The Scent Keeper(70)

Then, even as the customers began shifting away from each other with polite, nervous smiles, there came another scent, lurking inside the jasmine, where it always waited—a touch of indole. A trail that led you downward, into the dirt.

But not enough—the fragrance was still too sweet. It hovered in the store, off-kilter.

“Hmm,” Victoria said, her eyebrows pulling together.

“Wait,” I said.

The want of balance was like an ache in the air. The fragrance reached out, searching, begging for completion. It didn’t want sweet. It didn’t want nice.

And then, out of the skin, the sweat, the very heat of the women’s thoughts, came the missing base note. Keen edged as a knife, it rose to meet the sweetness.

Jealousy.

As we watched, one of the women picked up a cashmere throw and clutched it to her chest. Another sat down on a leather couch, her arms spread out like a claim jumper. Mine.

“Brilliant,” Victoria said, stifling a laugh. “Absolutely brilliant.”





THE MALL


Claudia started speaking even before the door was fully open.

“You’re late,” she snapped. “I’m not paid to—”

She froze like a squirrel when she saw Victoria.

“Ms. Wingate,” she said, her fingers going to the perfect knot of her scarf. “What a pleasure to have you stop by.”

“Hello, Claudia.” Victoria’s voice was as cool and relentless as an incoming tide. “I wanted to thank you for your efforts, but I think we’re all done here.”

Claudia sighed. “Ms. Wingate, I want you to know I did everything I could, but she just doesn’t get it.”

“That’s where you’re wrong.” Victoria considered the charts spread across the table. “What’s the first rule in this business, Claudia?”

“Learn your customer.”

“Indeed,” Victoria said. “And if you’d followed that one simple rule, you would have understood that this girl knows fragrances better than you ever will. I’ll be taking over her training. I’m sure there’s something you can do in the lab.”

Claudia glanced at me, her face pale, and I raised an eyebrow.

It was the most fun I’d ever had in that room.



* * *



Victoria said we should celebrate my new fragrance by taking the rest of the day off. She wanted to buy me some clothes. I had more than enough, I told her, but she was insistent.

“Coco Chanel used to say, ‘Dress shabbily and they remember the dress. Dress impeccably and they remember the woman.’” We were walking across the parking lot toward a magnificent shopping mall. “You want to be remembered, don’t you?”

My mind flicked back to Fisher, and I nodded without thinking.

“Chanel was a genius,” Victoria said, shaking her head in admiration. “She started with nothing but grit and brains, and she fought her way to the top.”

The doors of the department store opened with a sigh, and the smells clamored toward me. Even after three months in the city, the sheer cacophony was overwhelming. I wanted to bolt, but I clenched my teeth and followed Victoria, who wandered through the smells the way others might peruse flowers in a garden. I could almost see her mind, picking and gathering, pruning and arranging, as if all the scents were there for her to do with them as she pleased.

In the end, despite her comments about the importance of clothes, I noticed she paid far more attention to the customers’ fragrances. As we headed toward the escalator, she tilted her chin in the direction of one of the shoppers, breathing in.

“Cinnabar—orange blossom, clove, lily, a touch of patchouli.” She ticked the ingredients off. “That woman picked her perfume in college in 1978, and she’s worn it ever since.” She looked over at me and smiled. “She thinks it defines her. She’s right. And that one.” She nodded toward a woman standing by the leather boots in the shoe department. “Roses and gin, one of those boutique perfumes. She likes the joke of it, but she’s more traditional than she’ll ever admit. I bet she has plenty of fantasies she never acts on.”

It was like the game I used to play, back when I read the bedsheets in the cottages at the cove, tried to figure out who the guests were, what they wanted.

As we started up the escalator, a woman in her midsixties passed us going down, trailing a wake of fresh oranges behind her.

“Did you know,” Victoria said over her shoulder, “that if you put men in a room with just the faintest smell of grapefruit, they tend to think the women around them are six or seven years younger than they actually are?”

I watched the straight line of Victoria’s back ascend the escalator in front of me, and breathed in her scent of the day. It reminded me of the fragrance in the lobby at Inspire, Inc., cool and clean, with just a touch of money.



* * *



We were on our way out of the department store, bags in hand, a lunch of fresh crab salad in our stomachs, when Victoria took a detour.

“Let’s try something fun,” she said, steering me toward the makeup counter. I shied back. “Don’t worry,” she said, and sat me down on one of the tall stools. A ridiculously thin young woman glided toward us.

“Can I help you?” she asked.