The Memorist

The Memorist Read Free Page A

Book: The Memorist Read Free
Author: M. J. Rose
Ads: Link
focus on taking deep, even breaths and hold on to the present, but the mystery flooded back with ferociousness she was unprepared for. Not all the years of Malachai’s help or numerous hypnosis sessions or the scientific theories about pseudomemories that she adopted like a creed were a match for the enigma’s power.
    “Are you all right?”
    “Fine,” she said, not wanting to admit—especially to herself—that the ghost of herself as a child had risen up and that the child’s secrets were sucking the present out of the air, making breathing laborious, and that the haunting fears that used to encircle her, reach out with their sharp claws, pick her up and fly her away to a distant dimension, were reclaiming her again.
    Malachai put a glass in her hand. Until she drank the water, she hadn’t known she was thirsty, and then she couldn’t drink enough. Finally, she placed the empty glass down beside the manila envelope and the drawing.
    “What’s real is now,” Malachai said in a familiar cadence. “What’s real is now.”
    Nodding, she concentrated on that. It was one of the prompts they’d worked out when she was just a little girl. What’s real is now. What’s real is now . She used the mantra to regulate her breathing. Shaking her head as if the motion would dislodge her memory, she pounded her fist into the palm of her hand. “I haven’t gone near a piano. I’m not writing music. I haven’t in twelve years. Why isn’t that enough?”
    “Meer, you are being too hard on yourself, this isn’t something that’s your fault. We come back in this life to work out what we didn’t complete in our past lives and no matter how much we wish we could avoid our karmic debt we—”
    Among his other talents, Malachai was an amateur magician who could turn a scarf into a white dove or a problem into a bouquet of possibilities but she wasn’t in the mood to hear him offer up his outrageous explanations.
    “No matter what’s happening, I’m not going back on medication again to live in that fog.” Her voice stretched as tight as the muscles in her long neck.
    “What is it? What’s happening?”
    “The dreads are back,” she whispered, using the childhood name for the pervasive anxiety and terror she used to feel and the dissonant, conflicting chords she used to hear.

Chapter 3
    Vienna, Austria
Thursday, April 24 th —5:15 p.m.
    F or almost three hundred years experts had entered this same private viewing room to pore over treasures soon to be auctioned off. But how many of them had felt their hearts pounding as fast as Jeremy Logan’s was? Closing the door behind him, he turned the brass key in the lock and listened to the tumblers click into place. The inlaid parquet floor he crossed had been restored and the antique desk he sat at had been refurbished many times over but time hadn’t erased the pentimento of the important discoveries made here. Would his efforts today be added to that history?
    At sixty-five, Jeremy was not only the head of the Judaica department of the auction house but the man they called the Jewish Indiana Jones. Over the last thirty-five years he’d recovered hundreds of the thousands of Torahs and other religious artifacts hidden or stolen during World War II. Some he’d dug up like buried treasure, others he’d smuggled across the borders of Communist countries orsecured through brokering deals with dangerous operatives who only cared about the money he offered. Even with all these finds to his credit, the one treasure he’d been searching for the longest still eluded him: the solution to his daughter’s distress.
    And now here was a possibility that he’d found a clue to that puzzle.
    In addition to the whist markers, cribbage board, checkers and chess pieces and playing cards that he could see inside the box, an X-ray of the rosewood gaming case had shown a one-inch-deep false bottom containing a rectangle of either thin cloth or thick paper that even with their

Similar Books

Bone Deep

Gina McMurchy-Barber

In Vino Veritas

J. M. Gregson

Wolf Bride

Elizabeth Moss

Just Your Average Princess

Kristina Springer

Mr. Wonderful

Carol Grace

Captain Nobody

Dean Pitchford

Paradise Alley

Kevin Baker

Kleber's Convoy

Antony Trew