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?
EIGHTEEN
‘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
The 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.’
‘Hi, Heather. Is Elaine around?’
Her face flushed. ‘Sorry, but she’s on administrative leave.’
‘Why? I don’t mean to be nosy,’ I said, thinking yes I do, ‘but what happened? A family illness or something?’
‘It’s just until this whole thing with Nancy is settled.’
‘What do you mean, “settled”?’
‘There’s going to be an official hearing. Honestly, I’m really worried, Hannah. Elaine could lose her license.’
I plopped myself down in the guest chair. ‘Oh, no!’
‘They’re saying she didn’t follow proper procedures after Nancy was … well, you know.’
I didn’t understand, and I said so. ‘But Elaine reported it to Tyson, didn’t she?’
Heather shook her head. ‘No, that�
�s the problem. She didn’t.’
So Tyson hadn’t even known what was going on. ‘Then who told the board?’
Heather and I stared silently at one another. The way I looked at it, there were only six people who knew what Nancy and Jerry and been up to in her bedroom that day. Nancy and Jerry themselves, of course, if they could even remember the incident. Elaine and Heather, me and … Safa. Safa had assured me earlier that she hadn’t blown the whistle on Jerry and Nancy. But she had mentioned the incident to Masud. It was looking more and more likely that Masud Abaza was the WikiLeaks of Calvert Colony. The colonel certainly suspected as much.
The only way to find out was to ask Safa.
If I called I might be put off again. I decided to simply pop in instead, hoping that whatever the rules for Iddah were, if I transgressed, perhaps my ignorance of Islamic law would give me a pass.
Safa had mentioned that her daughter, Laila, worked outside the home, so I planned to arrive around mid-morning when I figured Laila would be at work.
First stop was Whole Foods, where I selected a fruit basket to take to the grieving widow, not knowing whether my first choice, Godiva chocolates, were halal. Before I pulled out of the parking garage I tapped Laila Kazi’s address into the GPS and, forty minutes later, pulled up to the curb in front of her home. I sat for a minute, studying the house – a modern, two-story colonial – before picking up my cell phone and giving Laila’s number a call, imagining, as it rang, that I could hear the phone ringing inside the house.
To my surprise, a child answered. ‘Kazi wesidence.’
I smiled. ‘Hello. My name is Hannah. Is your mother home?’
‘No.’
‘May I speak to your grandmother, then?’ I asked, taking a stab at the relationship.
Without taking the phone away from her mouth, the child yelled, ‘Grandmother, for you!’ then banged the instrument down on some hard surface. After a minute or two, while I stayed on the line rubbing my ear and hoping I hadn’t been forgotten, Safa picked up.
‘This is Safa Abaza.’
‘Safa, it’s me, Hannah.’
‘Hannah!’ She sounded genuinely pleased to hear my voice. ‘Thank you for your kind note.’
‘I felt …’ As much as I’d rehearsed coming over in the car, when the moment came I seemed to be at a loss for words. ‘I really wanted to see you, Safa, but then I talked to Laila and she explained about your Iddah and, well, I wasn’t sure what was permitted.’
‘I would like to see you, Hannah. We didn’t really get to talk … afterwards.’
‘I know.’
‘When are you free?’
‘Right now, as a matter of fact. I’m calling you from my car. If you look out your window, you’ll see me.’
Safa laughed out loud. A few seconds later I saw the living-room curtains twitch. ‘Please, come in, then.’
‘I wouldn’t be breaking the rules?’
‘Don’t be silly. I can have visitors, as long as they’re women, or men in my immediate family.’
As I climbed out of the car balancing the fruit basket in my arms, I wondered how long after Masud’s death that sort of foolishness would continue. The girl had been born in Texas, for crying out loud. Stepping from flagstone to flagstone as I made my way up the walk, I imagined Safa returning to Calvert Colony, meeting the retired CEO of a Fortune 500 company – suitably widowed, of course – casting aside her hijab and running through the Tranquility Garden with her apricot hair streaming like a banner behind her.
The object of my fantasy met me at the open door wearing a white hijab, a shapeless magenta maxi-dress and flip-flops. She engulfed me in a hug – so good to see you – then invited me to follow her into the kitchen. A child of around four sat on a tall stool at the butcher block island, drawing circles on a piece of paper with a green crayon. ‘This is my granddaughter, Yasmine.’
That the little girl’s name was Yasmine I might have guessed. She wore a bright purple T-shirt with her namesake’s Disney princess printed on it.
‘I brought you some fruit,’ I said, proffering the basket.
‘That was sweet of you, thanks,’ Safa said, taking the basket from my hands and setting it in the exact center of the island. She fingered some of the fruit through the cellophane. ‘Oh, I love blood oranges. Can I make you some tea?’
‘That would be lovely.’
Safa picked up the electric kettle and filled it with water from the tap. ‘Yasmine, why don’t you go color in your mother’s office so Hannah and I can talk?’ She switched on the kettle, removed two cups from the dishwasher and set them down on the counter.
Yasmine crammed the crayon she was using back in the box, hopped off the stool and said, ‘Can I play on your iPad, Grandmother?’
Safa smiled indulgently. ‘Of course.’
Yasmine snatched the device off the counter where it had been charging and skipped off into the adjoining room.
When the kettle began to scream for attention, I said, ‘Have the police made any progress in finding Masud’s killer?’
Safa filled the teapot and set it in front of us to steep. ‘Sadly, no.’
‘I keep asking myself who could have done such a terrible thing.’
‘I ask myself the same question, every minute of every day.’
I was tempted to tell Safa about the evidence I had found on the croquet mallet, but I had promised Detective Powers that I’d keep that information to myself. ‘Everybody at Calvert Colony is jumpy,’ I said instead. ‘If it can happen to Masud it can happen to anyone.’
‘Not just anyone,’ Safa said. ‘I think the newspapers were right. It was a hate crime.’
As I sipped my tea I reviewed my list of potential suspects: the colonel, Christie, Richard Kent, Tyler Bennett and Balaclava Man – who may, of course, have been one of the men. After a few moments, I asked, ‘Safa, are you sure you didn’t report what we saw to the Office of Health Care Quality, between Nancy and Jerry, I mean?’
She studied me over the rim of her teacup, pale eyebrows gracefully arched. ‘No, of course not. That’s not my job.’
‘Then who did, I wonder? It wasn’t Elaine or Tyson.’
Safa’s gaze was steady, unwavering. In that moment I knew it was Masud – it had to be. And she knew that I knew.
‘Masud can, uh, could be compulsive. When I told him about the rape, he marched off to see Tyson Bennett. Demanded that he do something, although between you and me, Hannah, I’m not sure what Mr Bennett could have done. You can’t chain old people to the beds, after all.’
As I sipped Safa’s fine Earl Gray tea, I mused that Masud was exactly the kind of person who might chain an infidel to a bed, but the man was dead, so I chided myself for being so judgmental and moved on. ‘So what happened between the two of them? Did Masud say?’
Safa set down her mug, stirred in another half teaspoon of sugar, then laid the spoon to one side. ‘Masud told the director that perhaps we’d made a wrong decision in moving into the colony, that maybe it wasn’t a safe place for a woman to be.’
‘Ah.’
‘Mr Bennett insisted that Jerry’s sex with Nancy had been consensual, and that, he said, was that.’ She shrugged. ‘Perhaps Masud called the Health Care Quality people after hearing that Mr Bennett didn’t plan to report it, or perhaps not. I really don’t know. But maybe Masud was right. Maybe Calvert Colony isn’t a safe place for a woman like me to be.’
‘Does that mean you’re not planning to come back?’
‘I’m needed here.’ She bobbed her head in the direction of the next room where the familiar sounds of Angry Birds – deedle-deedle-ha-ha-ha-squawk-squawk-squawk – followed by the computerized sound of broken glass testified to a touchingly familiar, normal twenty-first-century home environment.
‘They’ve been a great comfort to me, my family,’ she said.
‘I’m crazy about my grandkids, too, Safa, but you have many friends at Calvert Colony. We miss you.’
‘Af
ter the incident with the graffiti, Masud wanted to move right away.’
‘I can understand that, but where did he plan to go?’
‘That’s just it. The waiting list at Ginger Cove is a mile long and, well, they don’t cater to our special needs.’ She smiled. ‘I put my foot down, Hannah. I told Masud that the only way I was leaving Calvert Colony was feet first. I love my town home.’
‘Good for you,’ I said, admiring her gumption.
‘Underneath all this,’ she said, indicating her baggy dress and hijab, ‘there’s an opinionated Southern Baptist from Texas named Linda.’
I laughed out loud.
Safa’s face clouded. ‘I made every effort to be a good Muslim wife, Hannah, but no matter how hard I tried, Masud wasn’t entirely convinced that my conversion was sincere.’
‘I saw how he treated you outside the kitchen that day, Safa. Frankly, I was concerned.’
‘Masud was a jealous man, but his behavior that day was an aberration, I assure you. Masud never hit me, Hannah.’
I searched her face, seeking the truth. ‘I would never make a good Muslim,’ I told her. ‘I have too many male friends, and I enjoy their company, even when Paul isn’t around.’
‘That was the hardest part of conversion for me.’
‘Sometimes I don’t play by the rules either,’ I said, thinking about finding Safa alone in the kitchen with Raniero.
‘We have a lot more in common than you might think, Hannah Ives.’
I reached across the butcher block surface and squeezed her hand. ‘I know.’
NINETEEN
‘There is a curious respect for legal formalities. The signature of the person despoiled is always obtained even if the person in question has to be sent to Dachau in order to break down his resistance.’
John C. Wiley, U.S. General Counsel in Vienna,
March, 1938.
If I had to write a caption to illustrate the next few days, it would be this: Woman waits vainly for the telephone to ring.
Tomorrow's Vengeance Page 15
