To her astonishment, he bowed low, then swept an arm toward the Chrysler. “Your chariot, Lady Kendal. The doors stick but it has heat and intermittent defrost. I have never understood America’s love affair with the automobile, but this one, I assure you, knows its way to the Pinecrest Diner.”
He could have had the pick of any car at any dealership in the country, she knew, and yet the fussy man’s clunker charmed her.
“Then it is a very useful motorcar at that,” she said, faking a British accent. “And you, kind sir, are fascinating and gallant!” And playful, she thought. My stars!
A distant car backfired and they both jumped. The Nose attempted to recover his dignity and did the most unexpected thing of the young evening. He laughed. It was a pleasant, satisfying chuckle that trailed off on a merry note at the higher end of the scale.
“Everything okay there, folks?” called a voice out of the shadows, followed by the stark beam of a flashlight.
“Fine indeed, Marcus,” the Nose called back. “With you and your colleagues on patrol, we haven’t a worry.”
“Kind of you,” the security guard replied, “but you can’t be too careful after hours. You and Ms. Spretnak have yourselves a safe evening.”
“That we will, Marcus. That we will.”
The fog piled higher, making their faces indistinct in the spare lamplight.
They arrived at the driver’s side door of the Chrysler, but there he stopped again. “In order for m’lady to gain entry to said chariot, the driver must first gain entry and unlock m’lady’s door, which the key no longer agrees to open from the outside.” He was babbling. She smiled.
He slid the key into the driver’s side lock, jiggled it from side to side, and was rewarded with a promising click. “You must not think we are home free,” he cautioned. “Now comes the coaxing.” He pulled up the door handle with both hands, threw his back into it, and yanked backward, each tug accompanied by what could only be described as a grunt — a fastidious “hunth,” but a grunt nonetheless. Joy was delighted and strangely comforted that the particular Mr. Blankenship was not above grunting.
After a third thirty-second bout of jiggling, yanking, and grunting in combination, Joy laid a light hand on the man’s arm. Blankenship ceased all activity, his intense, determined gaze diverted by the feminine hand.
Joy took hold of the door handle. “I have experience with all manner of things that stick, including but not limited to toilets, kitchen drawers, venetian blinds, and jar lids. Allow me?”
He stood close behind, undoubtedly prepared to jump back into the fray should she find herself in trouble.
She yanked. The door flew open, catching Royce square in the nose. He sat down hard on the pavement with an audible plop, cupped his nose in both hands, and slumped forward with a moan.
Joy crouched beside him, staring in horror. She had clobbered the great Nose right smack in his million-dollar instrument. “Oh, Royce, I’m so sorry! What can I do? Is it broken? Can I see? Let me help, please!”
His answer was muffled but sounded like, “Pine Uhn Uhn.”
“Forget the diner,” she cried. “You need help. Marcus! Marcus, are you still out there?” She was certain she had shattered her friend’s chief sensory receptor and forever ended his career, just as he was entering prime time.
She heard the sound of shoes thudding on pavement. “Ms. Spretnak, I can’t see you! Where are you?”
She stood. “Here, here next to the Chrysler. Hurry!”
Another moan, another “Pine Uhn Uhn!”
She knelt and pulled his head to her bosom. “My poor Royce!
What are you saying?”
He lowered his hands, and she shrieked at the sight of blood seeping from the most sensitive nose on the planet.
“Nine, one, one,” he managed weakly. “Nine, one, one!”
She hardly sensed Marcus beside her or heard the radio squawk and the urgent relay of vital information. Joy reached into her pocket, pulled the cloth from around the flask of Cassandra, wadded it into a compress, and applied it to Royce’s nose.
Joy spent the next seven minutes holding Royce close, gently rocking him; then the fire department and the paramedics filled the parking lot, sirens screaming, lights ablaze, and night turned to day.
The Chevy Cavalier almost drove itself home in the predawn hour. A steady rain began to fall. Behind the wheel, a weary, frazzled Joy Spretnak turned the wipers on and fought back the tears that threatened any minute to spill over. Again.
How could she have endangered someone so valuable to the company? In a Parade magazine interview, Royce had likened a perfumer to a great musical composer passionately combining notes to make a rhapsody. So highly developed were Royce’s olfactory senses, he could analyze a mixture containing a hundred or more scents and precisely tell how much of each had been used to strike fragrance harmony.
How could she have so thoroughly botched the most beautiful and promising night of her life?
The scene played again and again in her mind. Medics stuffing the famous nose with cotton wadding. Mr. Blankenship shouting angry protests, demanding to be seen by his personal physician, a nasopharynx specialist, before they did a thing. She trying to convince the skeptical men in white that he did require extra delicate care and that just as they would not twist the neck of a person with a spinal cord injury, they should not violate the nostrils of an injured perfumer. Royce being loaded onto a gurney, protesting all the way inside the ambulance and raging still as the doors closed. She rousing the Dixon household, their dubious acceptance of her story, them agreeing to meet the ambulance at the hospital.
Her decision not to go to Mercy General was not that difficult to make. The magic of the night had vanished in a very mashed nose, and when she tried to hold Royce’s hand, he had pulled away. The Dixons seemed distant and angry and were probably wondering what she was doing at the office so late. They must think she planned the whole thing or at least schemed to get him alone for whatever nefarious reasons.
No one would ever credit the Nose with initiating an intimate stroll across the parking lot. Probably not even the Nose himself, once he came to his senses.
It was a horrible, embarrassing mess, one everyone could have done without in the last days before the launch. That thought was quickly followed by another even more depressing. Every newshound worth his salt monitored emergency calls on a police scanner. Barbie Silverman is probably at Mercy General waiting for the ambulance!
The one spot of comfort in the midst of disaster were the raccoons, whose eyes burned brightly in the headlights as she headed slowly up the drive of the dark house. She stopped the car short of the carport, tripping the motion sensor and flooding the cement pad with light. There was the burly dad, the dainty mom, and the three coon kids — she’d named them Mr. Sam, Miss Sue, Sister Sal, and the twins Sid and Sadie. She had no idea if she had the gender right on the young ones, but felt the names fit their personalities to a T.
They faithfully waddled into position by the woodpile at the rear of the carport and waited for her to gather her things, scolding her with growls and chatter for staying out so late. Their beautiful ringed markings, clever expressions, and busy hands never ceased to earn her pleasure. She supposed she shouldn’t encourage their freeloading ways, but a bag of doggie goodies every now and then was a small price to pay for their company.
She pulled her keys from the ignition and dropped them into her coat pocket, feeling the flask of Cassandra through the fabric. Sitting there in the car, she thought, Why not? The Nose had said to wait until she arrived home and to just not wear it to work.
She snapped on the overhead light and took out the bottle. Joy caught her breath again at the exquisite workmanship that had gone into the cruet. The pink stem felt cool and creamy-smooth in her hand, the tiny teardrop practically aglow with an inner fire. It was an instant collector’s item that, once emptied, would be next to impossible to throw away.
A thirst to kno
w seized her. She hurriedly removed the cap, and instantly the car filled with the most sensuous and provocative aroma she had ever breathed. It rose and wafted about her face, caressing and drifting along the nasal passages. It bore the perfection of a succulent ripe peach on an idle summer’s day, the intense sweet innocence of warm baby skin, the passionate crescendo of orchid blooms, the insistent musk of young lovers flush with desire.
It brought to her cheeks a flaming heat she hadn’t experienced since she was a novice stenographer fresh out of school. She at once felt more alive than she had in years, and she felt an irrational sense of indiscretion that was not altogether unpleasant.
Cassandra was a phenomenon.
Joy’s heartbeat quickened, and she felt a mad urge to rush from the car and dance with the animals. She dabbed scent on her wrists and behind her ears before she replaced the stopper, returned the bottle to her pocket, and grabbed a handful of crunchy treats from the bag she kept on the passenger seat.
The receptionist stepped from the car, closing the door behind her. “Okay, kids,” she called to her masked friends.
“Come and — ”
The hiker adjusted the headlamp and stopped. There it is again.Dogs or something snarling. Somebody’s yelling! Dog attack?
He hurried on in the dark, following the suburban trail that dissected the south slope of Pigeon Creek Ravine. He glanced up at the lights that illuminated the carport attached to the old frame two-story bordering the ravine. It was isolated from the next closest house by a field and a stand of alders.
Shadows in the carport, one large and hunched over. Other smaller, rounder shadows leapt against the large shadow, some falling back, others hanging on, attached to the bulk of a growing silhouette.
A scream. The hopeless, keening cry of the badly wounded.
Heart racing, the hiker extracted a hatchet from the pack on his back.
The trail bypassed the house. He angled up the slope, fought the brush, chopped at the tangle of Oregon grape.
Another scream. Choking. A woman. He willed his legs to run, fell, slid, stabbed at the hillside with the hatchet. On the night breeze, the smell of blood and perfume and animal stink.
He panted, gasped, lunged up the slope. At the crest he staggered back. A woman, curled into a bloodied ball, lay on the floor of the carport, covered in snarling raccoons. She cried and whimpered, lurched to her feet, grabbed for the door of a car at the carport’s entrance.
With little strength she slapped at the furred fury, bare arms dangling shreds of blouse, flesh raked raw. Bright blood ran in rivulets down white limbs. Her hair was matted with it. The three largest raccoons assaulted her, the two smaller ravished a shredded, red-stained coat on the ground.
He waded into the melee, boots kicking, hatchet and pack swinging. The coons yelped and slashed at him with savage teeth, flying at him from every direction. He stood straddling the woman, dropped the pack, and swung the hatchet backhanded. Two solid blows cracked skulls. The coons yowled and fell away. The hiker dropped the hatchet and wrenched open the back door of the car. He grabbed the woman around the middle with his other hand and arm. With a grunt he threw her facedown onto the car seat.
His back was turned for only a second. Heavy bodies hurled against his legs. Claws and teeth tore the pant legs. Hot needles stabbed his calf muscles. He swore. The raccoons twisted and shook.
Searing pain. With a roar he reared back and slammed the door shut.
The bull raccoon bit him in the thigh and held on. Its eyes stared, vacant as a shark’s. Its growls were as frenzied as a rottweiler’s.
He clubbed it away with his fist, tried not to focus on the streams of blood turning his pants dark.
His hand closed on a garden hoe leaning against the rear entrance to the house. He used it first as a battering ram, then as a scythe. The blade sliced through the air and connected with flesh. A slashing blow left one coon still, and the others shrank back.
The hiker threw the hoe like a javelin, yanked open the driver’s side door of the car, jumped in, and slammed the door behind him. Heavy bodies crashed against the doors and windows. Gnashing teeth clicked against the glass and left smears of pink saliva. After a minute they abandoned the car and fell on the coat and purse lying nearby.
Against the muffled sounds of frenzied fighting and tearing, the hiker heard the woman’s moans. A bloodied hand fumbled in a pocket and produced a cell phone. He fought to steady the shaking that made punching numbers difficult.
“Nine-one-one. What is your emergency?”
“Animal attack! Berserk raccoons! A woman here nearly comatose and bleeding profusely — you’ve got to hurry!” He thought he would wait to mention the intense smell of perfume permeating the inside of the car and filling the inside of his head with the strangest longings . . .
The authorities arrived and managed to shoot and kill two more raccoons before the rest of them disappeared into the ravine.
“Call in the tracking dogs to get those others,” Lt. Lloyd Reynolds of SFPD ordered his men. “I want these dead ones autopsied. Put a rush on it!”
He watched the EMTs treat the deepest lacerations before gently bundling an incoherent middle-aged woman and the Good Samaritan who saved her into an ambulance for the ride to Mercy General.
“If that don’t beat all,” he told the assistant investigator. “She came close to bleeding out, and I’ll bet she has acute shock trauma. It’s a toss-up whether she came closer to dying of her wounds or sheer fright. That hiker deserves a medal and maybe some skin grafts. But can you believe that smell?”
“Lieutenant? Stuff got scattered, but there’s ID in the purse, including a security badge for Azure World. It’s got her photo, a Joy Spretnak. We found this in the pocket of the woman’s coat.” The rubber-gloved officer held out broken shards of a perfume bottle. The alluring aroma that saturated the car, the carport, and the surrounding area had come from that bottle. “You ever know of any other life-and-death struggle that smelled so good?”
“Unbelievable.” The lieutenant felt odd. Unsettled yet somehow stirred. “There’s something else. Notice how deathly still everything is around the scene? The attack is the work of wild animals, yet there are no animals, wild or otherwise, around now. Isn’t this part of the city’s green belt usually teeming with critters? Where have they gone, and who — or what — called the evacuation?”
He was met with a shrug, but he noted that the eyes of his men shifted nervously around the scene. They all felt the eerie silence, yet there was a provocative presence of something inexplicable.
And what in the Sam Hill is the connection between the shooting at the Dixon place a few weeks back and this weird business? Azure World was the common denominator, making headlines for a rare new scent about to debut, and he would bet his retirement that the busted perfume bottle in that coat had held a sample of it. In his experience, there were few if any real coincidences. Certainly none the size of this whopper. Connect those dots, Lloyd baby, and you could make Detective of the Year.
“Interview the neighbors. I want to know everything they saw or heard or know about this lady. I’ll talk to the people at Azure. Ben, I want you to go to the hospital, and as soon as that Spretnak woman finds her marbles, I want you to learn every move she made this evening . . .”
A bright-eyed, clean-shaven detective in what appeared to be a new leather coat emerged from the house. “Lieutenant, we listened to the answering machine. Not much on it. One message from a dry cleaner’s about two pantsuits and a skirt left over thirty days. Another just past midnight from someone identifying himself as Rice or maybe Ross, can’t be sure. Sounds like he was pinching his nose shut when he talked. Funny message. Wanted her to know that right up until he took the edge of the car door in the face, he had been having one wonderful time, and could she please come visit. He has the most amazing news.
Ends the message with the precise visiting hours and detailed instructions on how to find his room at Mercy Gen
eral. I may not be his idea of a dream visit, but I’m pretty good around sick people. I’ll check it out.”
“You do that. I’ll have a chat with the good folks at Azure World.” And the lieutenant would practice his delivery for the next squad room debrief, when he would tell his colleagues he’d been assigned a case that really stank.
Chapter 13
The phone on the other end of the line rang four times before switching to voice mail.
“Cassandra, Fr. Byron here. Your delightful face is everywhere. The news from the market test has even the priests at St. John’s yammering. Speculation at Eucharist is almost unholy, the way everyone is buzzing about ‘the very breath of beauty.’ Lydia thinks it will help her catch a man, as she puts it, but the very thought caused such a severe case of the church giggles that she had to be excused from Communion and catechism both. Kyrie eleison! We need to talk about this explosion in your life. Call me.”
Talk? Who talked to their priest anymore? Therapists, hairdressers, bartenders, pets — that’s who took confession these days. Fr. Byron fumed. Divine forgiveness was no longer sought, because judgment was never passed. Guilt was as outdated as a derby hat.
“Cassie, Fr. B again. So, you can grant interviews to everyone and their poodle, but you can’t check in with your pastor? How many perfumers does it take to — never mind. Crede Deo. Trust God. How’s Beth? Bye.”
Marginalize the church. Render it irrelevant. Like letter writing, who anymore engaged in soul searching?
He banged out the number a third time and chewed another two Tums.
“Hello and thank you for calling. The Dixons are unavailable except through Azure World. Please contact 1-555-5551313, extension 65, and we will see that your call is returned by an Azure World representative. Should this be an emergency, please wait for the beep, then press zero for the operator.”
Fr. Byron’s bellyache intensified. He did not wish to go through an intermediary, so for a moment he toyed with the thought of being an emergency. No, I will not play games. He opted to leave yet another message in the hope they would screen the ones left at their home number despite the recorded brush-off.
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