The Scent Keeper(72)
I could do this in my sleep.
* * *
The fragrance landed us the account. It worked so well that Victoria joked the store would have to provide bigger bags for all the purchases, and after that she brought me along whenever she courted a new client. I’d carry a notebook and look demure—her assistant, jotting notes.
“You’re my secret weapon,” she told me. She set me up with my own lab, a small, bright room, its glass shelves packed with every scent I could ever want. For a week or two she stuck around, offering suggestions, showing me techniques, but it wasn’t long before she threw up her hands in mock surrender.
“You don’t need me,” she said. “It’s all yours.”
I dove in, exhilarated as a dolphin with a whole ocean in front of it. I made moods, worlds, memories of things that had never happened. I designed the flowery scents of romance for a jewelry store, but left out a missing note of lust. The sale of engagement rings skyrocketed. I concocted a fragrance for the waiting area of a restaurant, so light and virtuous that the orders for high-end steak went through the roof. Just for fun, I released odors of metal and electronics outside a bookstore, and watched people race inside and put their faces deep inside pages, searching for the rustle of paper, the welcoming scent of ink.
With the right ingredients, I could make people do anything.
* * *
At the end of every day, Victoria would stick her head in the door.
“Come on, worker bee. Time to get some fresh air in that brain.”
I would show her what I’d been doing, and then we’d head home, walking down the halls of Inspire, Inc., while people nodded and smiled in our direction. Their attention was for both of us now. Word was getting around the company about my scents.
Back at the apartment, the messages from Colette were stacking up, the light blinking on the machine. I’d called her regularly at first, regaling her with stories of my fragrances and what they’d accomplished.
“Really?” Colette would say, but her voice came from a distance that had nothing to do with miles, and my calls diminished as the months passed. It felt as if every time I talked with her, I was reminded of Emmeline-from-the-cove. Scared. Unsophisticated. Unable to hold on to her boyfriend. And beneath it all was the uncomfortable question: How did Colette view the current iteration? Each of our conversations seemed to have its own missing base note.
Pride.
But I didn’t want to think about that. I liked this new Emmeline. I liked the way that men looked at her, the praise she’d earned for her talent. The envy, even.
“Are you going to check those messages?” Victoria asked one evening. “They aren’t for me; I don’t use that line for anything but avoiding solicitors.”
“I will,” I said. “Later.” But each new message made it harder to listen to the others.
* * *
One morning in September, Victoria looked up from her coffee and said, “The Daily Sun wants to do an interview with you. It seems they’ve heard we’ve got a wunderkind at Inspire, Inc.”
“A what?”
“A prodigy.”
I fingered the handle of my mug. “I don’t know.”
“It’s time to let my secret weapon out of the box,” Victoria said. “Let the whole world know how good you are.”
I had an image of magazines fluttering through the city like birds. Maybe Fisher would see it, I thought. Maybe Colette and Henry would read it and be proud of me. I remembered discovering the article about my mother and father on the Internet. The photo, the way I’d been drawn into it, into them.
Would you come find me, Fisher, if you knew where I was? If you saw how I look now?
It had been almost a year since I’d seen him. I told myself every night that I didn’t want him anymore—but people lie. My father was right about that.
“Okay,” I said.
“Great. It’s set for two this afternoon,” Victoria said. “Let’s find you a good outfit.”
THERE’S A NEW NOSE IN TOWN
THE DAILY SUN
OCTOBER 2016
In a small lab on the fifth floor of Inspire, Inc., works a young woman with an astonishing story. Eighteen years ago, Violet Hartfell went missing, kidnapped as a baby by a father driven mad by failure. He hid away with her on a remote island, utterly cut off from civilization. He forced his young child to hunt and gather food, convincing her there was nothing beyond the island they called home.
That girl, now called Emmeline, survived the ordeal. In a dramatic turn of events, she was recently reunited with her mother, Victoria Wingate.
“I knew she was special from the moment I saw her again,” Wingate says. “She reads smells the way others read words. She’s an amazing olfactory storyteller.”
Wingate is the founder of Inspire, Inc., a company that creates olfactory environments. If you’ve ever walked into a store and were tempted to buy for no reason you could pinpoint, or walked into a hotel and suddenly felt as if you were on vacation, you’ve probably encountered the work of Inspire, Inc.
Emmeline now works to contribute to her mother’s legacy. In just a few months, she has created fragrances so successful that they are rapidly becoming the gold standard for olfactory branding, increasing sales for companies by a seemingly effortless 20 percent or more.