Carolyn Jourdan - Nurse Phoebe 03 - The School for Psychics (5 page)

He was struggling not to laugh. “What are you seeing now?” she asked.

“
Nothing
. I swear.”

“
Let’s get it all over with right now,” Phoebe said, “What else don’t I know about you?”

“That would be the part t
hat’s the
need to know
stuff.”

“Forget about need-to-know. I’m asking you to tell me right now the stuff that if you don’t tell me now I will
want to kill you for later, because you didn’t tell me now.”

“Wow,” he said. “I
s that Appalachian sentence construction? If so, it’s amazing. Nevertheless, we’re not gonna go there
ever
.”

Phoebe shivered at the implications. She wondered what would happen if she tried to back out now. He turned to face forward and she looked at his handsome profile. It would be embarrassing to flub this mission. Phoebe
was desperate to do a good job.

S
he sat there, frozen with indecision. Then, in the absence of any viable superpowers, she decided to go with her gut, which told her this was a good guy. He was no Christophe, but he was extremely good looking. And he couldn’t see that she was just ordinary looking. It was a unique situation. When she was with him, she would
never
have to worry about her hair, or anything connected with how she looked.

She decided
that except for being secretive, he was darn near perfect. She started the car, and asked, “Where to?”

H
e pointed toward a dirt road that led toward the highest part of the island.

* * *

As they chatted Phoebe called him
Professor
and he said, “Call me J.J.”

She’d already forgotten his first name so she asked,
“What does that stand for?”

“
Jean-Jacques,” he said with an accent, so it sounded sort of like Zsa Zsa.

Jean-Jacques De
Blackmere
, she repeated to herself. It sounded like something out of a medieval romance novel. To be honest, he looked like something out of medieval romance novel—one of the time travelling ones if you needed to explain the shorts and the t-shirt.

Chapter
7.

The mysterious professor
was a great tour guide. He directed her to all the best lookouts and filled her in on the history of the place. Because of its location and elevation, Lanai was cooler and drier than the other islands. Phoebe’s favorite stop was at the pretty stable where they kept horses for guests at the Lodge at Koele. There was something appealing about the notion of a Hawaiian cowboy.

At his suggestion t
hey had dinner on the terrace of Manele Bay Hotel, overlooking the ocean. Eating perfectly ripe local tropical fruit was a new experience for Phoebe. The papaya was a revelation. There was fresh, expertly-cooked fish as well. It was all pretty fabulous, except for her partner being blind and having some gigantic secret.

When she took
J.J. back home to drop him off, he invited Phoebe to follow him into his immaculate cottage while he got them a couple of light jackets. His house was small, but very well designed with a sleeping alcove and a bathroom off a charming central space that served as the kitchen, dining room, living room, and study. He had very few possessions there and everything was neatly arranged so he could find it easily.

They went back outside and sat on the porch steps
in the dark, listening to the ocean. “After I lost my vision,” J.J. said. “I gradually realized I could still see, but in a different way. It’s not visual, it’s more of a sense of pressure. I learned to perceive shapes, and even landscapes, if I was still enough, and calm. And I could sense if things were solid or hollow.

“
Then I realized there was another benefit to being blind. It meant that I had a lot of room for memory, far more than sighted people do. Without the massive bombardment to the senses from normal vision, I was left with a big warehouse that I could use for information storage. So, in retrospect, losing my sight turned out to be a blessing for me.

“
I tell you this so you’ll know I can be of assistance to you. Unfortunately I’ll never be able to share the driving, unless you’re really and truly desperate.”

Phoebe laughed
at that last bit, but shuddered inwardly at the feeling she got when J.J. said it.
Really and truly desperate
was not exactly a rare condition for her, and certainly not since she’d joined
The
School for Mysteries and Psychics
.

The way her life had been going
lately, she knew without a doubt that there would come a time in the not too distance future when J.J. would be driving and she would be the passenger in a car.

It was inevitable.

* * *

They sat on the porch for a while and enjoyed the breeze
after the heat of the day. Then Phoebe went back to the Hotel Lanai where she slept peacefully in her cozy room, under a gently faded Polynesian quilt.

The next day was perfect
. Of course it was. She was in Hawaii! Phoebe told herself to enjoy it while it lasted. Tomorrow, where they were going, it would be winter. The temperature would drop thirty to forty degrees. France would be freezing.

When she arrived
at J.J’s cottage to pick him up, he was sitting on the porch in navy trousers and a blue oxford shirt with a medium sized black duffel bag beside him. “You travel light,” Phoebe said. “You know we’re going to the real world now. I hope you packed for the cold. Can I help you with your gear?”

“It works best for me if I can take your arm and walk slightly behind you.
It helps me anticipate how level the ground is by whether you’re stepping up or down. And this way people won’t notice anything unusual. The dark glasses at night used to be a dead giveaway, but I’m told it’s fashionable now.”

Phoebe
smiled and agreed that this was true. Then she took J.J.’s bag and set it in the back of the Jeep next to her duffle. He got in and she drove them to the main dock where she left the keys under the mat as directed by the rental agent, and they boarded the boat that would take them to Maui.

* * *

Phoebe trudged slowly along the crowded jetway in the queue with a coupla hundred other people boarding the commercial airplane. Ugh. Honolulu to Newark in just under ten hours, then eight more hours to Paris.

She
knew she was being ridiculous. She’d had one measly trip in a private jet and she was hooked. She craved them. She couldn’t go back in time and erase her knowledge of the fabulousness of a private airplane. Once you’d experienced it, you couldn’t bear to go back, but you had to.

On her way
out to Hawaii, Phoebe had dreaded the long flights, but she had tickets in first class on the legs of the westward trip where the planes were big enough to have it. That had made things more pleasant. She felt truly sorry for everyone in economy. The same thing was true for J.J. and her when they flew back to the east, except the planes on the way back were bigger, so First Class was even better.

Her
dread had been for nothing. Air travel was pretty fabulous when you had your own
pod
. Privacy, a bed, and your own television, transformed a cramped nightmare into fun. A couple of First Class pods and eighteen hours later they landed at Charles De Gaulle Airport in Paris.

Ain’t
we a pair?
Phoebe thought, mimicking Tina Turner’s line in a Mad Max film. Here they were—an old maid and a blind man, a late middle-aged Marion Ravenwood and Indiana Jones.
Be afraid world, be
very
afraid
.

* * *

As they shuffled through the long lines at customs, J.J. started up a conversation in French with a gentlemen who’d occupied a nearby pod during the transatlantic leg of the flight. Phoebe loved hearing the rapid speech. French was so beautiful, even when you didn’t understand it.

She heard J.J. say,
merci
several times. The words for
thank you
were part of her microscopic French vocabulary. He turned a happy smile on Phoebe and said, “We won’t need to worry about catching a train and renting a car. Monsieur Brissac has kindly offered to take us to our destination.”

Being driven by a local guy
would be a lot nicer than lugging their luggage through the airport, a train station, and to a car rental place. Phoebe mumbled a wobbly self-conscious, “
Merci beaucoup
.” Then she added, “I’m sure this gentleman’s car will be a
lot
more pleasant.”

“It’s not a car,” J.J. said. “
It’s a squirrel.”

Phoebe looked at him with a puzzled expression, but of course he couldn’t see it. So she said, “A
squirrel
?”

“
An Airbus Écureuil!”

It took Phoebe several beats to decipher what J.J. had said. She
recognized Airbus as an airplane manufacturer, but had no idea what an Écureuil was.

“I
t’s a helicopter,” he explained. “Quite a famous type.”

“A flying squirrel?”
She was picturing some mechanical version of Cinderella’s carriage made from a pumpkin, drawn by mice, and driven by a rat. She wondered what would happen if they were still in the air when their allotted time ran out. At least Cinderella had stayed on the ground.

“Don’t be afraid,” J.J. said.
“They’re the best. They’ve landed one of them on the summit of Mt. Everest!”

Phoebe was afraid to ask how hard they’d hit the summit and whether they’d been able to successfully take off and get home safely.

Apparently Mr. Brissac was able to follow the main points of their discussion because he smiled at her and nodded to confirm what J.J. had said. As soon as they cleared customs, their luggage was magically picked up by two men in suits and transported to a Range Rover. They were then driven to an area reserved for helicopters.

They flew southwest from the airport, which took them over Paris. What a view.
Mon Dieu
, Phoebe said to herself, practicing more of the French she’d learned from American television. Pepé LePew cartoons in this particular case.

As they flew
, their host pointed out an enormous pile of white rock that he identified as Château Chantilly. Phoebe remembered seeing it in a James Bond film. When she excitedly said, “James Bond,” Mr. Brissac laughed and had an exchange with J.J. that had them both laughing.

J.J. translated
what Mr. Brissac was saying, “The Petit Château was built in 1560 for Constable Anne de Montmorency. Now it’s an art museum.”

Phoebe didn’t understand what exactly
there was about the monstrous place that was
petite
, but she decided to let it go. She asked for clarification on the second part of the sentence. “They let a woman be a constable? Is that what you were laughing about?”

“N
o, we were laughing because Anne, which can be either a man’s or a woman’s name in French, would be spinning in his grave to know that the name of a character from a fictional story was more famous than his own, and is now what we associate with his house rather than himself.”

Oh.
Yet another bombastic French nobleman. Megalomania abounded in France. Phoebe refrained from commenting any further and focused on enjoying the grand panoramas of the most beautiful city on earth as they zoomed across it. A few minutes later, the helicopter swooped down to land on the immaculate lawn of a gorgeous château.

“
Esclimont,” said Mr. Brissac to Phoebe. Apparently that was the name of the place. Brissac and J.J. exchanged a few brief sentences. J.J. said
merci
and
non
several times very politely and held up his hands to refuse something, but then he gave in to accept whatever the offer was and the men shook hands.

Phoebe w
as already beyond impressed with getting to ride in the flying squirrel and with the landing at a castle, but then a couple of uniformed bellmen ran out from the fairytale château carrying a set of portable stairs which they placed outside the chopper to aid Mr. B in dismounting.

He left them, crossed
a patch of lawn and stepped up onto a wide terrace outside a row of tall French doors that ran the length of an entire wing of the house. Before he went inside, he turned and waved. J.J. and Phoebe waved back as the helicopter lifted off the ground.

“Wow,” Phoebe said, “I knew things like this happened to other people, but I never thought it would happen to
me
.”

“He likes to come here for lunch,” J.J. said. “The
château is a luxury hotel now, with a Michelin two-star restaurant.”

“He takes a helicopter to
lunch
?”

“Well, from his perspectiv
e he’s merely going home to eat.”

Phoebe was agog. “Home?”

“Yes, he owns this place. What does it look like? Is it nice? I just assumed, what with the helicopter…. Why aren’t you answering?”

Phoebe was so shocked she couldn’t speak. She’d just ridden across Paris in a squirrel owned by a man who owned a castle. Maybe she’d fallen and hit her head and all this was a dream she was having while she was laying in a hosp
ital in a coma on a respirator.

“I hope I didn’t make a mistake by accepting his offer,” J.J. said nervously.

“What offer?”

“I thought it would be a good way to save some money. He offered us lunch and dinner and a room for the night. I turned down the lunch because we have to work, but I accepted
the dinner and room. That’s got to be worth something, I hope.”

“I’d say it’s worth a
coupla thousand dollars,” said Phoebe, then described the palatial residence to him.