The Scent Keeper

Emmeline is uneasy. The magazine article appears to suggest she is her mother’s “secret weapon” (250) to expand Inspire’s portfolio. Disturbed, she seeks the refuge of her office where she falls into a deep sleep. When she awakens, she smells the cabin—specifically, her father’s pipe smoke. She follows the scent to a small backroom lab where she meets Rene, an older researcher in charge of developing scents for things that are disappearing, like typewriter ribbons, virgin forest rains, and in this case pipe smoke. Rene tells Emmeline he knew her father and introduced him to Victoria.

When Emmeline returns to her office, she feels suddenly unable to focus on her newest project, a scent for a car dealership. Distressed, she leaves the building and heads to a park. There, in the window of kiosk, she catches sight of herself and sees how closely she now resembles her mother. Panicked, she goes to the bar where she found Fisher. He is there, working behind the bar. Fisher sees Emmeline but says nothing. When a man at the bar makes an inappropriate remark to Emmeline, Fisher steps in and confronts the man. Given his show of temper against a customer, Fisher is told by his boss to leave and not come back until he can control his anger.

Fisher and Emmeline depart together. The reunion is awkward. Fisher shows Emmeline where he lives in Vancouver harbor, just outside the city limits, in a loose armada of rundown boats abandoned by rich people as tax write-offs. The boats are now linked together in a kind of refuge for the homeless. Emmeline is enthralled to see Fisher’s boat. He apologizes for not trying to get in touch. He explains that after he lost the nursery job, for defending one of the business’s female employees from unwanted advances from the boss, he felt ashamed. In his flash-temper over the woman’s dilemma, he only saw his father and hated himself. In a moment of honesty, Emmeline at last shares with Fisher her deepest secret: her complicity in her father’s death. The two make love.

When they return to the bar the next day, Fisher, reinvigorated by the reunion with Emmeline, plays a game with customers: He will concoct a drink he believes is perfectly tailored to a customer. He proves adept at matching drinks to people. The game suddenly halts when Victoria walks in. She is unusually understanding about Emmeline’s recent inattention at work. She is also happy to meet Fisher, though she claims the drink he concocts for her is off. She tells Emmeline not to worry about the car dealership project, given her reunion with Fisher. However, she later takes Emmeline to dinner alone and assures her that no man is worth any sacrifice. “Men always betray you” (290), she tells her.

The vitriol in her mother’s voice compels Emmeline to visit Rene the next day. She is determined to learn more about her parents. The longer the two talk, the more Emmeline realizes the depth of her mother’s villainy. Nightingale was her father’s project, and he warned Victoria that the scents could not last. Nevertheless, Victoria financed the project to make a quick killing and then blamed the scientists—John in particular—when the scents inevitably faded and clients began to file lawsuits. Victoria, Rene tells a stunned Emmeline, was “brilliant, but cunning” (295). She destroyed John’s reputation in order to save her own. Rene also tells Emmeline that before he went into hiding, her father carefully preserved the scent of his infant daughter in a bottle he stopped with a blue wax. That was the bottle, Emmeline realizes, her father tried so desperately to retrieve when she sent it over the bluff back on their island.

Emmeline and Fisher agree to return to Secret Cove. Before she leaves her mother’s townhouse, Emmeline goes into the closet where her mother keeps the scents in bottles. She figures if she is to learn about her parents she must start at the beginning. She opens the first bottle and detects scents that reveal the story of her parents’ courtship and stormy marriage: One is musk, suggesting animal attraction; the next is water lilies, suggesting love; the next is the sterile scent of paper money, suggestive of the debacle of Nightingale; and finally a return to the animal musk, as the two released from their marriage. The next bottle, she understands, represents Emmeline: she opens it and takes in the citrus and pine scent she recognizes from Inspire’s lobby, a scent her mother told her helps quiet potentially aggravated clients. Her mother, she sees bitterly, uses even her.

Before Emmeline departs, she and Victoria have a contentious showdown. Her mother tells Emmeline she did everything for her. The truth that there are no fairy tales hurts. Emmeline returns to her room and gets the last bottle from her father’s collection that she still has. She takes the bottle to the kitchen, opens it, and burns the scented paper. Suddenly, the kitchen smells like the cabin, with its aromas of rain, pipe smoke, fir trees, and coffee. Emmeline remembers that it is the scent of the morning her father first explained to her what Nightingale was. For the first time, Emmeline says, she is at peace: “I felt whole” (307).

In the Epilogue, it is revealed that the entire novel is a narrative that Emmeline, now a mother-to-be, is sharing with her soon-to-be newborn daughter. The narrative includes everything that happened to her: all the wonderful things, the tonic magic of scents, and the love she found with Fisher, presumably the daughter’s father. The narrative also includes all of the dark things she would have rather kept secret.