The Scent of Shadows sotz-1

by Vicki Pettersson

  Olivia. Be Olivia. I took a deep breath. “Uh…not quite myself, actually.”

  “I know what you mean.” He ran a palm over the back of his neck. “I’m sorry for your loss.”

  I wanted to say it’d been his loss too, but the words backed up in my throat. “How long have you been following me?”

  “Just today. Well, yesterday too. I had some sort of misguided notion you needed protecting, but that’s probably just my own guilty conscience at work.” He laughed again, but it was too bitter to be funny. “I was going to help you with those guys back there, but you seemed to take care of them too. You must get that all the time.”

  Yeah, I’d taken care of them, all right. I looked at my shoes, flecks of cement on the bright red bottoms, and felt my own guilty conscience spring to life. “Did you need something, Ben?”

  “I did…do, actually.” He reached for his back pocket. “Can you tell me anything about this picture?”

  I knew what he was going to show me even before he pulled out the photo. The mug shot must’ve been taken the night Ajax attacked me in Valhalla. I recognized the suit hanging slack on his body. I’d given him the injury that lay bandaged on his neck. Shit, I could practically smell the rot through the photo paper.

  I swallowed hard and handed the mug shot back. “Terrible lighting. But at least he doesn’t have his chin resting on his fist. I hate that pose.”

  “It’s a mug shot, Olivia,” Ben said through gritted teeth. “You’ve never seen this guy before? Sure you don’t know him?”

  “Oh my God!” I said in mock alarm. Ben straightened expectantly. “Puh-lease don’t tell me this is one of those guys from that blind dating reality show. I knew I shouldn’t have given them my number.”

  “Never mind,” he said, sighing, and I could practically see him deflate. After a long silence he said, “I know it probably doesn’t matter now, but what about that night? Do you remember anything at all about…anything at all?”

  “I’m, uh, still working through all that.” I looked away like I didn’t want to talk about it—and I didn’t—but I wasn’t fast enough to miss the way his lips thinned in frustration. Ben had never looked at me that way before. Like he was disgusted. Like I was weak.

  Then he sighed heavily…and I didn’t like that at all.

  “Look, Traina, don’t get all huffy and impatient on me, okay?” I said, my high voice rising even higher with indignation. “I’ve had some memory loss. There’s a lot I can’t recall.”

  “I’m sorry, of course.” His face softened. “But if there’s anything you can remember about Jo, about that night, anything…you’ll call, right?”

  I nodded, a soundless lie.

  “I don’t know—” he began to say, then stopped before trying again. “I don’t know if she told you about our date, or if she got the chance, or—”

  He swallowed hard, and I watched his throat work. The throat I’d kissed and nuzzled just weeks earlier. I knew what it smelled and tasted like, and suddenly I knew the words that were going to come from it. “Olivia, forgive me for dredging up the past, but there’s something I’ve wanted to say for a long time now.”

  I shook my head, felt the mass of blond hair bounce. “Ben—”

  “Please, let me say it. I should have said it to Joanna, but I didn’t, and now—” He broke off, face crumbling.

  I bit my lip, nodded once, and braced myself for what I was sure would be a heartbreaking speech.

  “I just wanted to say I’m sorry.”

  Genuinely surprised, I drew back. “For what?”

  “Being weak. For not standing by your sister when she needed me. I caused you both pain.” His voice broke again, and the words I’d been expecting came through in that awful sound.

  Tears welled in my own throat and eyes. “She never blamed you, Ben.”

  “I know. I hated myself enough for the both of us.” He ran a hand through his hair, causing it to stick up further in wild, curly tufts. “God, I think I was afraid she’d end up like my mother, just this shell who’d once been vibrant and beautiful and solid but who’d let one man change her, and hollow her out.”

  Ben never talked about his parents. I was so surprised he was doing so now, with Olivia, that I remained silent.

  “He told me it was my fault, you know. He said that’s what happened when a man couldn’t take care of his woman, and as much as I know he was just saying it to hurt me, I think a part of it sunk in. Not here, but here.” He pointed to his head, then his heart.

  “Your father was an ass, Ben.” I didn’t care if it sounded like Olivia. It was something he needed to know.

  “I know.” He nodded. “But those words stayed with me. I let them torture me, just like my mother let his words destroy her, and I lost out on the chance to know who Joanna had become—lost a whole fucking decade—just so I could imagine her as she was.”

  “You were young.” A tear slid down my cheek, and I brushed it away, hoping he hadn’t seen.

  “She was younger,” he said vehemently. “So were you.”

  “What happened that night made us all who we are today,” I said, trying to calm him. “And Jo…Jo liked who she was.”

  He nodded after a bit. “I liked who she was too.”

  He’d stopped ranting, but the sorrow rising off him was twined with such guilt and fury and denial that the sickly combination, oily and raw, would eventually eat him alive. “Ben, please,” I said softly, moving closer. “You have to let her go.”

  “She did not come back into my life in the eleventh hour just to let me know what I was missing!” The words burst from him so fiercely, it was as if they’d been gathered on the tip of his tongue, waiting for a lit fuse to ignite them.

  “Shh.” Jesus, I thought, stepping back. “Okay, Ben. It’s okay.”

  But that was a lie, and he shook his head violently, knowing it. “And there’s more to this whole thing than a botched break-in and two people falling to their deaths. I know it!”

  “How do you know?” I said quietly. “You weren’t there.”

  “I know because I know Jo!”

  What could I say to that? A part of me thrilled to hear those words. But if he didn’t leave this one alone, he was putting us both in danger again. I hardened myself to his sorrow. “This isn’t one of your mysteries that need to be solved, Ben. You can’t put a happy ending on this one.”

  “Then I can at least get an answer that satisfies me.”

  “The police say she died.”

  “I don’t care. She came to me that night, Olivia! She came to me and we made love, and she was supposed to be dead already—” Shit. He was right. “But she was in my arms, warm, alive, and—”

  “I saw her, Ben,” I finally said, hating to hurt him, but seeing no other way. “I saw her fall.”

  He was silent for a long moment. “The papers said you couldn’t remember anything.”

  Oops. “That’s the last thing I remember,” I said. “I’m sorry. She’s gone.”

  His jaw clenched stubbornly. “Then I want to find out why. Why’d she return to your apartment, huh? Why didn’t she just go home? Why did she leave me at all?”

  I turned away to pace, to try and think this whole thing through, though I hardly knew where to begin. I didn’t know how to act because this life as Olivia, as a crime-fighting heroine, was not yet fully mine. But there was one thing I did know. I glanced back at him. “You’re not working with the police on this, are you?”

  “I told you,” he said, not meeting my eye, “I’ve taken a leave of absence.”

  I shook my head. My God. He’d gone vigilante. The department said it was an open and shut case; I was sure Warren and Micah had worked hard to make it so. Now Ben, of all people, was opening that door again.

  “No, Ben. This is not what she wanted,” I said, before correcting myself. “It’s not what she would have wanted.”

  “Oh, Olivia.” He looked at me like I was hopelessly naive. For one moment
I actually thought he was going to rumple my hair. “Vengeance is exactly what she wanted. And I’m going to get it for her.”

  “Ben,” I said, my voice a sharp contrast to his overly solicitous one. “That wasn’t what she was doing. That wasn’t the goal.”

  “Really? Did you ask her? Because I did. I asked what she’d do if she ever found the man who attacked her, who attacked you both. She said she’d kill him.”

  I had said that.

  “Joanna was often glib that way.” I swallowed hard, thinking fast. “But what she really wanted was to face that man down and let him know she’d survived it. That she’d survived him. She wanted to look that…that monster in the face and let him know not only didn’t he kill her, but he didn’t break her.”

  Ben’s jaw set stubbornly. “‘It is better to be violent, if there is violence in our hearts, than to put on the cloak of nonviolence to cover impotence.’”

  Yeah, and thank you, Mahatma Gandhi, for that one.

  I pretended I didn’t hear him, and put a gentle hand on his arm. “Don’t let this break you, Ben. Joanna wouldn’t want that.”

  For a moment I thought I’d gotten through. His face cleared and he looked young and lost, but it was only for a moment. His expression hardened again, and shadows seized his eyes.

  “Stop looking at me that way,” he said softly, jerking back from my touch. “Everyone’s looking at me like I’ve lost it…”

  You mean like the way they used to look at me.

  “…like I’m crazy, and I don’t know what I know. But I know what I saw, Olivia! Joanna was in my bed and in my arms at the time they’re saying she was already dead…” Shit. I was going to have to ask Warren how to clear up that one. “And I may be angry, sure, but I’ve never been clearer on what I need to do. In fact, I think I’m more in my right mind now that I’ve been in, oh, at least a decade.”

  And I couldn’t help but notice his eyes did look clear. But his scent was that of futile regret, and his guilt had soured upon him.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, catching my look. This time he was the one to lay a hand on my arm. Olivia’s arm, I reminded myself as his touch shot a tremor through me. “I shouldn’t have come to you with any of this but…you’re all that’s left of her.”

  “I know.” And at least I could give him that comfort. I pulled him into a hug, resting my palms on the hard plane of his back, and for a moment—just one—I let myself go. I shut my eyes and hugged him like I was me and nothing had changed and there was still a storm brewing on the far horizon. I pretended we’d never left the restaurant that night, and wondered if Ben could feel the regret of that decision in my arms. I squeezed harder, because maybe through the force of that hug I could put him, us, back together.

  Yet the reality was we had lost one another. Again. There was no fixing this, and I should have just said to him there were no answers to be found. Only the truth, which he could never know.

  “I’m going to find him, Olivia,” he said, his promise warming my head, ruffling my hair. “I’m going to hunt him down, just as Joanna would have, and this time I’ll kill him. I’ll take away everything and everyone that means something to him. I’m going to annihilate his world so thoroughly he’ll never be able to piece it back together.”

  “I have to go now,” I said, pulling away, hating his words. Hating who he reminded me of. Hating, I thought, the scent of rot seeping through each syllable.

  “Okay, but you’ll call if you remember anything, anything at all?”

  “I’ll call,” I said, practically tripping over myself to get away from him.

  “Olivia!” I stopped, closed my eyes and turned back slowly. When I opened them he was standing just as before, but he didn’t look as angry from a distance. He just looked alone. “You know when I first ran into Joanna again I gave her this generic list of attributes, characteristics to tell her how well I knew her…or thought I knew her.”

  I folded my arms over my chest. “I bet stubborn was on that list.”

  At least he could smile at that. “Yeah, and so was restless. And impatient. But I forgot one.”

  “Really? Which?”

  “Mine,” he said, his fists bunching at his side. “She was mine.”

  And he walked away, leaving me staring, wordlessly, behind.

  Leave it to Cher to think a nice pick-me-up after a sister’s death would be a spray-on tan. I was ushered indoors, signed in, and naked in such short order that my head was actually spinning, and the sight of the spray gun had thoughts of comic books, construction workers, and even Ben Traina scuttling to the back of my mind. It looked like a machine from Ghostbusters.

  “You want me to spread what?” I dubiously asked the technician for the third time. She was Russian, heavy on the makeup, light on patience, and obviously a great fan of her own product. She muttered something under her breath, sat back on her heels and glanced in Cher’s direction.

  “Come on, Livvy,” Cher said. “You’re acting like you’ve never done this before. Now bend over and show Yulyia your talent.”

  I grimaced as the two women hooted with laughter, but did as I was told, following Cher’s lead.

  “Whoo! Olivia, are you getting dizzy yet?”

  Inverted, I looked over at her. “No.”

  Red-faced, she turned an accusing gaze upon me. “You’ve been eating again!”

  The spray hit my ass before I could reply. Perhaps, I thought desperately, it would help to try and think of something else. Fortunately or not, I had a lot to think about. I wanted to tell Warren about my strange encounter in Master Comics, and ask him what Zane had meant about me being “the one.” I wanted to see if he thought it was all right for me to swing by my old house as Olivia, knowing even if he didn’t, I probably would anyway. I wasn’t the sort of person who took orders easily. Unless, I was discovering, there was a can of tanning solution pointed at my naked ass.

  I also needed to figure out what to do about Ben. And how to do it as Olivia. I frowned, thinking of the time I’d spent studying her home. I’d been all over that apartment in the past two days; read every piece of paper, viewed every video diary, even every recipe she had written down in the place. It was possible she had a safety deposit box I didn’t know about, but I’d found no key, and no mention of one. There was also her beloved computer, but that was the one place I couldn’t access, not that I believed any of the above could help me solve this problem.

  How to stop him? How to help him? How to keep him from getting killed?

  “What’s wrong, Livvy?” Cher said, arms raised so Yulyia could spray beneath her pits. “You’re not talking much.”

  What to say? I’d been half listening to the conversation, and so far it had lacked any meaning, direction, or obvious import. These two seemed to pluck topics from the sky and fold them like origami into something with meaning. For instance, I now knew there were eunuchs in Afghanistan who made more money than prostitutes, that Cher’s mother had decided she needed to share with her adult daughter everything she thought about sex—I had to groan with her on that one—and I’d learned that Yulyia’s motto in life was, “No cheaters, no beaters, no little peters.”

  Call me crazy, but I had the sneaking suspicion that my concerns over my recently acquired superheroine status weren’t going to score very high in comparison with these eclectic topics.

  Or would they?

  “I was just wondering,” I started conversationally, as Yulyia tagged my left pit, “if you could be a superhero, what kind would you be?”

  “You mean to have save me?”

  “Not X-Man and no He-Man,” Yulyia said before I could answer. She motioned expansively with her spray gun. “I want G-Man.”

  “G-Man?” We both looked at her.

  “To help me find G-spot. That’s my kind of hero.”

  “Good point!” Cher exclaimed.

  Too much information. I grimaced and tried again. “I meant what kind of superhero would you be?”
r />   “A cute one, definitely!”

  “With fur-trimmed cape trailing behind as I fly through the night!”

  “Fox fur!” yelled Cher, getting in the spirit.

  “Marten,” Yulyia purred, shuddering delightedly.

  Did this spray kill brain cells?

  “Okay, but other than—you know—cute, what kind of powers would you have? You know, how would you use them to fight evil and save mankind?”

  They both looked at me in a moment of profound silence.

  “The power to make any man fall in love with me!” Yulyia exclaimed.

  “I already have that,” scoffed Cher. “How about the power to have spontaneous orgasms, and never grow old!”

  Yulyia squealed and Cher giggled. I sighed and tried not to breathe in too deeply.

  Fifteen minutes later we were in the day spa’s lounge area; tanned, dried, and wrapped in short terry-cloth robes. I was reclining in a vibrating massage chair, while Cher poured us fizzy water from a pitcher filled with lemons, ice, and cucumbers. About a half a dozen other women were scattered about the room, like a bunch of seals sunning on a rock. But the melodious chatter of dulcet female tones gradually melted into a sea of serenity. I hadn’t been in this environment before. I’d either shunned it in favor of a sports massage, or all chitchat had ceased when I entered any ultrafeminine domain. I was surprised to find the smell of peppermint, cucumber, and estrogen to be a heady and profoundly relaxing mix.

  “Do you want to get French pedicures?” Cher asked, handing me a glass.

  I sipped, and considered making up an excuse to leave, something I’d have readily done only one week earlier. I’d never had another woman look to me for companionship. I knew Cher believed I was really Olivia, but it felt good to be the recipient of her open smiles and concerned attentions. I remembered how fondly my sister spoke of Cher on the video diaries, and for that alone I would have said yes. Besides, I reasoned, what would Olivia do?

  “Why not?” I said, smiling.

  Cher seemed pleased to lead the conversation, and I was content to let her. She started off talking about a new pill that was supposed to shrink the waist, lift the breasts, and put color into your cheeks—being tested on mice as we spoke—then moved on to a story about a lingerie saleswoman who’d copied her phone number from her check and was making threatening phone calls about how many times Cher had sent her back for a different size chemise in magenta rolled silk. At some point, through the rhythm of Cher’s narrative, I began to understand the rhythm of my sister’s life in a way I previously hadn’t. I also began to wonder why I’d never gotten a spa pedicure before. The foot massage alone would have done wonders after a training session with Asaf.