Scratch the Surface

and Tabitha would simply have to stay as prescient and communicative as they’d always been. After all, one of fiction’s most important functions was to misrepresent reality.
    Loretta had kept the meeting short. It was now only quarter of eight, and Felicity wished that she’d delayed her dinner and could call Ronald to suggest that they meet at a restaurant. Better yet, she wished that Detective Dave Valentine would appear at her door to announce that the murder had been solved and that she was consequently free to talk about it to the press. And free to accept an invitation to go out with him? She reluctantly settled for calling Ronald, who answered his phone but said that he couldn’t talk because he was listening to Glenn Gould, with whom he was, in Felicity’s view, obsessed. Felicity had no ear for music and couldn’t tell one Goldberg Variation from the other, and although she’d enjoyed Thirty-two Short Films About Glenn Gould when Ronald had dragged her to a theater to see it, she’d been bored the first time they’d watched the video together and, after the third time, had refused to see it again. She did, however, manage to divert Ronald from his music long enough to make him promise to go out for dinner with her the next evening. At the end of the short call, having failed to ask her how she was, he neglected to utter any of the usual formulaic phrases about how glad he’d be to see her or how much he was looking forward to dinner, but simply hung up.
    Felicity longed to call Detective Dave Valentine but could think of no pretext. She’d tell Valentine about the animosity between the Norwood Hill and Newton Park neighborhoods, but the antagonism hardly suggested a motive for Coates’s murder. Even Felicity found it unimaginable that some disgruntled resident of Norwood Hill had slain a professor of Romance languages simply to cause trouble in Newton Park by leaving his body in a vestibule. Could Quinlan Coates have planned to buy a house in Newton Park? No realtors’ signs hung in the neighborhood, and nothing in Coates’s apartment had hinted at any intention of moving. What connection could there be between Coates and Newton Park? Had he fathered one of Loretta’s children? Had a book he’d published been pirated by the horrible Mr. Trotsky? Had he allowed Edith or Brigitte to put a paw on Trotsky’s grass?
    In lieu of phoning the detective, she went to her computer in the hope that someone had e-mailed her, but nothing of interest had arrived. She again searched the Web for information about Quinlan Coates but found nothing she didn’t already know. On impulse, she entered Dave Valentine’s name and, to her delight, retrieved a photograph of him in his kilt at the Highland Games. To her even greater delight, she discovered something for which the thousands of mysteries she’d read had failed to prepare her, namely, that unlike the wives of the attractive male detectives, both amateur and professional, who populated mystery fiction, the woman hadn’t left or divorced Valentine, thus making him bitter, regretful, self-recriminatory, or mistrustful. No, novels to the contrary, Mrs. Valentine had died!
    The wives of fictional detectives did die once in a while, Felicity reminded herself, but the cause of death was usually cancer, wasn’t it? And in those cases, instead of developing the detective’s character by having him respond with bitterness, regret, self-recrimination, or mistrust, the author revealed the protagonist’s devotion during his wife’s illness, his subsequent grief, and thus his capacity for deep, complex emotion. Mrs. Valentine, however, hadn’t died of cancer, been killed by terrorists, been run over by a drunk driver, committed suicide, or perished in some other fashion that might be expected to add sharpness and profundity to an author’s depiction of her husband. Rather, according to the obituary that had appeared in a Boston newspaper two years earlier, she had died of endocarditis, an infection of the heart that she had contracted during a routine dental appointment. As a literary device, the cause of death had nothing to recommend it, and, indeed, so far as Felicity could remember, nowhere in mystery fiction had a detective’s wife ever died from having her teeth cleaned. Still, Dave Valentine had probably mourned her despite the unliterary nature of her demise, arid to her credit, Mrs. Valentine had an excellent excuse, indeed, the only acceptable