Scratch the Surface

after introducing herself, lifted the heavy carrier with no sign of effort, settled it on a metal examining table, and looked in. “What a beautiful cat!” she exclaimed.
    “Thank you.” Fearful of making a fool of herself, Felicity was determined to say as little as possible about the cat. Did Dr. Furbish or her staff recognize Felicity’s name? Did they know who she was?
    “I take it that she’s new.”
    “She was left at my doorstep,” Felicity said. “On Monday evening. I thought she ought to have a checkup.”
    Dr. Furbish opened the carrier door, reached in with both hands, removed the cat, and placed her on the table. “You’re a big girl, aren’t you?” She stroked the head of the unprotesting cat. “Amazing eyes. Magnificent.” Casually touching the cat and speaking gently, she conducted a thorough examination. The cat cooperated when Dr. Furbish applied a stethoscope, looked in her ears, checked her teeth, and used a thermometer to take the cat’s temperature. “Spayed female,” she told Felicity. “Healthy. Young. Three or four.” She then moved a small scale to the table, lifted the cat onto it, and said, “Thirteen pounds. Let’s consider this her maximum acceptable weight. She’s not obese, but I don’t want to see her any heavier.” She then raised the cat’s head and pointed to a small area on the throat. “That’s been shaved recently. Within a day or two.”
    “What on earth for?” Felicity asked. She immediately regretted the question. For all she knew, shaving a spot on the throat was an essential part of routine cat care.
    “It’s a venipuncture mark. A blood test maybe.” Without asking Felicity’s permission, she retrieved a small electronic gadget from a shelf and slowly passed it over the base of the cat’s neck. Studying it she said, “Okay.” Then she reached for a pad of paper and a pen, and wrote down a string of numerals. “Microchip number. With luck, in no time we’ll know whose cat she is. She’s a beauty. And so mellow. Someone will be relieved to have her back home.”
     

 
    “She isn’t one of ours,” said the young woman behind the high counter. “We keep the numbers for all the animals we microchip on our computer, and her number isn’t here. Dr. Furbish would’ve recognized her, anyway. If you want to have a seat, we’ll call the company, and they’ll look up the number.”
    And what if I don’t want to have a seat? thought Felicity. What if I want to take my cat and go home and reexamine Uncle Bob’s money? Reluctantly seating herself on one of the wooden benches that lined two walls of the waiting room, she concentrated on behaving herself. Only a few minutes ago, when Dr. Furbish had been examining the cat, Felicity had enjoyed the rare sense of being able to relax while kind, competent adults managed practical matters better than she could have done herself. Then Dr. Furbish had said, “I’m sorry, but we can’t release the cat to you until the registered owner has been contacted.”
    The cat was now somewhere behind the scenes at the clinic while Felicity was stuck here in the waiting room. Registered owner, hah! Murder victim! And Dr. Furbish rather than Felicity would get all the credit for discovering the identity of the little gray man, who had definitely been left in Felicity’s vestibule for Felicity. Particularly galling was the reflection that the cat, just like Morris and Tabitha, had possessed information about the murder that she had “communicated,” albeit not in the mysterious fashion favored by Prissy LaChatte’s cats but via a microchip and a scanner. So what! The cat was Felicity’s, the information belonged to her, and she deserved the credit; Dr. Furbish and her staff deserved none.
    The young woman behind the counter put down the phone and said, “The number’s busy. I’ll try again in a minute.”
    Eager though Felicity was to return home to the fireproof box and its puzzling contents, she was unwilling to do anything to suggest that she had abandoned the cat. Still, she was tempted to tell the young woman that she’d be back soon and to zip home to pursue her investigation.
    The clinic door opened and in stepped a well-dressed woman with a well-groomed golden retriever. The woman greeted an elderly couple seated far from Felicity on the other wooden bench. She’d barely noticed them. There was a small green cat carrier at their feet, but they’d been speaking neither to each other nor