Adam's Daughter (33 page)

CHAPTER FORTY

It was nearly eleven by the time Kellen found Nathalie and her crowd gathered in the dark of the Place Denfert-Rochereau. Garrett watched as Kellen was embraced by the group, a multilingual clique of fashionably dressed young people. The warm night air was filled with wine-fueled laughter and the sweet scent of marijuana.

The troupe followed Nathalie down a dark and deserted side street. Kellen linked her arm through Garrett’s and they trailed along. Everyone paused, and two of the men reached down and pried open a manhole cover. There were suppressed giggles as Nathalie admonished everyone to be quiet. Garrett and Kellen watched in astonishment as, one by one, the party members disappeared down the manhole.

Then Nathalie kissed them both on the cheek and descended the iron ladder. Below, in the gloom, Kellen could see the crisscrossing rays of flashlights.

“A party
in a bloody sewer?” Garrett laughed.

“It’s not a sewer,” Kellen said. “It’s the catacombs. Come on. It’ll be fun.”

They climbed down the ladder. Below, the air was moist and cool. It was pitch black. Kellen could hear Garrett breathing and reached for him.

“The candle,” she said.

He retrieved it and took a match from his jacket. He lit the candle, and his face appeared out of the darkness. They were in a narrow passageway. There was an old stone floor and a low, rounded ceiling. Far off, down the passageway, Kellen could see the flickering lights and hear the laughter of the others. There was a strange smell in the air, of something timeless and sacred, like the inside of an ancient cathedral.

“Let’s find the others,”
she said.

They went down the passageway. Garrett had to bend over slightly to keep from bumping his head. The passageway opened into a small, circular room. The other party goers were gathered there, passing around bottles of wine. The flashlights made crazy arcs in the dark. Someone lit candles.

The walls of the room were constructed entirely of human skulls and bones. The bones were worn to a finely polished ochre patina and were carefully arranged in precise rows, like some bizarre, artful mosaic.

“What is this place?” Garrett whispered, unable to take his eyes off the walls.

“The catacombs,” Kellen said. “In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Paris was being rebuilt, and the cemeteries were in the way. The skeletons were brought here. It’s a tourist place now during the day.”

“Charming,” Garrett
said. “And now that we’re here what are we supposed to do?”

There was a shriek of laughter.

“
Cache-cache
!” Nathalie called out, and everyone ran, whooping gleefully down the passageways that led off from the room like spokes of a wheel. The sound of laughter and retreating footsteps echoed in the empty room.

Garrett turned to Kellen. “Hide and seek?” he asked.

She nodded. “Would you like some champagne?” she asked, holding up the sweating bottle.

He eased out the cork and took a long drink. “But no games,” he said, holding out the bottle to her.

She took a drink. “Then let’s take a tour.”

They chose a passageway. It was another dark and twisting tunnel. Kellen held the candle as they walked.

“You have some strange friends,” he said.

“I suppose. But at least they’re not boring.” She stopped and turned to look at him. “I like exciting people.”

“And what, in your mind, makes a person exciting?”

“Oh, I don’t know. You just feel it when you’re around them. They have a madness to them. A sense of danger and of possibilities. They’re willing to go farther and do more. They’re open to more experiences. They’re fearless.”

Garrett stared at her.

"They’re filled with life,” she said.

“Because they party in cemeteries?”

“No, because they have lives of passion.”

“It’s easy to say that,” Garrett said. “And quite another to have the guts to really do it.”

It was her turn to stare at him. She turned and walked on slowly. Garrett followed. They came to another room, smaller than the first, with only one wall of bones. It was marked with a stone inscription that noted the year 1804 and the name of the now lost cemetery.

Kellen turned away from the wall and set the candle on a ledge. She stared down one of the three passageways that led away toward darkness.

“They say these tunnels run for miles under most of Montparnasse,” she said softly. “You could get lost in here forever.”

Garrett took her by the shoulders, turning her toward him. His face was dim gold in the candlelight. He leaned forward and kissed her. Her arms went up to his neck and, instantly, his kiss became harder. His arms encircled her, and his hands pressed the small of her back, pulling her toward him.

Kellen
moved her hands up under his jacket and over his chest and back. She lost all reference to time or place, sensing only being in a floating cool dark void with his body pressed tight against her own and his lips hot and moist on her face and throat.

T
hey stumbled backward and she felt a wall, sharp and cold, against her back. The dark void began to swirl.

He was whispering something, but she couldn’t understand. His fingers pulled at the top of her dress and when he kissed her breast, she moaned and
wound her fingers through his hair.

There was no thought to what they did
. Everything was reduced to an instinctive urgent need.

Suddenly, he pushed her dress up on her thighs. Before she could help him, she heard and felt the ripping of
her silk panties giving way. Her fingers fumbled at his belt.

“Oh, god, hurry,” she
whispered.

The wall ground into her back as he lifted her onto his hips and entered her brusquely, his lips buried in the hollow of her neck. She felt nothing but him, filling her, and then finally, a release so sweet and complete that she cried out, and tears fell down her face.

The cavern flickered back into her consciousness. The air swirled around them, cool and moist. She opened her eyes to see a shadow of their joined bodies on a far wall. Somewhere far off, like a faint echo, she could hear someone calling her name. Different voices, calling for her, over and over.

Kellen...Kellen
. Where are you? Kellen...are you lost?

She felt Garrett’s lips soft on her neck, and she clung to him.

For the next week, they didn’t leave each other’s side. Garrett postponed his return to London, and Kellen called in to work to say she was ill. She stayed with Garrett in his hotel room. Neither of them understood completely what was happening, and they didn’t talk about it.

For seven days
and nights, they were lost in each other’s bodies. They discovered they had an intuitive knowledge of each other’s needs and how to fulfill them. They were both aware of a force at work out of their control, that their being together had a strange inevitability.

“I feel like
I have known you all my life,” Garrett said, “and that I will never, ever really know you at all.”

“I
know,” Kellen said.

On the eighth day, Garrett told her he had to leave
, that he had pressing business in London with his father demanded his attention. They had a quiet dinner in a restaurant on the Left Bank.

“I don’t know when I can get back to Paris,” he said. “As soon as I can.”

She didn’t say anything. She knew in that moment that she had fallen in love with him. It was crazy. She knew so little about him. And he knew even less about her. She had never told him the truth about her background.

“I’ll be here,” she said.

The next morning, she saw him off at the airport then returned to her own apartment to change her clothes. She went to the Trib office.

The editor greeted her with a concerned look. “Kellen, where have you been?”

“At home. I told you I was very ill.”

“We’ve been calling for three days, and there’s been no answer.”

“I’m sorry, I took the phone off the hook.” Kellen sat down at her desk and started to go through some papers.

“There’s an important message for you,” the editor said. “That’s why we’ve been trying to get you.” He held out a slip of paper. “This man has been calling every day. He says he has to talk to you. It’s an emergency.”

Kellen took the note. On it was scribbled Josh’s name and office number. She knew he wouldn’t call her unless it was truly important. She glanced at the clock. It was midnight in San Francisco. She quickly dialed Josh’s home, and he answered immediately.

“Kellen, thank god,” he said. “You got my message.”

“Only that it was an emergency. What’s wrong, Josh?”

“It’s your father.” There was a long pause, and the line jumped with static. “He’s dying
. Kellen, are you still there?”

“Yes...Josh...what, how?”

“There’s not much time, Kellen. Please come home. He wants you.”

“I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

She hung up the phone and sat there for a long time. Her heart was beating so hard she could hear the blood throbbing in her head. Everything around her was a blur. Finally, she rose slowly and went into the editor’s office. She told her stunned editor that she was resigning and returning to the States. She didn’t stop to get anything in her desk or to say good-bye to anyone.

She stopped at her apartment long enough to pack a few things and to drop off the keys with a neighbor.
Out on the street, she paused. Rue de Seine bustled with people, and for a moment she felt disoriented. She realized suddenly that she had only about fifty dollars’ worth of francs.

She walked up to Boulevard St-Michel and into a bank. It was the bank where her father had been making deposits in her name for the last five years. The account now had more than
ten thousand dollars in it. She withdrew enough money for a plane ticket.

At the airport, she caught the first flight to New York. As the jet lifted off, she pressed her forehead against the window and watched the lights of Paris grow dimmer. The steely reserve that had powered her actions throughout the day suddenly broke down, and she began to cry softly.

She was going home. Her father was dying. She was going home.

CHAPTER FORTY
-ONE

In the weeks following Adam’s funeral, Kellen wandered around the house in a stupor of grief and guilt. She blamed herself for not coming home sooner to make things right with her father. She had been selfish, too caught up in her own life in Paris.

But she also blamed her father. Why hadn’t he told her he was so ill? Why had he waited until it was too late? Now he was gone, so suddenly and without a chance for reconciliation. As much as she had mourned her mother, it had not been like this. Even though she had not seen her father in years, she had always somehow felt his presence. But now she had no one. She felt utterly, painfully alone. And suddenly very fragile and very mortal.

The loneliness of the large quiet house was oppressive. Ian was seldom home, spending most his time at the newspaper office or at the club. Tyler was a ghostly presence, hovering in the shadows. Kellen thought often about what Adam had said about Tyler before he died -— take care of your brother. But whenever she made an overture toward Tyler, he avoided her.