Scratch the Surface

didn’t finish it. Oh, and I had some cake.”
    “Can tomatoes cause food poisoning?”
    “Anything can if it’s handled by someone with dirty hands.”
    “You didn’t have any pudding?”
    “No. It looked disgusting. Speaking of which, Sonya, I’m on the mend, and I’d rather not have a relapse. Do you think we could—”
    “Felicity, this discussion is necessary! Admittedly, it would be more useful to all of us if we’d been given some kind of real poison and especially if one of us hadn’t gotten sick at all, like in that Dorothy Sayers book. Which one is it? Where the murderer builds up his own tolerance for arsenic and then puts arsenic in something he eats himself and feeds to his victim?”
    “An omelet,” Felicity said. “But I can’t imagine that Janice fed us arsenic.”
    Sounding disappointed, Sonya said, “Still, if we had to be poisoned, it would’ve been better to experience the effects of one of the classic poisons instead of this ordinary bug, whatever it is.”
    “Sonya, if we’d had one of the classic poisons, we’d all be dead!” Felicity’s mind, however, was on titles: The Hotchkiss Identity, maybe. Or Coates of Many Colors.
    “There is that,” Sonya said. “In any case, we should never have been poisoned at all, and I want to know how it happened.”
    “We weren’t deliberately poisoned. We just ate something that made us sick.”
    “Where did that food come from? That’s what I want to know. It’s some deli Janice likes. She knows people there. That’s why we get a special deal. A discount. And I can’t ask her because she can’t talk to anyone yet. I thought you might remember the name of the place.”
    “It’s in Jamaica Plain. Tony’s? I think that’s it. Tony’s Deli. It should be on the receipts.”
    “Janice has the receipts. She’s our treasurer.”
    “Maybe you should wait until she’s well enough to talk.”
    “Wait? I am not waiting! You know, it’s easy for you to take this incident casually, Felicity. You got off lightly. The rest of us are very ill. In fact, I’m going back to bed right now.”
    With that announcement, the conversation ended. Felicity felt well enough to follow her usual morning routine of making her bed, tidying the kitchen, and taking a shower. Brigitte having abandoned the disposable razor in the upstairs hallway, Felicity had returned it to the bathtub and used it to shave her legs. Maybe she should preserve it in some honorable fashion. It deserved to be bronzed. Quinlan Coates had owned many cat mysteries, including some of her own, some by Lilian Jackson Braun, Shirley Rousseau Murphy, Rita Mae Brown, and other successful contributors to the genre. But he had owned the entire opus of Isabelle Hotchkiss. He had been genuinely crazy about cats. As an academic, especially an academic who had started to write mysteries a dozen years earlier, he might well have chosen to use a pseudonym for any series, but it would have been one thing to be identified as the author of sophisticated academic puzzles or existentialist novels of suspense, and quite another to be recognized as the man behind the pen of Isabelle Hotchkiss and her talking cats. Yes, it all fit! And those venomous responses for which Isabelle Hotchkiss was notorious? The horrid letters in which she’d refused to blurb books? Exactly the sort of nastiness to be expected in the world of academe. Or, at any rate, in the world of academe as portrayed in mystery fiction. Felicity was so overjoyed at the prospect of conveying her brilliant insight to Detective Dave Valentine that after shaving her legs, she washed her hair with a perfumed shampoo she saved for special occasions and scrubbed with a body gel scented with the same fragrance.
    Stepping out of the tub, she wrapped herself in a giant towel and practiced her opening line: “The intended victim,” she proclaimed, “was not Quinlan Coates. The intended victim was Quinlan Coates as Isabelle Hotchkiss!“
    So stunned would Dave Valentine be by this remarkable feat of detection that he’d overlook Felicity’s minor misrepresentation of the manner of Uncle Bob and Aunt Thelma’s death or perhaps reinterpret it as a sign of family loyalty carried to excess. Anyway, now that the truth about Coates and Hotchkiss had been revealed to her by her supersleuth cat, she, Felicity Pride, with the assistance of Detective Dave Valentine, would rapidly solve the murder. Having done so, she would finally be at