Thirteen Diamonds

Like the king who wanted to control the tides, I wanted to control time. Then, just as the minute hand passed the six and started its inexorable climb toward the twelve my cell phone rang. Adrenaline surged through my body.
    “Hello,” I said, softly, into the phone, my voice shaky. The noise of the talking inside the room and the fact that I stood outside drowned out the ring for the bridge players; only I had heard it.
    “All systems go,” Tess said. She immediately hung up.
    I walked into the recreation room and signaled Wesley, who was already looking at me, anxious to get started. He got everybody's attention by striking a coffee cup with a spoon and said, “Ladies and Gentlemen, Lillian has honored us by baking some of her famous apple pies. Let's enjoy them now while they are still warm.”
    As I had anticipated, everybody moved toward the table on which the pies sat. They were purposely not sliced yet; Ellen, who had complimented my apple pie at our ill-fated lunch, grabbed a pie server. So far so good.
    Nobody looked in my direction. Even so, I moved back outside the door and two steps down the hall so I was out of sight from the room. I punched Carol's beeper number into my phone. When the proper tone sounded I punched in the number from her code sheet. Then I quickly replaced the phone in my purse and entered the recreation room. I went to the table to help with the pies.
    When a telephone rang a minute later I pretended to ignore it since it wasn't mine. Ellen raced over to her purse and pulled out her phone. I was close enough to hear her conversation.
    “Hello...I didn't beep you...I don't know...I tell you I didn't do it...I won't....” She hung up without saying goodbye. She walked back to the pie table with a frown on her face.
     
                       *    *    *
     
    “When Carol called Ellen in response to your beep she knew who she was calling,” Tess said. “She didn't hesitate or check to see whose number it was; she immediately called it. Her first words were, 'Why did you beep me?' She didn't even identify herself.”
    “I'm glad I had you watching her. Was she suspicious when you barged into her office?”
    “Of course not. I followed her in when she returned from lunch, right after I called you from the reception desk. Fortunately, Ophah hadn't returned and wasn't there to see me use her phone. And I had a legitimate question for Carol regarding housekeeping. But I was afraid she wasn't going to make it back from lunch before the bridge club started. I almost thought it was too late to call you.”
    “It almost was. It's a good thing we synchronized our watches. We're getting good at this.”
    “I have more information,” Tess said. “Dutifully following your orders, I talked to Joe.”
    “What did he say?”
    “Joe told me the fire alarm that was set off is the one near the reception desk,” Tess said. “You have to reset it manually to stop the alarm.”
    “Good work,” I said.
    “Listen, that's not all. Because of your interest in Carol, I checked with her secretary. Carol was in a meeting in her conference room all morning of the day Gerald was killed.”
    “Which is near the reception desk.”
    “The meeting ended about noon...”
    “Which is when the bridge club started, back in the days when it included lunch. And when Ellen made a call on her cell phone the day Gerald died. And when the fire alarm went off.”
    “Right. Do I get my gold star?”
    “Two of them.”
    But my euphoria resulting from finding out that Carol and Ellen knew each other better than I had suspected and that Carol might have some involvement in Gerald's murder was already fading, as we sat in Tess' living room after the bridge club. I had more circumstantial evidence that a crime had been committed, but as usual nothing I could take to the police.
    “I don't understand why you think Carol might have a part in this,” Tess said. “Why would she want to see Gerald dead? Does it have something to do with the gift to Silver Acres in his will?”
    I couldn't tell Tess that Carol might be an embezzler because of my promise to Wesley. I said, “It does, but don't worry about it for the moment. Think about the fire alarm; who gave us the all clear afterward so we could go back inside.”
    “Carol did. I remember distinctly; she came out of the same door we did—the one across the hall from the recreation room.”
    “That's what I remember, too.”
    “Joe told