Perfect Scents

by Heather Karn

  Part of me wanted to talk to Tom Hildebrant, but a larger part argued that I didn’t want to have anything to do with talking to him about the death of his son. This was for a small English essay. Once it was done, I never had to think about weregals again. The last thing I wanted to do was bring up the pain of losing a child to write a meaningless essay.

  First I needed to look up what the newspapers said about weregals. Then I could check out his son’s obituary. If I still didn’t have enough information, then I would talk to Tom.

  “So besides this English essay, how was school today?” Gram called back to me as I walked into the house and hung my coat up in the closet by the front door.

  The house was tiny, but it was clean and well maintained. The outside needed a new coat of white paint, but structurally it was sound. The inside smelled old, but I couldn’t expect anything else since Gram had grown up in it. She and Grandad had built an addition with a bedroom, which was Aunt Gwen’s, and a bathroom so that they could have indoor plumbing. We all shared the bathroom.

  The living room held an old floral print couch, an equally old recliner and a TV that had to be as old as I was. An entry at the other end of the room from the front door led to the kitchen which was just big enough to hold our small table and the kitchen cabinets. The stove barely fit, and there wasn’t a dishwasher. I’d had to get used to that.

  My room was right off the kitchen. Gram and Aunt Gwen’s rooms and the bathroom were down the narrow hall at the kitchen’s entrance. It wasn’t much space to live, but it was comfortable.

  Gram was already in the kitchen. I could hear glass bowls clanking as I put the few bags of groceries on the counter and sat down at the table.

  “It was school, Gram. Not much to say about it. Just glad the week is over.”

  “It couldn’t have been that bad, you made a new friend,” she told me as I pulled my math book out of my backpack to do some homework.

  “I guess you’re right. I’m a bit tired and ornery. It felt like one really long week.”

  “Some weeks can feel like that.” She began scrounging around in the plastic bags until she found a package of hamburger which she opened and deposited into a large bowl. My mouth watered as I realized Gram was making her famous meatloaf for dinner. The bad week I’d endured was looking to end on a happy note. My stomach growled loud enough to make Gram laugh. “I heard that way over here. Don’t they feed you at that school?”

  A giggle escaped me. “They do, but I’m always hungry for your meatloaf.”

  “You do like your meat.”

  “Yup, that’s me, a meat and potatoes kind of girl.”

  Gram continued to laugh as she added some eggs, onion, brown sugar, saltine crackers and barbeque sauce to the bowl along with a few other seasonings. “You make it easy to cook for you, but also very boring. Now, put that homework down and get over here and get messy.” In other words, come over here, stick your hands in this raw meat and mix all of this stuff together for me. I was pretty sure she had me do it because she knew how much I hated wetness, especially slimy wetness, between my fingers and up my fingernails.

  After everything was well mixed, I picked up the lump of gooeyness and dropped it in the casserole dish that Gram had gotten out of a cupboard while I had been whimpering my disgust. Once the meat mixture was ready, Gram put it in the oven to cook, and I made sure to scrub every inch of my hands and arms below the elbow. When my hands were dry, I went back to my homework while Gram began peeling potatoes. I was fine with instant potatoes, but Gram wouldn’t hear of it.

  Though I tried to concentrate on the math problems, I kept going over in my head what Gram had told me about weregals. Were they that dangerous? If so, why hadn’t they killed more people? And where had they gone all those years ago? With today’s technology, if they were anywhere else in the world, I was sure someone would have broadcasted it on every news channel available. And why would they want humans as mates if they were killing humans? What kind of woman would want to be mated to a creature like that? The idea of that sent a shiver down my spine.

  “What do weregals look like?” I blurted as Aunt Gwen stepped into the kitchen, having gotten home from work while I was absorbed in my thoughts.

  “I thought that was a banned subject around here.” She set her plastic cooler style lunchbox on the counter next to where Gram was dicing the peeled potatoes.

  “They are? Why?”

  Gram finished dicing the last potato before turning around to face me, and when she answered, it was slow as she thought about each word before she said it. “You’ll find that a lot of people around here, especially the older folks, don’t want to talk about them. We have a nonverbal agreement not to bring up that part of our past. The young folks don’t have that mentality. The weregals are exciting to them; they haven’t seen the damage weregals can do.”

  “I’m sure they weren’t all bad.” I closed my math book, my ability to concentrate on it gone for good. I’d have to finish it tomorrow sometime.

  She let out a heavy sigh. “No, you’re right, they weren’t all bad.”

  “So what brings all of this about? I didn’t know Joey knew about weregals.” Aunt Gwen began washing her hands in the sink, but her motions were choppy with tension.

  Getting up from the table, I decided to set it for dinner even though there was still plenty of time left to do it. “I didn’t. Mrs. Huckabee assigned them to me as a topic for an essay I have to write, but you never did answer my question. What do they look like?”

  “Why don’t you see what you can find out from those newspaper articles you want to look at, and if you need more information, then we’ll tell you,” Gram suggested as she placed the pot of potatoes on the stove to boil.

  “Sure, that’s fine. I’ll go first thing in the morning so I can stay for a few hours.”

  “You’re going to read through newspapers all day?”

  I let out a laugh. “No, silly, when I’m done with that, I’m going to come home and finish my math homework.”

  Grabbing a banana off the counter, Aunt Gwen laughed as she left the kitchen to go to her room to change clothes. Before her door closed, she yelled down the hall, “Happy hunting, Joey.”

  An image of a dead tiger, shot trying to have a dinner of sheep entered my mind. As I watched the tiger turn into a human man, I shuddered.

  After a dinner that was to die for, I called Chrissa to confirm our library trip in the morning and went to bed early. Well, I went to my room anyway. Gram was watching TV and Aunt Gwen had to run to Tom’s farm to get some eggs. I’d wanted to be alone.

  Sitting on my bed, I flipped through one of Mom’s photo albums. They were one of the few possessions that I had left from her and Gerry. We’d had to sell most of what we’d owned to pay for the doctor bills and Gerry’s funeral. There wasn’t any room for it at Gram’s house anyway. The photos in the album were enough for me. I could always relive the happy times, and most of the pictures made me smile.

  Meg, my mom, met Gerry when I was a year and a half. They married, and we’d moved to Michigan for Gerry’s new job and had lived there until Mom got sick. We were so happy together, the three of us. Yeah, being a Time Lord would have been a much better super power than having a nose that smelled everything.