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“Okay.” Big Bob was still instructing. “Jorge is going to hand out the marshmallows. Now, rule number one: Don’t poke the marshmallow all the way through.”

“What if we want a double-decker?” Zack asked. “Two marshmallows.”

“You have to do one at a time. This is gourmet. Right, Alice?”

“Sure.” Grandma was rubbing her forehead. “I hope Keith picks her up and gets a move on.… That smell is giving me a headache.” Big Bob leaned over and put a marshmallow on the tip of Grandma’s wire.

“Grandma, that smells like the community garden did when Mr. Peters reported the skunk. If the skunk didn’t make the smell at the community garden, who did?” Keisha asked as she tried to find the right position, not too close and not too far away from the flames. She sat on a little stump Daddy had cut and left by the pit for sitting.

“Maybe Keith has a plot at the garden, too.…” Grandma was twirling her marshmallow stick with the same intensity that she rocked the swing on their back porch.

“No.” Keisha turned her marshmallow slowly,
thinking. “The smell was definitely coming from inside the shed.”

“Well, if there’s any smell like
that
coming from that shed, we’d better check it out—”

“Now pay close attention.” Big Bob interrupted Grandma with some last-minute s’mores instructions. “These babies use the conductive heat of the wire to cook your marshmallow outside and in.”

“We know it wasn’t skunk spray,” Keisha said.

Grandma kept up her twirling. “Well, it had to be something … Bob? Bob! I’m on fire over here! How’d that happen?”

The next morning, Razi was finishing up his lost skunk posters, Mama was doing the breakfast dishes, Paulo was teething on a spoon dipped in honey and Daddy and Grandma were doing dinner prep.

“Hey, bucko.” Daddy leaned over Razi’s drawing. “I don’t think that’s right. Keisha, is that how you spell
skunk?”

As the fourth-grade spelling bee champion at Langston Hughes Elementary, Keisha was called upon to settle any spelling issues in the Carter household.

“Keisha said it rhymes with
trunk!”

“Well, you got the
unk
part right. It’s just that’s a
k
instead of a c.”

“Cuh-cat.” Razi smacked his crayon on the table. “I already did six of them!”

“But if you do this …” Keisha picked up the crayon and showed Razi how to draw a straight line that tickled the back of the
c
, making it look like a
k
. “You don’t have to erase a thing.”

Razi laid all his posters on the table side by side. Then he took the crayon and, with great concentration, drew a straight line up against every
c
.

“Excellent,” Grandma said. “Razi, you are a skunk artiste. Every one of these looks like Stinky out there. You even got the scar on his nose just right.”

“No naming the animals, Grandma.” Mama had finished the dishes and was now sitting at the kitchen table sewing a patch on Razi’s jeans.

“I wasn’t naming him. I was describing. But what would be the big deal if we did name him? He’s not wild.”

“That’s only a hypothesis.”

“Well, even if he was, he’ll never be wild again. His defense mechanism’s been disconnected.”

“Which is precisely why we don’t want to become too familiar with him. We don’t have room for residents.” Mama made a knot and bit the thread.

“Why you think I’d take kindly to a stinky little fur ball who eats garbage and steals my clothes, I don’t know.”

“Well, it’s time to find the little fur ball a home. We’re heading out soon to the community garden to put up these signs. Keisha, run down and get the staple gun,” Daddy instructed.

“Check out that smell at the community garden,” Grandma said. “There’s something rotten going on over there and we know it’s not a skunk with a loose shooter.”

“Can I use the gun? Can I shoot the gun, Daddy?”

Daddy picked up Razi so they could rub nose to nose. “Possibly,” he said. “Under very controlled conditions.”

Daddy always gave Razi what Grandma called “the benefit of the doubt,” but Keisha wasn’t so sure it was a good idea. The staple gun was very strong. You could get hurt using it.

The Carters agreed that Daddy, Razi and Keisha should go to the community garden. Grandma had a hair appointment and Mama needed to stay home to take care of the animals. When Daddy offered to take Paulo, Mama said she could feed the ducklings and clean the raccoon and skunk pens with a sleepy Paulo in his stroller.

When the Carters arrived at the garden, they found Mr. Peters sitting on a stool, watering his tomatoes.

Daddy shook Mr. Peters’s hand. “Fred Carter,” he said. “Carters’ Urban Rescue.”

“Albert Peters. Is that your original artwork, young man?”

“We’re doing a lost and find,” Razi said, holding out one of his flyers.

“Ahhh.” Mr. Peters examined the flyers. “First we get rid of the skunk and now you want to bring it
back
again?”

“No, Mr. Peters,” Keisha said. “We think the skunk is somebody’s pet.”

“Holy tomato. Now I’ve heard everything.”

“I’ve examined it, Albert,” Daddy said. “The skunk has been de-scented. That’s what people do to skunks in the pet trade.”

“Well, if he was de-scented, how do you explain the smell around the garden shed? I’ve got to blame something.”

“I think we’ve fallen victim to a logical fallacy,” Daddy said. “You saw a skunk and we all smelled the smell that has some of the same qualities as skunk odor, so we thought
A
+
B
=
C:
bad smell + skunk = skunk odor. But my wife, who has a very keen nose for animal smells, was not convinced from the beginning. And my daughter is a born detective. She smelled exhaust mixed with the smell of burning wood yesterday and was reminded of the smell here.”

“So what you’re saying …” Mr. Peters stood up slowly. As Grandma would say, his thinker had shifted into high gear. “Even though the skunk is gone, the smell goes on and on, because … what made it is still here. And when you’re smelling gasoline and burning … goodness gracious, we might have something flammable on our hands.”

Daddy and Keisha nodded. They’d already come to this conclusion.

“My son’s in the fire department,” Mr. Peters said,
“and he has told me more than once, when you have problems like this, you should let the professionals handle it.”

“Do you really think we need the fire department?” Daddy asked. “For a smell?”

“Daddy! Daddy! You said I wasn’t tall enough to put up the posters. Maybe the firemen will let us use their ladder.”

“I don’t think they’d need to bring the fire truck,” Mr. Peters said. “Al’s the fire prevention officer. Maybe the emergency response vehicle.”

“That’s even bigger!” Razi threw his hands up in the air and lost a couple of skunk flyers.

“Razi!” Keisha chased after them. She had the feeling Razi didn’t know what an emergency response vehicle was.… She wasn’t sure herself, but she guessed maybe it was more the size of an ambulance.

Mr. Peters pulled out his cell phone and pressed a button. “I have the fire department on speed dial,” he said, putting the phone to his ear.

In no time at all, an SUV pulled up. Keisha was right. The emergency response vehicle was more like a normal-sized car or van. Razi might have been disappointed, but as it made its way down the garden lane—popping a couple of melons under its wide tires, yellow and green lights flashing—he shouted, “It’s like the circus!”

“Why do I get the feeling that life with you is something of a circus?” Mr. Peters asked Daddy. “Want me to hold on to those flyers for a minute?”

“That would be nice … while we check out this vehicle.” Daddy put Razi on his shoulders. The truck pulled up alongside the Peterses’ garden and a junior version of Mr. Peters rolled down the window. “Hey, Dad. You got a tomato emergency or what?”

“Very funny. But be sure to take a few home with you to Dena. She loves my beefsteak beauties. Now, Al. Oh …” Mr. Peters remembered his manners. “I didn’t introduce you all. This is Albert Peters the Third. My son, Al.”

Al got out of the truck. He looked very official with dark aviator sunglasses and
GRFD
embroidered on his shirt pocket. “Nice to meet you,” he said. And he shook everyone’s hand. Keisha made sure to look him in the eye and return Al’s handshake with a firm grip.

“Fred Carter. Actually, I’m a wildlife rehabilitator and we got called out here because of a problem with a skunk. We did find a skunk, but now we realize he couldn’t have caused the problem.”

Al took off his glasses and sniffed the air. “Smells like sulfur,” he said. “It is a little like skunk smell.”

“Yeah, but his stinker’s on the blink,” Mr. Peters said. “The skunk’s, I mean.”

“This is my daughter, Keisha,” Daddy said. “She’s the one who put it together.”

Daddy looked at Keisha. So did everyone else. He was expecting her to go on with the story. Razi had squirmed back down to the ground. Even
he
was looking at Keisha. What if they’d brought the fire department out for no reason?

“I’m not sure this makes sense,” Keisha said. “But last night, when we were making s’mores in the fire pit, there was something about the smell of Keith’s truck and maybe the matches we used to get the fire going. It reminded me of the smell in the garden shed. And I remembered that the skunk file said that sometimes people said skunk spray smelled like sulfur or burned rubber.”

“A lot of other unpleasant things, too,” Daddy added. “Rotting garbage, sewage—”

“And then …” Mr. Peters Junior looked at Keisha. He wanted to hear the rest of the story.

“And then,” she said, hugging Razi close so he wouldn’t launch into his own “and then” story. “I remembered that on the Fourth of July, Mama said the gardeners were picking up the papers from bottle rockets and firecrackers in their gardens.
And then
I remembered seeing some burned-up cherry bombs near the shed. And so when I told everything to Grandma
Alice, she suggested we come back to see if the smell is still here because it might be dangerous.”

“I thought we were going to put up the lost skunk flyers,” Razi said.

“Of course we are. We’re multi-tasking.” Daddy took Razi’s hand. “I bet we could even find some late-bearing strawberries and, if we’re nice, get a taste.”

“Well, you called the right place. I am the fire prevention officer. When amateurs start investigating these things, someone could end up hurt.”

“Believe me,” Daddy said, “in our line of work, we know all about amateurs.”

“So, where is this strange smell coming from?” Al asked.

“The garden shed. I’ll lead the way.” Mr. Peters marched them single file through the rows of bush beans and corn plants and honeysuckle vines to the garden shed.

“Whoo, I can really smell it here.” Al took a long sniff. “Not quite gasoline.… You’re right, Keisha. I smell sulfur, too.”

They opened the shed door, and sunlight streamed into the dark cluttered space.

Al fell to the ground and started to crawl toward the back of the shed. “Stay back, everyone. Let the expert do the work.”