Scratch the Surface

Ogunquit and a condo in Florida. It wouldn’t have been very convenient for them to have had pets.” Felicity served the salmon, the tossed salad, and a loaf of French bread. “You obviously found dog hair,” she said. “What kind of dog did it come from?” She picked up her fork.
    Dave Valentine, too, reached for his fork. “This is the best meal I’ve had in front of me in a year. Probably more.” Although the detective didn’t hammer his head at his food as Brigitte had done, Felicity was happy to see that he ate with gusto. Was his wife a terrible cook? Just what you’d expect from someone who used to read Felicity Pride! Or maybe she was just Scottish. Or, with luck, had been.
    “Quinlan Coates was a widower,” he said. “His wife died ten years ago. Her name was Dora. Does that ring any bells?”
    “Dora Coates. No. It doesn’t sound familiar.”
    “There’s a son, William. Bill.”
    “William Coates. Bill Coates. Billy Goats! The poor thing!”
    Valentine smiled. “I hadn’t noticed that.” He paused to eat. “Everything is delicious. Thank you.”
    “You’re welcome.”
    “If you don’t mind, let’s go over this business about the cat and the microchip. Just tell me about it.”
    Felicity was happy that he hadn’t said “in your own words.” Whenever she heard the phase, she wondered whose words she was expected to use. Shakespeare’s? Still, she had to choose between her own nonfiction words, so to speak, and her storytelling words. After her regrets about the unimaginative first interview she’d had with Valentine, she longed to embellish the account of taking Edith to Dr. Furbish, speaking to Ursula Novack, discovering the victim’s identity, and pulling off the daring rescue of darling Brigitte. With a sense of disappointment in herself, she settled for giving a simple account that did, however, emphasize her effort to reach him and her concern for Brigitte.
    When she’d finished, she returned her attention to her food and then added, “While I was looking for Brigitte, I noticed that there were a lot of cat mysteries, including mine.”
    “A few of yours. Others, too. What do you make of that?”
    “Not much. Lots of people read mysteries.”
    “The other books are all about the French or in French, or biographies, academic journals, that kind of thing.”
    “Professor Coates was entitled to a little relief, wasn’t he? And he loved his cats.”
    “The choice is kind of, uh, feminine.”
    “Men read mysteries, too!”
    “Cat mysteries?”
    “Some men do.”
    Perhaps because he was finishing a meal she’d cooked, Valentine didn’t argue the point, but switched to asking her to think about anyone who might have a grudge against her. “About anything,” he said. “Something that might seem like nothing to you.”
    The two people who came immediately to mind were her mother and sister, whose resentment, far from seeming negligible, felt monumental. “I can’t think of anyone,” she said.
    “I want you to dig deeper. Go through your appointment book and see if it brings back anything. Letters you’ve sent. Or received. You use e-mail?”
    “Of course.” Did he think of her as belonging to the generation that feared the Internet? “I use it all the time. Nonstop.”
    “Good. I want you to go over any e-mail you’ve saved. Sent and received. Look for anything at all that might have made someone want to retaliate. Anything that might’ve hit someone else the wrong way.”
    After again thanking Felicity for dinner, Detective Valentine rose to leave. Although she had read hundreds of times that police detectives weren’t allowed to drink on duty, she couldn’t resist reminding him that they were both Scots. “I don’t suppose you’d like a wee deoch an doris, would you?”
    But after smiling and refusing, he said, “Another time.”
    Felicity waited until he was out of earshot before bursting into song. She did not sing the Harry Lauder song about a wee drink at parting. Rather, at the top of her three-quarters-Scottish lungs, she bellowed the chorus of “Scotland the Brave.”
     

 
    One thing Felicity never ate for breakfast was oatmeal. She had acquired the prejudice against it from her mother, who had been raised on “mush,” as the Scots called it, and who especially loathed the innocent combination of oatmeal and raisins known as “mush torra laddy.” On the morning of Thursday, November 6, Felicity ate scrambled eggs and went so far