Scratch the Surface

notice? Or maybe he did.”
    “He was out. Actually, his wife was still at work, and he was down the street.”
    “Down the street from here?”
    “You’ve got a neighbor named Loretta.”
    “Loretta the organizer. She runs our condo association.”
    “That’s where he was.”
    “With Loretta? What was he doing there?” Felicity belatedly remembered Loretta’s two children by two different fathers. “Oh,” she said. “Oh!”
    “Yes, oh,” Valentine said flatly. “Oh.”
    Brigitte wandered into the dining room and leaped onto the table. Janice Mattingly had been one thing; Dave Valentine was quite another. “Off! Get off right now!” Felicity scolded.
    Brigitte ignored her. Dave Valentine gently picked up the dainty cat and placed her on the floor. Edith wandered in. He patted her.
    “My hero cats,” said Felicity. “The Globe and the Herald both called them that.”
    “Those stories are going to sell a lot of books for you.”
    “I hope so. I feel motivated to write these days. I have a lot to say.”
    She told the truth. Now that she knew something about cats, she was eager to write about them. She would, of course, always be grateful to her very own late Morris, but she was also grateful to Edith and Brigitte.
    As it happened, Felicity’s cats were indirectly responsible for solving her final mystery, which was, of course, the puzzle of how Uncle Bob had acquired cash worth the sale of 61,799-307 books. While savoring newspaper accounts of her role in solving the murder of Quinlan Coates, she had also scanned the papers for a report of a counterfeit or stolen hundred-dollar bill left in the donation box at Angell. She had found nothing. The bills certainly looked genuine and probably were. Who had paid the sums recorded in the notebook? And why?
    On the Sunday afternoon following her Friday night dinner with Dave Valentine and their Saturday night together at the movies, Felicity, who was feeling increasingly at one with Prissy LaChatte, broiled a large piece of Scottish salmon for Edith and Brigitte. Prissy regularly cooked for Morris and Tabitha, but always remembered to set a timer. Felicity, however, burned the salmon and thus dirtied the oven of Aunt Thelma’s expensive range. In search of instructions for persuading the self-cleaning oven to clean itself, she found the three-ring binder that contained the manuals and warranties for the many new appliances in the house. In leafing through it, she came upon a collection of receipts and acknowledgments of delivery signed and dated by Aunt Thelma. The names of the months were written in the same script that appeared in the little notebook. The numbers, too, were identical. It hadn’t been Uncle Bob who had recorded those deposits. It had been his wife, Aunt Thelma, the same Thelma who had persuaded the undertaker to give her jewelry from her mother-in-law’s body, the same Thelma to whom Bob had doled out the weekly housekeeping money in cash. For decades, Aunt Thelma had skimmed off her share to amass a private fund. The money was thus Felicity’s to spend. On Edith and Brigitte.
     

The Dog Lovers’ Mysteries
    by
    Susan Conant
    Featuring dog trainer Holly Winter
     
    The Wicked Flea
    0-425-18885-X
     
    The Dogfather
    0-425-19459-0
     
    Bride & Groom
    0-425-20074-4
     
    Stud Rites
    0-425-20159-7
     
    Praise for the Dog Lovers’ mysteries:
    “Hilarious.” —Los Angeles Times
     
    “A real tail-wagger.” —Washington Post
     
    Available wherever books are sold or at
    penguin.com
     

Susan Conant
    graduated summa cum laude from Radcliffe College and holds a doctorate in human development from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. The author of the popular Dog Lover’s Mysteries, she is a six-time winner of the Dog Writers Association of America’s Maxwell Award. Scratch the Surface is her first cat mystery.
    She and her daughter, Jessica Conant-Park, are now working on a new series of culinary mysteries, the first of which is titled Steamed. Susan and her husband live near Boston with two Chartreux cats and two Alaskan malamutes.