Page 115 of Bless This Hot Mess

“Wait a minute, what about Emma-Lou?” Suwarna asked.

Rebekkah shook her head, “I didn’t see her. She wasn’t in any of the future visions before I lost the signal.”

“It would have been more helpful if your visions had a rearview mirror. Seeing the future is cool but not super helpful when we’re trying to figure out what happened yesterday,” Ronald noted astutely.

“Smell,” Carrington said finally. “Smell can always be counted on to leave a good memory and the first thing to haunt a bad one.”

They closed their eyes, frowning in concentration, “I remember being in the lobby. The lemon cleaner wafting up from the morning’s mop on the tiles. The smell of coffee, cheap and burnt, definitely not the lovely aroma pumped out from an espresso machine. Rebekkah’s perfume. No wait, not a perfume. A bath bomb from The Body Shop in the strip mall. A buttery vanilla.”

“Thank you!” Rebekkah grinned. “You’ve really got a nose for this.”

“It wasn’t a compliment, simply an olfactory observation and an assumption on your shopping habits,” Carrington clarified. “And layered under it all… popcorn.”

“Popcorn,” Japheth echoed.

“Sweet at first,” Carrington went on. “That fake butter smell from the machine by the staff kitchen. And then it shifted. Sharper. Acrid. The smell of popcorn when you’ve left it in the microwave too long and it goes past movie magic and edges over into snacker beware.”

“Burnt popcorn,” Ronald said slowly.

“Like at the fair!” Rebekkah recalled. “When we were supposed to do theNot Short on Talenttalent show, Emma-Lou got the news about her parents being lost at sea. Remember?”

“Her parents vanished. Popcorn,” Suwarna said slowly, almost to herself. “Our station vanishes. Popcorn.”

“Either God has a very specific scent for traumatic events,” Carrington said, “Or someone leaves a trail of burnt kernels whenever big life changes happen.”

“Could be a coincidence,” Ronald said. “Lots of things smell like smoke in a fire. Maybe we’re not remembering it right.”

“Or could be a pattern,” Suwarna countered, “and we’re just not sniffing out what’s important from what’s not.”

They drifted deeper into the ruin; each lost in their own thoughts. A twisted metal staircase led to nowhere. A melted wall clock drooped like a Dali painting, its hands frozen at some arbitrary, pre-apocalyptic moment. A fragment of a poster clung stubbornly to a brick wall depicting a cat hanging by its paws precariously from a clothesline that read auspiciouslyHang in There.

Rebekkah brushed soot from the cat’s face on the poster, leaving a black streak on her fingers and the appearance of a mischievous moustache on the cat. “It’s like someone hit pause on our lives,” she said, “and forgot to press play again.”

“You still have your voices,” Carrington reminded them gently. “You still have each other. Japheth, you and Rino still have a ridiculous amount of unresolved romantic tension as do Ronald and I. Rebekkah, you have the fashion sense of a low budget music video and we’re gonna be able to fix that. That all must count for something.”

“Iwantto resolve the romantic tension because I agree,it’s getting ridiculous and I’ve practiced abstinence so long I’m ready for the playoffs. But how do we use the crescendo of my romance or a make-over moment at the mall with Rebekkah to pay rent?” Japheth levelled with them. “Or find Emma-Lou? Or un-burn a radio station?”

“I don’t think we can,” Ronald said. “Not today, anyway. Today we just take stock of what we know.” He ticked points off on his fingers as he recalled what they’d learned from their sensory memories, “We know Rino argued with Emma-Lou about money, not murder. We know he left angry because he was left on hold with Weinus, Weinus & Ware. He was in a hostile mood but not homicidal. We know Emma-Lou chased him, or we think she chased him. In any case, she left work early. We know she had been piling up paper bags and there may be some kind of association with popcorn. We know something or someone turned this place into a marshmallow roast and that Emma-Lou hasn’t been seen since. And a lot of stuff about our futures, which is informative but not relevant, not really. Sorry Rebekkah but also thank you. Still super cool.”

“And we know,” Suwarna added, “that whoever did this is still out there. Maybe feeling justified. Maybe feeling guilty. Maybe feeling nothing at all. Maybe cackling and waiting until midnight so they can return to behead, flay us alive, or tear us apart with tiny hands.”

“Comforting,” Rebekkah muttered. “Why tiny hands? Wait, whose tiny hands?”

“I’m not sure,” Suwarna assured them in an unsettling voice. “But that’s kind of what makes it even creepier right? Like a bunch of tiny hands instead of two regular sized ones tearing you limb from limb?”

They fell silent again, listening to the wind thread itself through the jagged gaps where windows had once been.Somewhere in the distance, a siren wailed, then faded. A crow landed on the top of the far wall, cocking its head at them like a judgmental usher at a funeral, then took off with a lazy flap of its wings, having lost interest in their sorry state.

“What do we do?” Japheth asked, turning to face the others. “If Rino’s not the villain, and I really hope that’s true, then who is? Do I need to interrogate him more? Do we break into Emma-Lou’s house? We’re coming up against more questions than answers.”

Ronald’s eyes dimmed as he tried to muster some encouragement but came up short, “We can’t do nothing. If we do nothing, then whoever did this gets away with it. Emma-Lou will still be missing. I can’t even imagine having to go to her funeral, if it comes to that. And we will never know if we were right to trust the people we’ve trusted.”

“And if we do something,” Carrington said cautiously, “we might poke a bear. A bear with many tiny hands that could tear…”

“We could start small,” Rebekkah interrupted, having heard enough about unseemly ends. “Interview people. Ask more questions. Quietly. We’re already known as being a bit outspoken and curious. No one will suspect a thing.”

“Except everyone,” Carrington shook their head. “They’ll be suspicious. The five of us, from WWJD, are going to go around town asking politely who has a can of gasoline in the back of their pick-up truck and some lighters in the glove compartment? That’s literally every second vehicle in Napanee.”

“Jesus didn’t do subtlety,” Ronald remembered. “He flipped tables in the temple! He multiplied fish and fed hundreds. He made water into wine for a wedding. Maybethisis our table-flipping moment!”