by Susan Conant
On her way out, she paused at the cash register to speak with the pale woman. “A friend of mine shops here, I think,” she said. “Janice Mattingly.”
The woman was expressionless.
“Janice?” Felicity prompted. “I thought she was a friend of someone here?”
“No.” Even the single syllable was heavily accented.
Embarrassed, Felicity said, “Could I have a half pound of yogurt cheese?”
While she waited for the woman to get the cheese, she reflected that people like her must wander in by mistake all the time. The shopkeeper must be used to customers who didn’t belong and who bought strange foods they didn’t want. Why had the proprietors chosen such a misleading name? Why wasn’t the place called Boris’s Groceries or Natasha’s Russian Takeout? Feeling mildly victimized, Felicity paid for her cheese and left. As she drove home, she promised herself that if she ended up making a trip to the correct Tony’s Deli, the one Janice patronized, she wouldn’t buy anything at all.
By the time Felicity got home, she was feeling remarkably healthy and made herself a cup of tea and a small Russian-yogurt-cheese sandwich on white bread. The cheese was bland enough to be from Scotland and made an excellent food for invalids. Fortified, she called Sonya to report on her investigation.
“I’m sorry to disappoint you,” she told Sonya, “but it was the wrong Tony’s Deli. This one is Russian, and it’s a little grocery store with takeout.”
“Felicity, it certainly is not the wrong one! After I talked to you, I dug through a box that was handed over to me when I started as president of Witness, and I came across some old receipts. They’re from Tony’s Deli.” Sonya had been the president of Witness for only a year. Her predecessor had moved to Oregon.
“Well, it must be another Tony’s Deli, Sonya! This one sold pickled vegetables and whole dried fish. There were no cold cuts, no ham, none of the food we had at Janice’s, and the woman there had never heard of her. It was the wrong Tony’s Deli.”
“On Centre Street in Jamaica Plain.”
“That’s where I went. I have just come back. Sonya, I’m telling you, it’s a Russian shop where the woman at the cash register had never heard of Janice. The food we ate couldn’t possibly have come from there. And we have never had food like that at any Witness meeting. Sonya, it was weird food! And everything we have is ordinary American food. It couldn’t possibly have come from that place.”
Sonya was silent for a moment. When she spoke, her voice was ominous. “Oh, Felicity, this is terrible. It is simply terrible. The food wasn’t from Tony’s Deli, but the receipts are. How do you suppose Janice got hold of the receipts?”
“What do they look like?”
“Oh, I see. They’re rubber stamped. They’re from those receipt pads you can buy at any stationery store. Staples. Anywhere. With the Tony’s Deli name and address rubber-stamped on.”
“Where do you suppose she’s been getting the food?”
“I have no idea. Some place that charged her less than we’ve been reimbursing her. Maybe it’s food that restaurants were throwing out. No wonder we got sick!”
“Maybe she got it from the school where she teaches,” Felicity said. “It tasted a lot like school cafeteria food. She might’ve bribed someone in the kitchen. What a pitiful little scam! The poor thing.”
“Poor thing? She could have killed us all!”
“She didn’t. And she has by far the worst case of food poisoning.”
“And you had by far the lightest. It’s easy for you to call her a poor thing. What she is, is a thief! What on earth are we going to do?”
“What can we do while she’s in the hospital?”
“Hold a board meeting that she won’t be able to attend. Hash everything out. Decide what to do.”
“Sonya, you and Jim and Hadley are too sick for a meeting.”
“Well, Jim and Hadley will just have to pull themselves together. Have you ever read their books? Those hard-boiled detectives are always getting drunk, and they never sleep, and they don’t eat properly, and then they get shot or stabbed, and they keep right on going, so Jim and Hadley can just put their bodies where their books are, so to speak.”
“What about you? You’re not well enough, either, are you?”
“That’s no problem,” said Sonya. “We’ll meet at my house.”
THIRTY-FIVE
To Felicity’s great annoyance, the phone rang almost as soon as she had hung up. What must it be like to be the sort of fabulously successful author who can afford to rent an office away from home? Or who has the self-confidence not to answer even when Caller ID displays the name of one’s mother?
“Felicity,” said Mary, “I’ve been thinking about your Aunt Thelma.”
“She wasn’t exclusively mine,” Felicity snapped. “She was your sister-in-law.” Feeling guilty, she said, “And what were you thinking about her?” Felicity and Angie suspected that Mary was having transient ischemic attacks, ministrokes that sometimes thickened her speech and, in Angie’s view, accounted for a tendency to harp on topics that, in Felicity’s view, she’d been harping on forever. Still, a person experiencing TIAs deserved consideration, even a person who happened to be one’s own mother.
“Well, I’ll tell you,” said Mary. “I was wondering if you’d happened to come across any of the jewelry she stole from my mother. There was a gold chain. And an opal ring. She weaseled it out of the undertaker, you know.”
“I’ve heard.”
“Those things were rightfully mine.”
“I’m sure they were. But I have no idea what happened to them. I never saw them on Aunt Thelma, and they certainly aren’t here.”
“How’s your murder? I haven’t seen anything in the papers. Are you sure you didn’t imagine it?”
“Mother, you did see something in the paper. And I did not imagine it.”
“You’re very high-strung, you know. You always were. Angie, now she was the easy one. Did I tell you she sent me a beautiful flower arrangement? I kept it going for weeks.”
“That was for Mother’s Day. It was six months ago.”
“There’s nothing stingy about your sister. Fresh flowers are very dear. It’s a shame she ever married that Italian. She was such a pretty girl, and he was so short and dark. They made a very unattractive couple.”
“That was the least of their problems. Among other things, he beat her.”
“I’ve never believed that story of hers.”
In desperation, Felicity said, “The doorbell’s ringing. I have to run.”
“I don’t hear it.”
“It’s very quiet. Uncle Bob paid extra for it. It’s the quietest doorbell I’ve ever heard. I’ll call you soon. Bye!”
Feeling more done in by her mother than by the food poisoning, Felicity allowed herself to skip her time with Prissy LaChatte and to take a nap instead. When she went upstairs, both cats were asleep on her bed, Edith on the pillow that had formerly been Felicity’s, and Brigitte toward the center, almost touching Edith. Although their extraordinary eye color was hidden, they were remarkably beautiful, especially as a pair. Their coats were an identical blue-gray, Edith’s thick and short, Brigitte’s long and flowing, and they had somehow contrived to fall asleep in the same curled-up pose, as if a photographer had positioned them to maximum advantage. Reminding herself that this was, after all, her bed, Felicity nonetheless sensed herself to be an intruder and took care to undress silently and to slip under the covers without disturbing the bed’s self-proclaimed owners.
When she awoke two hours later, Edith was on one side of her head, Brigitte on the other. Could they have mistaken her head for a third cat? She stirred, and Brigitte suddenly ran across the comforter to pounce on Felicity’s feet, and to her amazement, Felicity heard herself laugh aloud. What if she were deliberately to wiggle her toes? She did. And Brigitte again pounced. Neglected, Edith butted her large, solid head against Felicity’s and drew another laugh. Attached though Fel
icity was to Prissy’s Morris and Tabitha, she knew that neither had ever given her this silly, even childish, sensation of simple pleasure. Furthermore, although Morris and Tabitha had the convenient habit of making no demands on Felicity until she booted up her notebook computer, once she awakened them, they were quite demanding in the sense that they relied on Felicity to create and animate them; without Felicity’s effort, they simply didn’t come to life. Brigitte and Edith, in contrast, lived their own lives even when Felicity was asleep; because they existed apart from her, she didn’t have to perform the work of making them up. It seemed to Felicity that she had had a minor revelation: She finally understood what people meant in characterizing cats as independent.
After washing her face and getting dressed, Felicity wandered downstairs to find a message from Sonya on her answering machine. Jim and Hadley, whose sleuths pursued bad guys despite bullet and knife wounds, were so depleted by upset stomachs that they refused to leave home. Consequently, Sonya had arranged for the board, minus Janice, of course, to hold a meeting online in a private chat room. Sonya had e-mailed the instructions for finding and entering this room, and she expected Felicity to be there at seven o’clock. Without fail! Felicity groaned. Sonya had chronic difficulty in distinguishing between minor obligations to the regional branch of a small writers’ organization and patriotic duties to the Land of the Free. And this chat room! Felicity’s computer literacy allowed her to create, save, move, copy, print, and delete files. She was fluent in the sending and receiving of e-mail messages. She searched the Web and shopped online. She had entered online chat rooms only three times, when she had been the guest visitor to cyberspace associations of mystery fans who had asked her questions about her books. Each time, she had found the experience unsettling. As she was typing her answer to one question, another would appear on the screen, and then another. By the time her replies had been posted, they’d had nothing to do with the immediately preceding questions. In her own eyes, she had ended up looking as if she were incapable of holding a normal conversation.
Although Sonya, Jim, and Hadley were fellow writers and not fans, she had no desire to make a fool of herself with them, either; on the contrary, she wanted them to see her as a computer whiz and chat room adept. Consequently, she planned to be at her computer by six-thirty to study the instructions Sonya was sending on how to enter this imaginary room. In preparation for a meeting with people who wouldn’t see her and wouldn’t have cared how she looked, anyway, she took a shower, did her hair and makeup, and put on tailored pants and a good sweater. Although she now felt healthy, she ate a bland dinner of French toast and apple-sauce. Then, to avoid prolonged exposure to the fishy odor of canned cat food, she moved the cats’ water and food bowls to the bottom of the staircase that ran from the kitchen, past the back door that lead to the garage, and down to the large, open family room on the ground floor, which bore no resemblance to a cellar or basement. It had sliding glass doors she had never opened, comfortable-looking chairs and couches on which she had never sat, and a giant-screen television she had never turned on. The sight of all this previously unused space inspired her to move the cat litter and a supply of cat toys down there as well. The cats didn’t sleep in the guest room anymore, and, of course, they were more than guests. When she’d finished carrying the cats’ belongings two flights down, from the second floor to the ground floor, she felt an obligation to inform Brigitte and Edith of their change of address, but had almost no idea of how to go about communicating with them. On inspiration, she opened a can of some disgusting giblet concoction that Edith liked, and spooned it into a bowl that she carried to the family room. When she returned to the kitchen, Edith was standing on all fours on the table, the edge of which she was affectionately rubbing with her mouth. Looking Felicity in the eye, she uttered a soft, solitary meow.
“Your food is downstairs,” said Felicity. “I have moved it.” I am learning to talk to cats, she thought. It did not occur to her that Edith was soliciting the affection she was lavishing on the edge of the kitchen table.
At six-thirty, she sat at the computer in Uncle Bob’s study, where she read Sonya’s e-mailed instructions, easily followed them, and found herself waiting for the other board members to show up, as they finally did. Felicity pictured them in her mind, Sonya with her Scandinavian blondeness and her loose cotton garments; Jim with his Chinese-African-American coloring and features, looking like a grown-up version of a child in a UNICEF poster; and Hadley, probably pale and unshaven after his illness.
After a few preliminary postings that established everyone’s presence and awareness of the purpose of the meeting, Sonya wrote: “Let’s begin by stating that Janice did not intend to poison us. The poisoning we have suffered was accidental. It is, however, the occasion for our discovery of certain irregularities in Janice’s billing Witness for money she claimed to have spent.”
Felicity, feeling that details were required, wrote: “Janice claimed that the food she supplied for Witness meetings came from Tony’s Deli in Jamaica Plain. I went there this morning. It is a Russian grocery store. The food Janice billed us for couldn’t have come from there, and the store employee there had never heard of her.”
“But I have old receipts with the name of Tony’s Deli stamped on them,” Sonya added. “Witness has been reimbursing Janice for money she didn’t spend there.”
“Food isn’t the only thing we’ve been reimbursing her for,” Hadley wrote. “There are newsletter costs, photocopying, office supplies, drinks.”
Jim posted a question: “She teaches school. Does anyone know where?”
“Boston,” Sonya replied.
“Does the school have a cafeteria?” Jim asked. “Think about the food she’s been serving us. Cold cuts, iceberg lettuce, sliced tomatoes. All that could’ve come from a school lunchroom.”
“Those stale rolls,” Hadley added. “You’re onto something, Jim.”
“The pudding,” Felicity wrote. “I wondered the same thing. On Sunday, she was talking about all the conferences she was going to. I wondered how she thought she could afford all the promotion she was planning.”
“Now we know,” Sonya wrote. “By stealing from us!”
“Not stealing,” Jim wrote. “Petty pilfering. There’s no reason to be punitive.”
Felicity agreed but wrote: “Teachers are paid quite decently. They make more money than writers do. But she already collects autographed first editions, and she’ll have big expenses if she plans to go to all the conferences, and she also has a sick cat.”
“She dotes on that cat,” Hadley wrote. “Ugly thing.”
“The cat eats special food,” Felicity explained, “and the vet bills must be substantial.”
“Means, motive, and opportunity,” Sonya wrote.
“It isn’t murder,” Hadley wrote. “It’s a sad little scam. It needs to be handled quietly. Look at all she’s done for Witness.”
Sonya was incensed. “All? Look at all she’s stolen from us!”
“She didn’t mean to steal,” Hadley argued. “She probably thought she was entitled. And she was ambitious. She wanted to go to conferences and be a star. Felicity, she wanted to be you.”