Scratch the Surface (12 page)

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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

BOOK: Scratch the Surface
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“Thank you.” Fearful of making a fool of herself, Felicity was determined to say as little as possible about the cat. Did Dr. Furbish or her staff recognize Felicity’s name? Did they know who she was?
“I take it that she’s new.”
“She was left at my doorstep,” Felicity said. “On Monday evening. I thought she ought to have a checkup.”
Dr. Furbish opened the carrier door, reached in with both hands, removed the cat, and placed her on the table. “You’re a big girl, aren’t you?” She stroked the head of the unprotesting cat. “Amazing eyes. Magnificent.” Casually touching the cat and speaking gently, she conducted a thorough examination. The cat cooperated when Dr. Furbish applied a stethoscope, looked in her ears, checked her teeth, and used a thermometer to take the cat’s temperature. “Spayed female,” she told Felicity. “Healthy. Young. Three or four.” She then moved a small scale to the table, lifted the cat onto it, and said, “Thirteen pounds. Let’s consider this her maximum acceptable weight. She’s not obese, but I don’t want to see her any heavier.” She then raised the cat’s head and pointed to a small area on the throat. “That’s been shaved recently. Within a day or two.”
“What on earth for?” Felicity asked. She immediately regretted the question. For all she knew, shaving a spot on the throat was an essential part of routine cat care.
“It’s a venipuncture mark. A blood test maybe.” Without asking Felicity’s permission, she retrieved a small electronic gadget from a shelf and slowly passed it over the base of the cat’s neck. Studying it she said, “Okay.” Then she reached for a pad of paper and a pen, and wrote down a string of numerals. “Microchip number. With luck, in no time we’ll know whose cat she is. She’s a beauty. And so mellow. Someone will be relieved to have her back home.”
SIXTEEN
“She isn’t one
of ours,” said the young woman behind the high counter. “We keep the numbers for all the animals we microchip on our computer, and her number isn’t here. Dr. Furbish would’ve recognized her, anyway. If you want to have a seat, we’ll call the company, and they’ll look up the number.”
And what if I don’t want to have a seat?
thought Felicity.
What if I want to take my cat and go home and reexamine Uncle Bob’s money?
Reluctantly seating herself on one of the wooden benches that lined two walls of the waiting room, she concentrated on behaving herself. Only a few minutes ago, when Dr. Furbish had been examining the cat, Felicity had enjoyed the rare sense of being able to relax while kind, competent adults managed practical matters better than she could have done herself. Then Dr. Furbish had said, “I’m sorry, but we can’t release the cat to you until the registered owner has been contacted.”
The cat was now somewhere behind the scenes at the clinic while Felicity was stuck here in the waiting room. Registered owner, hah! Murder victim! And Dr. Furbish rather than Felicity would get all the credit for discovering the identity of the little gray man, who had definitely been left in Felicity’s vestibule for Felicity. Particularly galling was the reflection that the cat, just like Morris and Tabitha, had possessed information about the murder that she had “communicated,” albeit not in the mysterious fashion favored by Prissy LaChatte’s cats but via a microchip and a scanner. So what! The cat was Felicity’s, the information belonged to her, and she deserved the credit; Dr. Furbish and her staff deserved none.
The young woman behind the counter put down the phone and said, “The number’s busy. I’ll try again in a minute.”
Eager though Felicity was to return home to the fireproof box and its puzzling contents, she was unwilling to do anything to suggest that she had abandoned the cat. Still, she was tempted to tell the young woman that she’d be back soon and to zip home to pursue her investigation.
The clinic door opened and in stepped a well-dressed woman with a well-groomed golden retriever. The woman greeted an elderly couple seated far from Felicity on the other wooden bench. She’d barely noticed them. There was a small green cat carrier at their feet, but they’d been speaking neither to each other nor to the cat that was presumably in the carrier. After checking in at the counter, the woman with the golden retriever took a seat near the couple. Her dog sat on the linoleum next to her without so much as sniffing the cat carrier. Neither the people nor their animals were of interest to Felicity, who continued to focus her thoughts on tax-free cash until a phrase drew her attention.
“. . . tract mansions!” the elderly woman exclaimed. “That’s what they’re called.”
“McMansions,” the elderly man said. “Like McDonald’s. I think that’s quite clever. And very appropriate. Do you know that those people pretend that their development is in Newton? Someone was telling us about some scheme of theirs to have their mail delivered with Newton addresses.”
Felicity knew all about the so-called scheme. To her disappointment and that of her neighbors, it had failed, as had the effort to have trash collected by Newton trucks.
“They’re more than welcome to their pretensions,” said the woman with the golden retriever. “All I object to is the traffic. And the way they drive! Our streets aren’t meant for all those cars, and those people treat them like speedways. One of these days, someone’s going to be run over and killed. I don’t know why they can’t use their own entrance.”
“Because it’s in Brighton!” the elderly woman crowed.
All three Norwood Hill residents had a laugh at what Felicity felt to be her expense. To her relief, the young woman behind the counter had the phone at her ear and was reading off a number. Felicity gave her a questioning look, and she nodded. After hanging up, she said, “The chip number’s on file. They’ll call the owner, and then the owner will call us.”
“Do you have any idea how long this is going to take?” Felicity asked.
“It depends on whether they can reach the owner.”
Felicity cursed herself for having failed to bring her notebook computer along. A veterinary clinic would have been the ideal setting in which to work on the latest adventure of Prissy and the cats. Since the little gray man was dead, he wasn’t going to answer the call from the microchip company, so she’d probably have to sit here for hours with nothing to do. In case she ever wanted to have Prissy take Morris and Tabitha to a vet, she studied the waiting room and made mental note of details. A board with removable letters gave the names of the clinic’s veterinarians, veterinary technicians, and veterinary assistants. What was the difference between technicians and assistants? If she got it wrong, an irate reader would let her know. The elderly couple and their cat carrier vanished into an examining room. Two new clients arrived with dogs. The phone rang several times, and a young man who’d replaced the young woman behind the counter dispensed advice about bringing animals to the clinic. When the phone rang again, Felicity assumed that the caller was once again a pet owner. This time, however, Felicity overheard the young man say “microchip.” She rose and stepped to the counter.
“My cat,” she mouthed to him as he took notes.
“So you’re the breeder,” he was saying. “California?” After a pause, he said, “If you wouldn’t mind. Yes, she’s right here.” To Felicity he said, “This is the breeder. She’d like to talk to you.” He handed the phone to Felicity.
“Hi. My name is Felicity Pride. I’m the one who found the cat. Or rather, she was left in my vestibule.”
“
The
Felicity Pride? The author?”
“Yes. I’m a mystery writer.”
“I know! I just love Morris and Tabitha. And
you’re
the one who found Edith?”
“Edith,” Felicity said flatly. Edith? What a bland, disappointing name! How was she supposed to do effective publicity with a cat named—damn it all!—Edith! “Yes. I didn’t exactly find her. I think that she was left for me. On Monday night.”
“Well, where on earth is Quin? He must be frantic. He’s devoted to his Chartreux.” It took Felicity a second to connect the spoken word with the name she’d seen in one of her new books. The woman said “Char-troo,” whereas Felicity had assumed that
Chartreux
should be pronounced with an effort at a French accent. The accompanying picture had shown a big gray cat with greenish-hazel eyes. Why had she of all people trusted a
book
to be accurate! Especially a book about cats! “He must be worried sick,” the woman continued. “Why didn’t he call me? Why didn’t he call the microchip company? He has Edith’s microchip number. He should have reported her missing. And what about Brigitte?”
“Who?”
“Quin’s other Chartreux. She’s a fluffy. Edith has her premiership, but you can’t show fluffies. Well, some people are starting to, but not as Chartreux.”
Nervous about exposing her ignorance to a member of her adoring public, Felicity limited herself to making a small sound that she hoped would indicate comprehension.
“Edith Piaf and Brigitte Bardot.” To Felicity’s relief, she anglicized the pronunciations. It was more than enough effort to remember to pronounce
r
’s in English words without having to twist her tongue around an unpronounceable foreign language just to say the names of cats. And
Chartreux
! Or “Char-troo.” In either language, that rotten
r
was lurking in wait for persons slaving to throw off the chains of a Boston accent. “Those aren’t their registered names, but Quin is a professor of Romance languages, and he wanted French names.”
“Quin is . . .?” The young man behind the counter handed Felicity a slip of paper. “Oh, I have it here. Quinlan Coates.” Now that her attention had been drawn to the veterinary assistant or technician, whichever he was, Felicity saw that he was impatient and belatedly realized that she was monopolizing the phone line. “Look, I think we need to talk more. If it’s okay with you, I’ll take, uh, Edith home with me, and I’ll call you from there.”
“It’s more than okay. Obviously, Edith couldn’t be in better hands. And I’m sure you’re as worried about Brigitte as I am. Really, your love for cats just shines through in your books. Look, take Edith home with you, and I’ll call Quin right now, and we’ll get this whole thing straightened out. You didn’t give Edith any vaccinations, did you? Because she’s up to date . . .”
After listening to a brief lecture on the risks of immunization, Felicity obtained the name of the breeder, which was Ursula Novack, and her phone number and e-mail address, and once Ursula had given permission to the clinic to release Edith to Felicity, Felicity was finally allowed to take the cat and go home. Driving Aunt Thelma’s car back to Aunt Thelma and Uncle Bob’s house, she alternately fumed about Edith’s plain, flat, unliterary, and throughly unmysterious name and, as was habitual with her, plotted the next steps in a murder investigation. Usually, it was Prissy LaChatte who took those steps. This time, it would be Felicity Pride, assisted, of course, by her prescient, communicative, and lovable feline companion, Edith. Edith! By her prescient, communicative, and lovable feline companion. Period.
SEVENTEEN
In Felicity’s years
as a kindergarten teacher, she had been forced to write lesson plans. She’d hated the task, and ever since liberating herself from her day job, had luxuriated in the freedom of having no fixed schedule, not even a self-imposed one. Felicity attended meetings and made and kept appointments, but she shunned daily to-do lists, weekly calendars showing tasks to be accomplished, and other activities that would have felt like personal lesson plans doomed to transform her life into one more classroom. A prolific writer, she had no need to impose deadlines on herself and had never missed a contractual deadline for the delivery of a manuscript. Consequently, her recent experience in planning events consisted mainly of outlining her Prissy LaChatte books and of scrambling to think of ways to promote sales.

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