The Scent Keeper(73)

Numbers don’t seem to mean much to young Emmeline, who looks not a minute older than her almost nineteen years. She is shy, and seems more comfortable with scents than conversation. Ask her about fragrance, however, and she opens up.

“They’re alive,” she says, pointing to the bottles that line the walls of her laboratory. “They tell me things.”

“Emmeline was like a savant when she first arrived,” says Claudia Monroe, who trained her. “Like she’d been raised by olfactory wolves or something. She had this incredible raw talent. It was a joy to polish it.”

For now, Emmeline seems content to stay hidden away in her laboratory, churning out her magical creations. She has all the air in the world to work with. We can hardly wait to see what comes next.





RENE


I put the article down, my hands shaking. Forced to hunt and gather food? Survived the ordeal? They’d made it sound as if I grew up wearing sealskins. I’d talked with the woman for more than two hours. I hadn’t said a thing about the island, or my father. I’d talked about the sense of smell, about how scents weren’t real anymore, about how Dodge paid more attention to the world around him than most humans.

None of that was in there.

I stuck my head out my office door. I wanted to find my mother, but instead I saw Claudia, heading down the hall, a cardboard box in her hands. Fury rolled through me.

“Olfactory wolves?” I said as she came closer. “Really?”

“Don’t worry, princess,” she said. “Your mother just fired me.” She lifted the box in her hands. I saw a framed photo inside, Claudia and a boy, maybe her brother. For a moment I felt sorry for her.

“She’s using you, you know,” Claudia said. “Like she did me.”

“She wouldn’t,” I said. I was her daughter. Her secret weapon.

Claudia shook her head, disgusted. “You’re just a customer, Emmeline. We all are.”

Figure out their story, and they’re all yours. I remembered Victoria leaning in close in that hot, loud store, telling me a secret. I remembered the glow of her approval for my first fragrance. Claudia had received none of that.

“You’re jealous,” I said, but she just shrugged, as if nothing could matter less to her, and went down the hall, the open flaps of the box bouncing with her steps.



* * *



“Don’t worry,” Victoria told me when I found her in her office. “It’s actually great press.”

“But it’s not true.”

“Sales did go up,” she noted. “They got that part right.”

I shook my head, miserable.

“Come on, Emmeline.” Her voice was friendly, persuasive. “It’s just a story—and a hell of one, really. People will pay attention. Chanel always said, ‘In order to be irreplaceable, one must always be different.’ Take advantage of this.”

“What if I don’t want to?”

Victoria met my gaze, and shook her head. “Sometimes,” she said, “you remind me of your grandmother.”

There was a disappointment, a bitterness in her voice that brought me up short. All I knew of Victoria’s mother was that she had worked in a department store. I’d never even seen a photo of her.

“How?” I asked. Whatever it was, I didn’t want to be like that.

Victoria shrugged. “My mother had a great nose,” she said, “but she never took it beyond the perfume counter. That work doesn’t pay much, so she had boyfriends, one after another. She wasted her talent figuring out which fragrance would catch them. Tabu for the man who already had the white picket fence at home. Arpege for the widower whose wife had loved flowers. And my mother didn’t just wear the fragrances, she became them.” Victoria’s voice had shifted as she talked, changing from sultry to saccharine, ending with everyday disdain. “The irony was, the men never did marry her. Do you see what I’m saying?”

“No,” I said. I was lost in the story.

“It’s simple, Emmeline. Nobody respects you if all you care about is what they think. I learned that lesson early on.”



* * *



But it wasn’t as simple as just not caring. I went back down a hallway lined with curious faces, and shut the door of my office. I thought of Fisher finding that article, of Colette reading it. They’d think I’d said those things.

When Victoria came by at the end of the day, I told her I was working on something, and I’d see her at home. Her brow furrowed, but she left me alone. I stayed in my office, surrounded by scents, listening to them whisper. The susurration of saffron. The sweet reassurance of benzoin. The way sandalwood always seemed to be asking a question, and vetiver always seemed to have an answer. Of all the things I’d heard that day, those were the only ones that made sense. I settled into my chair and closed my eyes, shutting out the rest of the world.



* * *



I awoke with a start from a dream about the cabin. It was as tangible as the chair I was sitting in; I could still smell the pipe smoke. I breathed in, trying to calm myself, but the scent remained, stubborn, beckoning. I paused, sniffing hesitantly.

The smell persisted.

I rose and crossed to the door, poking my head out. There was no one there, just the wake of an aroma. Still half lost in my dream, I followed the scent along one hall, and another, then down a flight of stairs. The building was empty, and my steps sounded huge in the quiet, but the trail was there, leading me all the way to the far corner of the fourth floor, where a door was cracked open, light trickling out.