Scratch the Surface by Susan Conant

I just drove home and put my car in the garage. I didn’t get out of the car first. I used the garage door opener. Then I went to the front door.”

    “The front.”

    “I always use the front door unless I have packages to carry in.”

    “Did you notice anyone around? Any cars? Anyone out for a walk? Anything?”

    “No. I mean, there wasn’t anyone, and I didn’t see any cars anywhere near here. I would’ve noticed.”

    “Any strangers around earlier today? Or this week? Anything unusual?”

    “No. There’s hardly ever anyone around here except lawn services. Oil trucks. People repairing things. Some of the people who live here have second or third homes and practically don’t live here, and the others work all the time. You hardly ever see anyone.”

    “Sounds lonely,” he said.

    “I’m a writer. I need time alone.”

    “You might want to get someone to stay with you tonight. These things sometimes have a bigger impact than you expect. Anyone you could go and stay with? Friends? Relatives?”

    “I couldn’t leave the cat here all alone.”

    “Oh, we’ll take it off your hands.”

    “No! No, it needs to stay here. He does. He was left for me . I can’t abandon him. He’s had a terrible time. He needs to be with someone who understands cats. Please! He needs to stay with me. I’ll be fine. I’ll set the alarm.”

    To Felicity’s surprise, Dave Valentine didn’t fight for possession of the cat. He did, however, return to the matter of her staying alone. Pressed, she admitted that she did have a friend she could call. When Valentine had taken down her phone number, the names of her late uncle and aunt, and a few other pieces of information, and when he had warned her that the police would be in her vestibule and yard for some time yet, he insisted that she call the friend she’d mentioned.

    “A couple of other things,” he said. “You’re going to need to avoid talking about any of this. Don’t discuss the details with your neighbors. Or the media. You need to avoid any contact with the media. If they call you, just tell them you’ve been asked not to talk about it.”

    Felicity felt the blood rush up her throat to her face, as if Dave Valentine had read her thoughts and decided to ruin her grand plans.

    Before she had the chance to say anything, he thanked her for talking with him and handed her his card. “I’ll be in touch,” he added. “And if you think of anything else, call me. Anything. If it’s something small, some little detail, call me anyway. And get that friend of yours over here.”

    With some relief, Felicity decided not to trail after the detective to observe the real investigation of an authentic crime scene. Instead, as soon as she’d ushered him out the back door, she called Ronald. She had no intention of asking Ronald to spend the night, but Ronald would certainly know what to do about the cat.

NINE

    In the British mysteries that Felicity read at bedtime, the characters who nurtured and soothed the unfortunate finders of dead bodies fell into two categories, the first being loud, jolly women with large families and the second, blatant eccentrics. The eccentrics sometimes turned out to be murderers, as did the apparently traumatized body finders. In Felicity’s experience, the fat, jolly women never killed anyone, probably because they were too busy taking care of their large families to have time to perpetrate so demanding a crime as murder.

    Although Ronald clearly belonged in the category of eccentrics, Felicity had little doubt of his innocence in the slaying of the gray man. The vestibule had been empty when Felicity left for Newbright Books. Even if Ronald had already stashed the corpse in the trunk of his car, there hadn’t been time for him to leave his shop, drive to Newton Park, deposit the body in the vestibule, and drive back. Or had there? Could he have done it while Felicity was on her way to the signing? While she was in the shop? In