Perfume

Chapter Twenty - Hit

I knelt down next to him and took the berries in my hands. It was true. They were Atropa Belladonna berries. They were unmistakingly so. And the leaves. I gave him back the berries and took the leaves, spreading one of them over my hand. My God, it was it. A Belladonna leaf. The first Belladonna leaf I had seen in years. I looked up at him with wide eyes. "How?" I asked the strange man. 

     Now that he was closer, I could see he was young. Perhaps mid-twenties. Twenty-four, no more than twenty-six, definitely. He wore a sweater which, once upon a time, had been white, but was now covered in dirt and had a yellowish-brown tint to it.

     "How?" I repeated my question, louder. "How do you have this?"

     He chuckled. "There's a lot more where I come from."

     "Where do you come from?" I asked.

     He stood up, hefting up the sack, and put the berries back in. "Let's go for a walk." 

     I stood up and handed him the dried leaves. He took them and set them inside the bag. 

     We began to walk back to the skeleton, the leaves crunching underneath us. My heart beat fast, not because of the adrenaline but because of the discovery. Of the Belladonna. He had said there were more of them where he came from. More Belladonnas. Where? Could it be possible that the plant wasn't completely extinct?

     "Tell me," I demanded. "Where are you from?"

     "Feisty, just like your father." He laughed. "Meldville, Arizona. There's a little secret society there, I guess."

     My father. He knew my father. Had known my father, I corrected sadly. 

     "What do you mean?"

     He hummed. "Bella, you weren't the only kid who lost her parents during that fire. There are a lot of us. Not everyone, though. Not every kid joined the society."

    A society? It made me puzzled. What did he mean? About not every kid joining the society? What society?

     "What are you talking about....?" I asked, unable to call him anything. I didn't know his name.

     "Jared," he said. "Jared Breitkreutz."

     Kristin Breitkreutz's son. I knew so at once.

     "Jared," I said, "what are you talking about? I don't understand what you're saying. A secret society in Arizona? Not everyone in it? Explain this to me." I shook my head, my feet crunching a twig underneath my feet, and another one.

     Jared nodded. "I was eighteen when the fire happened. I lived in my own apartment near my mom's place and I went to college in the city. I was studying biology. And when my mom died...I knew it was him at once. He had been after them for a while. Had known what they were doing. His daughter dying had been the flame that ignited the powder keg." He swong the bag from side to side as we walked.

     I cut him off. "What do you mean? I'm not following you. He had been after them for a while? What does that mean?" I felt useless, stupid, as he had information that I didn't. Knew things I did not.

     "They'd been hired to produce beauty products, right? With the plant. But they were spending most of their time in labs and here experimenting and looking for medicinal uses. You see, they found useless to use the plant for beauty products. There were already so many other products for that. 

     "Darwin began to notice that they weren't coming up with anything and became suspicious. And he suspected this. Suspected that they were not experimenting for beauty purposes, but for medicinal ones."