‘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 Looking thin, washed out and withdrawn, she slouched in an overstuffed chair pulled up as close to the fish tank as the built-in benches would allow.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?’