Seduction: A Novel of Suspense (5 page)

Carefully, she stood. Grabbing her dopp kit from the dresser, she hurried to the bathroom.

Jac had never been regular. Stress and air travel affected her menses. Since she’d recently flown quite a bit, she hadn’t paid much attention to missing her period in June. Or in July. Besides, she hadn’t felt different. And people said you did. That you knew. But she hadn’t known.

That’s why, a few days ago, she’d finally bought the test. At home, she unwrapped it and then sat on the edge of her bed and stared at the plastic stick as if it were a priceless object discovered on one of her expeditions in Greece or Turkey or Japan.

She’d just looked at it and wondered what she’d do if indeed she was pregnant. Jac didn’t have a husband or a boyfriend. All she’d had was a moment out of time—a passion resurrected for a few brief nights in Paris in late May—with a man she’d been in love with it seemed, for better or worse, for most of her life. But Griffin was married. Had a family. Was entrenched in problems with his wife and trying to salvage their relationship. Jac couldn’t interfere. If she was pregnant, how would she handle it?

Jac wasn’t like most of her friends. She never imagined herself with children. Never allowed herself to yearn for a baby. She was just too worried she’d be the same kind of mother hers had been to her and Robbie. A childhood fraught with that much trauma causes damage, and Jac couldn’t conceive of damaging another human soul. Would never want to inflict anything like what she’d been through on someone else.

But could she give a child up if she was pregnant? Especially Griffin’s child? Hadn’t she given up much too much already?

So she hadn’t taken the test. Jac had put the plastic stick in her medicine cabinet and decided to deal with it after her weekend with Malachai. Now that wouldn’t be necessary. Now she knew. She just didn’t know how she was going to cope with what she knew.

As she cleaned herself she tried to reconstruct what had happened to her in the woods that had made this happen.

The lightning hadn’t struck her, but it had hit right next to her. For a moment, the flash had blinded her. The resounding crack had deafened her. The earth had trembled. The shock came up through the soil. The power and intensity of it rattled her bones and hurt her teeth. The acrid scent of burning leaves filled her nostrils. She’d jumped back and smacked into the rock’s hard, unyielding surface. Around her leaves fell and branches broke and all the while the rain, the interminable rain, never lessened, never yielded.

Finally Malachai rushed out, dragged her across the moat and pulled her into one of the stone huts, where they waited out the rest of the storm. She remembered he’d helped her take off her sneakers. The rubber soles were burnt and her socks were singed. But her skin was untouched. He’d said he didn’t think any electricity had been conducted up into her.

But wasn’t the proof of its power slowly seeping out of her? And didn’t it mean there was now one more loss to mourn?

As Jac zipped up the dopp kit, she remembered the terrible sadness she’d felt just before the storm struck. And the beautiful but bitter scent. A primordial scent like the forest. Like the stars. She’d recognized it but didn’t know it. If such a thing was possible, it seemed the scent was in her DNA. That she knew it on a very subliminal, primitive level.

Malachai said he hadn’t smelled anything. Hadn’t even really seen what had happened to her because the lightning had blinded him too.

Jac scooped water in her mouth and used it to swallow two painkillers. Then washed her face. Brushed her hair. Put her robe back on and belted it tightly.

Even if the cramps abated, she wasn’t going to be able to sleep again so she didn’t go back to the bedroom. Instead she ventured downstairs. She’d do what Robbie always did, make a cup of tea. Just thinking about her brother helped. She’d call him. Tea and then phoning Robbie. A plan. And right now, she needed one.

The mansion was designed in the gothic revival style of the mid-1800s, so though it was glorious during the day, at night it was ominous. Walking along the dimly lit hallway, she listened to floorboards creak under the carpet and watched her shadow’s progress on the walls.

The grand staircase was two stories high, and she felt dwarfed walking down the steps. Dark oak gothic arches framed the melancholy family portraits that hung at even intervals. The dead relatives’ eyes all seemed to follow her as she made her way to the ground floor.

In the kitchen, Jac turned on the kettle. While she waited for the water to boil she stared out the window over the sink. Weak moonglow illuminated towering trees bending in the wind. Leaves were
flying, even though it was weeks until fall. Jac watched a ten-foot limb break off and sail though the sky, toppling a stone angel off her perch, before crashing into the reflecting pool.

The library was slightly more welcoming. Here at least heavy damask drapes covered the windows and offered a buffer from the relentless sound of the storm.

Jac’s hands were shaking. On the bar, next to the fixings for the martinis Malachai had made the night before, was a bottle of Armagnac. She poured some into her tea and took a sip. The smell was pungent and bracing. The liquid, warm and reassuring.

In this room, like the rest of the house, there was no sense of the present. Modern accoutrements were designed to maintain the conceit that you’d stepped back in time, into another century. Upon first arrival, Jac had found it odd, slightly disconcerting. But now it was an appreciated escape from her reality. As was the scent of leather. The aroma was warm, masculine and dark. Creating a leather—a
cuir de Russie
scent—was a rite of passage for every great perfumer. The leather in this library reminded her of her grandfather’s
Russie
. The House of L’Etoile still produced it, and even though it was marketed as a men’s cologne, Jac often wore it.

As she sipped her tea, she examined the bookshelves, reading the gilt lettering on the spines, imagining the people, through the decades, who had amassed this collection and read these volumes.

A glow emanated from behind a pile of books on the partners desk and she walked around to see what was causing it. It was Malachai’s state-of-the-art laptop. A stark exception in the perfectly preserved nineteenth-century room.

The screen showed a search engine page. Jac sat in the comfortable leather desk chair, put down her tea, typed
lightning strikes
and hit the return key. Within seconds the first of hundreds of thousands of results appeared. Scanning, she clicked on the tenth item, titled “The Body Electric” and read the harrowing story of a woman named Anne Downy who’d been part of a group of kayakers all hit by lightning.

Not everyone in the party had survived. Those that had had been severely injured.

“As millions of volts of electricity pass through the body, brain cells are burned, ‘insulted’ or bruised, which can result in cerebral edema, hemorrhage and epileptic seizures. Passing down through the body, the electricity hits the soft-tissue organs—heart, lungs and kidneys . . .”

A word leapt out at her. She jumped ahead.

“And when pregnant women are hit, either spontaneous abortion occurs, or else they carry the baby to full term but after delivery the infant dies.”

Jac closed the laptop. Then her eyes. The idea of the miscarriage was too large and complicated to grab hold of. She didn’t know how to absorb it yet.

She stood quickly, wanting, needing to get away from the computer. In her haste she didn’t see Malachai’s briefcase on the floor and tripped over it. It fell open and spilled its contents on the rug.

Bending down, Jac picked up the papers, stuffing them back inside the case. Outside the wind continued to howl and the rain to fall. Each time more thunder broke, she involuntarily shuddered. She tried to tell herself that the worst was over now. Or the best. That it didn’t matter that she might have been pregnant. Dwelling on it wouldn’t resolve anything.
This too shall pass,
she intoned silently, repeating her mother’s oft-used phrase.

This too shall pass.

Jac wasn’t paying attention to the documents she put back in the briefcase until her own name jumped out at her from an envelope she was holding.

Jac L’Etoile

c/o Malachai Samuels

The Phoenix Foundation

19 West 83rd Street

New York, NY

The script was heavily slanted, indicating someone left-handed. In mythology being left-handed was associated with Lucifer and black magic.

Turning the envelope over, she saw it had already been slit open. An almost surgically clean cut made with a letter opener. Like the lapis lazuli one Malachai kept on his desk at the Phoenix Foundation, she thought. But why would Malachai open a letter addressed to her?

Jac glanced at the return address.

Wells in Wood House, Isle of Jersey, England

The words were engraved on the expensive, heavy stock. A memory teased her but remained elusive.

Who was it from?

Pulling out the single sheet of paper, she scanned the writing—not yet reading—just searching for a signature.

Theo

Without a last name. She hadn’t known his last name back then either. None of the patients at the Blixer Rath clinic knew each other’s surnames. The institute’s policy was to protect their patients’ privacy.

Jac hadn’t thought about him in years, but now she recalled the strange and wonderful boy she’d met seventeen years ago. How amazing that after all this time, Theo had found her.

It had been summer. The first time she’d seen him, Jac had been walking on one of the mountain paths when she’d turned a corner and found him sitting on the promontory that was her secret place. He was looking out over the countryside and didn’t know she was there until she stepped on a twig.

Theo wasn’t handsome as much as striking. Tall and skinny. His sun-streaked hair was pulled back off his face in a ponytail that exaggerated his already prominent cheekbones and broad forehead. The eyes that were unabashedly examining her were a pale blue, watered down as if tears had drained them of most of their color. He had a haunted expression on his face.

Jac had felt as if he were a magnet and she were a heap of helpless
slivers of iron. She’d never before met someone she was drawn to so swiftly, and her response surprised her.

She was fourteen, with raging hormones and an overactive imagination. Primed for a boy to come along and stir her up. Especially one who aesthetically fit her image of the young Greek heroes she read about in mythology classes.

Jac, like so many girls her age, was not quite sure of herself. Meeting a boy, she became self-conscious and more aware than ever that she wasn’t really pretty, not in a traditional sense. Like her mother’s, her auburn hair fell around her face in Medusa-like waves. Her neck was too long. Her nose too strong. Her eyes were green, an underwater jade, not sparkling but brooding. Jac looked old-fashioned, unlike the girls she saw on television or in the pages of magazines. Jac only recognized herself in Pre-Raphaelite paintings in the museums she visited with her mother. Found resemblances in the heavy-lidded women in nineteenth-century compositions of medieval subjects done in abundant detail and intense colors.

But Theo hadn’t looked at her as if she was out of fashion. He’d stared with curiosity. And as he did, Jac saw heat flush his cheeks that was matched on her own. Unused to feeling desire, caught off guard by it, she turned. And ran.

Jac and Theo had spent the next two weeks dancing around each other—flirting with looks but not ever really talking. They were like any two high school kids, attracted to each other but too shy to do anything about it. Except they weren’t in high school but at a psychiatric clinic in the Swiss Alps that dealt with cases of borderline personalities, schizophrenia and mood disorders.

Patients at Blixer Rath were not locked up. No one was under guard. Only young adults who were highly functional and not deemed dangerous were admitted. The patients were encouraged to make friends with each other and engage in social activities. If they were doing well and had permission during daylight hours, they were allowed to check out to take hikes, go swimming or play tennis with each other during free periods.

Romantic liaisons, however, were not allowed. Alcohol, cigarettes
and recreational drugs were prohibited. Packages were inspected and contraband was removed.

Breaking one rule merited a stern talking-to. Breaking more than one meant privileges were curtailed. Theo broke all the rules. But for a long time no one but Jac knew.

He said rules made him feel like a prisoner. So instead of checking out, he’d sign into the library then leave via an open window in the back of the stacks where no one ever went. He had smuggled drugs in with him when he arrived, somehow managing to escape detection. Mostly marijuana but some more potent illegal substances. He bribed the kitchen help with exorbitant sums of money even they couldn’t resist, and had a steady supply of cigarettes and wine.

Until Theo arrived, Jac had been a model patient. She’d never even thought about breaking the rules. Once she met him, that changed. Because she’d been at Blixer Rath for several months and was trusted, her initial infractions, staying out later than curfew, didn’t alarm anyone.

Not at first.

Dear Jac,

It’s been a long time since that summer we first met. And what a strange summer it was. My biggest regret about my time at Blixer Rath has always been that I left without getting my friend’s surname or any other information about you. For years, I wanted to find you but didn’t know how. In some of my bleakest moments, I even wondered if you were real or a figment of that very confusing time.

To bring you up to date, quickly. I live on the Isle of Jersey, in my ancestral home, with two great-aunts. I own and run a local art gallery I inherited from my mother. I was happily married until six months ago. Sadly, tragically, my wife died in an accident. We were childless.