The Scent of Rain

by Kristin Billerbeck

  “Besides the excess of leather and chains? I just wish he had a job and a real car. I hate seeing you putting that bucket on your head and driving off in the open air on that motorcycle. I’ve already lost my wife. I can’t lose you too.”

  Ben made the sound of an engine.

  “You’re the one always telling me about God’s will. If it’s God’s will that my head ends up splattered on the pavement—”

  “Abby!”

  “Sorry. Ben, Auntie Abby isn’t going to get hurt.” She turned back to Jesse. “Now you’re judging people by what they wear and they drive? If Spike doesn’t drive a sedan, he’s not husband material? Seriously, that’s Christian? Besides, if someone were to judge you by what you wore, they’d think you’d wandered off the set of Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood.”

  “This is a nice suit!” he protested.

  “For a fifty-year-old man, it is. In your case, it looks like you’re in the suit we buried Dad in.”

  “Don’t change the subject, Abby. Spike has no life plan. Don’t fight me—look at reality. How is a man like that supposed to take care of you? Your life is your own, but I’m old-school when it comes to marriage. I believe if a guy can’t afford a ring, he can’t afford to be married.”

  “Fair enough, but we’re not getting married, so I don’t see what you’re going on about.” She threw the last toy into the box and slammed the lid shut. “Look at reality? You mean, the way I asked you to do with Hannah?”

  At the sound of his mother’s name, Ben looked up. He knew enough to know the name changed the mood of his home.

  “Which should tell you, sometimes love blinds you to certain realities, and that’s not a good thing. Unless you want to end up like me, a pathetic middle manager at a sorry company working for a man who doesn’t know the first thing about running in the black.”

  “Just because you’re miserable doesn’t mean I will be.”

  “I’m not miserable, Abby. I’m saying the reason God gave us the Bible is so we could see how people messed up and try to do better. Actually, you don’t even have to crack the Bible. I’m right here as your warning sign.”

  “You are maddening!” she said through her teeth. “Ben, tell your daddy to worry about Thomas in the tunnel and let Auntie go get ready.”

  “Yes, Daddy. Get Thomas.” Ben nodded his head up and down and bent down to look through the vent’s holes for his long-lost wooden friend.

  Abby disappeared into the hallway but stuck her head back into the living room. “Remember, I saw how special Hannah was from the beginning, but she had all those crazy allergies. Would that have stopped you from marrying her?”

  “What does that have to do with you not listening to me about Spike? Hannah had allergies, not a history of unemployment.”

  “I’m only saying there are no guarantees in life, Jesse. It’s impossible to see all the details sometimes. Spike and I are happy. Isn’t that enough for now?”

  No, he wanted to tell her. It wasn’t enough. A man who could afford to put gas in his hog still wouldn’t be enough. “You just don’t know how special you are, Abby.” He lifted the vent off the floor. “Tell her, Ben. Tell her she deserves the bestest ever! Hey, is there a craft shop nearby where you could get knitting stuff?”

  “What?” Abby peeked her head around the corner.

  “You know, knitting stuff. The new hire knits when she’s nervous, and today in the car she started knitting when she didn’t have any needles.”

  “Are you making her nervous?”

  “What? No. I just thought she’d be less, you know, quirky if she had some knitting needles in her hands.”

  “Take her Hannah’s knitting basket. It’s in the hall closet. No one here is going to use it.”

  “She also does archery.”

  “Who does? The nose?” Abby asked.

  “Daphne. Now who is calling her the nose?”

  The roar of Spike’s chopper could be heard vibrating their city street. “Don’t say anything. I’ll be right out,” Abby said.

  Jesse put the vent back and followed Ben out to the front yard. Spike came into view on one of those ridiculous choppers where his arms were perched straight up, like he was being held up in a robbery. The roar of his engine tore down the street like a tornado.

  Jesse walked with his son toward the motorcycle. For all of Spike’s faults, he was good to Ben.

  Ben clambered onto the motorcycle’s banana seat in front of Spike. Jesse was sure it wasn’t called a banana seat, but it looked just like the one his sister had had as a kid.

  “Hey, Spike, big plans tonight, huh?”

  Spike cradled Ben in one arm and pulled him back, then removed his helmet. “He’s going to be riding before you know it.”

  “Not if I can help it. Abby says you need to talk to me?”

  “We need to talk to you.” He looked down at Ben. “Later. When Ben’s in bed.”

  Jesse got a waft of gasoline off the bike, and the small detail struck him. The gas!

  He had smelled gas at Daphne’s. Something hadn’t been right, but he’d been in such a hurry to get home, he’d ignored his first instinct. The memories shot through his mind now like a meteor shower, and it all made sense. It wasn’t a simple cold as he’d suspected. It had to go deeper.

  Daphne had said nothing about the overwhelming stench of spoiled milk in his car. She hadn’t commented on the soured smell of garlic in the Italian restaurant. Nor the strong fennel scent that wafted off the minestrone. In fact, the only odor she’d referenced since arriving was the baby powder in his office, which he’d tried to use to sop up the week-old spilled Sippy cup that morning.

  “I smelled gas!” Jesse said aloud.

  “Pardon, bro? No worries. I just got gas. Spilled some on the bike.”

  “Huh?” Jesse stared at his sister’s boyfriend. “No, not now. I’m thinking out loud. It’s been that kind of day.”

  He wondered if the stress of moving and adjusting might have blocked out the gasoline smell from the normally meticulous nose, or if it was something more. She was hard to read as it was. And he didn’t know her well enough to wonder if she was acting strangely. The fact was, he had to check. He couldn’t afford another regret in life.

  Hannah’s sensitive soul had been too tender for the world’s pain. If he’d done a better job of protecting her, maybe she never would have needed the pill for sleeping that had been substituted with the deadly antibiotic. All the signs had been there for postpartum depression, but he’d been so ecstatic over Ben’s birth that in his bliss he failed to notice the warnings. What kind of new mother couldn’t fall asleep at a moment’s notice?

  Hannah couldn’t sleep. Every hiccup and sputter kept her awake, and she needed one good night’s sleep. Rather than hear any subtext in her request, he’d called the doctor and gotten the deadly prescription.

  He lifted Ben off the bike and looked to Spike. “We’ve got to run. Got an urgent errand. Tell my sister to lock up.”

  “Motorcycle!” Ben reached toward the bike. “I don’t want to leave, Daddy.”

  Jesse swung Ben up in his arms and sprinted toward the car. “Sorry, buddy. Daddy has to do something.” He opened the passenger door, pulled up the front seat, and plugged Ben into his car seat. “I’ll make it up to you.”

  He sped the roads back to Daphne’s house, convinced he’d look ridiculous, but unable to turn off that inner voice that shouted danger.

  Chapter 11

  Daphne didn’t know where to start. The project of the house was overwhelming, and without her most important sense, she probably didn’t know the worst of it. Her cell phone rang, and by the Rascal Flatts song she knew it was Sophie. She welcomed the interruption.

  “Sophie!”

  “Hey, Daph! How’s the new job?”

  “I think it’s going to be okay,” she answered honestly. “I have a boss who looks like he stepped out of a BMW ad, but he drives an American hatchback and has a missing wife. But he had
my back at a horrible meeting today, and I think we have a great idea for his new product.”

  “That’s not good, though. Missing spouses are never good.”

  “Well, she’s not alive. But it was an allergic reaction. There was no foul play.”

  “So he says.”

  “He said I could Google it, so go ahead if you don’t believe it. Now his sister lives with him, and he has a son. You see what I’m getting at, right? I attract circus acts, not people, into my life. Everyone has to have a story.”

  “Maybe you should have been the psychologist.”

  “Maybe that’s why you’re my best friend.”

  Daphne could tell that Sophie wasn’t saying everything she wanted to say. They’d known each other for too long, and she recognized that another shoe was about to drop. “What is it, Sophie? Just spit it out already.”

  “I wanted you to have more time to heal before I gave you any bad news.”

  “But this is my life, so that isn’t possible.”

  “Mark is making it impossible. I have to tell you.”

  Daphne slipped the letter out of her bag. “I’ve got a letter he wrote to my boss. I’ve been waiting all day to read it. Are you proud of me? I didn’t obsess.”

  “I am proud of you.”

  She searched for a place to sit down and went to the lone piece of furniture near the small living room window: an old sewing table that had seen better days.

  “Daphne?” Sophie said. “Mark took your job at Givaudan.”

  Daphne nearly fainted with relief.

  “Daphne?”

  “I thought he might have, but I didn’t want to believe it.”

  “You’re okay with it?”

  “Of course I’m not okay with it. Why do you think I’m denying the reality by not reading the letter?”

  “Don’t get harpy, I’m only asking.”

  “Mark wasn’t qualified for my job,” she said. “Not at Givaudan, with their training center. I don’t understand it, but it’s an enormous company. Arnaud’s sway must not have reached whoever hired Mark.”

  “Actually, he’s working for Arnaud.”

  “No.” Daphne shook her head. “He’s not!”

  “He is.”

  The betrayal she felt was worse than that she’d felt on her wedding day. Something was wrong with this picture, but she couldn’t think about that now.

  “Arnaud knows you, Daphne. It’s only a matter of time before Mark proves himself to be the fake he is. I just wanted you to hear this from me, and not someone else.”

  “Why would he do this, Sophie? Wasn’t leaving me at the altar enough?”

  “Do you want my professional opinion? Or my opinion as your friend?”

  “Whichever one says that he’s a psychopathic lunatic who shouldn’t be on the loose and he must be painfully good at what he does or he never could have fooled me.”

  “Yeah. That’s it.”

  “I don’t understand. It’s like he’s personally trying to destroy me. What could I have done to him to make him hate me so?”

  “Nothing. You didn’t do anything, Daphne. This is about him.”

  “I did everything right, Sophie. I gave up my job for love. I let my father help us buy a home so we’d have something. Why is this my reward?”

  “Because there’s evil in the world, Daph. Plain and simple. And Mark seems to have more than his fair share of it.”

  She wanted to believe it was all about Mark and his own inferior personality traits, but how did one give up all responsibility for someone systematically taking away the things that mattered to her? If she were anyone else, Sophie would tell her to look within to see what she’d done for her half of the dynamic. And maybe she’d say it yet, when the pain of rejection wasn’t so unrelenting. But it was nearly impossible to believe Mark didn’t have a motive, the way he’d gone about things.

  “But you missed it, Sophie. You’re a professional, and you missed it. How will I ever know what to look for if I missed every possible sign that this man was going to leave me at the altar and take away the one thing that mattered to me?” That wasn’t fair. If she were honest, she’d admit that she’d given the job and her dream away for the price of love. What she thought was love, anyway.

  “I don’t know what Mark’s motives were, but I plan to find out if it’s the last thing I do. I feel that if I can understand him, it will help me somewhere down the line in my professional career. I never liked him, but that’s not enough to provide a diagnosis or to have seen any of this coming. I feel like if I could have seen it, I’d be worthy of being a psychologist.”

  “I think it would make you worthy of being a psychic, and no one expects that of you.”

  “I haven’t told you the worst part,” Sophie said.

  Daphne wasn’t sure she could take the worst part. “Worse than losing my sense of smell? I can’t think of anything that’s worse than that.”

  “Me either. It’s who you are. I think of all those nights you never drank or ate the spicy food while we all indulged, and it doesn’t seem fair.”

  “I’ll get the name of a doctor, a real doctor,” she told Sophie. “I’ll go to the library after work tomorrow. I’m going to rent a car until I figure out what my next move is.”

  “Before you plan your next move, I have to tell you something. That’s not the house your father bought.”

  “What?” Would the sources of betrayal never end?

  “It seems the house you’re in isn’t the one your father planned to buy, but rather a case of bait and switch. Mark bought a different house and kept a large chunk of the intended down payment.”

  Daphne looked around the shack of a home. This made sense.

  “Your father hired a private investigator to figure all this out. He couldn’t bring himself to tell you, though. He feels like he should have done all this before the wedding.”

  “Mark had to be planning this forever, Sophie!” Leaving her at the altar was the tip of Mark’s iceberg. An iceberg that he’d planned and molded and shaped into a sparkly facade of love.

  “It will be over soon. Your father is handling it in court. I’m coming out to help you get situated. You’ll get past this, Daphne. It’s just a valley on your way to the top of the crest.”

  She wished she believed that. “I have a headache. I’m going to lie down for a while.” She looked around and wondered where she planned to lie.

  “Hold tight. I’m coming, and we’ll get your new life started. It’s going to be beautiful.”

  “I’m going to call Arnaud. I have to ask. Of all people, I can’t believe he’d betray me with Mark. Even my father, I can see his motives with money. It’s always been all about winning with him. But Arnaud? That doesn’t make any sense.” She slid down the wall and leaned against it. “I’ll be fine, Sophie. You and Gary don’t have to coddle me.”

  “We do,” she said. “We love you, and we don’t want you to wear this. It doesn’t become you.”

  Daphne hung up. It had to be her. This wasn’t happening to anyone else. She looked up at the ceiling and saw the brown soil marks where water damage indicated a plumbing problem. Upstairs, she’d seen the same thing and dismissed it rather than believe she’d need to replace the roof before winter approached. The scent of rain was decidedly less inspiring when it came through a moldy Dayton rooftop.

  She needed to change out of her work clothes. Her slacks and the carpet, circa 1955, did not mesh with one another. She unzipped her suitcase and found a pair of jeans. Her head was pounding, and she needed some water. She hoped the tap water at the house was fit to drink, because that was all she had.

  First she checked the time in Paris by calculating it from her watch. Then she plugged her cell phone into the wall, thankful she’d at least had the forethought to turn on the utilities before she’d arrived. She prayed to be strong enough to hear whatever Arnaud had to tell her, even if it was why he’d betrayed her, and she dialed Paris.

  “Al
lo, Arnaud Polge. Qui est al appereil?”

  She warmed at the sound of his familiar voice.

  “Arnaud, it’s Daphne,” she said in English, and he switched over to her native tongue.

  “Daphne, where are you?”

  “What do you mean, where am I? I’m in Dayton, Ohio.” She drew in a deep breath. “You hired Mark,” she said.

  “Oui. You did not tell me your boyfriend, ah, husband, had the same training as you. I completely missed it on his résumé the first time. Why didn’t you tell me, so that I could give him a job too?”

  “I did tell you. I told you everything about him, and you said he didn’t have the experience for any of the jobs in the Paris region.”

  “Ah, but your husband—”

  “He’s not my husband, Arnaud. He’s not even my boyfriend.” She felt the heat in her face as she told him. “He left me at the altar, and you gave him my job!”

  “No! You left the job so that you could get married.”

  “To him! I left the job to get married to him, and he’s there! You’ve given him my job, which I quit for him.”

  “No! I hired him so that you would come to me. I thought you’d be arriving with him. You are not here?”

  “No, I’m not there. I’m in Dayton, and I’m in trouble, Arnaud.”

  “You will come back here. To France. And Madeleine and I will care for you. We will restore you with good food that’s easy on the palate and love. My foolish pride made a mistake letting you go, but now your boyfriend is here. You can have your job and be happy, no?”

  “I can’t come back, Arnaud.” What good was a nose who couldn’t smell? “I’ve made a promise to my employer here.”

  “I said there was no job for you here. Things change. Tell him this and you will come back to us.”

  Her head ached. Something didn’t make any sense. Arnaud was acting innocent, but she knew that man like she knew the scent of her favorite Paris café, and he didn’t miss a trick. Something was very wrong. “I need to go.”

  “No! à Dieu ne plaise. I would never betray you, my best student.”