Authors: Susan Conant

Tags: #General, #Fiction, #Mystery & Detective, #Women Sleuths, #Detective and mystery stories, #Detective and mystery stories - Authorship, #Cats, #Mystery fiction, #Apartment houses, #Women novelists

Scratch the Surface (6 page)

“I don’t hate him,” Felicity said. “On the contrary, I’m crazy about him, and I love cats. I write about—”

“Cats. Of course. Well, I hope it all turns out for the best,” Brooke said, “but I’ve got to get some dinner and get to bed.” With that, she drove off, leaving Felicity to wonder how a murder could possibly turn out for the best or even for the half decent. Brooke was probably too exhausted to know what she was saying. She and her husband, whom Felicity had never met, seemed to work eighteen-hour days and, understandably, to spend their weekends sleeping. Indeed, many residents of Newton Park left for work early in the morning and returned home late in the evening. Felicity assumed that they were slaving to pay their mortgages. Whatever the reason, the result was what often struck Felicity as an unpopulated or perhaps underpopulated neighborhood. If the murderer had driven up in an eighteen-wheeler and deposited scores of dead men and live cats on her front lawn, the chances were excellent that there would have been no one around to notice. With only a slight feeling of guilt, Felicity realized that in one respect, the murder actually was turning out for the best: For once, the neighborhood was filled with people.

SEVEN

Sprawled on her
back on the unmade bed, Brigitte exposes her pale blue-gray belly to the musty air, which seems to her neither stale nor fresh but so familiar that it is taken for granted. She is named after Bardot but is no sex kitten. For one thing, even for a cat, she is flat chested. Also, she was spayed at an early age, and thus feels nothing for males and cannot attract them. Even so, her name, Brigitte, is pronounced in the French manner or in as close to the French manner as Bostonians can manage. Furthermore, at the age of two years, she is not a kitten except to the extent that her diminutive size and long, fluffy coat doom her to be eternally, if nauseatingly, known as Baby Brigitte. At seven pounds, she is only a little more than half as big as her absent companion, Edith.

Brigitte cannot be said to miss Edith but does find it dull without her, principally because provoking Edith is Brigitte’s favorite means to banish boredom. In every tiff between the two, Brigitte is the instigator and the loser. To those who don’t know Brigitte, it might seem stupid of her to tackle so hefty an adversary. Brigitte, however, understands Edith’s gentle, pacific nature. Provoked beyond endurance, Edith strikes back, but she can be relied on to yank out great quantities of Brigitte’s long, soft hair without inflicting flesh wounds. What’s more, Edith never holds a grudge.

So, lolling on the sheets, Brigitte doesn’t actually long for Edith’s presence but suffers from the tedium that Edith’s presence would relieve. Rousing herself, she leaps off the bed, flies to the kitchen, and attacks the dry cat food in the bowl that she and Edith amicably share. When she finishes, the bowl is almost empty. Brigitte is unconcerned. She has never experienced hunger.

EIGHT

Irked at the
unliterary—and infuriatingly un-British—behavior of the police and her neighbors, Felicity longed to retreat to her kitchen to await the inevitable arrival of an important detective of some sort, preferably a chief superintendent, if the rank existed in the United States, as she suspected it did not. To fortify herself against shock, a condition commonly observed at crime scenes in British mysteries, she intended to pour herself a second shot of Laphroaig and broil a fillet of farm-raised Scottish salmon. Accustomed as she was to controlling the behavior of law enforcement personnel, she was chagrined to have the lowly policeman forbid her to enter her house.

“It’s a crime scene,” he explained.

“The
vestibule
is a crime scene, and I have no desire to go there. Ever again! I have already been in my kitchen, and I just want to go back.”

“We’ll need to check for signs of forced entry. Were your doors locked?”

“Of course. The doors to the house were locked. The outer door to the vestibule wasn’t. And I have already been in the house! If the murderer were lurking there waiting to kill me, I’d be dead now.”

“Do you have an alarm system?”

“Yes, but it was turned off. I never use it. I tried, but I kept forgetting the code or setting it off by accident. Please! I’m cold, and I haven’t had any dinner.”

As the officer was sympathizing, yet more official vehicles arrived, and for the next ten minutes, Felicity was temporarily distracted from her thirst and hunger by the sight of what looked increasingly like a movie set. Powerful lights flooded the area, and to Felicity’s satisfaction, uniformed men taped off her yard with official crime-scene tape. Just as in a mystery novel, the police were securing the scene. Hurrah! Better yet, after Felicity had surrendered her house keys, a pair of officers armed with real, actual handguns entered her back door to search for the presence of what Felicity knew enough to call “the perp” or to look for signs that the perp had been inside. Meanwhile, other uniformed men walked around the house, presumably to check for signs of forced entry. At the outskirts of the hullabaloo, neighbors stood around in small groups. Noticing them, Felicity couldn’t decide whether she was happy or embarrassed to have her house the center of attention. If the powerful lights had been mounted on media vans, she’d have been unambivalently delighted. Where
were
the media?

“I’m freezing,” she told the officer. “And I really need to use”—she lowered her voice—“the bathroom.” What was wrong with her! She should have thought of that perfect excuse a long time ago. Maybe she really was suffering from shock.

After consulting with his colleagues, the officer gave Felicity permission to enter her house and returned her keys. “But don’t go anywhere else. And please don’t discuss anything you’ve seen with anyone. One of the detectives will want to talk to you first.”

A detective! Felicity thanked the officer and made her way to her back door and into her house. After the damp of the November evening, the kitchen was as cozy as a British village mystery. The prospect of being interviewed by a real detective sent Felicity to the powder room off the kitchen, where she fussed with her hair and freshened her lipstick. Then, as she’d been eager to do, she poured herself a second Laphroaig, broiled the salmon, and congratulated herself on having attended a presentation for mystery writers about procedures for interviewing witnesses. An interviewer’s first task, she had been told, was to establish rapport with the witness. The point was vivid in her mind because the example given, namely, remarking on the weather, had struck her as ludicrous.
Hot enough for you? So, what did the gunman look like?

Seated at Aunt Thelma’s kitchen table, she ate the salmon with French bread and a helping of leftover salad. Instead of depositing the salmon skin in the garbage disposal as she’d normally have done, she chopped it up and put it on a saucer for the cat, which had remained out of sight. Fish skin was evidently a safe food for cats if given as an occasional treat. At any rate, Prissy LaChatte fed it to Morris and Tabitha without provoking readers to compose the kinds of irate letters that Felicity had received after the publication of her first book, in which Prissy had foolishly overindulged the cats’ love of canned albacore tuna. “If those cats don’t start eating a well-balanced diet in a hurry,” someone had written, “they’re going to die of malnutrition, and where will you be then?”

Feeling and, indeed, sounding foolish, Felicity called, “Here, kitty!” Should she whistle? After placing the saucer on the tile floor, she picked it up and put it back in the hope that the sound of a dish landing on a floor would be familiar to the creature and would lure him out in time to play his part when the chief superintendent, captain, lieutenant, or whoever he was finally turned up. The cat, however, failed to come running for dinner in the gratifying manner of Morris and Tabitha, and when the back doorbell rang, as it soon did, all Felicity had to display in place of that crucial piece of living furry evidence in a murder were the pillow and saucers on the floor, and a kitchen that smelled unpleasantly of fish.

Opening her back door, Felicity was startled to see a tall and almost unbelievably muscular man with an exceptionally large head and thick, curly gray hair. In introducing such a character to her readers, she’d have described the color of his eyes as the blue of a Siamese cat’s. There was, however, nothing truly catlike about the man; if he resembled any sort of animal, it was perhaps a Clydesdale horse. His muscularity was not confined to his body, but extended upward to his massive neck and jaw. Even his cheekbones were brawny. What surprised Felicity was not so much the man’s monumental build as it was the memory of where she had seen him before and what he had been doing then: She’d noticed him at the Highland Games in New Hampshire a little more than a year earlier. He’d been tossing the caber, the caber being a log the approximate length and width of a telephone pole.

“Dave Valentine,” he said.

Valentine or no Valentine,
Felicity thought,
you look like a MacKenzie or a MacFarlane or a Campbell to me
. Then, having wondered what kind of name Valentine was and what it was doing on this Scottish Hercules, she realized with horror that her mind was, in effect, the pitiful victim of demonic possession; it had been so aggressively invaded and conquered by her mother that unless she immediately exorcized the maternal demon, she’d find herself quoting “Scots, Wha Hae” and offering this tree-trunk-hurling Highland giant a wee dram of Oban.

In triumph, she said, “Felicity Pride. Come in.” The fresh air blowing through the door seemed to exacerbate the fish smell, and Felicity was suddenly and belatedly aware of the empty glass and the bottle of Laphroaig that sat on the counter near the sink. It was one thing to imagine inviting this Atlas of Inverness to take a drop with her, but quite another to have him catch her drinking alone. What’s more, the damned cat was nowhere in sight. “Coffee?” she asked. “Something to eat? I could make you a sandwich.”

Valentine shook his head. “No, thanks. I need to ask you about what happened. Are you doing okay?”

Was he looking at the bottle? Damn! The expert on interviewing witnesses had emphasized the need to inquire about the witness’s condition and to take note of special circumstances. For instance, had the witness been drinking?

“I’m all right. More or less. But I’m worried about the cat. The one that was left . . . There was a cat in my vestibule. With the . . . with the man. I brought him in. The cat. I carried the cat in, and I’ve made a little bed for him, and there’s food, but he’s hiding somewhere.” The scene was not playing itself out as Felicity had intended. Even to her own ears, she sounded frightened and uncertain, and instead of expressing overwhelming concern for the cat, she sounded irritated with it, as, indeed, she was. The sight of the Laphroaig bottle and the damned odor of salmon were beginning to make her queasy. “Could we go somewhere else?” This house of Uncle Bob and Aunt Thelma’s was
her
house, damn it! Why was she asking permission to leave her own kitchen? “Somewhere other than the kitchen,” she amended. “I had fish for dinner. I’m not afraid to be alone here.” Not that anyone cared whether she was afraid, she reflected. Not that anyone had volunteered to take her in.

She led the way to the front hall. Through the glass panels on either side of the front door, she caught sight of figures moving in the vestibule. “Your men,” she said, but hastened to add, “and women.”

“A few,” Valentine agreed.

He followed her into what had been Uncle Bob’s study, not that her uncle had actually studied anything either there or anywhere else, so far as Felicity knew, since his graduation from Harvard more than a half century earlier. The inaccurately named study did, however, testify to her uncle’s devotion to his alma mater, boasting as it did objects and furnishings emblazoned with the College shield and the word
Veritas:
a crystal carafe and drinking glasses, glass steins, and shot glasses on shelves that had been built for books; a leather chair for use at the desk; and, on top of the desk, a Harvard lamp. A brown leather couch and two armchairs were blessedly unadorned. The room looked to Felicity as if it had been copied from a movie set intended to depict a rich man’s study that had, in turn, been copied from some British aristocrat’s wood-paneled private office. The paradoxical effect of the successive copying was a sense of genuine warmth and comfort. Intending to use the study for writing, she had installed her desktop computer and printer on her uncle’s large cherry desk. A complete collection of her own books occupied a prominent place on a shelf above the desk. To her disappointment, she had found herself writing on her notebook computer at the kitchen table, as if she were a housekeeper with literary ambitions instead of a published author who owned the whole house.

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