The Reincarnationist (33 page)

New York City—Thursday, 10:50 a.m.

“Y
ou're going to go to sleep now, Esme. And when you wake up, you'll be Rachel and remember what happened, but you won't be afraid. A part of your mind has always known this story. You just didn't have conscious access to it. When you wake up you'll know that there are things you need to work out, but you'll be confident that you can do what needs to be done. You'll be able to put the memories into perspective. You'll remember what you've seen when you wake up, but you won't be afraid. You're not Esme. Harrison Shoals isn't Blackie.”

Josh watched her face while she slept. The dark lashes resting on her cheek. Her red lipsticked mouth closed tightly around the last word she'd said. There was no eye movement, just the rise and fall of her chest as she breathed.

“Rachel…”

She didn't move.

“Rachel…when I count to three you are going to wake up and feel totally refreshed and clearheaded.”

He waited nervously. This was what Beryl Talmage
had warned him about. He'd exposed Rachel to a new image of her soul in another body in another time, and it was going to be hard work to align the two separate selves.

“One. Two. Three.”

Rachel opened her eyes and looked right at him. Her lovely face was in repose, framed by chestnut waves. There was nothing there to suggest she was in any kind of distress.

“Take your time. You remembered a lot.”

The way the darkness descended on her face, it was as if he'd suddenly pulled the sun out of the sky. Her eyes clouded, her mouth pursed and she bit the lipstick off her lips. Her hands twisted in her lap. It only took twenty or thirty seconds for her to remember most of it.

“He killed me, didn't he?” Rachel asked.

“Not you. A woman named Esme.”

“He shot me and I died?”

“He shot Esme. It happened a long time ago.”

“And he died, too, didn't he? I was holding on to him and he was holding me out over the railing and the ship was listing badly and I had my arms around his neck and I pulled him down with me.”

“Not you. Esme.”

“Was he the man who is Harrison now?”

“Not exactly. Just like Esme is not really you. Let me show you.” Josh took a mug off the desk and filled it with water from the bottle he pulled out of his backpack. Standing, he held out his arm, opened his fingers and let the mug fall to the marble floor, where china smashed into a dozen fragments and the water pooled.

She stared at him as if he'd gone crazy. “What are you doing?”

“We—you and I, everyone—our bodies are the mug.
Our souls are the water. When you break the mug, the water spills out, and while it does change its shape, its properties remain the same. What was in the bottle, then in the mug and now there on the floor is all the same water. You still can see it. I'll get down on the floor and soak it up with a towel, but it will still be the same water that was first in the bottle in one configuration and then was in the mug in another and then on the floor in yet another. That's how reincarnation works. Our souls find new bodies, and along the way we change, the same way the water picks up dust and particles and molds to the shape of the new vessel that holds it.”

“But what do I do now that I know that Titus Blackwell killed Esme?”

“Use the information to help you understand your anxiety about Harrison. Examine your fear of who he is now versus who Blackwell was then, find out if your emotions are grounded in the present or the past.”

“To what end?”

“So you can get it right this time, in this life. End the cycle. Not repeat the past.”

“Repeat it literally?” Her face had drained of color. “If I find out something illegal about his business practices do you think he could kill me to keep me quiet?”

“I'm not a magician or a fortune-teller. There's no rule book to this stuff. We're learning as we go along. I could spout hours of philosophy and theory about the concept of reincarnation, but it would be just that, theory and philosophy, and I don't think that it would help much right now.”

She frowned. “I know you can't tell me this, Josh, but based on what you've seen other people go through, what are the chances that this
is
history repeating itself?”

“The idea that someone who killed you once will kill you again is too pat. This is subtler than that. It's about
the emotion behind the action. If greed was what made Blackie kill in order to protect his secret, then it's possible greed is the emotion Harrison is wrestling with now and that it will affect your relationship with him somehow.”

“I can't breathe in here,” she said as she propelled herself out of her seat and walked quickly out of the room.

Josh followed Rachel down the hall and to the elevators. She jabbed the button, once, twice, waited, jabbed it again, and then took off for the stairs. He stayed with her down four flights, then through a hall filled with giant primitive sculpture that loomed up and seemed to tilt wildly as he sped by and into the main lobby.

He couldn't let her go off on her own. Not so soon after coming out of the trance. People everywhere stared, surely thinking he was in pursuit of her for all the wrong reasons. All he hoped was that no one would try to stop him before he caught up to her.

“Rachel!”

She didn't turn around, but kept going, out the front doors, down the granite steps, onto the sidewalk, where she turned right, ran half of that block and then took another right into the park.

He finally caught up to her inside the playground at the Eightieth Street entrance. She was bent over next to the sculpture of the three bronze bears, trying to catch her breath, and when he called her name this time, she looked up and he saw the tears streaking her face. Behind her, a half a dozen kids climbed on a jungle gym. Shrieking and laughing, they challenged one another to go higher.

“I'm sorry. I just got scared,” she said when he reached her side.

“I know.”

“Can we take a walk?” Her voice sounded young and vulnerable.

He nodded, and they took the path that led past the playground toward a wide expanse of green lawn where dogs were chasing one another while their owners looked on. At the fork, she didn't hesitate but took a left, and for a few seconds they were in darkness as they passed under a bridge. On the other side, she got her bearings, made a move to go right, then changed her mind and turned left.

The route she had chosen was the one he was familiar with, too.

“There's so much I don't understand. Why is this remembering happening now? Why not last year. Or two years ago?”

“I think you responded to what we call a trigger—an event that jump-started your memory.”

“What kind of event?”

“You told me the first time you experienced a flashback you were reading…Do you remember what you were reading?”

“About the excavation of the Vestal Virgins' tomb in Rome in the paper.” She stopped and turned to him, stunned. “Reading about the tomb was my trigger. And the second time it happened I was at the Met, and those curators were discussing the robbery and the murder of the professor in the same tomb…. Josh, is it the same tomb that Neely discovered?”

“I don't know that for sure, but I don't think so.”

“What did they find?”

“They found the Memory Stones.”

“The same stones that I remember?”

“I'm not sure.”

As they walked under shadows cast from heavily leafed oaks and linden trees, Josh told her the story in greater detail than the newspapers had reported it.

“Is that why you agreed to see me that first day?” she asked when he was done. “Because you wanted to use me to help the other archeologist…what's her name?”

“Professor Chase. And no, that's not why. It couldn't have been, you didn't tell me about the stones until today.”

“But it's why you agreed to meet me today and hypnotize me.”

“Rachel, listen, someone's life is in danger and it's imperative that I find the stones that Blackie took.”

“I don't know where those stones are.”

“When you were under you told me about the painting Blackie had bought Esme. Do you remember that?”

She considered this. “Yes. Of course, the painting…” She was seeing it in her mind. “The young Bacchus.” And then her face dissolved into a mask of horror. Something was terribly wrong. Something she couldn't process.

“What is it?” He hoped his guess was right.

“That's the painting that Harrison is brokering. The painting that he bought at the auction. The same painting that Blackie gave Esme. The one my uncle wanted so much and was so angry I didn't get at the auction.”

They'd reached an overgrown part of the park called the Ramble, where it was easy to forget that you were in Manhattan in the twenty-first century. Instead of skyscrapers there were boulders as tall as the trees, and instead of traffic there was only birdsong and the sound of rushing water.

“Help me, Josh. This is all much too much to process. It's coming at me too fast….”

“I will, but we don't have a lot of time.”

“Is it possible the stones are still with the painting?”

“If no one knew about them but Esme and Blackie, and they both perished on the ship, then yes,” Josh said.

“Do you think Harrison knows about the stones?”

“I don't think so.”

“What about my uncle? He's purchased several paintings from the Blackwell's estate. Actually, every painting that the estate has put on the market. Josh—” Her eyes were wild, and she was overwhelmed with the flood of information.

“What if I help you and they find out? If my uncle finds out? Or if Harrison finds out? This could be just the thing that sets him off. If I go with the reincarnation theory, that we keep coming back until we get it right, then what if he's not ready to do it right? Why shouldn't I walk away from him now? Never see him again? Protect myself?”

“Maybe you should.”

“Can I, though? Can I just walk away from him, never see him again? Will I avoid whatever this is leading up to? What happens to me if I just walk away from Harrison and my uncle and from you?”

“I'm not psychic. I've been searching for answers just like you have. I can only tell you the theory.”

“It's better than nothing. Explain it to me.”

“If you buy into reincarnation, then you buy into fate. So if you try to run away, like Oedipus did, you might escape from what you perceive as the danger only to come face-to-face with the real danger at the end of the journey.”

She looked down as she stepped over a large felled tree trunk covered with lichen. “No, I'm sorry. I can't do this. I'm not stupid enough to walk right into a potential minefield.”

“I can't blame you. My problems aren't yours to solve.”

They walked on in silence for another few hundred yards. She was leading them west now, toward an exit. The path looped around and then sloped down. At the bottom, Josh realized he knew this spot. They were right
under the bridle path. He hung back a few steps; he didn't want to be the one to choose which way to go, not now. She'd chosen the route. He had assumed the path she'd taken had been somewhat arbitrary, that she'd certainly been too upset to plan a course. But on some level, some part of her must have known where she was taking them, because there were no coincidences and they had arrived at the Riftstone arch.

“Do
you
believe in fate?” she asked.

Standing in its shadow, he looked at the bridge. “I don't know what I believe.”

She followed his glance and stared at the rough-hewn stone structure. Almost as if she was in a trance, she walked up to it and put her hand out, touching the rock with her fingertips.

“Josh, do you have lurches, too?” she asked as she turned around to face him again.

“For the past year and a half.”

“What was your trigger?”

“I was in an accident.”

“Were you hurt?”

“Yes, I was almost killed.”

“Where do your flashbacks take you?”

“To Rome. Ancient Rome.”

She stared at him quizzically. “But that's not the only place, is it?”

“No, it's not.”

She was still staring at him as if she was trying to see through him. “The humming…” she said. Then frowned. Shut her eyes, opened them. “Esme had a brother. Did I tell you that?” Swaying slightly as if she were dizzy, she reached out for one of the supporting boulders that held up the arch. “I think they played here. She was worried about him when she was in Rome. She thought he might be sick
because he'd stopped writing—did I tell you that when I was under hypnosis? Did I tell you about my brother?”

“No. Do you know his name?” He waited, not aware that he was holding his breath.

“Percy.”

Her voice sounded extremely loud, and it seemed to Josh that the word “Percy” echoed, bouncing off of the stones. The scent of jasmine and sandalwood blew down over him, and he braced himself. This was no time for a lurch, but now that he sensed it coming, he ached for it. An addict craving his drug. The air undulated around him, and shivers of excitement shot up and down his arms and legs and wrapped around his torso. He wasn't moving, and yet he had that same feeling, as if he was being sucked down into a vortex where the atmosphere was heavier and thicker. He turned around and saw his sister, Esme, standing high up on the highest rock, laughing and shouting to him to come and look at what she'd found.
“A man's gold pocket watch. Someone must have lost it. Look how it shines.”

No. He wasn't Percy. He was Josh.

“Do you remember it here?” Josh asked, unaware he was even speaking out loud.