Tomorrow's Vengeance (19 page)

Had Masud and Raniero finally come to blows over Masud's imagined – perhaps confirmed? – suspicions about the relationship between his wife and the master chef?

Masud had been making trouble for Tyson Bennett, too, over the incident with Nancy and Jerry. If Bennett were holding Masud responsible for the possibility that Calvert Colony might lose its accreditation, and his spotless reputation along with it, things might have gotten ugly between them. It seemed unlikely that he would have been able to persuade Masud to stay quiet on the issue. And what if Masud had threatened to leave Calvert Colony and take all the other Muslims with him?

If you added the Islamophobes like Christie McSpadden and Colonel Nate Greene, who'd also been upset for his friends and didn't want to have to move from the colony in the event of it being shut down, and even the old guy I'd met on the porch that first day, the list grew even longer.

Could I eliminate Jerry, who'd been separated from the love of his life for no good reason? No. Stranger things had happened.

I shook myself back to reality. My iPhone was beeping.

A text message from Paul, my seafaring husband:
WTF?

He must have come ashore and picked up a newspaper. I had some explaining to do.

A week after the murder I decided to pay a condolence call on Safa Abaza, but when I knocked on the door of her town home she didn't come to the door. From the helpful woman at reception I learned that Safa had left Calvert Colony and was staying, at least temporarily, at her daughter's home in Potomac, Maryland. With a nudge-nudge-wink-wink, I-won't-say-anything-if-you-don't, the receptionist gave me Laila Kazi's phone number.

After three attempts at talking to Laila's voicemail I managed to reach the actual daughter on the phone.

‘Mother can't come to the phone right now,' Laila explained. ‘She's in her
Iddah.
'

In her Iddah?
Was Safa in her room, her car, her boat, her cottage in the back yard or what? ‘Uh …' I started to say, when Laila rescued me from ignorance.

‘
Iddah
is Mother's official period of mourning,' she informed me cooly. ‘It generally lasts for four lunar months plus ten days.'

During
Iddah
, I learned, her mother would wear plain clothing and no makeup, perfume or jewelry. She'd stay at home, seeing no one, except for emergencies, of course. Apparently talking to me wasn't one of those emergencies. After asking Laila to convey my sincerest condolences to her mother, I hung up. I sent a handwritten sympathy note to Safa at the Potomac address, but decided that, for the moment anyway, there wasn't much more that I could do.

The next time I returned to Blackwalnut Hall I found Angie McSpadden and her mother in the lobby trying to organize a game of croquet. Angie was dressed casually in Bermuda shorts and a yellow tank top, but Christie, her mother-in-law, had stepped out of a TravelSmith catalog wearing gray slacks and a pebble-print tunic in shades of gray, purple and magenta with matching purple tennis shoes.

‘Your mother-in-law looks nice today,' I told Angie,
sotto voce
.

‘Go figure,' she replied. ‘I'd been after her for weeks to get her hair done, then all of a sudden, like, it's an emergency. Had to drive her out to Karen James on Maryland Avenue because the salon here was totally slammed.'

‘Is she going on a date?' I asked, thinking about Richard Kent.

Angie groaned. ‘She lives in hope. But I haven't seen Dickey-boy in a couple of weeks. He's off on some secret mission. Like I'm buying that shit.'

‘I'd like to play, if you've still got room,' I said.

‘Sure. You'll make a foursome, but we still can add two more.' She scanned the lobby hopefully. ‘Croquet, anybody?'

It was then I noticed that someone had parked Nancy Harper in the lobby. Looking thin, washed out and withdrawn, she slouched in an overstuffed chair pulled up as close to the fish tank as the built-in benches would allow. She stared with no sign of interest into its aquamarine depths.

‘Let's ask Nancy,' I suggested. ‘I know she can play. She was out on the court a couple of weeks ago.'
With Jerry
, I thought, with a pang. ‘You just have to keep reminding her what direction she's going in. I'll play and keep an eye on her, if you like.'

Despite encouragement from me, Nancy stubbornly refused to budge, and nobody else in the lobby was dying to volunteer, so I hauled out my cell phone and called Naddie. ‘Want to join us for croquet?' I asked.

She had been watching the Food Channel on TV, but readily agreed. ‘Sure, why not. They're making sushi out of live sea urchins. I can live a long and happy life and never taste that.'

When it came to croquet, Naddie was a catch. She'd been a member of the crack Ginger Cove team that had trounced the Naval Academy midshipmen the previous year in a match that had been covered by
Sports Illustrated
magazine. At Ginger Cove croquet wasn't a game, it was blood sport. Team members played year-round on two AstroTurf courts. During inclement weather, aficionados moved inside to a ballroom court, laid out with specially weighted wickets. Naddie had even dated – briefly – their Imperial Wicket, who was a spry ninety-one. The average age of his team, from newbies to veterans, was eighty-one, but it would have been a mistake to underestimate them. Their win-loss record against the navy was 12-7 and, until next year, at least, the geezers remained in possession of the coveted Generation Gap Cup.

Calvert Colony, by comparison, was a bit low tech. The courts were laid out, end to end, on two meticulously manicured, fifty-by-one-hundred-foot swatches of lawn adjacent to the tennis courts. Oversized white wickets were staked out on each court in the traditional double diamond design. Although the white stood out clearly against the close-cropped green of the grass, red flags had been tied to the tops of the starting and finishing stakes to capture the attention of the more visually challenged.

The croquet set – one of two snazzy models imported directly from Jacques in London – was stored in a garden shed adjacent to the courts in wheeled, wooden caddies. By the time Naddie joined us I had already located one of the caddies, dragged it from inside the shed, and we players were busily selecting mallets, arguing about colors and hurling good-natured insults at one another.

I snagged blue, won the coin toss, cued up my ball and gave it a good whack, sending it sailing through the first two hoops. Angie followed, and then her mother, who managed to tap my ball. Instead of taking the extra stroke to which she was entitled, Christie chortled like the witch from Hansel and Gretel, placed her ball against mine, held it there with the toe of her purple shoe and
thwack
, ‘sent' my ball into the underbrush.
Damn
. I hated that rule.

When my turn came again I trudged into the taller grass, dropped down to my hands and knees and narrowed my eyes, lining up the shot. If I angled it just right, I calculated, the ball would hop over a tuft of grass, bounce up onto the court and, if the croquet gods were in my favor, come to rest somewhere in the vicinity of the third wicket.

I swung the mallet experimentally, not quite connecting with the ball, then swung it again, testing, preparing for the shot. As I concentrated on the mallet at the spot where it would make contact with the ball I noticed something clinging to the surface of the wood. Not wanting a pesky clump of dirt to spoil my aim, I swept the mallet up and squinted, turning it into the sunlight for a better view. Something dark stained the wood, and imbedded in the stain were several strands of coarse, dark hair.

‘Your turn, Hannah! What
are
you waiting for?' Naddie taunted.

Christie flapped her elbows, clucking like a chicken.

A Southwest plane on a landing approach to BWI droned overhead.

These sounds and others merged, surged and faded as the significance of what I was seeing sunk in.

‘Naddie! Come here a minute,' I called when I finally caught my breath.

Naddie wandered over, swinging her mallet casually like a cane. ‘Seeking advice from the croquet pro already?'

Carefully balancing the handle of the mallet on the palm of my hand, I offered it up for her inspection. ‘What does this look like to you?'

Naddie stared, moved in for a closer look then drew back as suddenly as if she'd been slapped. ‘Blood, would be my guess, and hair.'

‘Damn. That's what I thought, too.'

Our eyes locked. Without another word, we each sensed what had to be done.

‘Sorry, gang,' I sang out. ‘Just got a text from my daughter. Gotta go. I'm sure you can carry on here with out me.'

Naddie laid a hand on my arm, patted it reassuringly then turned away. ‘Look out, here I come!' she called. ‘Christie, you are going to be toast!'

Carrying the mallet gingerly so as not to smudge any latent fingerprints other than my own, I made my way back to the staff parking lot at Blackwalnut Hall, lay the mallet down on the clean concrete next to my LeBaron, and, for the second time in a week, called 9-1-1 and asked to be put through to Detective Ron Powers.

‘We can't go on meeting this way, Mrs Ives.' Detective Powers's smile didn't quite reach his eyes.

‘Sorry.' Although what I had to be sorry about, I couldn't imagine.
I
was the one who found his missing murder weapon, after all. At least I believed it was the murder weapon.

As we talked, the croquet mallet lay like an exclamation point on the ground between us.

Powers squatted, resting his butt squarely on his heels. ‘A croquet mallet! Well, I'll be damned. The medical examiner thought it might have been a baseball bat, or one of those old-fashioned wooden hammers.' He looked up at me. ‘I probably shouldn't be telling you this, Mrs Ives, but I know you'll eventually weasel it out of me anyway, or out of your brother-in-law down in Chesapeake County.'

I raised my eyebrows. ‘
Moi?
'

He straightened and loomed over me. ‘There were wood fibers in the wound, but the lab is having trouble identifying them.'

‘
Lignum vitae
,' I said.

His eyes widened. ‘I beg your pardon?'

‘
Lignum vitae
. Tree of life. It's a hard, resinous wood, one of the hardest woods there is, actually. It doesn't even float.'

‘And you know this because …?'

‘It's the national tree of the Bahamas, for one thing. My husband and I lived on an island in the Abacos for six months while he was on sabbatical.' I felt my face flush and fessed up. ‘Actually, I read about it on the information booklet that was attached to the croquet set. Jacques uses aged
lignum vitae
in the construction of their mallets, and … well, we had a
lignum vitae
in our yard on Bonefish Cay, so it kind of caught my attention.'

Power leaned in for a closer look at the mallet, but didn't touch it.

‘Did you find any fingerprints at the crime scene,' I asked, ‘like on the glass reed?'

‘Sadly, no. Whoever grabbed it wiped it clean afterwards.'

He rose, straightened and adjusted the waistband of his khakis. ‘Can't tell much just by looking. Could be animal blood, could be human. The hair …' He shrugged. ‘We'll have to get it to the lab. Where's the rest of the set?'

‘My friends are over at the croquet courts playing with it now. The colony has two sets, actually, and they keep them in a kind of garden shed between the croquet and the tennis courts.' Before he could ask, I added: ‘The door wasn't locked, Detective, so anyone could have had access to them. The only reason I picked up this particular mallet is because I wanted to play with blue.'

‘We'll need to take the sets away, too.'

‘Of course,' I said, thinking, well, there goes any prayer of a Calvert Colony championship season. ‘Want me to show you where they are?'

‘Thanks. But first, can you keep an eye on it for a minute while I get something from my car?'

I nodded but paced uneasily like a mother lion protecting her cub until Powers returned carrying a large white paper bag.

He slipped the mallet carefully into the bag, secured the flap and initialed it, then said almost conversationally, ‘We'll need your fingerprints, of course, for purposes of elimination.'

‘I was arrested once,' I confessed. ‘They're in AFIS.' When his eyebrows shot up into the stratosphere, I said, ‘It was a mistake.'

‘Of course it was,' he said evenly, but I had the feeling that the minute he got back to his office he'd be tracking my tarnished record down like a bloodhound.

‘One should never get into arguments with people who later turn up dead,' I said, flashing back to what had happened between me and the late, unlamented Naval Academy company officer, Lt Jennifer Goodall.

‘A good rule,' he agreed. ‘Especially in this case.'

‘Ah …' I thought about the arguments I'd recently overheard. Raniero Buccho. Balaclava Man. Was somebody's goose about to be cooked?

‘It should be noted that many people at the death of a dear person will bring flowers and wreaths and after proceeding with the funeral will take the flowers and wreaths to the home of the deceased. They buy the best flowers and wreaths to show their deep sympathy and concern. To do this is forbidden – whether presenting it at the funeral, accompanying the funeral with it, or bringing it to the deceased's house. This is an imitation of non-Muslims, and is an evil innovation which should be strictly avoided. Those who do such a thing will have no reward from Allah. To the contrary, they will be questioned for such meaningless waste.'

Shaykh Abdul-Fattaah Abu Ghuddah (RA),
Haq Islam
,

Sending Flowers and Reading Quran During Funerals, 9.4

T
he following day I went to read to Nancy and stopped to check in with Elaine. To my surprise, Heather was sitting in the unit manager's office. As my shadow darkened her door she glanced up from the chart she was annotating, grinned and said, ‘Hi, Hannah.'