Scratch the Surface (28 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
“Boston,” Sonya replied.
“Does the school have a cafeteria?” Jim asked. “Think about the food she’s been serving us. Cold cuts, iceberg lettuce, sliced tomatoes. All that could’ve come from a school lunchroom.”
“Those stale rolls,” Hadley added. “You’re onto something, Jim.”
“The pudding,” Felicity wrote. “I wondered the same thing. On Sunday, she was talking about all the conferences she was going to. I wondered how she thought she could afford all the promotion she was planning.”
“Now we know,” Sonya wrote. “By stealing from us!”
“Not stealing,” Jim wrote. “Petty pilfering. There’s no reason to be punitive.”
Felicity agreed but wrote: “Teachers are paid quite decently. They make more money than writers do. But she already collects autographed first editions, and she’ll have big expenses if she plans to go to all the conferences, and she also has a sick cat.”
“She dotes on that cat,” Hadley wrote. “Ugly thing.”
“The cat eats special food,” Felicity explained, “and the vet bills must be substantial.”
“Means, motive, and opportunity,” Sonya wrote.
“It isn’t murder,” Hadley wrote. “It’s a sad little scam. It needs to be handled quietly. Look at all she’s done for Witness.”
Sonya was incensed. “All? Look at all she’s stolen from us!”
“She didn’t mean to steal,” Hadley argued. “She probably thought she was entitled. And she was ambitious. She wanted to go to conferences and be a star. Felicity, she wanted to be
you
.”
you
.”
“What a thrill!” Felicity posted. Then, remembering that she might be taken seriously, added a smiley face. “And let’s remember that she made herself so sick that she had to go to the hospital. Sonya, if punishment is in order, Janice has been punished.”
“We still have to do something,” Sonya wrote.
“She can’t stay on the board,” Hadley agreed. “And no more handling money.”
“Do we ask her to return what she took?” Jim asked.
“We don’t know how much it was,” Hadley answered. “Let’s give her the benefit of the doubt. She was temporarily deranged. She deserves sympathy. We’ll discreetly ask her to resign. And that’s that.”
“Who will?” Sonya asked. “Do we have a board meeting and spring it on her?”
The other three members vetoed the idea.
“It’s a sad event,” Jim wrote. “It needs to be handled privately.”
“Are you volunteering?” Sonya asked.
“No,” he replied. “Felicity could do it. Sonya, you’re too worked up about it.”
“I can’t,” Felicity wrote. “She asked me to blurb her book, and I didn’t. She must have hard feelings about that.”
“You can write a wonderful review of her book,” Sonya wrote. “To compensate. Tell her that you’ve finally gotten around to reading the manuscript, and you love it, and you’re going to publish a rave review.”
“I don’t write reviews,” Felicity wrote.
“This will be the first,” Hadley responded. “You love the book so much that you’re breaking your silence. Tell her you owe her an apology for not doing the blurb.”
Felicity slammed her fist on the desk next to the computer. These chat rooms were worse than she’d realized. “There’s probably still time to do a blurb. But I don’t want to,” she posted. “I don’t want to confront her.”
“Neither does anyone else,” Sonya replied, “but you are the best qualified. I’m sure you will do an excellent job. All you have to do is explain what we’ve discovered and ask for her resignation. It’s big of us to let it go at that. Janice will understand that we could press charges. She’ll be relieved. She’ll be grateful to you.”
“Thanks, Felicity,” Jim wrote. “Let us know how it goes.”
Hadley and Sonya joined him in offering thanks.
After posting a good-bye, Felicity exited the chat room. As she left the computer, the realization crossed her mind that Prissy LaChatte was immune to other people’s efforts to manipulate or exploit her. Prissy was nobody’s fool! In the present case, Prissy would either refuse responsibility for confronting the malefactor, or she’d find a way to turn the situation to her own advantage. Felicity was not Prissy LaChatte. In effect, she had already agreed to deal with Janice, and she could think of no way to derive any benefit from what was bound to be an unpleasant confrontation. On the contrary, she was stuck with the job of firing the newsletter editor who’d been eager to write up the story of Felicity’s very own cat-related murder. Damn! If only it were possible to shrink herself into near-invisibility, slip into her notebook computer through one of those mysterious ports she never otherwise used, infiltrate the files of her new book, slither out again, and, thanks to the miracles of technology and imagination, emerge as Prissy LaChatte! Prissy would make quick work of Janice Mattingly and her trivial misdeeds. Prissy would then solve the murder of Quinlan Coates, a.k.a. Isabelle Hotchkiss. Well, so would Felicity Pride!
THIRTY-SIX
Edith, the most
placid of creatures, has about had it with Brigitte. Has no one ever told that little fiend to let sleeping cats lie? At two-thirty in the morning of Tuesday, November 11, Edith is curled up on the pillow that she defines as hers on the sumptuously large bed that she also defines as hers, and she has been asleep and would like to return to sleep, but Brigitte is sorely trying her almost endless patience.
placid of creatures, has about had it with Brigitte. Has no one ever told that little fiend to let sleeping cats lie? At two-thirty in the morning of Tuesday, November 11, Edith is curled up on the pillow that she defines as hers on the sumptuously large bed that she also defines as hers, and she has been asleep and would like to return to sleep, but Brigitte is sorely trying her almost endless patience.
What is especially infuriating about Brigitte is that she has her uses. In particular, the human inhabitant of this cushy and indulgent new abode is deficient in such inter-species basics as patting and stroking, and Edith must thus rely on Brigitte, who, when she is in an affectionate mood, snuggles sweetly, engages in mutual grooming, and otherwise compensates for the human being’s incompetence. In Edith’s view, Brigitte suffers from a warping of personality seldom observed in her species. Healthy cats are content to eat and sleep; they are almost incapable of boredom. Brigitte, however, is easily bored. What’s more, she is afflicted with an abnormal amount of energy, and the excess is misdirected, usually at Edith. Tonight, for example, whenever Edith drifts into the delightful hypnagogic state that precedes (or should precede) sleep itself, Brigitte sneaks up and pounces. Edith has already given the fluffy little pest a few lessons in the hazards of sinking her teeth into the flesh of a big, strong cat. Brigitte should have learned the first time! Is it going to be necessary to trounce her yet again? Edith hopes not. Almost twice Brigitte’s size, she is no bully. But Brigitte is starting to provoke her beyond endurance. Never try the patience of a patient cat!
THIRTY-SEVEN
How hard it
was to play the role of Prissy LaChatte when other characters refused to stay in character! As Felicity’s best friend in a mystery series, Ronald should have done his part by staying up late, creating dramatic scenes, and requiring Felicity to go zooming off into the night to save him from himself. Although he was permitted to be a suspect in the murder, he should have aroused the suspicions of the police rather than Felicity’s own suspicions. As it was, Ronald stayed at home on most evenings. He read books and listened to Glenn Gould. So far as Felicity knew, the police had no interest in him; she alone understood the depth of his eccentricity, and she alone had a hunch that he’d known the identity of Isabelle Hotchkiss. Viewed as a continuing character in the series, Ronald was, in brief, a rotten best friend.
was to play the role of Prissy LaChatte when other characters refused to stay in character! As Felicity’s best friend in a mystery series, Ronald should have done his part by staying up late, creating dramatic scenes, and requiring Felicity to go zooming off into the night to save him from himself. Although he was permitted to be a suspect in the murder, he should have aroused the suspicions of the police rather than Felicity’s own suspicions. As it was, Ronald stayed at home on most evenings. He read books and listened to Glenn Gould. So far as Felicity knew, the police had no interest in him; she alone understood the depth of his eccentricity, and she alone had a hunch that he’d known the identity of Isabelle Hotchkiss. Viewed as a continuing character in the series, Ronald was, in brief, a rotten best friend.
Then there was Dave Valentine, whose detective work should have consisted primarily of calling Felicity, visiting her to discuss theories and suspects, and insisting that she accompany him to assist in interviewing witnesses because they’d be far more forthcoming with her than with him. What had he actually done? Not much. Furthermore, his romance with Felicity should have flourished. By now, he should at least have invited her out to lunch, if not to dinner. In reality, the romance had barely sprouted before her stupid lie about Uncle Bob’s accident had caused it to wilt and perish.
This wretched subplot about Janice’s little scam was unsatisfactory, too. According to Felicity’s literary intuition, it was developing out of its proper sequence. Instead of asserting itself now, it should wait until after the solution to the murder; it belonged in the denouement. What was it doing here?
These dissatisfactions troubled Felicity when she awoke on Tuesday morning. Having wrestled with characters, plots, and subplots before, she was not, however, discouraged. Rather, she vowed to make it plain to all characters, events, themes, and developments that whether they liked it or not, this story was going to be author driven; any elements that disagreed would suffer permanent deletion. At ten o’clock, she set to work rewriting reality by calling Detective Dave Valentine. Her true purpose was to rectify his failure to stay in incessant communication with her. At first, she’d thought of using her observations of William Coates as an excuse to call Valentine; in her books, the dullard police might have overlooked the significance of William’s hostility to his father and his rivalry with his father’s cats. On reflection, she had realized that there was no need for a trumped-up excuse; she had an all-too-real reason to call. She made a fresh cup of coffee and settled herself at the kitchen table with the phone.
Reaching Valentine, she said, “This is Felicity Pride, and I owe you an apology. I should have been perfectly straightforward about how my aunt and uncle died.”
“Family loyalty,” Valentine said.
“My uncle wasn’t really an alcoholic, you know. He was in the liquor business.”
“I know.”
“Why is it that Scots don’t object to those signs and ads? If there were Irish liquor stores with signs and ads covered with stereotyped pictures of leprechauns and the Blarney Stone, there’d be protests. Or Italian liquor stores with pictures of Mafia hit men. But all those caricatures of Highlanders? And no one minds?”
“Maybe some of us do,” Valentine said.
“Maybe we do. Anyway, Uncle Bob wasn’t an alcoholic. He was just in the liquor business his whole life. Since I’m making a full confession, I should tell you that he got his start during Prohibition. That’s something of a family secret.”
“Prohibition ended in nineteen thirty-three,” Valentine said.
“So it did.”
“He must’ve been an awfully young bootlegger.”
“I hadn’t put that together. I guess he was. Maybe he was earning his college tuition. As I said, it’s a family secret. My mother just told me about it the other day. By the time I knew him, he was perfectly reputable.” This topic was making Felicity nervous. Except to verify that no one had entered or tried to enter her house on the evening when Coates’s body had been left in her vestibule, the police hadn’t searched her house, and there was no reason why they should search it now. Bob and Thelma certainly weren’t murder suspects; they had died months before Coates’s slaying. Therefore, no matter what the source of the stashed money, the police had no reason to look for the fireproof box. Felicity’s apprehension about discussing Bob and Thelma was pure paranoia. Well, it was impure paranoia. What had possessed her to slip that hundred-dollar bill into the donation box at Angell?
“As I was saying,” she continued, “he wasn’t an alcoholic.”
“But he did drink and drive.”
“Obviously,” said Felicity. “Obviously, he did drink and drive. I should have told you about the accident the first time we discussed it. About his death and Aunt Thelma’s. I feel like a fool. So, please accept my apology.”
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