her efforts seriously, and he’d spent a good part of the morning trying to talk his way out of his faux pas.
She’d only gotten it started that morning, and he hadn’t realized what she was trying for—but now he understood. Solange must have gone back to her apartment and worked on it all that night.
It was a portrait of his sleeping face layered with a dream-scape of a dark green-black forest that melded into a blue-black sky illuminated by a crescent moon. A double exposure that was beautiful, disturbing and deeply moving.
“You never saw it finished,” Emeline said. Not a question, a statement.
“How do you know that?”
She shrugged and the lamplight danced on her skin. “A guess. It was in her room on an easel. Everything in her room was left the way it was that day. Did you know that? They didn’t touch anything. It wasn’t until my mother killed herself, in Solange’s room, by the way, in her bed, that I finally got Andre to agree to let me have it cleaned out, redecorated.”
“But how did you know I never saw it finished?”
She shook her head. “I…I don’t know.”
He took a long look at the painting and then turned back to her. “Why are you giving me this?”
“You almost died that night, too, didn’t you? Andre never told me. I found some old newspaper articles online and read about it.”
“For a long time afterward I wished I had.”
“I felt like that, too, when I was in the hospital. I didn’t understand what death was, but I wanted to stay in that place,” she said softly. “You’ve never really stopped missing Solange, have you?”
He wasn’t looking at the painting anymore, but at Emeline. “I’m not sure I knew this before now, but what I thought was missing her has really been missing the part of me that loved her like that.”
Leaning forward, he kissed Emeline again. She let the kiss continue and continue, and after a time he pulled down the shoulder of her T-shirt and kissed her there and then pulled it up and over her head and then he undid her ponytail so that her hair spilled over her shoulders.
She sat naked from the waist up, looking at him with a sad expression in her eyes. “I know what you want and I want it, too, but please, don’t do this unless you’re sure it’s me you want,” she said.
“You think I’m looking for someone else inside you, but I’m not, Emeline.” He tilted her face up so their eyes met. “I’m just looking for you.”
She smiled but he could still see she wasn’t sure. Trust took time. He understood that. Lucian picked up her T-shirt and handed it to her. “But we’ll wait until that question doesn’t even enter your mind.”
Chapter
FORTY-ONE
During the flight to Los Angeles, Nicolas Olshling watched movies on one of the portable DVD players the steward handed out while Lucian spent most of the time sketching, not as much because he wanted to as because he felt compelled to. Without his choosing which of the women to draw, it was the old woman from Persia and the young woman from ancient Greece who accompanied him on this trip. It made sense: these two were tied to each other. Across centuries and long distances, both were connected to the statue of Hypnos.
Lucian knew from his extensive reading on the subject and what Dr. Bellmer had reiterated that there are no coincidences in reincarnation. We’re given a chance to get our actions right every time we come back, a chance to finally learn our lessons and the lessons of the universe.
If he accepted that, then he’d be able to accept that he was working on a case involving a sculpture that he might have interacted with in two past lives—a piece of art connected to the deaths of two women, Iantha and Bibi. Two deaths he—or whoever he’d once been—had been responsible for.
And if Lucian didn’t accept it? Then his unconscious had creatively used the case he was working as a springboard into fantasy. That was the much more likely scenario; it was both credible and logical. Except that presented a conundrum: if he didn’t trust what was happening in Dr. Bellmer’s office then he couldn’t trust that Emeline was the host for Solange’s reincarnated soul. Either regression was possible or it wasn’t, and for different reasons he was as desperate to believe it was as he was to believe the opposite.
A little more than five hours after the plane took off from New York’s Westchester County Airport, Lucian looked at his watch as the wheels touched down. 8:40 p.m. Eastern Standard Time. He never changed his watch when he traveled out of his time zone.
The Matisse Monster had stipulated a six-o’clock meeting, which gave them twenty minutes to unload the crate. “Not bad timing, despite the traffic delay leaving Manhattan,” he said to Olshling as the plane taxied toward an oversize hangar.
Lucian hadn’t requested a representative from the museum, but they’d insisted. Someone from the staff always accompanied artwork when it traveled to and from another institution for shows—or, in this case, for use as currency.
There was high security in place inside the hangar, including four fully armed guards, two of whom held lean, muscular German shepherds on short leads.
“Full court press,” Lucian said.
“Every shipment from the Met gets this greeting.”
As they started to disembark, one of the shepherds growled and his handler said a few sharp words.
“Damn, I told them no dogs,” Olshling said under his breath.
“I’ve known you for a long time, but this is news to me. You have a problem w
ith shepherds or all dogs?” Lucian asked.
“Any dog whose teeth are bigger than mine.”
The wooden crate was in midair, on its way down, when Lucian’s phone rang at exactly 6:00 p.m., 9:00 Eastern.
“James Ryan here,” Lucian answered in a clipped, clear voice.
“Code word Klimt. Where are you?” It sounded like the same man who’d called Tyler Weil in New York to set up the exchange. Lucian knew they’d never get a trace on the call. Not even the Matisse Monster could defeat the location-tracking capability of a cell phone unless he was on a virgin line that had never been used before to accept any incoming calls. And so far that was just what he’d done.
“In the hangar at LAX.”
“At VIP courier?”
Lucian had advised Olshling to arrange this delivery the way he arranged any transport—use the same courier service and work with them the same way. Do nothing out of the ordinary. So it was no surprise that the man on the other end of the phone knew the name of the courier.
“Yes.”
“In about five minutes two trucks will pull up in front of the hangar. If anyone is standing outside other than you, they’ll keep going. Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
“Please open the crate. Have the man driving the forklift bring it outside, leave it on the lift, leave the lift running and go back inside. We have someone on one truck who will take care of inspecting and loading the sculpture.”
“Not until I’ve seen the paintings.”
“Impatient?”
“No, cautious.”
“We’ll deliver the paintings to the hangar after we’ve inspected the sculpture.”
“I’m sorry, I can’t let you have it before I look at the paintings and ascertain that they are the same ones I saw last week.”