THE NOSE AND HIS PERFUME

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Thirteen: The Man Behind the Nose

Bunny woke up early Christmas morning. She climbed up the ladder of her bunk bed to the top bunk to wake Penny up, but Penny was awake already, lying there with her eyes open.

“It’s Christmas,” Bunny said.

“Oh,” Penny dully responded.

“Come on, you’re not even a little excited? Santa? Presents?”

“I guess it’s exciting, if you like that kind of thing.”

Maybe just in comparison to how excited she normally would have been on Christmas morning, Penny seemed especially unhappy. Bunny had gotten so used to this new miserable Penny, she had almost forgotten how happy and excited she used to be about everything. Beau slid open the door to Bunny’s room and came in.

“Come on, let’s go see if Basil’s awake,” Bunny said.

As they entered his study, Basil wished them a Merry Christmas.

“Can I ask you something?” Bunny asked him, after they had said good morning.

“Certainly,” Basil replied.

“You guys keep saying we have to keep the extractor a secret, but how do you know it’s a secret? Someone told the Nose about the it. What if they told lots of people?”

“No,” Basil said. “Mr. Hartford and the Nose are the only others who know about the extractor.”

“But how do you know that?”

As Basil swam around his fish tank, Bunny could tell there was something he wasn’t telling them.

“What about Peter Spark? Did he know about the extractor?” Beau asked. “What happened to him?”

“Peter ran away. He never wanted to be a Spark. Even as a small boy, he frequently pretended to be someone else. I imagine he felt left out. He was much younger than your mother—the only young person amongst us. He desperately wanted to work with us on the extractor, and he certainly had the intelligence to. Peter may only have been a teenager at the time, but he was already inventing things of his own.”

“What happened?”

“He broke into our lab and tried to use the extractor before it was finished. ‘Fortune favors the brave,’ and all that. When he told us what he had done, he was proud. There was a terrible argument. He believed he had discovered something, but when he tried to warn us our extractor would not work, we refused to listen. We thought it impossible he could know more than us. Unfortunately, he was right. What happened to your parents was an accident, but one that might have been prevented had we listened to him.”

There was a knock at the front door, and Basil said, “I wonder who that could be.”

Bunny tried to ignore it, because she didn’t want Basil to stop talking, but whoever was at the door kept knocking, increasingly loudly.

“Maybe it’s the TV crew coming back for their stuff?” Beau said.

In their haste to chase after the Nose, the TV crew had left some of their equipment behind the night before. Leaving Basil, the children went to answer the door together.

When she opened the front door, Bunny wasn’t all that surprised to see the Nose.

“I forgot my jacket,” the Nose said, as he came into the apartment.

He pulled the sweater and scarf that he had borrowed out of a large XEssence store bag he had with him. Bunny took the sweater and scarf from the Nose and retrieved his tuxedo jacket.