“I was really hoping to get you,” Periwinkle Sweater confided. “If that’s okay.” She forced the bottles into my hands before I could protest.
I played dumb. “Why me?”
“You’re Nora Black, aren’t you?”
I nodded. “Yep. That’s me.”
She took a white t-shirt from a designer hobo bag. “Can you smell this for me?”
The woman behind her had been staring a hole in my direction. When I glanced at them, they quickly averted their gazes and tried to look as if they weren’t trying to see if their friend was successful in whatever shenanigans she was trying to pull off.
“I’m sorry. Sniffing clothes isn’t one of the jobs I perform.”
She clucked her tongue as her eyes widened. “But the newspaper...”
“See Jackie,” the woman in the lemon-yellow jacket scoffed. “I told you that letter wasn’t real.” She nodded at me. “I’m sorry, ma’am.”
“But I have to know if Tucker is cheating on me,” Periwinkle Jackie insisted. “He came home last night with someone else’s scent on him.” She pushed the cloth up to my nose, and the scent of cheap perfume, ripe with alcohol, made me turn my head. I slapped her hand away from my face.
“Your friend’s right,” I told the desperate woman. “But if you suspect he’s cheating, he’s probably cheating.”
Jackie’s eyes glittered with tears. “I knew it,” she seethed. “See, Loretta, I told you he was cheating. Ms. Black saw it.”
“I didn’t?—”
She cut me off. “That son-of-a-birch tree.” She was sobbing now. “I’ve given him the best years of my life.”
I frowned. The woman couldn’t have been more than twenty-one. “The best years are still ahea?—”
Jackie cut me off again. “He won’t get away with this.” She scrunched up the t-shirt and squeezed it with both fists.
Loretta, the light-jacketed voice of reason, tried to, well, reason with her friend. She put herself between Jackie and me. “Ms. Blackdidn’t sayAdam was cheating.”
I arched my brow as I got a good whiff of her perfume. The scent was light as if on the verge of wearing off, but it wasn’t hard, with my sensitive nose, to recognize it.
“You all need to buy something or leave,” Gilly stepped in. She pointed to the door. “Now.”
Loretta and Jackie scurried out. Gilly could be menacing as heck when she wanted.
However, the Purple Sweater friend took four bottles of body spray to the counter: Lavender-Sandalwood, Very Berry, Mint-alyptus, and Citrus Blast. “I’ll take these,” she said quietly, giving me an apologetic nod.
After she checked out and left the store, Pippa and Gilly turned to stare at me.
“What?” I asked.
“Is Adam cheating?” Pippa asked.
“What she said,” Gilly added.
“You both know the scent has to be tied to strong emotions.” I gave them a wry look. “But yes, he’s definitely cheating. And it’s with her friend Loretta.”
Pippa gasped as she leaned over the counter. “You saw that?”
“No.” I shook my head. “Loretta was wearing the same awful dime store perfume I smelled on the t-shirt. Plus, her eagerness to stop her friend and discount any assumptions about my saying he was probably cheating, well, it was a simple matter of putting two and two together.”
“To add up to infidelity,” Gilly finished. Her first husband, Giovanni Rossi, had been a cheater. Luckily, her new husband loved her the way she deserved. And if, for some reason, that ever changed, I knew several ways to get rid of the body.
I shrugged. “It doesn’t take a psychic.” The fact that I hadn’t gotten a vision from the scent on the t-shirt only meant that the cologne hadn’t been memory-inducing for Adam or Loretta. Not every odor had a sentimental attachment.
