Scratch the Surface

pilfering. There’s no reason to be punitive.”
    Felicity agreed but wrote: “Teachers are paid quite decently. They make more money than writers do. But she already collects autographed first editions, and she’ll have big expenses if she plans to go to all the conferences, and she also has a sick cat.”
    “She dotes on that cat,” Hadley wrote. “Ugly thing.”
    “The cat eats special food,” Felicity explained, “and the vet bills must be substantial.”
    “Means, motive, and opportunity,” Sonya wrote.
    “It isn’t murder,” Hadley wrote. “It’s a sad little scam. It needs to be handled quietly. Look at all she’s done for Witness.”
    Sonya was incensed. “All? Look at all she’s stolen from us!”
    “She didn’t mean to steal,” Hadley argued. “She probably thought she was entitled. And she was ambitious. She wanted to go to conferences and be a star. Felicity, she wanted to be you.”
    “What a thrill!” Felicity posted. Then, remembering that she might be taken seriously, added a smiley face. “And let’s remember that she made herself so sick that she had to go to the hospital. Sonya, if punishment is in order, Janice has been punished.”
    “We still have to do something,” Sonya wrote.
    “She can’t stay on the board,” Hadley agreed. “And no more handling money.”
    “Do we ask her to return what she took?” Jim asked.
    “We don’t know how much it was,” Hadley answered. “Let’s give her the benefit of the doubt. She was temporarily deranged. She deserves sympathy. We’ll discreetly ask her to resign. And that’s that.”
    “Who will?” Sonya asked. “Do we have a board meeting and spring it on her?”
    The other three members vetoed the idea.
    “It’s a sad event,” Jim wrote. “It needs to be handled privately.”
    “Are you volunteering?” Sonya asked.
    “No,” he replied. “Felicity could do it. Sonya, you’re too worked up about it.”
    “I can’t,” Felicity wrote. “She asked me to blurb her book, and I didn’t. She must have hard feelings about that.”
    “You can write a wonderful review of her book,” Sonya wrote. “To compensate. Tell her that you’ve finally gotten around to reading the manuscript, and you love it, and you’re going to publish a rave review.”
    “I don’t write reviews,” Felicity wrote.
    “This will be the first,” Hadley responded. “You love the book so much that you’re breaking your silence. Tell her you owe her an apology for not doing the blurb.”
    Felicity slammed her fist on the desk next to the computer. These chat rooms were worse than she’d realized. “There’s probably still time to do a blurb. But I don’t want to,” she posted. “I don’t want to confront her.”
    “Neither does anyone else,” Sonya replied, “but you are the best qualified. I’m sure you will do an excellent job. All you have to do is explain what we’ve discovered and ask for her resignation. It’s big of us to let it go at that. Janice will understand that we could press charges. She’ll be relieved. She’ll be grateful to you.”
    “Thanks, Felicity,” Jim wrote. “Let us know how it goes.”
    Hadley and Sonya joined him in offering thanks.
    After posting a good-bye, Felicity exited the chat room. As she left the computer, the realization crossed her mind that Prissy LaChatte was immune to other people’s efforts to manipulate or exploit her. Prissy was nobody’s fool! In the present case, Prissy would either refuse responsibility for confronting the malefactor, or she’d find a way to turn the situation to her own advantage. Felicity was not Prissy LaChatte. In effect, she had already agreed to deal with Janice, and she could think of no way to derive any benefit from what was bound to be an unpleasant confrontation. On the contrary, she was stuck with the job of firing the newsletter editor who’d been eager to write up the story of Felicity’s very own cat-related murder. Damn! If only it were possible to shrink herself into near-invisibility, slip into her notebook computer through one of those mysterious ports she never otherwise used, infiltrate the files of her new book, slither out again, and, thanks to the miracles of technology and imagination, emerge as Prissy LaChatte! Prissy would make quick work of Janice Mattingly and her trivial misdeeds. Prissy would then solve the murder of Quinlan Coates, a.k.a. Isabelle Hotchkiss. Well, so would Felicity Pride!
     

 
    Edith, the most