The Guest Room Has Learned My Scent

How it begins

Room Twelve smelled of my friend's wet coat.

Not rain generally.

Not wool.

The exact sour warmth of the coat she used to leave over my kitchen chair after walking home from the late shift.

I stood outside the open door with my sample kit in one hand.

Ruth waited at the end of the corridor.

"Do you need more light?"

"No."

The hotel had been empty for nineteen years. Its rooms should have smelled of dust, damp plaster, and whatever the sea carried through the broken seals.

Most did.

I had cataloged eleven before lunch.

In Room Twelve, a chair stood beside a narrow bed.

Over its back hung nothing at all.

"Has someone been in here?"

Ruth's keys clicked together.

"Not today."

I opened a clean collection vial.

The smell changed.

Coffee now. Cheap hand cream. The burnt edge of toast scraped over a sink.

My kitchen, six years ago.

The last morning I had seen her.

I closed the vial without taking a sample.

Behind me, Ruth took one step closer.

"It does that sometimes."

"What?"

"Finds a way to make people comfortable."

From inside the room came the sound of a coat slipping from a chair.

There was still no coat.

I wrote the time in my notebook.

My friend had been missing long enough for people to stop asking whether I had heard anything. They asked how I was instead, as though the question could be made kinder by removing its subject.

The room smelled of her shampoo.

Freshly washed hair.

Someone expecting company.

Ruth whispered my name.

I looked down.

Beneath the door, on the room's clean side of the threshold, a damp mark appeared.

One footprint.

Then another.

Both facing the bed.

I put my sample kit on the floor outside and took a full step back.