Scratch the Surface

careful steps. When the three reached the bottom of Felicity’s front steps, Tom marched up. Felicity paused for a moment. Zora was no bigger than a preteen. The corpse was no sight for childlike eyes. “Zora, wait here,” she said. “You wait here.”
    When Felicity had finished speaking, she looked up to discover that Tom had opened the vestibule door and was now inside. She hurried up the steps to find him bending over the body and pulling at the strips of duct tape. “Hold good,” he said. “Duct tape. WD-40. Duct tape. Good. Fix anything.”
    Felicity said, “Well, they won’t fix death! He’s dead, isn’t he? I don’t think you should touch anything.”
    “Dead,” Tom pronounced. “Cold. Stink in here.”
    With no warning, he stood up, brushed past Felicity, opened the vestibule door, and shouted at the cat in Chinese. The animal had been huddled in a corner but responded to the shouting by making a dash for the open door and would have escaped but for Felicity’s prompt action. Bending down while taking care not to drop her tote bag, she grabbed the cat and, finding it astonishingly heavy, wrapped both arms around it as if it were a heavy bag of groceries that would split unless supported on the bottom. Knowing nothing about cats that dwelled outside the pages of mystery fiction, she did not expect the animal to wiggle, scratch, and try to bolt, and was thus unsurprised when it settled itself in her two-armed grasp.
    “This cat is evidence,” Felicity said. “I’m taking it in the house right now.”
    Eager to escape the stench, she carried the cat down the steps, along the pathway, and to the back door near the garage. In this house that felt like Uncle Bob and Aunt Thelma’s, there seemed to be doors everywhere: the front door, the door to the garage, this back door near the garage, and doors to more balconies and decks than she’d bothered to count. The house had an alarm system so complicated that she never turned it on. Squeezing the unprotesting cat with her left arm, she used her right hand to fish in her tote bag, find her large ring of keys, and open the back door. Once inside, she lowered the cat to the floor at the bottom of a flight of tiled stairs that led up to the kitchen. What had possessed her to summon the Wangs? Zora had been useless, whereas Tom had tampered with evidence. What would her adoring public think of her when it was revealed that she’d panicked at the sight of a body?
    The thought of her public’s reaction set her heart pounding. The cat! Her public, consisting as it did of cat lovers, would be concerned with one personage in this horrible drama, and that one personage would be the big gray cat. Where was it? Hiding, no doubt. Having followed it up to the gigantic kitchen, Felicity took a deep breath, opened a cabinet, removed a low crystal glass, and then opened another cabinet and extracted a bottle of single malt scotch. Even the liquor cabinet remained Uncle Bob and Aunt Thelma’s, especially Uncle Bob’s, and was so well stocked that it would remain theirs for a long time, Bob Robertson having been in the liquor business. Whereas members of other ethnic groups objected to stereotypes about national origin, Scots went out of their way, or so Felicity thought, to promote the image of Scotland as a land of tartan-clad pipers, single-malt sippers, and dancers of the Highland fling. As Felicity understood the phenomenon, Scottish chauvinism was such that it never occurred to Scottish-Americans that anyone could possibly think ill of the most intelligent and literate citizenry ever to grace the earth, the noble people who would, to a person, still be the Lairds of the Highlands if it weren’t for the treachery of the scheming English. In any case, every one of Bob Robertson’s liquor stores had had a neon sign showing a tartan-clad piper, and even now, after the chain had been sold to the DiStephano family, the pipers continued to brighten the night skies of eastern Massachusetts with what Uncle Bob had seen as a depiction of Scottish pride.
    The taste of Laphroaig, combined with the happy image of her worshipful readership and her liberation from the stench of the corpse, gave Felicity a new perspective on the whole situation. Viewed with what she realized was good Scottish practicality, the position was this: She, Felicity Pride, Mistress of the Cat Lover’s Mystery, had found at her doorstep the body of a little gray-clad man so mousey that he