Unaware of the soft footsteps and rustling outside the room, the first thing she did was to check the club’s CCTV security cameras installed last year. The video wasn’t very clear as she watched the morning on the courts unfold, but she could see more than one person in succession on the court hastily and furtively applying a substance to the kitchen floor.
Could it be one of the other players who resented Bill? She knew their personalities like the back of her paddle. Moving her eyes like a bouncing pickleball ball, Pickles carefully studied the security footage. “Yikes,” she shook her head in surprise, “it was three of them, unbeknownst to each other.”
Squinting at the footage through her reading glasses, she deduced that Bill had put oil on the floor trying for a big insurance payout in a minor injury, but what she hadn’t expected to see was that Louisa had also added a waxy substance to the floor because she was likely tired of Bill’s behaviour. And to further muddy the pot with similar resentment, Angus, who played and lost to Bill the most, had done the same nearby, not realizing a clandestine skating rink of a pickleball kitchen had been created by the three.
“Multiple people interfered with Bill’s game,” she marvelled to herself. “No one intended to kill him – least of all himself – but all contributed to his death… Ultimately Pickleball is a cutthroat game on and off the court. People can’t be trusted.”
Delight at solving the mystery lit up her face, but she knew that resolution couldn’t be shared.
With a fondness she hadn’t realized she had for the perps on the video, her next step didn’t take much consideration. Like a proud jigsaw puzzler dismantling a completed thousand-piecer, Pickles painstakingly went through the fatal morning’s recorded footage and deleted each incriminating clip and removed it to the electronic trash.
Then she happily wiped her palms back and forth, turned out the lights and headed home, confident that Bill’s adversity was in the past. She spend her evening on the couch with her cat and her laptop, savouring her success as the covert amateur sleuth of the postmenopausal set, and planning the next big pickleball tournament for the Ballers.
She did not realize the community centre had an external storage device with automatic backup enabling deleted CCTV footage to be recovered. And unlike her pickleball players, film doesn’t lie.
As her iPhone on the doilied end table began to ring, Pickles’ widening eyes noted with surprise, SUN LIFE FINANCIAL INSURANCE COMPANY lighting up the call display.
And at the same time, in a townhouse not far away, Tilly the Raqueteer was telling herself, “Sun Life should be calling her any moment, thanks to my tipping them off about Pickles’ hiding of evidence. Look out for your job, Pickles, it’s my turn now.”
