Scratch the Surface

wallet in her shoulder bag was a one-hundred-dollar bill from Uncle Bob’s fireproof box. Back at home, when she’d decided on the efficient course of acquiring Hotchkiss’s books while interrogating Ronald about cats, she’d had to confront her reluctance to contribute to Hotchkiss’s royalties. The public library would have some of the old Hotchkiss mysteries, but the new one, Purrfectly Baffling, would—damn it all!—have a long waiting list, and Felicity wanted to study its depictions of Olaf and Lambie Pie without having to read the whole book at her computer. With luck, Newbright Books would have some used Hotchkiss paperbacks, but to acquire Purrfectly Baffling, she’d have to buy a new hardcover. The bill from Uncle Bob’s stash represented a compromise: Although Isabelle Hotchkiss would get paid for the book, Felicity herself wouldn’t have earned the money that ended up in Hotchkiss’s bank account. Entering the store, Felicity found Ronald conferring with a customer about the perfect present for the woman’s elderly aunt who doted on her cats. He immediately introduced the customer to Felicity and, as if engaging in some secret and probably illegal transaction, advised the woman to have Felicity inscribe a copy of Felines in Felony to the cat-loving aunt. And in Felicity’s wallet was the ill-gotten and possibly even counterfeit hundred-dollar bill that she’d intended to palm off on this dear friend, this sweetest of men, this promoter of her books!
    After Felicity had inscribed her book to the aunt, she headed to the section of used books, where she found satisfyingly cheap paperback copies of the first Isabelle Hotchkiss, Purrfectly Poisonous, and three later books in the series, Purrfectly Murderous, Purrfectly Deadly, and Purrfectly Sleuthful. With regret, she moved to the shelves of new paperback mysteries, where she picked up Purrfectly Criminal. Finally with an emotion close of pain, she added Purrfectly Baffling to the stack of books she carried.
    “Her new hardcover?” Ronald inquired in an undertone. “And her new paperback? Felicity, how unlike you!”
    Felicity was about to say that it was unlike Ronald to discourage a customer from buying books when she realized that it was actually something he habitually did: If he thought that a customer wouldn’t enjoy a book, he said so. She settled for responding with a noncommittal nod before demanding, “Ronald, who is she?”
    “What do you care?”
    “I’m just curious.”
    “I have no idea. No one does. Presumably. Felicity, you know all this. Mystery writers used to write under pseudonyms all the time. Nicholas Blake was Cecil Day-Lewis. The poet laureate. Michael Innis was—”
    “J. I. M. Stewart. Amanda Cross. Carolyn Heilbrun. I know! Carolyn Heilbrun wrote about it somewhere. Academic types were stigmatized if their colleagues knew that they wrote mysteries. Michael Innis was a don at Oxford. Except that everyone knew who he really was. And it was no secret that Carolyn Heilbrun was Amanda Cross. So why all the secrecy about Isabelle Hotchkiss?”
    Ronald shrugged. “Have you looked up copyright information? It’s on the Library of Congress Web site.”
    “I hadn’t thought of that.”
    “It won’t tell you anything.”
    “Then why would I look there?”
    “Because you’re stressed. It would give you something to do. I wish I could persuade you to listen to—”
    “I don’t want to listen to Glenn Gould!”
    “Look, Felicity, why don’t you take the rest of the weekend to relax. Play with your cats. Cats are great stress reducers. They’re so mellow.”
    “Brigitte isn’t. She’s wild.” Felicity lowered her voice. “Speaking of which, is it normal for cats to hang around in bathtubs?”
    “Cats are individuals. They have eccentricities. Likes and dislikes. Just the way we do.”
    Felicity felt dissatisfied. Among other things, she suspected that Ronald knew more about Isabelle Hotchkiss than he was willing to say. Even so, she paid for the books with her debit card and left Uncle Bob’s hundred-dollar bill in her wallet. Ronald didn’t deserve to get stuck with it, but maybe she’d encounter someone who did.
     

 
    With some justification , Felicity had a high opinion of her own ability to comprehend the written word and thus had no intention of reading Isabelle Hotchkiss’s books sentence by sentence or paragraph by paragraph. Rather, she intended to go through the books with her goal in