Scratch the Surface

as the blue of a Siamese cat’s. There was, however, nothing truly catlike about the man; if he resembled any sort of animal, it was perhaps a Clydesdale horse. His muscularity was not confined to his body, but extended upward to his massive neck and jaw. Even his cheekbones were brawny. What surprised Felicity was not so much the man’s monumental build as it was the memory of where she had seen him before and what he had been doing then; She’d noticed him at the Highland Games in New Hampshire a little more than a year earlier. He’d been tossing the caber, the caber being a log the approximate length and width of a telephone pole.
    “Dave Valentine,” he said.
    Valentine or no Valentine, Felicity thought, you look like a MacKenzie or a MacFarlane or a Campbell to me. Then, having wondered what kind of name Valentine was and what it was doing on this Scottish Hercules, she realized with horror that her mind was, in effect, the pitiful victim of demonic possession; it had been so aggressively invaded and conquered by her mother that unless she immediately exorcized the maternal demon, she’d find herself quoting “Scots, Wha Hae” and offering this tree-trunk-hurling Highland giant a wee dram of Oban.
    In triumph, she said, “Felicity Pride. Come in.” The fresh air blowing through the door seemed to exacerbate the fish smell, and Felicity was suddenly and belatedly aware of the empty glass and the bottle of Laphroaig that sat on the counter near the sink. It was one thing to imagine inviting this Atlas of Inverness to take a drop with her, but quite another to have him catch her drinking alone. What’s more, the damned cat was nowhere in sight. “Coffee?” she asked. “Something to eat? I could make you a sandwich.”
    Valentine shook his head. “No, thanks. I need to ask you about what happened. Are you doing okay?”
    Was he looking at the bottle? Damn! The expert on interviewing witnesses had emphasized the need to inquire about the witness’s condition and to take note of special circumstances. For instance, had the witness been drinking?
    “I’m all right. More or less. But I’m worried about the cat. The one that was left... There was a cat in my vestibule. With the... with the man. I brought him in. The cat. I carried the cat in, and I’ve made a little bed for him, and there’s food, but he’s hiding somewhere.” The scene was not playing itself out as Felicity had intended. Even to her own ears, she sounded frightened and uncertain, and instead of expressing overwhelming concern for the cat, she sounded irritated with it, as, indeed, she was. The sight of the Laphroaig bottle and the damned odor of salmon were beginning to make her queasy. “Could we go somewhere else?” This house of Uncle Bob and Aunt Thelma’s was her house, damn it! Why was she asking permission to leave her own kitchen? “Somewhere other than the kitchen,” she amended. “I had fish for dinner. I’m not afraid to be alone here.” Not that anyone cared whether she was afraid, she reflected. Not that anyone had volunteered to take her in.
    She led the way to the front hall. Through the glass panels on either side of the front door, she caught sight of figures moving in the vestibule. “Your men,” she said, but hastened to add, “and women.”
    “A few,” Valentine agreed.
    He followed her into what had been Uncle Bob’s study, not that her uncle had actually studied anything either there or anywhere else, so far as Felicity knew, since his graduation from Harvard more than a half century earlier. The inaccurately named study did, however, testify to her uncle’s devotion to his alma mater, boasting as it did objects and furnishings emblazoned with the College shield and the word Veritas: a crystal carafe and drinking glasses, glass steins, and shot glasses on shelves that had been built for books; a leather chair for use at the desk; and, on top of the desk, a Harvard lamp. A brown leather couch and two armchairs were blessedly unadorned. The room looked to Felicity as if it had been copied from a movie set intended to depict a rich man’s study that had, in turn, been copied from some British aristocrat’s wood-paneled private office. The paradoxical effect of the successive copying was a sense of genuine warmth and comfort. Intending to use the study for writing, she had installed her desktop computer and printer on her uncle’s large cherry desk. A complete collection of her own books