The Scent Keeper(50)

But I was through with fiction. The only reason I’d willingly gone back to school was the computer. At lunch, I went to the library. The first thing I did was search for nurseries in the city. There were forty-nine. Forty-nine. A map popped up: bright red markers scattered across a grid of lines and colors that looked bigger than the ocean.

I remembered Jessie, our summer worker, strong and adventurous, talking about the city.

There are so many people, you can just get lost. In a good way.

I couldn’t imagine a good way. And I knew that I couldn’t just go, not into that seemingly endless grid. I needed something—a clue. But how to get it? My life was like a series of locked doors, and it didn’t much care for giving me keys.



* * *



I changed course, shifted my research back to my father. I had the librarian teach me how to sort my searches by date, then I typed in John Hartfell, and clicked on the earliest hit.

THE POWER COUPLE OF SMELL

THE DAILY SUN

MARCH 12, 1999

The smell of your grandfather’s pipe. Your first-grade teacher’s perfume. One whiff transports you back in time. Now imagine being able to access those memories whenever you want them. Think a Polaroid camera for smells.

John Hartfell and Victoria Wingate exploded onto the olfactory scene last year with the Nightingale, a sleek, fit-in-your-hand device that captures the scents of our memories and preserves them forever. Overnight, Wingate and Hartfell revolutionized the way we think about smell, but as we found when we visited them in their modest home, paying attention to scent is nothing new to them.

They are the quintessential yin and yang of couples. John, the quiet scientist. Victoria, the vibrant businesswoman. They met at a fragrance company where John had the enviable job of traveling the world, finding new scents to use in everything from high-end perfumes to dish soap. Victoria was what is called a “nose,” in charge of creating those fragrances.

“We like to say we had a very traditional relationship,” Victoria says with a laugh. “He hunted and gathered. I cooked.”

The idea for Nightingale came when the two were at a restaurant one night and a young man offered to take their picture with a Polaroid camera.

“It just struck me,” Victoria says. “We want to capture our lives, and photos are wonderful, but what if we could do the same thing with scents?”

She stops, gazing off for a moment toward a world the rest of us can’t see.

“Smells hold memories,” she continues. “For just a moment they let you travel through time. We wanted to create something that would let you have that feeling, whenever you wanted.

“Once we had the idea, it was all up to John,” she says, and gives him a loving smile. “He’s the scientist.”

Nightingale hit the market in time for Christmas, and turned Victoria and John’s tiny company, Scentography, into a massive success story. Sales of Nightingale were triple the initial projections of 10,000 units in the first three months. Rumors of an IPO for the company later this year are already buzzing. If Nightingale continues its astonishing flight, something tells us we’ll be coming back to visit this power couple for an article in our Houses of the Rich and Famous issue.



A photo had run alongside the article. The man was so young and clean-shaven it was hard to recognize my father in him. The woman beside him was stunningly beautiful, with long, dark curls and pale skin. Her smile was luminous; his was uncomfortable. I could just imagine how little my father would have liked all that attention.

As I looked closer, however, I noticed something else: a silver-gray scarf, tied in a loose, elegant knot around the woman’s neck. I knew that scarf. I had burned it.

I sat there for a long time, and then I went back to the list and worked my way through the links. The story they told was not a good one. A flurry of breathless articles gave way to investigative reporting and angst-soaked accountings of marriage proposals and births and vacations lost forever. Apparently there was a price for memories, and lawyers were happy to name it. Victoria Wingate was mentioned in the articles, but more and more often as one of the duped, and vitriolic denunciations of John Hartfell began leaping off the screen. Then he went missing, and Victoria went on television, pleading for the return of her child. The press reported it all avidly.

But, as the reporters liked to say, John Hartfell had disappeared as completely as the scents his invention had promised to capture. The Nightingale machines were recalled, Scentography went bankrupt, and after a while the search for John Hartfell faltered, then seemed to stop.

I heard a bell ring and glanced up at the clock. Three P.M. I had been in the library all afternoon. No one had come to find me; the librarian sat at her desk, seemingly oblivious to my presence. As I left, however, she leaned forward on her elbows.

“Just this once,” she said, and I wondered what she thought I’d been searching for.



* * *



I didn’t know what to do with the information I’d found. When I got back to the cove, I checked the mailbox, but it was empty, so I walked the wooden boardwalk to the restaurant that used to be the whalebone museum. It was empty now, too, dark and shuttered for the off-season.

I slipped in the side door and sat in one of the red leather booths. I closed my eyes, trying to remember how it had smelled that first day when I’d found the bones floating in the air, but all I got was the slippery odor of French fry oil, a lingering after-scent of fish. One story covering another.