Scratch the Surface

that you are the person who ended up suffering most,” she said, with the intention of making a delicate reference to the severity of Janice’s food poisoning. Glancing at the white meat that Janice was devouring, she added, “Look, it’ll be best for everyone if you’ll make a clean breast of things.”
    Janice said, “I don’t know how you figured it out. Like take the cat food. How’d you know about that?”
    Cat food? In softening Janice up for the confrontation about her pilfering, Felicity had mentioned free cat food as one of the perks of Edith’s serving as a blood donor at Angell. Felicity also remembered having gone on to say that Dorothy-L must be costing Janice a fortune. Hinting at the economic motives for Janice’s fraud, Felicity had acknowledged the cost of a possible new treatment as well as the need to pay for the cat’s medicine and special food. By comparison with the veterinary procedure and the prescription drugs, the special cat food must be a minor expense; Janice had certainly picked an odd example.
    Even so, Felicity answered Janice’s question. “When we were at your house on Sunday, Dorothy-L’s food was in your kitchen.”
    “But how did you make the connection?” The wine or perhaps the conversation had brought color to Janice’s face. Her cheeks had round red spots. Something, perhaps the wine, had given her an appetite. She dug her fork into the rice and bent her head to shovel the food into her mouth. Again without swallowing properly, she said, “I found out by a fluke. How did you find out?”
    Baffled, Felicity asked, “How did you?”
    “You remember that horrible letter I got? I sent her my book and asked for a blurb, and I got simply the most awful letter. Sonya read it, and so did some other people, and they said it was the most vicious thing they’d ever seen. I know it by heart. ‘This person cannot write and should not try.’ And then there was, ‘In a market glutted with cat mysteries and, indeed, with mysteries, this book does not stand a chance of success.’ ”
    “That really is vicious.” Felicity refilled both glasses and sipped from her own. Her heart was pounding, but determined to show nothing, she concentrated on keeping her face expressionless.
    “So, about three months ago, actually, on the first Monday in August, it must’ve been, I was at Angell to pick up a case of Dorothy-L’s prescription food. I always buy it by the case because I’m always scared I’ll run out, and her digestive system just will not tolerate regular cat food, so I can’t just go to the store and grab what’s there. It really isn’t clear what’s causing all her digestive problems. Whatever it is, it’s separate from her thyroid disorder, but it does make me wonder about the radioactive iodide treatment, you know, whether she could tolerate that.” Janice took a break to eat voraciously. “Anyway, you know how they keep a lot of dog and cat food in the lobby?”
    “Yes,” said Felicity, who didn’t trust herself to say more. “Well, the kind I needed wasn’t there, and someone went to look for it for me, but I knew it would take a while. Angell is the best place, but it isn’t necessarily the fastest. And there’s no place to sit in the lobby, so I went into that sort of corridor beyond it and took a seat on one of the benches, and I got to talking with this man who was waiting there, too.”
    “Yes,” said Felicity.
    “And his cat was a blood donor. He was picking her up. He told me all about how she gave blood, how he brought her in four times a year, the first Monday of the month every three months. Like, this was the first Monday in August. He showed me a picture of her and of his other cat, and he told me they were Chartreux. They really are gorgeous. You could tell he was crazy about them. And I told him about Dorothy-L. Anyway, I didn’t tell him about Tailspin, but I just asked him if he ever read cat mysteries. And you know what he said?”
    “I have no idea.”
    “He said, ‘Most of those people can’t write and shouldn’t try.’ Just like that! So then he asked me if I’d ever read Isabelle Hotchkiss. Naturally, I said yes. And he said that he didn’t know why anyone else bothered writing cat mysteries because the market was glutted with them and with mysteries in general, and most new mysteries didn’t stand a chance. So, I knew.”
    “The same phrases as the ones in the horrible letter.”
    “But I didn’t say a