Scratch the Surface

turned out, once Felicity had managed to undo the latch and open the little metal door, Edith emerged on her own and, to Felicity’s surprise, didn’t bolt out of the room, but hopped onto the kitchen table and sat there looking like a sphinx come to life. Prissy’s cats stayed off dining surfaces. Edith’s large, placid presence on the table didn’t bother Felicity, who had, in any case, no inclination to respond to the cat’s apparent effort at friendliness by scolding or punishing her. With the inscrutable Edith still planted on the table, Felicity quickly made a salmon salad from the previous night’s dinner and carried her own plate and a saucer of salmon salad to the table. Perhaps Felicity moved faster than Edith liked. Or maybe Edith had had all the human contact she could tolerate for the moment. For whatever reason, she took a muscular leap off the table and vanished in the direction of the front hall. With hurt feelings, Felicity ate her lunch, cleared the table, rinsed her own plate and put it in the dishwasher, and put Edith’s saucer on the floor.
    She began her detective work by dialing the phone number for Quinlan Coates that she’d copied from the veterinary assistant’s slip of paper, which also showed an address on Commonwealth Avenue in Brighton. No one answered. Her next step was to use the Web. In modern mystery novels, the amateur sleuth was often a computer illiterate who needed the help of a young relative, a teenage employee, or some other techno wizard to retrieve even the simplest information from cyberspace. Felicity had nothing but scorn for the device of the youthful assistant. The female amateur detective should be self-reliant! Had Nancy Drew gone around whining for help with machinery? On the contrary, in the Nancy Drew books of Felicity’s childhood, Nancy had capably driven her roadster without complaining that she had trouble shifting gears and without turning over the wheel to Beth or George. Capably steering with mouse and keyboard, Felicity soon had directions to Quin Coates’s address and a map of its location, which was only about a mile from Newton Park and almost no distance from Boston College. Within seconds, her favorite search engine, Google, confirmed her hunch that Quinlan Coates was indeed a professor of Romance languages at that same institution.
    She also found his office phone number, dialed it, and reached a woman who informed her in a heavy Boston accent that Professor Coates was on sabbatical. “He comes in every couplah days. You wanna leave a message? Or you want his voice mail?” Mail was “may-ull.”
    Felicity declined the offers. Arming herself with her cell phone, Detective Valentine’s number, and the cat carrier, she set off to rescue Brigitte, whose name was damned well going to be pronounced “Bree-zheet” and not “Brih-jut.” The cats’ names could’ve been much worse than they were, she reflected. Neither Edith nor Brigitte constituted a pronunciation pitfall for persons laboring to rid themselves of Boston accents. The worst words weren’t actually the obvious ones like car and Harvard that simply required speakers aspiring to standard English to remember to pronounce the letter r. No, the tricky words were those that demanded a decision about whether an r was or was not present. Sneaky words like elegy and sherbet put Felicity at such extreme risk of pronouncing the hateful letter r when it was supposed to be absent that she avoided the words altogether. Iris Murdoch’s husband’s memoir was just that and never Elegy — Elergy?—for Iris. She ordered ice cream and never that other stuff that was always sherbet and never sherbert. Wasn’t it?
    Even via the circuitous route down Norwood Hill, the drive to Quinlan Coates’s address on Commonwealth Avenue was so short that Felicity’s musings on the serendipity of the cats’ names occupied her until she pulled into a parking (not “pahking”) place. The Web had prepared her for the building’s proximity to Boston College but not for what she perceived as its intimidating grandeur. It was an old-fashioned, monumental apartment building constructed of gray stone, with a wide flight of stone steps ieading up to an imposing wooden door. The oversized cat carrier that she’d brought with her banged against her legs and made her feel ridiculous. The outer door was unlocked. She had trouble simultaneously holding it open and maneuvering the carrier inside. Once inside the