Scratch the Surface

now.”
    “Do you have an alarm system?”
    “Yes, but it was turned off. I never use it. I tried, but I kept forgetting the code or setting it off by accident. Please! I’m cold, and I haven’t had any dinner.”
    As the officer was sympathizing, yet more official vehicles arrived, and for the next ten minutes, Felicity was temporarily distracted from her thirst and hunger by the sight of what looked increasingly like a movie set. Powerful lights flooded the area, and to Felicity’s satisfaction, uniformed men taped off her yard with official crime-scene tape. Just as in a mystery novel, the police were securing the scene. Hurrah! Better yet, after Felicity had surrendered her house keys, a pair of officers armed with real, actual handguns entered her back door to search for the presence of what Felicity knew enough to call “the perp” or to look for signs that the perp had been inside. Meanwhile, other uniformed men walked around the house, presumably to check for signs of forced entry. At the outskirts of the hullabaloo, neighbors stood around in small groups. Noticing them, Felicity couldn’t decide whether she was happy or embarrassed to have her house the center of attention. If the powerful lights had been mounted on media vans, she’d have been unambivalently delighted. Where were the media?
    “I’m freezing,” she told the officer. “And I really need to use”—she lowered her voice—“the bathroom.” What was wrong with her! She should have thought of that perfect excuse a long time ago. Maybe she really was suffering from shock.
    After consulting with his colleagues, the officer gave Felicity permission to enter her house and returned her keys. “But don’t go anywhere else. And please don’t discuss anything you’ve seen with anyone. One of the detectives will want to talk to you first.”
    A detective! Felicity thanked the officer and made her way to her back door and into her house. After the damp of the November evening, the kitchen was as cozy as a British village mystery. The prospect of being interviewed by a real detective sent Felicity to the powder room off the kitchen, where she fussed with her hair and freshened her lipstick. Then, as she’d been eager to do, she poured herself a second Laphroaig, broiled the salmon, and congratulated herself on having attended a presentation for mystery writers about procedures for interviewing witnesses. An interviewer’s first task, she had been told, was to establish rapport with the witness. The point was vivid in her mind because the example given, namely, remarking on the weather, had struck her as ludicrous. Hot enough for you? So, what did the gunman look like?
    Seated at Aunt Thelma’s kitchen table, she ate the salmon with French bread and a helping of leftover salad. Instead of depositing the salmon skin in the garbage disposal as she’d normally have done, she chopped it up and put it on a saucer for the cat, which had remained out of sight. Fish skin was evidently a safe food for cats if given as an occasional treat. At any rate, Prissy LaChatte fed it to Morris and Tabitha without provoking readers to compose the kinds of irate letters that Felicity had received after the publication of her first book, in which Prissy had foolishly overindulged the cats’ love of canned albacore tuna. “If those cats don’t start eating a well-balanced diet in a hurry,” someone had written, “they’re going to die of malnutrition, and where will you be then?”
    Feeling and, indeed, sounding foolish, Felicity called, “Here, kitty!” Should she whistle? After placing the saucer on the tile floor, she picked it up and put it back in the hope that the sound of a dish landing on a floor would be familiar to the creature and would lure him out in time to play his part when the chief superintendent, captain, lieutenant, or whoever he was finally turned up. The cat, however, failed to come running for dinner in the gratifying manner of Morris and Tabitha, and when the back doorbell rang, as it soon did, all Felicity had to display in place of that crucial piece of living furry evidence in a murder were the pillow and saucers on the floor, and a kitchen that smelled unpleasantly of fish.
    Opening her back door, Felicity was startled to see a tall and almost unbelievably muscular man with an exceptionally large head and thick, curly gray hair. In introducing such a character to her readers, she’d have described the color of his eyes