Scratch the Surface

and there. She idly wondered what Brigitte had stolen. A tube of mascara? A lipstick? As Felicity was about to drift off, Brigitte sailed onto the bed. In her mouth was the disposable blue plastic razor that Felicity had left on the rim of the tub. Felicity’s experience as a cat owner, consisting as it did of copyright ownership, failed to generate alarm about injury to Brigitte and consequent vet bills. Instead of seizing the razor, she lazily watched Brigitte tote it around and noticed that the blue razor and the cat’s blue-gray fur and amber eyes made a pretty combination of colors. It then occurred to her that if she were living in a cat mystery featuring someone other than Prissy LaChatte, Brigitte’s choice of the razor would represent a message about solving the murder. The famous Cat Who, Koko, didn’t knock random books off shelves; rather, he made meaningful choices, albeit choices that Jim Qwilleran was often slow to interpret. Did anyone in the Coates case have a name connected to razor ? Alas, there were no Shavers, Beards, Beardsleys, or Sharps, nor was there anyone who shared a name with any of the well-known brands of razors. Furthermore, Coates hadn’t had his throat cut. A pun? Raiser ? Nothing had been lifted, had it? Razor. Occam’s razor, the simplest-is-best principle of logic that required shaving away concepts or elements that weren’t needed. Was murder an example?
    As Felicity’s eyes were about to close, her gaze wandered to the stack of Isabelle Hotchkiss books. Who was she? And what was her link to Quinlan Coates’s cats? Occam’s razor: Start with Quinlan Coates and his cats, Edith and Brigitte. Trim off unnecessary elements: Shave away hypothetical friends of Quinlan Coates, throw out relatives of his who could be mystery writers, discard the weird woman in the police sketch, and what simple explanation remained? Occam’s razor: Quinlan Coates was Isabelle Hotchkiss.
    Too exhausted and sick to pursue the revelation, Felicity fell asleep. She needed to recover her strength. She had work to do.
     

 
    On Monday morning , Felicity substituted tea for her usual coffee and ate nothing for breakfast except a slice of toast thinly spread with Dundee marmalade. She felt a little weak, but was no longer acutely ill. As she was drinking her second cup of tea, the phone rang, and Sonya Bogosian informed her that she was fortunate.
    “Janice,” said Sonya, “has by far the worst case. Hadley went to the Brigham and Women’s Emergency Room and got treated and sent home. Jim’s still sick, but he’s toughing it out, and the best that can be said for me is that I’ve stopped throwing up. But Janice got very dehydrated. She fainted, and her downstairs neighbors heard her hit the floor and came running up, and one of them drove her to the hospital. Janice had them call me. She’s going to be all right, but she’s too sick to talk to anyone yet. She’s on I.V. fluids.” Felicity silently congratulated herself on having eaten only a few bites of the half sandwich she’d made for herself at the board meeting. She’d also had the sense to keep herself hydrated. “Janice probably ate the leftovers for dinner,” she said. “Sometimes the severity depends on how much you’ve consumed.”
    “What business did she have eating the leftovers? That food belonged to Witness!”
    Felicity was far more interested in her Hotchkiss-Coates revelation than she was in Janice’s possible consumption of contaminated food that had rightfully belonged to other people. “Sonya,” she said impatiently, “do you honestly wish you’d taken your share home?”
    “Well, no, of course not. Anyway, what I want to know is exactly what you ate. Last night when I was so sick, I promised myself that I’d find out what happened. The mayonnaise strikes me as a likely culprit.”
    “Actually, commercial mayonnaise is a very unlikely source of food poisoning. I was going to use it in a book one time, but I read up on it and decided not to. I just threw suspicion on the mayonnaise instead of actually implicating it. And I used homemade mayonnaise, made with raw eggs. That’s the only kind of mayonnaise that’s likely to make anyone sick.”
    “That was hardly homemade mayonnaise we had yesterday. I can’t imagine that Janice made it herself. Did you have any?”
    “A little. I had a ham sandwich. Well, half of one. With mayonnaise, lettuce, cheese, and tomatoes. But it wasn’t very good. I