Scratch the Surface

as to offer some to Brigitte, who sniffed with interest, but then resumed her favorite activity, which was zipping around the house, upstairs and downstairs, and leaping in and out of bathtubs. Although the ravenous Brigitte had devoured canned cat food when Felicity had first brought her home, she had refused it since then, and although she eagerly sniffed at Felicity’s own food, she limited her actual intake to dry cat food.
    Over eggs and coffee, Felicity read the morning paper, which included a short article about the murder:
     
MURDER VICTIM IDENTIFIED
The homicide victim whose body was found on Monday evening at the door of a Brighton home has been identified as Quinlan Coates, 63, of Brighton. Coates, a professor of Romance languages at Boston College, died of a blunt trauma to the head. The victim’s remains were left in a housing development at the entrance to a unit occupied by Felicity Pride, 53. Authorities are pursuing their investigations.
     
    Felicity was incensed. Exactly how did her age pertain to the murder! And a “housing development”! A “unit”! A “unit” in Brighton! She’d have preferred minimansion. Furthermore, in the normal course of things, the appropriate response to receiving a personal insult in the newspaper was to write an outraged letter to the editor. But what could she write? That she was fifty-three, but didn’t look it? That she did not, as the paper had suggested, dwell in public housing, but lived in a house the size of a small cruise ship? That within feline mystery circles she was a bona fide celebrity and, as such, expected to be treated with respect? Impossible. All of it. Impossible.
    The best response was obviously to solve the murder— and to claim credit for having done so. Toward that end, when Felicity had finished grooming herself and dressing for the day, she settled herself in Uncle Bob’s Harvardian den and began to comply with Detective Valentine’s instructions to go through her correspondence in search of a clue to the murderer’s motive in having left Coates’s body for her. His cat, too, of course. In Felicity’s opinion, therein lay her advantage over the police: Whereas they dismissed the importance of Edith’s presence, she did not. Therefore, the more feline the clue, the better! She began with a folder of letters from readers. She kept only a little of what other authors called “fan mail.” Felicity received some correspondence that merited the term, but she preferred to think of thank-you notes as just that. In most cases, she read the thanks, sent a brief reply, and tossed out the note. She kept letters that pointed out errors. If a reader found a typographical error, she photocopied the offending page of the book, marked the correction, and sent the page to her editor. Her file contained a few such letters from readers, but who would dump a corpse in an author’s vestibule because cats had been misprinted as cast? She kept letters in which readers advised her about the proper care and feeding of Morris and Tabitha. Because of such advice, Prissy hadn’t given the cats milk for many years, fed them human food only as a rare treat, and took care not to let them play with long cords that might cause strangulation. No motive there. A few readers had expressed strong opinions about series characters. Some readers wanted Prissy to marry the chief of police; others cautioned against the alliance. There were several letters from correspondents who urged Prissy to adopt a third cat from a shelter. Nowhere did Felicity find anything even remotely suggestive of a wish to harm her.
    As Felicity was returning the file to a drawer, she was distracted by the sound of voices. In her apartment in Somerville, she’d have ignored this evidence of human presence. In Newton Park, the employees of lawn services sometimes talked or even shouted to one another, but the lawns had already received their final mowings of the season, and all the leaves had been removed. One of the voices was deep, male, and angry. Making her way to the dining room, she peered out and saw Mr. Trotsky standing in the road in front of his house. About a yard away from him, also on the pavement, was a woman with a golden retriever, indeed, the same woman Felicity had seen in the waiting room of Furbish Veterinary Associates. To Felicity’s horror, Mr. Trotsky was hollering at her. The subject of his anger was evidently the dog, at which he kept jabbing a finger. If it