Scratch the Surface (30 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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“Morris was allowed everywhere.” Felicity did not add that there was even less difference between her own Morris and the fictional one than Janice might suppose. “My other cat, Edith, is quite shy. She may show up, or she may not. She’s young, too. She’s four. Brigitte, this one, is two.” In the hope of gently leading the conversation toward Janice’s pilfering by way of one of her possible motives, she said, “And they are both healthy. Robustly so. Up-to-date on their shots, everything. In fact, Edith is a blood donor at Angell. She gets all her shots free. Free exams, blood work, everything. A bag of cat food when she donates. Dorothy-L must be costing you a fortune. All the medicine. And you’re thinking about some new treatment for her. And she has to eat special cat food, doesn’t she? That can’t be cheap.”
A startled expression crossed Janice’s face. Felicity attributed it to her own indelicacy in having spoken so directly about money. Still, the topic of money was the only reason she’d invited Janice to dinner.
“But, of course, you have an advance and a book coming out,” Felicity said. “A wonderful book!”
“Thank you.”
“And you have such extensive plans to promote it. I’m very lazy about that myself. And the expense! Maybe it’s my Scottish heritage, but I can’t see spending all that money unless I’m sure it’s worth it.”
“Oh, it is worth it!”
“Not always. It’s important to be selective, not just to throw money randomly at any promotion at all. But I do understand the temptations. I really do. Mystery writing is a tough business. All writing is. It’s very competitive.”
“Fiercely.”
“On the other hand, there’s a tradition in mystery writing of supporting one another. Look at all our organizations. Take the two of us. We both belong to Sisters in Crime and Witness and some other organizations, too. But those cost money. The dues for Witness are fairly low, but some of the other groups? And it adds up when you join everything.”
“It does,” Janice said stiffly. “Then there are clothes. I need new clothes. And my car. I can’t go around driving that junk heap.”
Distracted from her goal, Felicity said, “Who cares what you drive? How many of your readers are going to see your car?”
“You never know. Image is terribly important. It’s essential. When your readers meet you, they don’t want to just meet some ordinary old person, do they? They want to meet a
star
.”
“I wouldn’t say that,” said Felicity, who cultivated a rich picture of her readership and took care to present herself in stellar fashion. “If anything, your readers want to meet your protagonist. Or they expect to.”
“My protagonist is a man,” said Janice, “so they can’t honestly expect me to be him.”
“What matters for you,” said Felicity, “is your sense of having to be a star.”
“But my hair is awful. I’ve been thinking about going blonde. Could I ask you who does your hair?”
“Her name is Naomi. But I have to warn you—”
“Oh, I know! She must be hideously expensive. Cheap hair color looks so . . . cheap, doesn’t it? But money is no object.”
“Money is always an object,” said Felicity.
THIRTY-NINE
Seconds after informing
Janice that money was always an object, Felicity reminded herself that time, too, was always an object, especially her own time, and that she shouldn’t waste too much of it on this business of Janice’s scam. Having intended to serve an early dinner, she had cooked the rice, which was keeping warm in Aunt Thelma’s new rice steamer. A small roasted chicken with no seasoning except salt was in the oven, and the green beans, which she’d blanched, needed only to finish cooking in a little butter. She now rose and began to heat the green beans.
“A drop of wine with dinner?” she offered.
“Well, a little tiny bit, I guess. You know, if you eat raw oysters, you’re supposed to drink white wine with them. It minimizes your chances of getting hepatitis.”
“We’re not having oysters on the half shell, I’m afraid. Just roast chicken.” It occurred to Felicity that the meal she’d prepared was so unexciting as to be almost Scottish. Her maternal grandmother had often served chicken. She had prepared it by boiling it in gallons of plain water for many hours. “But we can still have white wine.”
“Actually, chicken is crawling with bacteria.”
The bottle in the refrigerator was a white burgundy. As Felicity opened and poured it, she found herself thinking that it was a shame to waste it on Janice. She should have saved it for Ronald, who would have appreciated it. Even Ronald would not have referred to its germicidal properties. When she had served the food and taken a seat, she didn’t bother to raise her glass. Janice hadn’t waited for her, but was already sipping the wine while stroking Brigitte. At the sight and smell of the roast chicken, which Felicity had arranged on a small platter, Brigitte abandoned Janice to poke a curious nose into the food. Without consulting Felicity, Janice picked her up and placed her on the floor. “There are limits,” she said.
Felicity had intended to delay the confrontation until the end of the meal, but she was annoyed to have Janice take it upon herself to remove Brigitte from the table. Had Felicity been a guest at someone else’s house, she’d have been disgusted by the presence of a cat on the dinner table and nauseated by the thought of eating food that a cat had already sampled. This, however, was not someone else’s house, and if anyone were to set limits on Brigitte, she herself, and not Janice, should do it. “There’s something we need to discuss,” she said.
“My book! I am so happy that you like it.”
“Actually, it’s something else.” Felicity kept her eyes on the chicken she was cutting. Instead of describing her visit to Tony’s Deli and going on to accuse Janice of fraud, she spoke obliquely. “I went to Jamaica Plain this morning.” She ate a bit of chicken. “And before I say more, I want you to know that I understand your motives and that I sympathize.”
“Empathize.”
Empathize?
Felicity did not question the correction aloud. In fact, enjoying as she did a high opinion of her own communication skills, she disregarded the possibility that she and Janice were talking about two entirely different matters. In Felicity’s view, her own mastery of verbal expression usually eliminated the risk that she would be misunderstood or would misinterpret the blundering efforts of others. Janice, she decided, failed to comprehend the distinction between sympathy and empathy. “I
do
understand,” she said magnanimously.
“Of course you do. You of all people!”
If Felicity’s conscience had been clear, she would probably have realized that she and Janice were speaking at cross-purposes. As it was, Felicity bristled. She was no thief! Keeping Uncle Bob’s cash didn’t count. She had inherited the house and its contents. Therefore, she had inherited the fireproof box. “It’s ironic that you are the person who ended up suffering most,” she said, with the intention of making a delicate reference to the severity of Janice’s food poisoning. Glancing at the white meat that Janice was devouring, she added, “Look, it’ll be best for everyone if you’ll make a clean breast of things.”
Janice said, “I don’t know how you figured it out. Like take the cat food. How’d you know about that?”
Cat food? In softening Janice up for the confrontation about her pilfering, Felicity had mentioned free cat food as one of the perks of Edith’s serving as a blood donor at Angell. Felicity also remembered having gone on to say that Dorothy-L must be costing Janice a fortune. Hinting at the economic motives for Janice’s fraud, Felicity had acknowledged the cost of a possible new treatment as well as the need to pay for the cat’s medicine and special food. By comparison with the veterinary procedure and the prescription drugs, the special cat food must be a minor expense; Janice had certainly picked an odd example.
Even so, Felicity answered Janice’s question. “When we were at your house on Sunday, Dorothy-L’s food was in your kitchen.”
“But how did you make the connection?” The wine or perhaps the conversation had brought color to Janice’s face. Her cheeks had round red spots. Something, perhaps the wine, had given her an appetite. She dug her fork into the rice and bent her head to shovel the food into her mouth. Again without swallowing properly, she said, “I found out by a fluke. How did you find out?”
Baffled, Felicity asked, “How did you?”
“You remember that horrible letter I got? I sent
her
my book and asked for a blurb, and I got simply the most awful letter. Sonya read it, and so did some other people, and they said it was the most vicious thing they’d ever seen. I know it by heart. ‘This person cannot write and should not try.’ And then there was, ‘In a market glutted with cat mysteries and, indeed, with mysteries, this book does not stand a chance of success.’”
“That really is vicious.” Felicity refilled both glasses and sipped from her own. Her heart was pounding, but determined to show nothing, she concentrated on keeping her face expressionless.
“So, about three months ago, actually, on the first Monday in August, it must’ve been, I was at Angell to pick up a case of Dorothy-L’s prescription food. I always buy it by the case because I’m always scared I’ll run out, and her digestive system just will not tolerate regular cat food, so I can’t just go to the store and grab what’s there. It really isn’t clear what’s causing all her digestive problems. Whatever it is, it’s separate from her thyroid disorder, but it does make me wonder about the radioactive iodide treatment, you know, whether she could tolerate that.” Janice took a break to eat voraciously. “Anyway, you know how they keep a lot of dog and cat food in the lobby?”
“Yes,” said Felicity, who didn’t trust herself to say more.
“Well, the kind I needed wasn’t there, and someone went to look for it for me, but I knew it would take a while. Angell is the best place, but it isn’t necessarily the fastest. And there’s no place to sit in the lobby, so I went into that sort of corridor beyond it and took a seat on one of the benches, and I got to talking with this man who was waiting there, too.”
“Yes,” said Felicity.
“And his cat was a blood donor. He was picking her up. He told me all about how she gave blood, how he brought her in four times a year, the first Monday of the month every three months. Like, this was the first Monday in August. He showed me a picture of her and of his other cat, and he told me they were Chartreux. They really are gorgeous. You could tell he was crazy about them. And I told him about Dorothy-L. Anyway, I didn’t tell him about
Tailspin,
but I just asked him if he ever read cat mysteries. And you know what he said?”
“I have no idea.”
“He said, ‘Most of those people can’t write and shouldn’t try.’ Just like that! So then he asked me if I’d ever read Isabelle Hotchkiss. Naturally, I said yes. And he said that he didn’t know why anyone else bothered writing cat mysteries because the market was glutted with them and with mysteries in general, and most new mysteries didn’t stand a chance. So, I knew.”
“The same phrases as the ones in the horrible letter.”
“But I didn’t say a thing! I mean, I just made normal conversation, and then they brought out Dorothy-L’s food. So, as I was sort of saying good-bye, I introduced myself, and he more or less had to do the same thing. And he said his name was Quinlan Coates. There’s another piece of luck. I mean, the first was that we were at Angell at the same time and got to talking. And the second was that he had an unusual name.”
“So it must’ve been easy to find out more about him.” Feeling the need for strength, Felicity tried to fortify herself by eating, but she had to take small bites. Her mouth and throat were dry.
“I used all those Web sites. Once I knew where he lived and where his office was, I hung around, so I knew what kind of car he drove, his license plate, where he parked his car, all that stuff.”
“In a way, you stalked him.” In her anxiety, Felicity lost control of her accent and heard herself say “stawked,” but Janice seemed not to notice the lapse.
“It was very interesting. You know how real private investigators always say how boring it is to keep someone under surveillance? Well, that part of it really was boring. But it was interesting to do it myself, if you know what I mean. I’m already using it in the book I’m writing now. And in terms of planning, that part was pretty easy, too, because I knew when he was going back to Angell for his cat to give blood. Every three months, the first Monday, so that made it November third, which was perfect, of course, because it was after daylight savings ended.”

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