The Scented Cipher (A Nora Black Midlife Psychic Mystery Book 9)

Chapter 1

To the Residents of Garden Cove,

It is with a sense of great urgency and a faithful duty to our community that I pen this letter. Recent events have brought to light a matter that cannot be ignored, a matter that strikes at the heart of our town’s integrity.

For too long, we have been unaware of the true nature of one of our own. Nora Black, a prominent member of our community and owner of the beloved local shop Scents and Scentsability has a secret—a secret that threatens our privacy and trust.

It has come to my attention that Ms. Black supposedly possesses a gift beyond the ordinary, a gift that allows her to plunder the deepest part of our unconscious and uncover our most intimate memories. If this revelation is true, it crosses the sacred boundaries that define our personal lives.

Without our knowledge or consent, Ms. Black has used her psychic abilities to read the thoughts and memories of unsuspecting citizens. Her ability violates our Fourth Amendment right to privacy.

As a community, we cannot turn a blind eye to such flagrant disregard for our privacy. It is our duty to hold Ms. Black accountable for her actions, regardless of her standing or reputation.

Let us stand together, united in our resolve to uphold the principles of trust and respect that form the foundation of our town.

With the deepest unease, A Concerned Resident

“You’ve got to be kidding me!” My best friend Gilly Martin threw the Garden Cove Gazette, the last printed newspaper still surviving in our area, across the floor of our shop. The pages scattered. Gilly shook a fist at the offending paper. “I demand that the Gazette apologizes for publishing this...”

“Truth,” I supplied.

“It’s trash,” Gilly spat.

The Gazette, established in nineteen seventeen, also had an online presence and was now run by social media influencer wannabes who loved a clickable headline. Ezra had shown me the article in the “Letter to the Editor” section at five-thirty this morning when he’d brought me coffee in bed. The sight of him wearing nothing but his boxer briefs, his hair slightly disheveled in that cute way I like and holding a cup of coffee out for me had been the last bright spot of the day.

“Nora,” Pippa, my other BFF and co-owner of Scents and Scentsability, said. “You can’t be okay with someone outing you to the entire town.”

I shrugged. “They sure picked a lousy weekend,” I muttered as I stacked two boxes of Red, White, and Blue soaps and lotions onto a dolly. Memorial Weekend was in full swing, and Garden Cove had been a hubbub of activity for our annual summer festival. Local restaurants had set up food trucks on Main Street, and most of the shops, including Scents and Scentsability, had rented booths for the street fair.

Initially, the letter had freaked me out, but then Shawn Rafferty, the chief of police and my long-time ex-husband, had called me, having his own freakout. It had actually calmed me down. Dealing with someone else’s crisis, even at my behest, had given me a reason to get out of my head.

“Hey,” I said, trying not to sound as stressed as I felt. I gave them the same speech I’d given Shawn. “It isn’t like folks haven’t been whispering about me for a while now. People are going to talk. And while I can’t control other people’s behavior, I can control my reaction to their behavior.” I gave the scattered newspaper a bland look. “I’m choosing to ignore.”

“You mean shove your head in the sand.” Gilly shook her head. “This isn’t going away because you don’t make a fuss.”

“If I do make a fuss,” I countered, “it’s only going to draw more unwanted attention.”

The door chimed, and three women walked into the store. It was a cool spring morning. One of the women wore a light lemon-yellow jacket, and the other two were wearing sweaters, one pastel purple and the other a periwinkle blue.

“Ladies,” I greeted with a nod. “Good morning.”

They quickly averted eye contact as they headed to the display of body scents.

Gilly leaned over and whispered to me, “And so it begins.”

I gave her a quick jab with my elbow. “As long as they buy something, I don’t care why they’re in here.”

“Can I bag that up for you?” Gilly asked loudly at Periwinkle Sweater as the young woman sidestepped closer to me.

She held a bottle of lavender and sandalwood body mist, one of my signature scents.

“We’re having a buy-one-get-one free,” I informed her while giving Gilly a bland look. “Grab yourself another scent or get two of the same.”

“Uh, thanks,” the woman said nervously. She shuffled back to grab another bottle. Her friends giggled, their glances flicking furtively between their friend and me.

Instead of going to the counter with the products, she brought them to me. “Uhm, I guess I’ll take these,” she said, thrusting them toward me.

“You can take them to Pippa.” I pointed to my thin blonde friend. Even after having a second baby three and a half months earlier, a boy they named Jordan Paul, Jr., Pippa was still skinny as a rail. I privately pondered if it was a good idea to call their daughter JJ and their son JP. It could get confusing. But, hey, I was only the godparent, and no one had asked for my opinion.

“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. Black didn’t say Adam 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.

“Okay,” Pippa said with a flourish of her hands. “If Nora’s not worried, then I’m not going to worry, at least not until this weekend is over. Portman’s is doing their lunch tour in ten minutes.” Pippa had joined the Garden Cove Chamber of Commerce to represent our store along with her husband Jordy’s coffee shop. She’d helped organize the itinerary for the event. “Rose Palace will be coming thirty minutes later, so it will be a quick turnaround.”

Rose Palace Resort is where Gilly used to work as the manager of the spa. She’d been accused of killing a security guard, who happened to be her abusive, crazy ex, and the manager ended up neck-deep in a local criminal organization. Needless to say, she quit her job and came to work at our shop. Massage therapy and aromatherapy went hand in hand. Our businesses crossed over in the best way.

“And we’ve got Parker’s Landing, Lakeshore Resort, Gardenia Hollow Resort and Marina, and Hunter’s Hillside Getaway successively,” Pippa informed us—as if she hadn’t already given us this information multiple times this week. “Nora, do you want to swap out the booth for the store?” She gave the Gazette a meaningful look before turning her gaze back to me. “Less traffic and all.” She shrugged, but I could tell she was worried about me.

“I’ll be fine,” I reassured her. “How many people still read the morning paper? And besides, most of the traffic,” I said, using her word, “will be out-of-town tourists. They’ll have no idea who I am.”

“No worries,” Gilly added. “We are all hands-on-deck until this shindig shuts down.”

“Great.” Pippa put on a cheerful face, but I could see the stress in her eyes. “Text me if you, uh, need help.”

“If it gets bad, I’ll call Tippy and see if she wants to trade jobs for the day.” I gave Pippa a tight smile. “I’ll babysit JJ and JP, and she can dazzle the crowd.”

Tippy had worked in the shop when Pippa had taken maternity leave, and she’d done a great job. This weekend, she was celebrating three years of sobriety. She’d dropped out of college years ago and recently started online courses to finish her degree in psychology. She wanted to work as a drug and alcohol counselor.

Pippa, her older sister, acted more like a proud mother. Considering that their parents had cut them out of their lives, it wasn’t surprising that they developed a relationship beyond siblings.

“Tippy started online summer classes last week. She’s got too much homework to get done, along with everything else this weekend,” Pippa said, her voice tinged with pride.

“Don’t you worry,” Gilly said to me. “If anyone gives you crap or gets pushy...” she clenched her fists. “I’ll start naming and shaming. I know a lot of secrets in this town. It would turn a stripper blue to hear all the confessions people make to me while they’re on my massage table.” She let out a noise of frustration. “I wish I knew who wrote that letter. I’d give them a poke in the eye with a sharp stick.”

“Let it go before you give yourself an ulcer,” I told her as I tilted the supply dolly back onto its two wheels. “It’s not worth it.”

My bestie since kindergarten pished me with a flick of her wrist. “Luckily, I have a doctor at home who can treat me.”

I smiled. Gilly had married the love of her life coming up a year ago, in June, and she was still in the honeymoon phase. Her happiness with a really good man filled my heart with joy. She deserved to be loved well, and Scott Graham did just that.