02_Coyote in Provence (26 page)

Elena read the email while tears streamed down her cheeks. She was lonelier than she’d ever been in her life. All she could think about was being with Jordan. She stood for a long time, looking at the Mitchell painting and then she walked over to the window. As she looked out the window at the little village below her, she was filled with a deep sense of fear and, at the same time, hope for a new life with Jordan.

 
Perhaps it was time for the coyote to go home.

PROVENCE, FRANCE  NOVEMBER, 2010

CHAPTER 41

The weeks following Jordan’s email had been very difficult for Elena. She wanted to go to California and be with him, but she was still afraid she’d be charged with murder and sentenced to prison. One morning she woke up, realizing that not seeing Jordan again was no longer an option. It was time for her to return to California. And in the very back of her mind was a little voice that kept saying, “Maybe you could find a chemist in California who could make the drug for you. You’ll probably never find one here.”

She’d just finished dressing one morning and was getting ready to walk down to Henri’s when her phone rang. “
C’est
Elena.”

The woman’s voice on the other end of the line began, “
Mademoiselle
Johnson, you don’t know me but I would like to meet you. I am Darya Rahimi, the woman who persuaded the Younts to open up their home to the little girls from Afghanistan. They speak very highly of you and I would like to thank you for the financial help you’ve given them. I’m here in Provence right now, but I’ll be flying back to California tomorrow. Is there any chance you could meet me today?”

Well, this is interesting. Pierre’s wealthy employer. Yes, I would very much like to meet her.

 “I’m just leaving for work, but if you could come to my cottage this afternoon, that would be fine. Will that work with your schedule?”

“Yes. I’ll make it work. I have to spend some time at my plant in Marseille, but I can be at your home around three this afternoon.”

“Perfect. Let me give you directions. I’m looking forward to meeting you.”

Elena put the phone down and stared at it for a moment.
This is someone I never thought I’d meet. Pierre’s employer and the woman who’s been helping little girls find homes in the United States for the last three years. I wonder what she’s like.

The time she spent working at Henri’s passed quickly. Although Monday was usually a slow day for the restaurant, it wasn’t on this particular Monday. The regulars felt they could reclaim their tables at lunchtime, having been reluctant to come on the weekends because of the tourists and the crowds. Elena looked at her watch and realized she had just enough time to get home and fix some iced tea before Darya would be arriving.

“
Bon jour
, Henri. I have a guest coming to my cottage to visit me. See you tomorrow.”

She quickly walked up the hill to her cottage, changed clothes, and took some cookies out of the freezer. She heard the sound of tires on her gravel driveway. Looking out the window, she saw a shiny black limousine come to a stop in the driveway and a beautiful dark-haired woman got out of it.

Elena opened the door. “Welcome to my home. I’m Elena Johnson,” she said as she held out her hand. Darya quickly walked over to her and shook her hand.

“I’m Darya Rahimi. Thank you for taking the time to meet with me.”

“Please, come in. I was hoping we could sit on the patio, but the wind has come up and I think it will be more comfortable inside. I see there is a man with you. Would you like to invite him in?”

“No, thank you. He is my bodyguard and he’ll stay outside, watching the house.”

Elena gestured for Darya to sit on the couch as she placed the iced tea and cookies on the coffee table.

Darya began, “I wanted to meet you and personally thank you for your generous gift. It will go far in helping little girls get from Afghanistan to California. I’ve been doing this for three years, but the economy has taken a downturn and I don’t have the ability to financially help as much as I have in the past.”

“May I ask what your business is?” Elena asked, interested in what the woman did that allowed her to have a private jet, a private chef, a limousine service and a bodyguard.

“Yes, I am the owner and founder of Darya Cosmetics.  I’ve always been interested in women and their health, both physical and mental. I know when I feel that I look good, my life seems better and my mental attitude reflects it.

“I have a Doctorate in Chemistry, so rather than spending my life in some boring lab, I decided to devote myself to helping women by developing and selling cosmetics. Now if I could just find some way to make them look like they never aged,” she said, smiling, “that product would probably make more money for me and help them more than anything else.”

Madre de Dios. Is this a sign? I can almost hear my mother telling me it’s a sign from God. Why else would this woman be here?

“Don’t you have a lot of chemists working for you? Do you miss doing what you were trained to do? I imagine running a large company takes you from that.”

“Yes. I have a lot of chemists working for me, but I personally test every product myself. If my name is going to be on it, I want it to be right, and I trust myself more than anyone else. So yes, I’m still very actively involved in chemistry. After all, every cosmetic is some sort of a chemical compound, nothing more. I know there are cosmetics which are chemical free and organic, but mine aren’t. As beautiful as you are, I’m guessing you probably don’t buy much make-up.”

“Actually, I love to look at make-up. The French drugstores are incredible. I could spend all day there. Let me ask you another question. Do you have manufacturing plants in different countries, and if you do, is there a universal language that chemists use for their formulas, kind of like doctors write in Latin?”

“Yes, there is a universal language for chemistry. It won’t mean anything to you, but a chemist can look at any written formula and decipher it. It’s complicated and I don’t want to bore you with it. But, that’s an odd question. Why do you ask?”

“Please excuse me. I’ll be back in a moment. I have something I want to show you. Help yourself to another cookie and have some more tea.”

When Elena came back into the room, she had a notepad in her hand. “Does this make any sense to you?” she asked, handing Darya the pad on which she’d transcribed Jeffrey’s formulas.

Darya bent over the pad and then raised her head and looked at Elena. “These are chemical formulas. Where did you get these?”

“It’s a long story. They’re mine. They were left to me by my late husband.”

“Well,” Darya said, “I can tell you what the ingredients are and how much of each ingredient it will take to make the product described in the formula, but there’s nothing to indicate what the ultimate product will be  when the instructions are followed. Do you have any idea what the end product is?”

“Darya,” Elena said, taking a deep breath, “for some reason I trust you. I would ask that anything said here today is not repeated or disclosed to anyone. I have my reasons.”

She began to tell Darya the story of how she and Jeffrey had come to buy the Blue Coyote Motel. She went on to describe how Jeffrey had invented the three formulas, slowly gone mad, and eventually how she shot him in self-defense when he attacked her with a knife on that terrible afternoon at the Blue Coyote Motel.

“Darya, the first formula is the anti-aging compound, the second, called Freedom, is the ‘feel-good’ drug, and the third is a combination of them in pill form. I took the anti-aging hormone and Freedom was piped into all of the rooms in the Blue Coyote Motel. Although I didn’t take the pills, I know they worked because people kept buying them. When I was exposed to Freedom, I never had a problem with depression, a condition that had plagued me for years. When I took the hormone, I didn’t look like I was aging. It was truly a miracle. I’m telling you this because I want you to know they work.

“I was able to read what the ingredients are and I looked them up. Although they come from South America, they’re available in Mexico at certain drug processing factories, but they only ship to bona fide laboratories in the United States. Jeffrey went to Mexico hoping to do with a company who would be willing to send him what he needed. He was successful and found someone to send him the processed materials.”

“Elena, do you have any idea what these formulas could be worth? To have something that would stop people from aging and also make them feel good? You can’t put a price on that.”

“Darya, I just discovered these formulas a few days ago on my husband’s laptop computer. I had a software program on it for the motel bookkeeping and I occasionally used it to search for recipes, but that was about it. I’m as surprised as anyone. He always told me his formulas were in his head. I wonder if on some level he knew he was going insane and decided to write them down. To be perfectly honest, I’d love to have one of those pills now.”

“I’m certain I can have them made for you. Actually, I’d like to think about the two of us going into business together. We wouldn’t be able to sell the pills in the United States, but there’s no reason we couldn’t sell them from my plant in Mexico.”

“People buy my cosmetics to look better. If I could offer them something that would make them feel better and also stop them from aging, they’d be standing in line to get the product. This is huge, Elena, absolutely, unbelievably huge.”

“Jeffrey seemed to think it could be when he originally developed it. But after he was no longer eligible for the Nobel Prize and was banished from the scientific community, he didn’t want anything to do with the FDA.”

“I can understand that, but in Mexico there is very little regulation or supervision. Are you planning on staying here or going back to the United States?”

“Well, I’ve met a man who wants me to come to California and says he can help me clear my name. He’s a police detective. I’ve fallen in love with him. I couldn’t bring myself to tell him about Jeffrey and everything else, but I asked him to call my parents when he returned to California. He did and they told him what the police told them, so now he knows some of my story.”

“Elena, let me do this. I have to go to Mexico next week. I’ll call my head chemist and see if we can get the plants to make the pills. If we can, I’ll try to make them while I’m there. Then, we’ll need to talk about what to do next. I don’t want lawyers involved at this point, so let me write you a receipt for these three formulas. I’ll also write a letter saying that they belong to you and I’m simply carrying out a wish by you to determine if they can be formulated. I’ll also state that no one else will have access to these formulas and that I alone will test them. I’ll have the driver and my bodyguard witness my signature. Will that be all right?”

“Under the circumstances, I think that’s fair and I don’t think we can do anything else. I’ve decided I’m going to go to California, to Jordan. After you leave, I’ll make my reservations. I want to spend Christmas with him.  That’s about a month from now. I’m the luncheon chef at Henri’s Bakery and I need to give him plenty of notice so he can find a replacement for me.”

“Let me ask you something. If I can make the pill, and I’m sure I can, will you take it?”

Elena paused for several minutes. “Darya, I don’t know. I don’t want to age and I don’t want to be depressed. Does anyone?”

“No, I might take the pill as well.”

Cornered Coyote

The silver bird gleamed in the blue sky as the early morning sun bathed it in soft golden hues. Flight 714 was on the last leg of its journey, having burned close to fifty thousand gallons of jet fuel on its trans-Atlantic flight from Paris to Los Angeles.

The intercom sprang to life. "Ladies and gentlemen, this is Captain Armand speaking. We have been given permission to land and we are starting our final descent into LAX International airport. The temperature is 61 degrees with 65% humidity, bright sunny skies with no clouds. We hope you had a pleasant flight and we hope you’ll fly with us again. Thank you."

Maria looked out the window. Her breathing became shallow and her tongue dried out. Her body had goose bumps all over it. She couldn’t believe she was coming back to the U.S. She’d thought she would never return to the United States, but a strange twist of fate had brought her back. Memories of the last few years overwhelmed her and she began to sob silently, sobs that shook her delicate frame.

As the giant A380 prepared to land, the undercarriage opened, and the landing gear swung out harmoniously, like the arms of a conductor leading an orchestra. The eight hundred and fifty thousand pound bird came to a slow roll in less than sixty seconds… a miracle taken for granted, in a world that had little time for gratitude.

As she prepared to disembark from the plane, Maria retrieved her black roller bag secured with a red Velcro belt from the overhead bin. Exhausted and suffering from jet lag as a result of the long trip from France, she was oblivious to people looking at her. The stunningly beautiful woman had become immune to the stares she received wherever she went and now they didn’t even register.

She looked nervously at the swirling mass of humanity hurrying to get through immigration and customs. People came to Los Angeles from all over the world; some with faces the color of the darkest black of the African jungles, while others had pale skin which had never been touched by the sun. The scene in front of her was a kaleidoscope of colors: bright tribal clothing from Africa and the Mid-East; sedate colors that people from the northern European countries seemed to prefer; and everything in-between.

She’d thought of little else but Jordan and called him on her cell phone as soon as she landed. Her spirits soared when he assured her once again that he’d made arrangements with law enforcement authorities and there was nothing to worry about. She would breeze through immigration hassle free and soon they could start their new life together.