Scratch the Surface

drowsiness, she feels a wordless, visionless apprehension that strangers will lift her up in the air and stretch her out, thus putting her at risk of falling. There is a lot of her to fall; she weighs thirteen pounds.
    Second, this small space is cold. Her dense blue-gray coat, which was much admired by the lifting-in-the-air strangers, is supposedly an adaptation to a rough life in the outdoors. She is in no danger of hypothermia and is not afraid of catching a chill. Rather, she is used to being indoors and likes the warmth of sunny windowsills and beds equipped with comforters or electric blankets.
    Third, this place has the repellent reek of litter in radical need of changing. Edith, who has high standards of personal hygiene, has spent her life in establishments with excellent litter-box service and expects no less even in alarmingly new and hatefully cold hostelries.
    Fourth, Edith has had nothing to eat since ten o’clock the previous evening and is ravenous. She is also thirsty. Here, there is nothing to eat or drink.
    Edith nestles next to the means to take her home, home being a familiar, warm, and clean abode where no one rouses her terror of falling and where there are always bowls of fresh water and dry food. Canned food appears often. Edith wants to go home, but the means is cold and getting colder. It does not respond to her.
     

 
    Although Prissy LaChatte’s adventures were cozy rather than terrifying, it happened now and then that a character other than the brave, resourceful Prissy was startled into speechlessness, thus providing Felicity’s sleuth with the opportunity to ask, Cat got your tongue? As Felicity stared at the scene in her vestibule, the cat had, indeed, gotten her tongue: A choking sensation in her throat suggested that she was incapable of producing so much as a moan, never mind an intelligible word. The cat in question was presumably the big gray creature nestled next to the small gray man.
    In less than a minute, Felicity shook off her state of mute immobilization. After stepping out of the vestibule and allowing its door to close, she reached into her tote bag, retrieved her cell phone, and dialed 911. Her greatest fear was that the police would make her check the dead man for a pulse or otherwise touch him. If she herself were writing the scene, either Prissy LaChatte or her police chief friend would ask, And what makes you think he’s dead? Alternatively, if the finder of the body did check for signs of life, in a later chapter either Prissy or the chief would lament the stupidity of the person who had tampered with evidence by ripping off the duct tape and uselessly applying first aid.
    In any case, Felicity had no intention of touching the body, which she felt certain was just that, a dead thing. Still, she turned to face the glass door, peered in, and monitored the man for signs of movement, but the only motion was the rise and fall of the cat’s abdomen. After reaching the police emergency number and giving her name and address, she said, “There’s a dead man in my vestibule. I’ve been out. I just got home, and I opened the door, and... His mouth and nose are covered with duct tape, and his skin is gray. He isn’t breathing. I don’t know what to do! I need help!”
    “Stay on the line.” A male voice calmly issued the order. “We’re on the way. Hang in there.”
    Still facing the glass door and still clutching her phone, Felicity mindlessly acted on a desire to distance herself from the horror by taking a few steps backward. If she had been living in the house for a long time or perhaps if it had felt like home, her mental map of the front entrance might have led her to turn around or come to a halt. As it was, she took one backward step too many and ended up tumbling down the low flight of bluestone stairs. For a few moments, she lay flat on her back, the wind knocked out of her. Light rain fell on her face. Newton Park Estates, never noisy, was completely silent. Felicity briefly missed Somerville, where a neighbor or a passerby would have found her by now and where there’d have been hundreds of people in shouting distance. The depressing thought crossed Felicity’s mind that she had landed in her characteristic position in life: all alone on hard stone in the rain with no one to help her.
    It was then that she remembered her cell phone. After struggling to her feet, she found it in the manicured grass beside the bluestone path, next to the tote bag