Scratch the Surface (15 page)
Read Scratch the Surface Online
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
Felicity’s considerable experience
as a consumer and producer of mystery fiction had given her a great fondness for emotional magnetism between female amateur sleuths and male homicide detectives. When the attraction became outright romance, the relationship often fell victim to author-imposed impediments cruelly placed between the would-be lovers to prolong tension from book to book, thus smoothing a series potentially chopped up by discrete murders. In some cases, the author found it useful to unite the duo in a consummated affair or in marriage, thus allowing the amateur gumshoe ready access to information otherwise known only to the police; it was far easier to write a little pillow talk than it was to invent complex subterfuges whereby the amateur protagonist discovered the results of a postmortem, learned which suspects had or lacked alibis, or became privy to the secret of exactly what bewildering object the murderer had left as a signature at the scene of the crime. Ah, love! What a splendid literary convenience!
as a consumer and producer of mystery fiction had given her a great fondness for emotional magnetism between female amateur sleuths and male homicide detectives. When the attraction became outright romance, the relationship often fell victim to author-imposed impediments cruelly placed between the would-be lovers to prolong tension from book to book, thus smoothing a series potentially chopped up by discrete murders. In some cases, the author found it useful to unite the duo in a consummated affair or in marriage, thus allowing the amateur gumshoe ready access to information otherwise known only to the police; it was far easier to write a little pillow talk than it was to invent complex subterfuges whereby the amateur protagonist discovered the results of a postmortem, learned which suspects had or lacked alibis, or became privy to the secret of exactly what bewildering object the murderer had left as a signature at the scene of the crime. Ah, love! What a splendid literary convenience!
Thus at six-thirty that evening, after Felicity had recounted the $120,555 in the fireproof box and added 1,353 words to her new Prissy LaChatte book, she was delighted to find Detective Dave Valentine at her back door. Having left her phone off the hook and her cell phone off, she was, not however, surprised. He’d have to reach her somehow, wouldn’t he?
“Come in,” she said. “You got my message?”
“Your phone’s out of order,” he said. “And you must’ve had your cell phone turned off. But I take it that you got there first.”
In more ways than one,
Felicity wanted to say. “I didn’t touch anything except the book on the coffee table. I had to get Quinlan Coates’s other cat. The one that was left here is Edith. They’re Chartreux cats. I took Edith to the vet this morning, and it turns out that she has a microchip. The number on the microchip was registered to the breeder, who’s in California, and she had his name and address. She made me promise to get his other cat right away. That’s Brigitte. They’re Edith Piaf and Brigitte Bardot. He was a professor of Romance languages.”
Felicity wanted to say. “I didn’t touch anything except the book on the coffee table. I had to get Quinlan Coates’s other cat. The one that was left here is Edith. They’re Chartreux cats. I took Edith to the vet this morning, and it turns out that she has a microchip. The number on the microchip was registered to the breeder, who’s in California, and she had his name and address. She made me promise to get his other cat right away. That’s Brigitte. They’re Edith Piaf and Brigitte Bardot. He was a professor of Romance languages.”
Possibly in response to the sound of her name, Brigitte flounced into the kitchen. Picking up speed, she leaped onto the counter by the sink and began to sniff the salmon fillet that Felicity had been seasoning.
“You see? She was starving.” As Prissy would have done, instead of asking whether Dave Valentine would like to share the meal, she told him to have a seat and set about fixing food for two. “It’s not for her. Cats need cat food. It’s Scottish salmon.” She turned the heat on under one of Aunt Thelma’s expensive new skillets.
“Smoked?”
“No. Farm raised. I tried it out of loyalty, but it really is good.” She paused in the hope that he’d mention the Highland Games or, indeed, anything else about Scotland. “Besides, it was on sale.”
He laughed. “How much more Scottish could it get?”
“I have to confess something,” Felicity said coyly. “I saw you at the Highland Games.”
“Making a fool of myself.”
“Not at all!”
“In a skirt. And I’m only three-quarters Scottish.”
“Me, too. But I’ve been to Scotland. Have you?”
“Never.”
“It’s beautiful. Everything is wonderful except the food. The food is horrible. Microwaved potatoes. Salmon is the only thing Scottish cooking doesn’t ruin.” With that, Felicity poured a little olive oil into the skillet, waited a moment, and put in the salmon fillets. Then she set the table with Aunt Thelma’s new place mats, napkins, plates, and stainless steel flatware.
When she set a place for Detective Valentine, he didn’t object, but he did abandon the topic of their shared heritage. “I need to ask you a few questions.”
When Prissy conversed with policemen, they often warned her off her investigation or sought her brilliant insights. They didn’t just interrogate her. Felicity reminded herself that fiction was to real life as Scotland was to everywhere else: better.
As Felicity tossed salad, he said, “Quinlan Coates was a professor at B.C.” The abbreviation for Boston College pleased Felicity, to whom it suggested collaboration in the investigation. “His speciality was French. Does anything about that connect with you? Did you go to B.C.?”
“No. It’s only about a mile from here. I drive by it all the time. Nothing else.”
“Do you speak French?”
“A few words.”
“You don’t own a dog, do you?”
“A dog? No.”
“Have you had any visitors who brought their dogs with them?”
“What is this about? No.”
“Your relatives who left you this house, the Robertsons. Did they have a dog? Or a cat?”
“No. A long time ago, when I was a child, Aunt Thelma had a cat. As far as I know, that was the last pet they had. They had a house in Ogunquit and a condo in Florida. It wouldn’t have been very convenient for them to have had pets.” Felicity served the salmon, the tossed salad, and a loaf of French bread. “You obviously found dog hair,” she said. “What kind of dog did it come from?” She picked up her fork.
Dave Valentine, too, reached for his fork. “This is the best meal I’ve had in front of me in a year. Probably more.”
Although the detective didn’t hammer his head at his food as Brigitte had done, Felicity was happy to see that he ate with gusto. Was his wife a terrible cook? Just what you’d expect from someone who
used to
read Felicity Pride! Or maybe she was just Scottish. Or, with luck,
had been
.
used to
read Felicity Pride! Or maybe she was just Scottish. Or, with luck,
had been
.
“Quinlan Coates was a widower,” he said. “His wife died ten years ago. Her name was Dora. Does that ring any bells?”
“Dora Coates. No. It doesn’t sound familiar.”
“There’s a son, William. Bill.”
“William Coates. Bill Coates. Billy Goats! The poor thing!”
Valentine smiled. “I hadn’t noticed that.” He paused to eat. “Everything is delicious. Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.”
“If you don’t mind, let’s go over this business about the cat and the microchip. Just tell me about it.”
Felicity was happy that he hadn’t said “in your own words.” Whenever she heard the phase, she wondered whose words she was expected to use. Shakespeare’s? Still, she had to choose between her own nonfiction words, so to speak, and her storytelling words. After her regrets about the unimaginative first interview she’d had with Valentine, she longed to embellish the account of taking Edith to Dr. Furbish, speaking to Ursula Novack, discovering the victim’s identity, and pulling off the daring rescue of darling Brigitte. With a sense of disappointment in herself, she settled for giving a simple account that did, however, emphasize her effort to reach him and her concern for Brigitte.
When she’d finished, she returned her attention to her food and then added, “While I was looking for Brigitte, I noticed that there were a lot of cat mysteries, including mine.”
“A few of yours. Others, too. What do you make of that?”
“Not much. Lots of people read mysteries.”
“The other books are all about the French or in French, or biographies, academic journals, that kind of thing.”
“Professor Coates was entitled to a little relief, wasn’t he? And he loved his cats.”
“The choice is kind of, uh, feminine.”
“Men read mysteries, too!”
“Cat mysteries?”
“Some men do.”
Perhaps because he was finishing a meal she’d cooked, Valentine didn’t argue the point, but switched to asking her to think about anyone who might have a grudge against her. “About anything,” he said. “Something that might seem like nothing to you.”
The two people who came immediately to mind were her mother and sister, whose resentment, far from seeming negligible, felt monumental. “I can’t think of anyone,” she said.
“I want you to dig deeper. Go through your appointment book and see if it brings back anything. Letters you’ve sent. Or received. You use e-mail?”
“Of course.” Did he think of her as belonging to the generation that feared the Internet? “I use it all the time. Nonstop.”
“Good. I want you to go over any e-mail you’ve saved. Sent and received. Look for anything at all that might have made someone want to retaliate. Anything that might’ve hit someone else the wrong way.”
After again thanking Felicity for dinner, Detective Valentine rose to leave. Although she had read hundreds of times that police detectives weren’t allowed to drink on duty, she couldn’t resist reminding him that they were both Scots. “I don’t suppose you’d like a wee deoch an doris, would you?”
But after smiling and refusing, he said, “Another time.”
Felicity waited until he was out of earshot before bursting into song. She did not sing the Harry Lauder song about a wee drink at parting. Rather, at the top of her three-quarters-Scottish lungs, she bellowed the chorus of “Scotland the Brave.”
TWENTY
One thing Felicity
never ate for breakfast was oatmeal. She had acquired the prejudice against it from her mother, who had been raised on “mush,” as the Scots called it, and who especially loathed the innocent combination of oatmeal and raisins known as “mush torra laddy.” On the morning of Thursday, November 6, Felicity ate scrambled eggs and went so far as to offer some to Brigitte, who sniffed with interest, but then resumed her favorite activity, which was zipping around the house, upstairs and downstairs, and leaping in and out of bathtubs. Although the ravenous Brigitte had devoured canned cat food when Felicity had first brought her home, she had refused it since then, and although she eagerly sniffed at Felicity’s own food, she limited her actual intake to dry cat food.
never ate for breakfast was oatmeal. She had acquired the prejudice against it from her mother, who had been raised on “mush,” as the Scots called it, and who especially loathed the innocent combination of oatmeal and raisins known as “mush torra laddy.” On the morning of Thursday, November 6, Felicity ate scrambled eggs and went so far as to offer some to Brigitte, who sniffed with interest, but then resumed her favorite activity, which was zipping around the house, upstairs and downstairs, and leaping in and out of bathtubs. Although the ravenous Brigitte had devoured canned cat food when Felicity had first brought her home, she had refused it since then, and although she eagerly sniffed at Felicity’s own food, she limited her actual intake to dry cat food.
Over eggs and coffee, Felicity read the morning paper, which included a short article about the murder:
MURDER VICTIM IDENTIFIED
The homicide victim whose body was found on Monday evening at the door of a Brighton home has been identified as Quinlan Coates, 63, of Brighton. Coates, a professor of Romance languages at Boston College, died of a blunt trauma to the head. The victim’s remains were left in a housing development at the entrance to a unit occupied by Felicity Pride, 53. Authorities are pursuing their investigations.
Felicity was incensed. Exactly how did her age pertain to the murder! And a “housing development”! A “unit”! A “unit” in Brighton! She’d have preferred
minimansion
. Furthermore, in the normal course of things, the appropriate response to receiving a personal insult in the newspaper was to write an outraged letter to the editor. But what could she write? That she was fifty-three, but didn’t look it? That she did not, as the paper had suggested, dwell in public housing, but lived in a house the size of a small cruise ship? That within feline mystery circles she was a bona fide celebrity and, as such, expected to be treated with respect? Impossible. All of it. Impossible.
The best response was obviously to solve the murder—and to claim credit for having done so. Toward that end, when Felicity had finished grooming herself and dressing for the day, she settled herself in Uncle Bob’s Harvardian den and began to comply with Detective Valentine’s instructions to go through her correspondence in search of a clue to the murderer’s motive in having left Coates’s body for her. His cat, too, of course. In Felicity’s opinion, therein lay her advantage over the police: Whereas they dismissed the importance of Edith’s presence, she did not. Therefore, the more feline the clue, the better! She began with a folder of letters from readers. She kept only a little of what other authors called “fan mail.” Felicity received some correspondence that merited the term, but she preferred to think of thank-you notes as just that. In most cases, she read the thanks, sent a brief reply, and tossed out the note. She kept letters that pointed out errors. If a reader found a typographical error, she photocopied the offending page of the book, marked the correction, and sent the page to her editor. Her file contained a few such letters from readers, but who would dump a corpse in an author’s vestibule because
cats
had been misprinted as
cast
? She kept letters in which readers advised her about the proper care and feeding of Morris and Tabitha. Because of such advice, Prissy hadn’t given the cats milk for many years, fed them human food only as a rare treat, and took care not to let them play with long cords that might cause strangulation. No motive there. A few readers had expressed strong opinions about series characters. Some readers wanted Prissy to marry the chief of police; others cautioned against the alliance. There were several letters from correspondents who urged Prissy to adopt a third cat from a shelter. Nowhere did Felicity find anything even remotely suggestive of a wish to harm her.
cats
had been misprinted as
cast
? She kept letters in which readers advised her about the proper care and feeding of Morris and Tabitha. Because of such advice, Prissy hadn’t given the cats milk for many years, fed them human food only as a rare treat, and took care not to let them play with long cords that might cause strangulation. No motive there. A few readers had expressed strong opinions about series characters. Some readers wanted Prissy to marry the chief of police; others cautioned against the alliance. There were several letters from correspondents who urged Prissy to adopt a third cat from a shelter. Nowhere did Felicity find anything even remotely suggestive of a wish to harm her.
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