Thirteen Diamonds

isn't real. Then only we and the perpetrator will know.”
    “Who do you think did it?”
    “One of the three women at Gerald's table, most likely, but what does it matter? It's over and done with now. It was just a joke.”
    “I'll bring it up at the bridge club this afternoon,” Wesley said. “We'll take a vote on it.”
    “And would you save the rest of the deck, along with the original box? Just in case there is ever any question regarding the legitimacy of Gerald's hand.” I knew that if it was ever needed, Wesley's testimony at a trial would be believed.
     
                       *    *    *
     
    The bridge club did not eat lunch before play started. The lunch committee had been disbanded by common consent. Instead, Wesley conducted a short business meeting. The members voted to have the 13 diamonds framed as a permanent memorial to Gerald. We also had a minute of silence in his memory.
    Then we played bridge, as usual. We played shuffle-and-deal instead of duplicate bridge because some of the members didn't want the cutthroat competition that duplicate engenders. I noticed that Ida and Ellen were still partners. Harriet, whose partner had usually been Gerald, was playing with a woman whose name I didn't remember.
    Our custom was to have each partnership play a certain number of hands against every other partnership. When Ida and Harriet played at the same table I watched them from my table out of the corner of my eye, but I didn't see any sign of bad feeling between them. They were good actors.
    When serious bridge players get together, they are models of complete concentration and even the ones who said they didn't like to play competitively got into the spirit of the game. I bet that most of the people there forgot about Gerald as the afternoon progressed and they bid and played their hands. By the end of the afternoon, activity at the bridge club had returned to normal.

CHAPTER 7
     
    It was too hot to play croquet, but Thursday afternoon was the only time all members of the foursome were available simultaneously, perhaps for weeks. I wore a large straw hat and put sun block on my exposed arms. My light skin doesn't take kindly to too much sunlight.
    I drew the line at wearing shorts to beat the heat. I was not about to put my varicose veins on display outdoors, without stockings. It was bad enough that I had to do it in the pool.
    My partner was a married man named Jesse; his wife didn't play croquet. Jesse was tall and thin and moved slowly, but his hands were amazingly steady for his age, which was on the north side of 80. He played the same kind of game—steady and conservative. I played a more wide-open game than he did, taking the high-risk shots, but together we made a good team and we had won the tournament the year before.
    Ellen Tooner had a female partner. I didn't know how good they were, but I had always pictured Ellen as being well coordinated because of the deft way she shuffled the cards when she played bridge, so I warned Jesse against being over-confident.  Ellen was dressed neatly and conservatively with a short-sleeved blouse and long shorts. I noticed, enviously, that she didn't appear to have any varicose veins.
    Ellen went first and sailed her ball through the first two wickets with a standard between-the-legs shot. Going for the side wicket, she pulled her approach shot off the mark, but she got fairly close on her last shot.
    This flat surface with the manicured lawn was heaven compared to the bumpy and irregular backyard croquet courts I had played on before. Standard procedure when I was a child and going for the side wicket had been to blast the ball into the flower bed. When I brought the ball a mallet's-head in from the tulips, with luck it would be right in front of the wicket. In the present case, I hit my ball cleanly through the first two wickets and used my next
    two shots to hit Ellen's ball.
    “Sorry,” I said as I placed my ball a mallet's-head length from hers. When I play I take no prisoners. My own son won’t play with me.
    She shrugged, feigning nonchalance. Up close she looked younger than many of the other residents of Silver Acres. Her hair was still a reddish-brown color, but I'm sure she dyed it. She was still good looking in a well-preserved sort of way.
    “Did Carol Grant talk to you about Gerald?” I asked her as I uncharacteristically tapped my ball to stop in front of the wicket instead of trying to hit it through.
    She