Page 58 of Hacking the Holidays
Unlike some people I know.
I glanced at Rose, but she wasn’t even paying attention to the conversation. She was scanning my workspace with methodical focus, her eyes tracking across every surface.
“What are you looking for?” I asked.
Rose didn’t answer. Instead, she leaned over my desk and inhaled deeply near the monitor. Then the chair. Then she hovered over the mouse, breathing in like she was trying to extract information from the air itself.
“Perfume,” she said finally. “Someone wearing perfume was here, and it’s not Eleanor’s or mine.”
Eleanor and Edgar moved closer, both sniffing tentatively.
“Oh …” Eleanor’s eyebrows rose. “You’re right. That’s an expensive perfume. Department store counter expensive, not drugstore aisle.”
Edgar shook his head. “I don’t smell anything.”
Officer Hugo called out from the basement stairs, and Eleanor and Edgar joined him, leaving Rose and me alone at the desk.
She closed her eyes, inhaling again with the concentration of a sommelier analyzing wine.
“Jasmine,” she murmured. She moved her head slightly, tracking the scent. “And vanilla.” Her eyes opened. “And coffee.”
I stared at her. “You can smell all that?”
“I have a sensitive nose,” Rose said.
I leaned in, trying to catch what she’d described. At first, nothing. Then, I noticed something. Faint but distinct.
“I know that smell,” I said, sniffing again a few times. “It’s very familiar, now that I think about it.”
“Yeah,” Rose said.
Then something flickered in her expression.
It was brief but unmistakable.
Rose suddenly lunged for the lemon-scented air freshener from my desk and started spraying. Aggressively. Multiple pumps in rapid succession, creating a fog of artificial citrus that immediately made my eyes water.
I coughed, waving my hand through the chemical cloud. “Rose! What are you doing?”
“Neutralizing,” she said.
“Neutralizing what? Me?” I coughed again, my throat burning. “My teeth have a lemon glaze on them.”
“You’re being dramatic,” Rose said, then analyzed the label on the bottle.“This has essential oils. It’s good for you.” She set the bottle back down on my desk, then glanced at the Einstein poster on my wall.
And there it was, that look. One of the telltale signs I’d learned to recognize over the past few days. Whenever she was nervous, whenever she was calculating her next move, whenever she was deciding how much to reveal, she’d focus on something random.
Like my Einstein poster …
Rose was rattled.
There was definitely something she wasn’t telling me. Again. And in that moment, I knew I couldn’t stop digging until I figured it out.
Chapter Fourteen
ZARA
The festive atmosphere in the auditorium for the Christmas Festival was the perfect distraction for my scattered thoughts and the sensory overload that almost made me believe in Christmas magic again.
