by Shawna Seed
CHAPTER TWENTY
“Some of what I’m going to tell you will sound crazy,” Genevieve began. “But please just let me get to the end.”
“Sure,” Julien said, settling back in his chair.
“OK, last week, my mom’s college roommate called me from Chicago, and... Wait. Maybe that’s not the best place to start.”
Genevieve thought for a moment. “Oh, actually, it’s as good a place as any. Christine called me, and I told her about this project, and she said that freshman year, my mom talked about Galerie de l’Étoile and David Lazare.”
“Really? How did she know about my family?”
“I don’t know,” Genevieve said. “Christine didn’t know.”
“Oh! I get it,” Julien said. “You think somebody sent you the gallery catalog because they knew about this thing with your mom?”
Genevieve had been so preoccupied with other things that this connection hadn’t occurred to her.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe.”
“I was supposed to listen, and I’ve already interrupted you,” Julien said, gesturing for her to continue. “I’m sorry. Go on.”
“Christine told me that my mom kept kind of a journal, and she thought maybe I would find some answers there. That’s one of the reasons I went back to Texas, to see if I could find these journals.”
Julien’s expression was mildly puzzled, nothing more. So far, so good. Genevieve prepared herself for the harder part.
“My mom, um, she... she went to this women’s college in Pennsylvania, and she was only there a year. Well, not even a year. She had a breakdown and left school. And, um, she struggled with what they thought were mental health issues and... I told you, I guess, that she died in a fire, but, um, I didn’t tell you that it was ruled a suicide.”
“Wow. That’s awful,” Julien said. “I’m sorry.”
His expression was kind, but Genevieve could tell he couldn’t quite figure out where she was going with this.
“Christine told me my mom was sort of fixated on David Lazare. When I went through her notebooks, there was a lot of stuff about him, including a sketch.”
Genevieve opened the folder that held her mother’s notebooks and turned to the sketch.
“That’s pretty amazing,” Julien said. “I guess she must have done it from a photo? Where did she get a photo, I wonder?”
Genevieve closed the notebook and placed her palm on the cover. She didn’t want Julien to start leafing through it and see her mother’s frantic scribbling. Grace McKenna had been dead for a quarter-century, but Genevieve still felt protective.
“Christine described several instances where she would wake up and my mom would be missing from their room. My mom describes those times as incidents where she...” Genevieve paused here to take a drink of her latte. “My mom believed that she was physically in, um, another place and time. Like, the 1940s. Where she, um, at some point encountered your uncle.”
“Whoa.”
“I know, it sounds crazy,” Genevieve said. “But it would account for how she could draw such a good likeness of him.”
Julien’s eyes widened. “Genevieve, you don’t really think that.”
“At some point, my mom became consumed with trying to warn David that his life was in danger. She believed she could save him.”
“That’s a sign of what? Schizophrenia?”
“According to my dad, the doctors then said she had grandiose delusions. But by the time she died, they had diagnosed a bunch of different things and tried different treatments. Like my dad said, it’s not like there’s a blood test or any definitive way to make a diagnosis.”
Julien put his hand on her arm. “Genevieve, what happened to your mom is really sad, and I’m sorry you went through that. But I don’t see where this is going.”
Genevieve fiddled with the folder where she’d placed the pendant, stalling for time. If she stopped here, Julien would think she’d over-shared about her mother’s illness, nothing more. Would that be so bad?
Why had she chosen Julien Brooks as her confidante, anyway? Why not her father or Christine? She told herself that she was trying to spare them painful memories of the difficult path they’d traveled with her mother, but was that really true?
She’d just spent several days with D, her best friend, a woman who knew everything there was to know about every pharmaceutical on the market. Even with a crisis of his own at home – actually, two crises now – Thomas would try to help if she asked.
But no, she had chosen Julien, who was now watching her, waiting.
Genevieve turned her chair to face him head-on.
“A few weeks ago, I had a weird... Well, I thought it was a dream. No. I should back up. First I had the strange thing that happened at the casino. You saw that.”
Julien frowned. He didn’t like where this was going.
“I had this sensation of things sort of sliding out of focus and this bright light above me, and then it was like... I snapped back to where I was. Then it happened again later that night. The light was the same, and I was...”
She paused. She would not tell him that she was naked.
“I was in a room with bright sunlight streaming in, and I was looking at a bare wood floor, and my sense was that I was holding a pose. For an artist. Like I said, I thought at first that it was a dream, although it didn’t exactly feel like a dream.”
Julien sat up straighter and crossed his arms. Not a good sign.
“It happened again a few days after that. It was the same room, same light. A man was holding my arm and trying to force my hand open, to take something, and I wouldn’t do it. I heard something clatter to the floor, and I looked down, and I saw this glint of something gold.”
Genevieve pushed up the sleeve of her sweater. “A couple days later, I noticed these bruises.” The marks had faded to a sour yellow.
“Then Mona was batting around something on the floor, and I swept behind the sofa, and I found this.”
She pulled out the plastic bag holding the gold pendant.
“It was right after you’d been to my apartment, that night we had Thai food, and at first I thought you put it there, because I’d seen you looking at the watercolor.”
“Why would I...”
Genevieve didn’t let him finish his question. “I thought maybe you were trying to mess with my head. So I asked my friend Thomas to find someone who knows jewelry to take a look.”
She pushed the copies of the academic’s notes toward him. “He says it’s Florentine in origin, mid-1800s. It’s not a knockoff. I looked at it against the photos, and I think it’s the pendant those generations of Lazare brides wore, the one your mother told you Théodore Lazare originally bought.”
Julien opened his mouth to say something, then stopped.
“When I was at my dad’s house, he went out while I was going through my mom’s stuff. I was looking at the notebooks, and at first none of it made sense, and then I got to the sketch. I felt everything sort of start to slide, and then I felt like I was somewhere else, it was nighttime, and someone was there next to me, and I was scared, and there were voices. They sounded German. They moved away, and then it was like the clouds cleared and moonlight streamed in and I could see that it was the same room. The man said one thing to me, he said, ‘Neuschwanstein,’ which is why I think maybe some of your family’s stuff was sent there.”
The words had poured out in a rush. Genevieve paused and took a deep breath.
“And then I sort of came back to myself. I was back in my old bedroom. I went out to talk to my dad, and he asked me where I’d gone. He said he came home from the store and looked for me and I was gone. And later that night, on the floor in the room, I found this.”
Genevieve pushed the handkerchief across the bar toward Julien. His silence unnerved her, and she began to fumble through the assembled folders.
“I made copies of the notes from the academic who looked at the pendant,” she said. “
Here, those are for you. And the pendant – I think that belongs with you, obviously. I didn’t have time to copy my mom’s journals, and I don’t really want to let those go, but I can do that tomorrow maybe, and...”
Julien gathered up all the papers she shoved at him, squared the corners, and tucked them into one of the folders. He took the pendant from the plastic bag and dropped it into the breast pocket of his shirt.
“Is that everything?”
His tone struck Genevieve as cool, almost amused.
“I guess so. Yes.”
“OK, then.” He stood.
“OK then?”
“Look,” he said, “I don’t know who put this whole idea together, but I have to hand it to you, except for the last 15 minutes or so, you people are pretty good.”
Genevieve stood, alarmed. “What do you mean?”
“I’m kind of surprised you got past Henry, because he said he vetted you before he hired you, and he’s as cynical as they come,” Julien said.
He ran his palm along his jaw, grinned ruefully.
“But I’ll admit it, you suckered me pretty good. You people did your homework. Put you in my path in Vegas and knew what to hit me with: gorgeous woman, smart, funny, a little bit vulnerable. Geez, even a redhead. Did you know, or was that just luck?”
He looked Genevieve up and down. “Wait, are you really a redhead?”
Genevieve recoiled as if she’d been slapped.
Julien crossed the room in a few long strides, the folder tucked under his arm.
He stopped at the door. “It’s a pretty good con. You even managed to get me to come up with the idea of sending you to Paris. And then I guess you’d find new leads to pursue so you could keep billing us, huh? But you lost me with the time-travel thing, or reincarnation, or whatever it is. I don’t believe in that science-fiction crap.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
After Julien left, Genevieve curled up on her bed, still in her clothes. Mona gave her the evil eye but grudgingly made room.
Genevieve stared at the wall, thinking about her mother.
She always said the only thing she remembered about her mother was sitting on the sofa after school, leafing through art books.
But that was a lie – a lie she told others, a lie she told herself.
She remembered afternoons when her mother would retreat to her bedroom and close the door. Genevieve’s father would come home from work and ask, “Where’s your mom?” Genevieve, engrossed in a Brady Bunch rerun, would just shrug and point.
She remembered whispered, urgent phone conversations and then her grandmother would arrive, cheerful and bustling, to pack Genevieve’s suitcase. She remembered going into her parents’ darkened bedroom to say goodbye to the woman curled up on the bed. Sometimes her mother would squeeze Genevieve’s hand and say, “Sorry, baby. Be good for Grandma.”
What had her mother believed, in the end? Did she see herself as a person with an unusual ability, misunderstood and persecuted?
Or did she think that the doctors were right, that she was delusional?
And which would be worse?
Did she wish, as Genevieve did, that she’d never mentioned anything to anyone?
What was done was done. Genevieve had learned her lesson.
Julien Brooks, she vowed, would be both the first and last person she would share this secret with.
But what to do now?
Obviously, her contract with the Lazare descendants was finished. Would Henry demand she return the money he’d paid so far? She could make a case that she’d earned it. She’d done the preliminary legwork and put together a blueprint another researcher could follow. But if he wanted his money back, she wouldn’t fight him. Her Hilliard severance check would arrive soon; she could use that to pay Henry back.
Then what? What probably made the most sense, she realized, was moving back to Texas. D would let her stay in the guest room as long as she needed, and there always seemed to be jobs in Texas, albeit at minimum wage. Selling Monet posters and Mondrian mouse pads in a museum gift shop wasn’t the best use of her master’s degree, but she wouldn’t starve.
How would she explain to D what had happened, though? To her father? To Thomas?
It was too overwhelming to think about. Genevieve closed her eyes.
Her phone woke her around 4 p.m. She wandered out to the living room to find it and checked the display. It was Thomas.
She let the call go to voicemail, powered the phone off and went back to bed.
When she woke up again, her apartment was dark. Genevieve turned on the lamp and checked the time. It was nearly 8:30.
She briefly considered changing into her PJs and turning in for the night. But she was hungry – her last meal had been a muffin at the Dallas airport.
Genevieve got up, moved a load of clothes from the washer to the dryer, fed Mona again and grabbed her laptop. She was thinking pizza rather than Thai.
Sitting cross-legged on the bed, she debated whether to check her work email. Would Henry Lazare fire her via email, or would he call? She decided not to check; what was the point in finding out she was fired at 8:30 at night? It could wait until morning.
Instead, she clicked over to check her personal email to see whether there was anything from Thomas. She felt bad about avoiding him. Not bad enough to turn her phone back on and call him – she wasn’t ready for contact with the world just yet. But she did want to see whether he’d sent an update about Philip’s situation.
There was nothing from Thomas, just the usual spam and an email from NoJumpingFromBridge, which was the name of her neighbor’s band.
Genevieve opened that one, thinking it would be an update about the lights along the driveway, perhaps an apology for turning them off. But no – her neighbor said he was in Cleveland on tour, an important package had been delivered to his house, and could Genevieve please retrieve it and hold it in her apartment until he came home? He didn’t want it to sit on the porch overnight.
She hit the reply button, intending to tell her neighbor no, she would not retrieve a package. But he’d helped her and Philip maneuver her sofa into the apartment while Thomas called out unhelpful instructions, and he’d once knocked on her door to let her know she’d left the Camry’s lights on.
She hit the cancel button.
Sighing, she put on shoes and grabbed her keys.
It was a moonless night, and Genevieve carefully picked her way down the driveway in the dark. The wind was up, and she shivered, wishing she’d grabbed her jean jacket.
A palm frond skittered down the street, which was empty. Whenever she went back to Texas, Genevieve got a lot of comments about the glitz and glamour of LA, but her little corner of it was pretty quiet at night.
She cut across the lawn and up to the neighbor’s porch, scanning for signs of a package. There was nothing. No package, no sticky note from the delivery company, nothing but a Chinese takeout menu rubber-banded to the doorknob.
She pulled that off with a satisfying thwack and stomped across the lawn and then back up the driveway, composing in her head the email she would send to her neighbor, who A) inconsiderately interfered with the outside lights – in defiance of the landlord’s directives, which B) compromised her safety and then C) asked her to retrieve a package, which D) he hadn’t even bothered to verify had arrived. Said email would contain many bullet points, she decided, and make her neighbor feel very, very bad.
It wasn’t until she got to the gate for her courtyard that she noticed the light above her door – which was on a timer – was dark.
Before she could process that, a man grabbed her from behind, one arm wrapped around her chest, the other hand clamping over her mouth before she’d even formed the thought to scream.
Frantically, she tried to remember what she’d learned in the self-defense class she and D took in college. Was this the Bear Hug or the Rear Neck Grab? Was she supposed to sink her weight or turn and strike?
The man began dragging
her backward, and Genevieve’s instincts took over. Her left arm was pinned, but her right was free. She opened her mouth and bit down on the man’s hand as hard as she could. In that first startled moment, he relaxed his grip just a little, and she drove her elbow back into him.
She knew she was supposed to aim for his windpipe or his groin, but it was dark, and she had no idea how tall he was. She was fighting blind. She did a half-turn, hoping to get enough of an angle to drive her fist – and her keys – into his groin, but he was ready for that. He grabbed a handful of her hair and yanked, causing her to yelp in pain.
He wrapped his arm around her throat this time. She remembered the self-defense instructor’s grim face as he described a woman’s limited options against the Choke Hold.
She tried jabbing her keys against the man’s thigh, but it had no effect. He began to drag her again; it appeared he planned to take her into the brush behind the apartment.
If only she’d had the Camry’s alarm fixed! Then she at least could have hit the alarm button on her car key, which might have attracted someone’s attention.
With reserves of strength she didn’t know she had, Genevieve drove her keys again into the man’s leg, bit his hand, twisted in his grasp, anything to gain room to maneuver. In the struggle, she dropped her keys.
He tightened his arm around her throat, and Genevieve saw a bright light.
So this is how it ends, she thought.
But then the man turned, and she realized that the bright light was a pair of car headlights climbing her driveway. Genevieve could hear the engine coming up the grade.
The man flung her against the courtyard wall and took off around the corner of her building as Julien’s silver Audi appeared.
Genevieve’s head hit the corner of the concrete wall with an audible crack, and she immediately felt a warm trickle down her neck. She put her right hand up to stanch the flow and sank to the ground.
Julien jumped out of the car, leaving the door open, and ran toward her.
As he stood over her, illuminated from behind by the light from his car, she raised her left hand in supplication.