Scratch the Surface

been fixed on her own fascinating image in the mirror before her. With most of her hair wrapped in pieces of foil and standing out from her head, she looked to herself like a freakish lion. She reluctantly turned her eyes toward the woman who’d spoken, a client who was having what was known as a “one process.” Her long hair was thickly coated with black and foul-smelling stuff.
    “If you don’t know where the cat came from,” the woman continued, “you might want to check for parasites. And have a vet give the cat a general going-over. What kind of cat is it?”
    “Big,” said Felicity. “A big gray cat.”
    “Longhaired?”
    “No. Uh, normal.”
    “A blue shorthair. You know, you might have a Russian Blue.”
    Ashamed of the paucity of her knowledge of real cats, Felicity shrugged her shoulders. If the cat turned out to belong to some breed, she could always say that the information was vital to the murder investigation and that the police had ordered her to keep it to herself. She was now spared the need to respond. The colorist darkening the woman’s hair handed her a kitchen timer, and the woman left for another part of the salon.
    For the remainder of her hair appointment, Felicity avoided any detailed discussion of the cat and silently vowed to remedy her ignorance. She had intended to go directly home, but when Naomi finished blow-drying her hair, she drove to an ATM and then to a large chain bookstore. Out of loyalty to Ronald, she ordinarily bought books exclusively at Newbright, but now felt the need for privacy, as if she were shopping for sex manuals or treatises on hemorrhoids. The chain bookstore was in a mall and had all the newness and brightness that Newbright lacked, as well as six or eight times the floor space of Ronald’s shop, and a coffee bar, too. Surveying the employees and customers, Felicity saw no familiar faces. After only a short search, she found the pet books, of which there were many more than she had expected. Suppressing the urge to hunt down the manager to suggest the wisdom of shelving some of her cat mysteries with the nonfiction cat books, she indiscriminately gathered a tall stack of works on cats and cat care, hurried to a register, paid using the anonymous cash from the ATM, and escaped with only a hint of disappointment that no one had asked, “Aren’t you Felicity Pride?”
    Driving home, she reminded herself that anonymity had, after all, been her goal, a goal achieved in part because her publisher always put her photograph inside the back flap of her books instead of placing it prominently on the back of the dust jacket. Newly possessed of the splendidly photogenic cat, Felicity would have to get an author-with-feline-muse photo that would simply demand to occupy the entire back cover of the next Prissy LaChatte. The mythical nature of her very own Morris’s existence had its conveniences, but, by virtue of nonexistence, Morris had been unable to pose before the photographer’s lens. And the real cat was far less trouble than she had imagined. In her haste to keep her appointment with Naomi, she had rushed out of the house without even bothering to open the door of the room it occupied. Furthermore, once she, Felicity Pride, had truly become an expert on all things feline, the gray cat really might enable her to solve the murder. Effortless promotion would follow. Felicity Pride and her crime-solving companion would be written up in the Boston papers, the stories would be picked by the wire services, and the term mass market as applied to paperback editions of the Prissy LaChatte series would become accurately descriptive of the hundreds of thousands of copies loaded into mammoth vans and transported to bookstores and mall department stores throughout the United States. Not to mention supermarkets! Throughout the country, supermarkets, the true mass outlet, would dump their copies of Isabelle Hotchkiss’s silly mysteries and replace them with Felicity Pride’s light entertainments.
    Preoccupied though she was with visions of fame, Felicity managed to drive Aunt Thelma’s Honda through the narrow streets of genteel Norwood Hill and into Newton Park, where there was no sign of the police and, as usual, no sign of anyone else, either. Especially notable for their absence were vans emblazoned with the names and logos of local television stations. But maybe the police and the media politely called first instead of just dropping in? Damn the taboo on