Vicki Pettersson - The Scent of Shadows

Even as a girl Olivia had a way of moving—through a room and through life—without settling very long in any one place, or at least never long enough to allow anything to really touch her. Some people thought her distracted, others called her flighty, but from a young age, watching her, I had named her Magic.

Wasn’t it magic when a woman could maintain her childlike innocence long after her childhood was over? Or believe that tragedy was an anomaly and the world really was a good place? Or that all people, despite past deeds, were essentially good, and could be redeemed? No, no matter what happened—to me, to her, to our family—the hope in her eyes had never dimmed, and the surety in her smile never faltered.

Of course, Olivia knew the effect she had on others. On men, in particular. I think she believed if it made someone happy to look at her, her job was to give them something fabulous to look at. Despite my disagreement, I was proud of her, and proud to be related to her. She was a pure light. A beacon as bright and compelling to others as a flame was to a bunch of flimsy-winged moths.

Only one other person had burned that brightly in my life. But for reasons I never understood, Ben Traina had preferred the dark.

I stumbled through the grid of familiar side streets, my eyes swollen and sandpaper dry, images of Olivia flailing in death caught like debris beneath my lids. My fatigue was so great it felt like a bowling ball was weighted on my shoulders. All the years of sweat and training and preparation had boiled down to this: I’d been useless under pressure. I’d been helpless, ineffective, deficient…and, as a consequence, Olivia was dead. Olivia was dead.

Olivia was dead.

Veering away from the Strip and the garish, flashing lights canvassing the sky, I crossed into the shadows, where apartments could be rented by the week, trash bins overflowed onto the sidewalks, and alleyways were tagged with scrawling obscenities. I noticed a vagrant asleep on some folded boxes and, thinking of Warren, stopped and leaned over him. I knew he was awake by the shallowness of his breath and by the way he shivered with the cold. I could even smell the dirty blade clutched in the fist he used as a pillow. But the man didn’t stir. He had no idea I was there, and the thought made me want to cry. Even here, among the darkest shadows in the city, I couldn’t hide from the person I’d become.

That was when I knew. No matter how long or far I walked, there was no escaping this new reality. The scents of both the living and dead would continue to reach out to me, and meanwhile I would leave nothing of myself behind.

Spotting a cab idling beneath a lamp post on Spencer Street, I crossed to it at an intersection where the night was deep enough to hide the condition of my clothing and the smudges of fatigue stamped beneath my eyes.

“You on duty?” I asked, bending to address the driver through the open window. He jumped like a catfish yanked from the water.

“Shit, lady! You scared the bejesus out of me!”

“Sorry.”

He nodded once, gruffly, swallowed to regain his composure, then stretched to see around me. “You alone?”

I nodded.

“Well, you look harmless enough.” He jerked his head toward the backseat. “Where you goin’?”

I climbed in, read him the address from the back of the card Ben had given me earlier—God, had that only been this evening?—and tried to continue looking harmless. The driver glanced back at me every once in a while, as if to reassure himself I was still there, but he didn’t try to talk, and the silence stretched between us, like the lights that elongated and snapped through the windows as we skimmed along the surface streets.

I wondered how harmless he’d consider me if I told him I knew he’d just finished a cigarette, and that less than an hour before he’d eaten a hot dog, with relish and mustard, along with a Diet Coke. Prior to dressing for work, he’d also had a quick, nonsweaty bout of sex, presumably with the woman whose ring he wore on his left hand. I looked at the dashboard and the license holding his name and photo. Ted Harris had a dog, but no children. He also had a gun tucked beneath his seat.

I could smell all of it on him.

“I think this is it,” I said. He jerked at my voice.

We pulled up to the house and I paid him with bills Warren had pressed on me before I left the motel. A homeless man with a wad of twenties in his pocket, I thought, shaking my head. Only in Vegas.

“Can you wait? Just in case no one’s home?” I asked, handing him the money through the open window. He took it gingerly, careful not to touch my fingers.

“Sure, lady,” he said, but I didn’t need to see the way his eyes flickered to tell it was a lie. I could smell the perspiration trailing down his neck. Sure enough, as soon as I started up the driveway, the wheels of the cab screeched from the curb and I was left in a cloud of burning rubber and exhaust.

I tried not to take it personally.

The house was not one of the newer tract homes, with their pastel stuccoed exteriors and five feet of space between one neighbor and the next. Ben couldn’t have lived that close to another family, I don’t think. He wasn’t even that close to his own family.

No, this was one of the boxy wood-paneled homes that’d gone up in the seventies, before land was so valuable the builders halved it, then halved it again, and Ben’s sprawling lawn and towering pines were a testament to that more generous era. Though paint could be seen peeling from the faux wood shutters, the window boxes were full of perennials, bright despite the winter chill, and the smell of fresh mulch—clean and damp and musky—reached out to me as I passed colorful pots of bronze and orange mums, dual sentries standing guard at the bottom of the concrete porch.

I paused when I got to the front door, wondering what I was really doing here. Sex was the last thing on my mind. What I truly wanted was sleep; to drift away on a tide of dreams, and wake to find that this night had been a nightmare. One that could be chalked up to something simple, like eating too close to bedtime. Reality, however, was that I had five hours left to decide whether I wanted to be some sort of twenty-first-century heroine—fighting crime on a paranormal plane against other superhuman beings, for God’s sake—or if I could somehow prevent being convicted of killing my own sister.

Tough fucking choice.

So, I raised my hand to knock, paused again, and tried the handle instead. It gave easily, with a soft snitch of the latch, and I was admitted into the womb of Ben’s home. Come , he had said. And then he’d left the door open so I could. Once inside, I was careful to lock the door behind me.

If I’d found Ben intoxicating before—the scent of him, the taste and the touch—my new enhanced senses sent my mind to whirling as soon as I entered his house. He was everywhere, and for a moment I grew so dizzy I had to lean against a wall to catch my breath. God, but he spoke to me. Ben Traina was so wound up in my soul, so intertwined with my past and the young girl I’d started out as—full of hope and innocence—that I think a part of me was expecting to find her here, as well as him. As I looked around his house, at his things, I knew that’s why I’d come. Ben was the only person left who knew me as I was really meant to be.

I did nothing to disturb the silence of the house, moving quietly through the dining room and kitchen, knowing Ben was here, somewhere, sleeping. I couldn’t help but try to scent out another woman’s presence, even if it were just a whiff of perfume long gone stale as weeks, and hopefully months, had rolled by. There was none. Just Ben, and the verdant scent from the small jungle of houseplants shooting leafy shadows at me in the dim half-light. A relieved sigh escaped me as I slipped into the living room. Halfway through, however, I stopped.