Scratch the Surface

them both for me.”
    “The whole business might have nothing to do with you, Felicity. You haven’t been here long. Maybe it has to do with your uncle and aunt.”
    “Nonsense. Why would anyone leave a body and a cat for them?”
    “Why would anyone leave them for you?”
    “Because of my books!”
    Ronald smiled and shook his head. “Authors,” he said. “Well, I’d better be going. Could you get the carrier? It’s in the kitchen.”
    “What for?”
    “To carry the cat.”
    “Where?”
    “Home.”
    “Oh, no! Ronald, that cat is staying with me. He... she is evidence in a murder. She was left for me. She is staying here. We’re going to get her settled in one of my guest rooms with her litter box and lots of food, and she’s going to learn that she is perfectly safe now.” Reaching down, she tentatively stroked the top of the cat’s head. The cat silently watched her.
    Acting on her plan, Felicity left Ronald and the cat in her room and transferred the litter box, cat food, and water í bowl to the largest of the unoccupied bedrooms, which were not, properly speaking, guest rooms, since Felicity hated having houseguests and never invited anyone to stay with ; her. Aspiring mystery writers on do-it-yourself book tours were always eager to avoid the cost of hotels by staying with fellow mystery writers, many of whom were happy to accommodate the out-of-towners, who, in turn, were happy * to reciprocate when their hosts traveled. Felicity had always managed to weasel out of offering hospitality to these visitors and had no desire to camp out in other people’s houses in strange cities. The cat, however, wouldn’t expect her to cook breakfast or recommend it to her literary agent and could be counted on never to expect her to sleep on a foldout couch or on some makeshift bed in a messy sewing room or office.
    When Ronald had carried the cat to its new room, he and Felicity returned to the kitchen, where Ronald finished his glass of wine and, as an obvious afterthought, presented Felicity with a small supply of Valium, a gift that she assured herself was the American equivalent of those British cups of sugary tea.
    Before leaving, he also reminded her to activate her alarm system. “And if your password is Morris, Tabitha, Prissy, or LaChatte,“ he said, “change it.”
    She’d intended to replace Uncle Bob’s password with Morris.
    “Ronald, I know better than that.”
    She walked Ronald to his car, in part to assure the police that she had survived her encounter with this suspicious-looking character—not that the police seemed to care—and in part to see whether they were leaving soon. The investigators of a murder couldn’t exactly be called guests. Even so, it seemed to Felicity that they were overstaying their welcome. When she invited people to dinner, she expected them to finish dessert, converse a bit over coffee, and go home so that she could go to sleep. Like after-dinner lingerers, the police, she feared, might continue to hang around well past her bedtime. How many photographs were really necessary? How long could it possibly take to gather trace evidence and to dust for fingerprints in one small vestibule? As it turned out, the police were, in fact, about to depart for the evening but would return in the morning to search the neighborhood by daylight. To Felicity’s disappointment, Dave Valentine had left without saying good-bye to her, cautioning her to lock up carefully, or otherwise expressing any concern for her or her safety. Having studied hundreds, perhaps thousands, of accounts of police procedure in English villages, she knew better than to expect a policeman to be stationed protectively in her kitchen all night; such special treatment was inevitably reserved for the aristocracy and for friends and relatives of the chief constable. Consequently, she was surprised to learn that a cruiser would remain in Newton Park. She didn’t actually feel threatened: If the murderer had wanted to kill her, she’d be dead by now, wouldn’t she? Still, she appreciated what she took to be the show of attention.
    Comforted by a sense of being looked after, she returned to her house, went to bed, fell asleep after only two pages of the new P. D. James, and dreamed neither of London and Dalgliesh nor of vestibules and gray men but of the Highland Games and Dave Valentine, who wore his kilt and tossed the caber.
     

 
    One male had come and gone. Another had arrived and, with him, the