Scratch the Surface

Russian, and it’s a little grocery store with takeout.”
    “Felicity, it certainly is not the wrong one! After I talked to you, I dug through a box that was handed over to me when I started as president of Witness, and I came across some old receipts. They’re from Tony’s Deli.” Sonya had been the president of Witness for only a year. Her predecessor had moved to Oregon.
    “Well, it must be another Tony’s Deli, Sonya! This one sold pickled vegetables and whole dried fish. There were no cold cuts, no ham, none of the food we had at Janice’s, and the woman there had never heard of her. It was the wrong Tony’s Deli.”
    “On Centre Street in Jamaica Plain.”
    “That’s where I went. I have just come back. Sonya, I’m telling you, it’s a Russian shop where the woman at the cash register had never heard of Janice. The food we ate couldn’t possibly have come from there. And we have never had food like that at any Witness meeting. Sonya, it was weird food! And everything we have is ordinary American food. It couldn’t possibly have come from that place.”
    Sonya was silent for a moment. When she spoke, her voice was ominous. “Oh, Felicity, this is terrible. It is simply terrible. The food wasn’t from Tony’s Deli, but the receipts are. How do you suppose Janice got hold of the receipts?”
    “What do they look like?”
    “Oh, I see. They’re rubber stamped. They’re from those receipt pads you can buy at any stationery store. Staples. Anywhere. With the Tony’s Deli name and address rubber-stamped on.”
    “Where do you suppose she’s been getting the food?”
    “I have no idea. Some place that charged her less than we’ve been reimbursing her. Maybe it’s food that restaurants were throwing out. No wonder we got sick!”
    “Maybe she got it from the school where she teaches,” Felicity said. “It tasted a lot like school cafeteria food. She might’ve bribed someone in the kitchen. What a pitiful little scam! The poor thing.”
    “Poor thing? She could have killed us all!”
    “She didn’t. And she has by far the worst case of food poisoning.”
    “And you had by far the lightest. It’s easy for you to call her a poor thing. What she is, is a thief! What on earth are we going to do?”
    “What can we do while she’s in the hospital?”
    “Hold a board meeting that she won’t be able to attend. Hash everything out. Decide what to do.”
    “Sonya, you and Jim and Hadley are too sick for a meeting.”
    “Well, Jim and Hadley will just have to pull themselves together. Have you ever read their books? Those hard-boiled detectives are always getting drunk, and they never sleep, and they don’t eat properly, and then they get shot or stabbed, and they keep right on going, so Jim and Hadley can just put their bodies where their books are, so to speak.”
    “What about you? You’re not well enough, either, are you?”
    “That’s no problem,” said Sonya. “We’ll meet at my house.”
     

 
    To Felicity’s great annoyance, the phone rang almost as soon as she had hung up. What must it be like to be the sort of fabulously successful author who can afford to rent an office away from home? Or who has the self-confidence not to answer even when Caller ID displays the name of one’s mother?
    “Felicity,” said Mary, “I’ve been thinking about your Aunt Thelma.”
    “She wasn’t exclusively mine,“ Felicity snapped. “She was your sister-in-law.” Feeling guilty, she said, “And what were you thinking about her?” Felicity and Angie suspected that Mary was having transient ischemic attacks, ministrokes that sometimes thickened her speech and, in Angie’s view, accounted for a tendency to harp on topics that, in Felicity’s view, she’d been harping on forever. Still, a person experiencing TIAs deserved consideration, even a person who happened to be one’s own mother.
    “Well, I’ll tell you,” said Mary. “I was wondering if you’d happened to come across any of the jewelry she stole from my mother. There was a gold chain. And an opal ring. She weaseled it out of the undertaker, you know.”
    “I’ve heard.”
    “Those things were rightfully mine.”
    “I’m sure they were. But I have no idea what happened to them. I never saw them on Aunt Thelma, and they certainly aren’t here.”
    “How’s your murder? I haven’t seen anything in the papers. Are you sure you didn’t imagine it?”
    “Mother, you did see something in the paper. And I did