Scratch the Surface by Susan Conant Page B

dishes of cat food. One dish contained dry food; the other, wet pink glop that smelled remarkably like the salmon odor left by Felicity’s own dinner.

    “Ronald, I’m not having a litter box in the kitchen,” Felicity said. “It’s unsanitary. Besides, you haven’t seen this cat. He’s huge. He’s twice the size of that little box.”

    “Once he knows there’s litter here, you can move the box. He won’t like it near his food, anyway.”

    “As if my opinion didn’t matter! Ronald, what a horrible ingrate I am. I’m sorry. I’m in shock. Thank you for coming over. Sit down.” She took a seat at the table. Ronald sat opposite her. Although he was examining a variety of cat toys he’d left there instead of paying attention to her distress, she said, “Ronald, someone did this to me! Why would anyone do that? Who hates me so much?”

    “Your mother.”

    “My mother is little and old, and she hardly ever leaves the house. She couldn’t have killed that man. And she couldn’t have moved his body.”

    “Maybe your sister helped her.”

    “Neither one of them would’ve touched the cat. And they’re not the perfect relatives, but they’re not murderers.”

    “They resent your inheritance.”

    “They were horrible to Bob and Thelma. I was nice. There’s no more to it.” Raising her glass, she paused for a moment. Ronald avoided the usual toasts to health and friends in favor of book titles. Felicity had picked up the custom. “Living Well Is the Best Revenge,” she said.

    Ronald took a sip of wine. “ Mommy Dearest . Do you have any idea where he is?”

    “My mother is admittedly toxic, but she is female.”

    “The cat. Have you looked for him?”

    “First of all, I have to remind you that I am the one who rescued the cat, so please stop making that face, as if I disliked cats. He was in the vestibule with the man. I told you this on the phone. Whoever left the body in my vestibule deliberately left the cat there, too. And when I made the mistake of getting my neighbors, the Wangs, Mr. Wang was horrible to the cat, so I picked him up, the cat, obviously, and carried him around to the back door and brought him inside. But then he took off. I put out tuna, and I called him, but I haven’t seen him since I found him under a bed upstairs. Isn’t that where cats always go?”

    Ronald drank some wine and then evidently reached a decision about the cat toys he’d been examining. After picking up a long rod with feathers and jingle bells fastened to one end, he rose and said, “Let’s go see.”

    The grand scale of Uncle Bob and Aunt Thelma’s house made the search for the cat a challenging task. Felicity was sure that the animal hadn’t gone down the stairs that led to the back door and to what Felicity persisted in thinking of as the basement even though the space contained a family room, a big exercise room, the little wine cellar, and other finished rooms. The upper floors, however, offered countless hiding places. Although Felicity used only the master bedroom suite, which had a dressing room and a luxurious bathroom, she kept the doors to the other five bedrooms open, mainly to remind herself that she wasn’t living in a hotel. And, as Ronald pointed out, the cat wasn’t necessarily still in the same place.

    “Cats hide under beds!” Felicity insisted when Ronald got down on his belly to peer under the living room furniture.

    “Cats hide,” Ronald said. “That much is true. He isn’t here.”

    “Well, I’m going upstairs where he was before. You can waste your time here if you want, but I’m telling you, Ronald, that’s exactly what you’re doing.”

    Felicity headed upstairs, and Ronald indulged her by following. In each of the five unoccupied bedrooms, he silently lowered himself to the floor and, raising the bed skirts in which Thelma had dressed the beds, searched in vain for the cat. It was only when Ronald had stuck his head under Felicity’s king-size bed