Scratch the Surface (22 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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By the time she had finished composing and dispatching this piece of correspondence, Quinlan Coates’s casket was being carried down the aisle. People rose and began to file out.
“Are we going to the cemetery?” Janice asked brightly.
“The interment is private,” said Felicity, who had no idea whether or not it really was. “Excuse me. There’s someone I need to speak to. I’ll be right back.”
By then, the women were outside the church, where clusters of people were lingering. The hearse and one black limousine were at the curb. Felicity rapidly made her way toward the limousine and thus toward William Coates, who was gazing at the gray November sky while moving his feet back and forth on the concrete as if trying to scrape something off the soles of his shoes.
Felicity introduced herself, but sensing that William Coates wouldn’t return a handshake, did not offer one. “I’m very sorry about your father.”
“I’m not,” he said.
“Well, in case you’re concerned about his cats, I wanted you to know that they’re safe. I have them.”
“Keep them. He treated every cat he ever owned a lot better than he treated me.”
It occurred to Felicity that if Quinlan Coates had hated cats, he might have been the perfect match for her mother. Now was not, however, the time to organize a support group for adult children whose parents didn’t like them. “I’m sorry to hear that,” she said.
“Were you a friend of his?”
“I never met him.”
“You didn’t miss much. Well, thanks for coming.”
“You’re welcome,” she said.
As she walked away from William Coates, she experienced a disconcerting sense of gratitude toward her mother, who had had the decency to insist on good manners. Preoccupied, she nearly bumped into Detective Dave Valentine, who wore a dark suit and looked well groomed in some male fashion that Felicity couldn’t identify. Had he had a haircut?
Fresh from her encounter with William Coates, she exclaimed, “What a rude man!”
“I didn’t expect to see you here,” Valentine said.
“I felt as though I should come.”
“It was nice of you. Look, this is an awkward time, but there’s something I need to ask you about your uncle and aunt. The Robertsons.”
“Yes?”
“You told me they were killed in a car accident.”
“They were.”
“By a drunk driver.”
“Yes.”
“There was a little something you didn’t mention.”
Felicity silently gazed into Valentine’s eyes, which the cloudy sky had turned an especially attractive shade of blue.
“The little something,” Valentine continued, “concerns the drunk driver.”
“Yes.”
“The driver in question was Robert Robertson.”
“Yes,” Felicity agreed, “the drunk driver was Uncle Bob himself.”
TWENTY-EIGHT
The funeral left
Felicity in a foul mood. As she changed out of her blue suit and into corduroy pants and an old sweater, she glared at her unmade bed and cursed herself for having skipped the housework to concentrate on her appearance. For all the good it had done to fuss with her hair, her makeup, and her outfit! Rather than inviting her out to dinner, or at least flirting with her, Dave Valentine had caught her in a stupid lie. Furthermore, he’d seen her with Janice and Sonya, and he’d probably overheard the silly whispering of women acting like schoolgirls. William Coates had been horrible, particularly because his antagonism toward his father had reminded her of hers toward her mother. As material for a writer, the church and the priest had been useless.
The funeral had been brief and nearby, and it was only quarter of twelve. Still, the bed should have been made by now, and the presence of both cats on the rumpled comforter was uncomfortably reminiscent of the dishevelment of Quinlan Coates’s apartment. Was it slovenly to let cats sleep on the bed? Felicity felt incapable of shooing them off. When she removed the pillows and yanked the top sheet and blanket toward the headboard, Brigitte, as if recognizing the start of a delightful game, began tearing around the room, leaping off and on the bed, and diving under the sheet. The large and stolid Edith, however, remained where she was, in the exact center of the bed, and her weight made it almost impossible to straighten the covers. Felicity, who was too intimidated to remove Edith, settled for pulling hard on the covers with both hands. She then plumped and replaced the pillows, but when she neatly folded over the top of the comforter, Brigitte flung herself onto the bed, dove under the fold, and wiggled. Felicity finally gave up.
After vacuuming downstairs, Felicity ate a light lunch and, resisting the urge to take a nap, went to her computer and visited the Web site of a large online bookseller to see how
Felines in Felony
was doing. Mistake! The new Isabelle Hotchkiss,
Purrfectly Baffling,
was selling better than
Felines in Felony
. Furthermore, two disgruntled readers had given
Felines in Felony
low ratings and posted nasty reviews. According to one of the readers, the book was “too feline and insufficiently felonious,” and according to the other, “the premise that Morris and Tabitha communicate with Prissy LaChatte in some unexplained fashion is utterly preposterous.” In search of consolation, Felicity looked at the ratings and reader reviews of
Purrfectly Baffling,
but found no comfort. “Olaf and Lambie Pie are even more lovable in
Purrfectly Baffling
than in its charming predecessors,” wrote one reader. “With twitching tail, I eagerly await the brilliant Isabelle Hotchkiss’s next recounting of the spine-tingling adventures of Kitty Katlikoff.” Was it possible that Mary Robertson had a computer hidden somewhere in her apartment and secretly visited this Web site to pan her daughter’s books and praise those of her principal rival?
To remind herself of just how badly Isabelle Hotchkiss wrote, Felicity decided to read some of the sample pages of
Purrfectly Baffling
available at the click of a mouse. She soon came to a section in which Isabelle Hotchkiss’s fictional cats were conversing with each other:
 
“I am not sure I feel like telling the Furless Person everything I know,” the hefty Olaf opined stodgily. “What has she done for us lately?”
“Fed us!” exclaimed the soft, fluffy little Lambie Pie.
“Oh, yum! Dry food! Yum, yum, yum!”
 
“‘Hefty Olaf opined stodgily.’” Felicity spoke with the joy of one who has found precisely what she sought. “Pass me the antiemetic, please.” Despite the claim to nausea, she devoured two full pages about Olaf and Lambie Pie. Although she believed in keeping an eye on the competition, she had read only a few of Isabelle Hotchkiss’s books and none of her recent ones. In
Purrfectly Baffling,
the cats were as saccharine as ever, but something about them was elusively different from what she remembered. When she’d read the old Kitty Katlikoff books, she hadn’t owned cats; the new element might be her own perception and not Hotchkiss’s depiction. Had soft, fluffy little Lambie Pie always draped herself on the edges of furniture? For that matter, had little Lambie Pie been soft and fluffy? Had she been little? As to Olaf, had he been compact and stodgy? Then there were the food preferences. Had Olaf always preferred canned food? And when Kitty Katlikoff opened a can of food, had Lambie Pie always danced eagerly around, sniffed the wet food, and then eaten dry food?
Clicking her mouse and scrolling down the pages, Felicity happened on a scene in which Kitty Katlikoff was making her bed. Lambie Pie ran madly around, leaping under the covers and hiding in the folds of the bedspread, whereas big, placid Olaf planted himself in the center of the bed and refused to budge. The bed-making scene settled the matter: Isabelle Hotchkiss seemed to be describing the late Quinlan Coates’s cats.
Had Hotchkiss and Coates known each other? But Edith and Brigitte were young, four and two years old, respectively, and the first Hotchkiss mystery had been published about a dozen years ago. Unless all cats acted alike? Or unless all Chartreux cats acted alike, and Isabelle Hotchkiss owned the breed? But Edith and Brigitte were both Chartreux, yet differed radically from each other in ways that mirrored the differences between Olaf and Lambie Pie. And neither of Ronald’s cats, George and Ira, bore a strong resemblance to Olaf and Edith or to Lambie Pie and Brigitte. Both George and Ira were only moderately active. Felicity had never seen either cat drape himself on furniture. Mystified, Felicity decided on a visit to Newbright Books, where she could question Ronald about cat behavior and Isabelle Hotchkiss’s identity while simultaneously preparing to investigate Olaf and Lambie Pie as they had been portrayed in Isabelle Hotchkiss’s early mysteries.
Forty-five minutes later, soon after Felicity entered Ronald’s store, she felt a wave of guilt. Tucked in the wallet in her shoulder bag was a one-hundred-dollar bill from Uncle Bob’s fireproof box. Back at home, when she’d decided on the efficient course of acquiring Hotchkiss’s books while interrogating Ronald about cats, she’d had to confront her reluctance to contribute to Hotchkiss’s royalties. The public library would have some of the old Hotchkiss mysteries, but the new one,
Purrfectly Baffling,
would—damn it all!—have a long waiting list, and Felicity wanted to study its depictions of Olaf and Lambie Pie without having to read the whole book at her computer. With luck, Newbright Books would have some used Hotchkiss paperbacks, but to acquire
Purrfectly Baffling,
she’d have to buy a new hardcover. The bill from Uncle Bob’s stash represented a compromise: Although Isabelle Hotchkiss would get paid for the book, Felicity herself wouldn’t have earned the money that ended up in Hotchkiss’s bank account. Entering the store, Felicity found Ronald conferring with a customer about the perfect present for the woman’s elderly aunt who doted on her cats. He immediately introduced the customer to Felicity and, as if engaging in some secret and probably illegal transaction, advised the woman to have Felicity inscribe a copy of
Felines in Felony
to the cat-loving aunt. And in Felicity’s wallet was the ill-gotten and possibly even counterfeit hundred-dollar bill that she’d intended to palm off on this dear friend, this sweetest of men, this promoter of her books!
After Felicity had inscribed her book to the aunt, she headed to the section of used books, where she found satisfyingly cheap paperback copies of the first Isabelle Hotchkiss,
Purrfectly Poisonous,
and three later books in the series,
Purrfectly Murderous, Purrfectly Deadly,
and
Purrfectly
Sleuthful.
With regret, she moved to the shelves of new paperback mysteries, where she picked up
Purrfectly Criminal
. Finally with an emotion close of pain, she added
Purrfectly Baffling
to the stack of books she carried.
“Her new hardcover?” Ronald inquired in an undertone. “And her new paperback? Felicity, how unlike you!”
Felicity was about to say that it was unlike Ronald to discourage a customer from buying books when she realized that it was actually something he habitually did: If he thought that a customer wouldn’t enjoy a book, he said so. She settled for responding with a noncommittal nod before demanding, “Ronald, who
is
she?”
“What do you care?”
“I’m just curious.”
“I have no idea. No one does. Presumably. Felicity, you know all this. Mystery writers used to write under pseudonyms all the time. Nicholas Blake was Cecil Day-Lewis. The poet laureate. Michael Innis was—”
“J. I. M. Stewart. Amanda Cross. Carolyn Heilbrun. I know! Carolyn Heilbrun wrote about it somewhere. Academic types were stigmatized if their colleagues knew that they wrote mysteries. Michael Innis was a don at Oxford. Except that everyone knew who he really was. And it was no secret that Carolyn Heilbrun was Amanda Cross. So why all the secrecy about Isabelle Hotchkiss?”
Ronald shrugged. “Have you looked up copyright information? It’s on the Library of Congress Web site.”
“I hadn’t thought of that.”
“It won’t tell you anything.”
“Then why would I look there?”
“Because you’re stressed. It would give you something to do. I wish I could persuade you to listen to—”

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