Jane was just about to turn around, when the whiff of gardenias gently wafted across the closet. As suddenly as it blossomed, the scent died.
Odd
, she thought. The dominant aroma in her closet, home and car was American Spirit cigarettes. There were no fresh flowers in the house; no scented candles or soaps that could transmit such a fragrance that Jane associated with doddering, blue-haired ladies. Besides, her olfactory senses had been weakened by twenty-three years of hardcore chain-smoking. She’d heard that when you quit smoking, your sense of smell and taste returned with a vengeance. But it had only been less than four hours since taking her last hit of nicotine. Certainly those senses weren’t re-emerging this soon.
She scanned the middle shelf of the closet. Suddenly, a distinct heaviness set in around her. It was the same weighty feeling that swelled around her chair when she was sitting in the doctor’s office. The air grew thicker, like sticky honey against a cold spoon. Her feet felt wedged into the carpet. An icy shiver cut through her body. Each breath seemed a bit more difficult to take. God, was this the cancer setting in? Was this some tentacle on a tumor that had reached a blood vessel and was strangling the life from it?
Jane lifted her head to the top shelf and noticed a large boot box in the corner. Written in black marker across the front were the words:
PHOTOS FROM HOUSE
. Next to it was a smaller box with the words:
KIT’S/MISC
. in red marker. The scent of
gardenias swept through the closet again, this time lingering a little longer before disappearing.
Yes, it has to be something in one of those boxes
, she thought.
Jane slid the box of photos off the shelf and lifted the lid. A jumble of black-and-white, and color photos were inside—all recovered from her father’s house two years ago when she cleaned it out. She’d never once looked inside the box, preferring to shove the images as far away as possible. Now she was staring into a muddle of memories; hundreds of eyes jockeying for her attention. A seeming innocuous photo on top showed her and Mike, her brother, competing in the annual ski race that Denver PD used to host in Breckenridge, Colorado. Fifteen-year-old Jane stood next to her puny, eleven-year-old brother on a pair of downhill skis that had seen better days. What the bright sun and reflections of the snow masked was the black-and-blue imprint of her father’s fingertips where he’d grabbed her neck the night before during a drunken rage. Jane turned the photo over and dug into the pile. She brought up a black-and-white photo dated
1969
of her father and mother standing in front of the famed Broadmoor Hotel in Colorado Springs. In the photo, her father, Dale, draped his arm stiffly around her mother’s shoulder. Anne Perry had the same sullen, lifeless gaze on her face that Jane always remembered. It was a portrait of sustained suffering. Turning the photo over, Jane noted the words,
Honeymoon.
She shook her head in disgust. The marriage started well below the curb and descended from there.
The scent of gardenias grew. Jane sunk her hand under the mass of photos and felt the edge of a folded document. She lifted it out of the box and discovered her parents’ marriage certificate. She opened it to watch a photo and yellowed newspaper clipping drop to the floor. Retrieving them, Jane was somewhat stunned to see a posed, black-and-white portrait of her mother, still serious in nature but minus the haggard eyes. A dewy glow emanated from her skin as her perfectly coiffed brown hair had nary a strand out of place. Looking at the clipping, there was
the same photo reprinted and a brief announcement that twenty-two-year-old Anne LeRoy of Willcut, Colorado, was to be married to Dale Perry of Denver, Colorado.
LeRoy. Yes, right
, Jane mused. Before Anne became cursed with the Perry name, she’d been a LeRoy. Just seeing the name of Anne LeRoy in print seemed to project an entirely new image of her mother. Anne was infused with a French lineage. Of peculiar interest, though, was that on the back of the portrait photo, someone had written,
Anne LeRóy
with a sharp accent mark over the
o.
While Jane couldn’t be certain, it looked like her mother’s handwriting.
Her mother’s hometown of Willcut, Colorado, was as small town as you could get and had long ago been absorbed into Jasper, Colorado, which sat on the rim of Larimer County north of Denver. Reading that yellowed engagement announcement, Jane sensed a strange incongruity between the photo and the text. This somewhat fresh-faced, chaste woman named Anne LeRoy was going to marry a cop named Dale Perry. Did she think she would be moving up in the world by doing such a thing? Did she feel he would make her life better? Maybe so. But by the time the grim honeymoon photo was snapped, she certainly learned that she’d made a terrible mistake.
The gardenia scent lingered, almost becoming cloying to Jane’s senses. She replaced the box of photos back on the shelf and removed the second box titled,
KIT’S/MISC.
Jane knew this would be anything but normal viewing as her friend was a believer in all things metaphysical, esoteric and New Age. Jane tossed off the lid, expecting to find a spilled bottle of gardenia essential oil. Instead, she discovered a mishmash of items including incense burners, ear candles, a few mood rings from the 1970s, a bag of
sacred dirt
from Chimayo, New Mexico, a small satchel of stone animal totems and a deck of tarot cards. Jane fondly recalled the bag of animal totems that had played a freakish, pivotal role in her life 15 months ago. At Kit’s urging, Jane drew a stone from the bag and uncovered the snake—“the symbol of radical transformation,” as Kit so enthusiastically
exclaimed. That stone had indeed signaled a shedding of the old skin for Jane Perry and was subsequently tucked underneath a mat of grass next to her father’s headstone. As much as Jane didn’t want to believe in all the
boojey-woojey
—New Age crap as she called it—there was no denying the palpable significance of how that silly stone led Jane to solve a headlining kidnapping.
The aroma of gardenias sunk around Jane, shouting its presence. Jane lifted the deck of tarot cards out of the box and set the box on the carpet. “Fucking ridiculous,” she muttered as she slid the rubber band off the deck. She didn’t have the guts to inquire as to her demise. But she just wanted to know…know something…what that
something
was, she wasn’t sure but she needed an answer to…
Jane didn’t think she’d moved her hand, but the deck of cards slid away, cascading downward and sprawling across the carpet. Every single card fell face down, save for one. Jane picked it up and stared at it. A drawing of a middle-aged woman with flowing hair and ribbons of light encircling her body emerged from the center of a blue lotus flower. A single word bordered the card:
MATER
. Jane’s negligible education in Latin decoded the translation:
MOTHER
.
Abruptly, the scent of gardenias evaporated.
CHAPTER 4
The noonday whistle ripped through the seam of silence. At least, that’s what it sounded like to Jane when her alarm clock rang at 5:15 am. With one hand, she slapped the
OFF
button while the other hand covered her ear. It took a few seconds before the reverberating echo drifted away, leaving her in stony, sweet silence. Jane had experienced this acute sense of sound after a night of hard drinking and then the expected pounding
head and sick stomach accompanied it. But this…
this
was entirely different. It was as though her auditory function had suddenly shifted into the realm of a dog’s aural ability. Jane lay on her back and listened. She heard a slight
tick-tick
of a clock, but the one beside her bedside was a digital. The only clock with a second hand was located in the kitchen, down the hall thirty-five feet and around a corner.
Jane threw back the covers and traced the
tick-tick
sound to the kitchen clock. It didn’t make sense. Last night, she smelled gardenias as strongly as if she’d been standing in a field of the heady flowers. But there were no gardenias in her house. Now, sound had become sharper.
Logic…use logic
, Jane urged her weary head. She’d stopped smoking exactly eleven hours and fifteen minutes ago. It was reasonable to believe that things would taste stronger—she’d heard that ad nauseam from people who had successfully quit tobacco. But hearing and smelling things that were distant or weren’t even present? It made no sense.
There was a distinct brutality to how Jane felt—
exposed, vulnerable
. She knew the dance quite well as her battle with the bottle proved nearly impossible to beat. Addiction was a sadistic lover; at once, enveloping you in its arms and then making you beg for mercy. It urged her back repeatedly and then slammed her against the wall, trapping her soul. Each time she gave in and returned, she was less in control; less able to dig herself out of the chasm that held her with sharp teeth. Now that battle would be waged with the nemesis of nicotine. While sobriety had been a hard row to hoe, Jane was beginning to wonder if giving up cigarettes would prove even more difficult.
Noting the time, Jane figured that she could get in a thirty-minute run before leaving for her 7:00 am doctor’s appointment—an early time given to her as a favor from her doctor. She’d been good about keeping up her daily running routine for over a year and a half. Her legs were toned and the sagging skin under her arms had developed into muscle. Jane deduced that she’d have to ratchet up the exercise routine since there was
that inevitable gain of at least twenty pounds when one quit smoking.
Outside, the late winter air was crisp and inviting. Spring was in the air, but winter was still clutching onto the fabric of the Denver landscape. Patches of snow and ice pockmarked with pebbles and dirt lingered against north-facing lawns. Jane pulled the collar of her fleece jacket closer to her throat. Darkness still traced the streets as the orange glow from the streetlamps illuminated Jane’s path. This would be the first test of many for Jane Perry. Her usual habit—albeit an odd habit, given the healthy aspect of running—was to light a cigarette on the porch and take three good drags before dipping the glowing ember into a can of sand that stood next to the doormat and setting off for her run. It was a comforting nicotine sacrament and this was the first morning that the ritual would be retired. Just the thought of that loss made Jane’s irritability jack up another few notches.
Even though the cloak of night had not given way to the dawn, Jane easily navigated down Milwaukee Street. A resonant hum grew apparent to her, accompanied by the aroma of a dryer venting the distinct odor of a fabric softener circling inside the tumbler. It wasn’t until Jane ran another two blocks that she located the house with the humming dryer.
Two blocks.
How could twelve hours of not smoking cause such a bizarre effect?
When she returned to her house, she started her morning coffee, adding her usual four heaping tablespoons of the espresso blend to the coffee filter. But upon sipping the brew, not only was the temperature searing, the taste was overpowering. She checked the filter to see if there was a problem but nothing looked abnormal. Jane could now add two more acute senses to her newfound, overly active body.
An hour later, Jane was seated in the doctor’s waiting room, wondering why the carpet suddenly smelled so pungent. Even though she was the first appointment of the morning, the doctor was still not on time. Her irritation grew with each passing
minute. Her thoughts turned to fifteen-year-old Jake Van Gorden and her impatience piqued. The more she thought about the drive to Midas and the plausible conclusion that the kid was a runaway and the strange notes sent to his parents were his way of getting his parents to pay attention to him…well, it wasn’t what she needed right now. Jane Perry needed to hole up and hide away. That’s why she didn’t hesitate to whip out her cell phone and call Betty, one of her dependable connections in Denver who oversaw a group of runaway shelters along the I-25 corridor. Jane figured that Jake would most likely catch a bus and go south toward Denver, ending up at a shelter when he got hungry or tired.
“J-A-C-O-B,” she spelled it out to Betty on the other end of the line. “Goes by
Jake
.” The more Jane filled her in on the whole situation—including the noose on the bridge to look like a suicide—the more Betty agreed with Jane that it went against the norm for fifteen-year-old boys to be kidnapped.
“Has he got a girlfriend?” she asked Jane.
“No idea.”
“Well, if he’s a runaway, he took his girlfriend. Or he’s meeting a girlfriend somewhere…or maybe a friend on the Internet…”
Jane’s head spun with the various angles, none of which she felt like pursuing. Betty agreed to put the word out and call Jane back soon. Yes.
This is progress
. As Jane slipped her cell phone back into her leather satchel, she enjoyed the fleeting power of circumventing protocol in order to take care of Jane Perry.
The nurse finally arrived and ushered Jane back to the far room at the end of the hallway. After taking a few notes and asking the same damn questions she’d asked Jane less than ten days ago, she handed Jane a paper gown and directed her to the white table with stirrups. She assured her that the doctor would be right in, but she didn’t appear for another ten minutes. It was just enough time to ratchet up Jane’s tension. She closed her eyes and imagined taking a long, hard, satisfying drag on
a cigarette, hoping the visualization would allow her anxiety to abate. But all it did was make her body crave a hit of tobacco.
When the doctor finally strolled in, Jane was met with a usual “how you doing?” chatter that was meant to create some sort of cozy connection between the two of them. But Jane tuned her out. She was more aware of the stainless steel tray singing as the doctor swung it closer. The overhead light demanded to be heard. The sharp aroma of disinfectant stung her nostrils. The clutch of the speculum groaned. The cold knife cut with judgment. Everything around her came alive within her raw, unfiltered, sentient awareness. Jane closed her eyes, desperate to tune it out. But her mind cried,
Life is a struggle…and then you die.