Scratch the Surface

not imagine it.”
    “You’re very high-strung, you know. You always were. Angie, now she was the easy one. Did I tell you she sent me a beautiful flower arrangement? I kept it going for weeks.”
    “That was for Mother’s Day. It was six months ago.”
    “There’s nothing stingy about your sister. Fresh flowers are very dear. It’s a shame she ever married that Italian. She was such a pretty girl, and he was so short and dark. They made a very unattractive couple.”
    “That was the least of their problems. Among other things, he beat her.”
    “I’ve never believed that story of hers.”
    In desperation, Felicity said, “The doorbell’s ringing. I have to run.”
    “I don’t hear it.”
    “It’s very quiet. Uncle Bob paid extra for it. It’s the quietest doorbell I’ve ever heard. I’ll call you soon. Bye!”
    Feeling more done in by her mother than by the food poisoning, Felicity allowed herself to skip her time with Prissy LaChatte and to take a nap instead. When she went upstairs, both cats were asleep on her bed, Edith on the pillow that had formerly been Felicity’s, and Brigitte toward the center, almost touching Edith. Although their extraordinary eye color was hidden, they were remarkably beautiful, especially as a pair. Their coats were an identical blue-gray, Edith’s thick and short, Brigitte’s long and flowing, and they had somehow contrived to fall asleep in the same curled-up pose, as if a photographer had positioned them to maximum advantage. Reminding herself that this was, after all, her bed, Felicity nonetheless sensed herself to be an intruder and took care to undress silently and to slip under the covers without disturbing the bed’s self-proclaimed owners.
    When she awoke two hours later, Edith was on one side of her head, Brigitte on the other. Could they have mistaken her head for a third cat? She stirred, and Brigitte suddenly ran across the comforter to pounce on Felicity’s feet, and to her amazement, Felicity heard herself laugh aloud. What if she were deliberately to wiggle her toes? She did. And Brigitte again pounced. Neglected, Edith butted her large, solid head against Felicity’s and drew another laugh. Attached though Felicity was to Prissy’s Morris and Tabitha, she knew that neither had ever given her this silly, even childish, sensation of simple pleasure. Furthermore, although Morris and Tabitha had the convenient habit of making no demands on Felicity until she booted up her notebook computer, once she awakened them, they were quite demanding in the sense that they relied on Felicity to create and animate them; without Felicity’s effort, they simply didn’t come to life. Brigitte and Edith, in contrast, lived their own lives even when Felicity was asleep; because they existed apart from her, she didn’t have to perform the work of making them up. It seemed to Felicity that she had had a minor revelation: She finally understood what people meant in characterizing cats as independent.
    After washing her face and getting dressed, Felicity wandered downstairs to find a message from Sonya on her answering machine. Jim and Hadley, whose sleuths pursued bad guys despite bullet and knife wounds, were so depleted by upset stomachs that they refused to leave home. Consequently, Sonya had arranged for the board, minus Janice, of course, to hold a meeting online in a private chat room. Sonya had e-mailed the instructions for finding and entering this room, and she expected Felicity to be there at seven o’clock. Without fail! Felicity groaned. Sonya had chronic difficulty in distinguishing between minor obligations to the regional branch of a small writers’ organization and patriotic duties to the Land of the Free. And this chat room! Felicity’s computer literacy allowed her to create, save, move, copy, print, and delete files. She was fluent in the sending and receiving of e-mail messages. She searched the Web and shopped online. She had entered online chat rooms only three times, when she had been the guest visitor to cyberspace associations of mystery fans who had asked her questions about her books. Each time, she had found the experience unsettling. As she was typing her answer to one question, another would appear on the screen, and then another. By the time her replies had been posted, they’d had nothing to do with the immediately preceding questions. In her own eyes, she had ended up looking as if she were incapable of holding a normal