Claire sighed and shook her head. After what seemed like a long moment of deliberating, she handed the books back to me. “Here, you can have them.”
I rummaged around my pockets for some coins. “How much do I owe you?”
“They are on the house.” She started to walk away. “But I mean it, Alyson. You’re on your own with this one.”
5
Claire
Every day, I got breakfast delivered to my door at the Dolphin (F)Inn. For my first two days in town, I had gobbled it down gratefully, but on this day, I was in a rush and had forgotten about it, so I almost stepped in my bowl of cornflakes as I was leaving my room. I paused and looked around. I had no time to eat but didn’t want the food to go to waste.
Maybe Mr. Ferdinand would like it.
I picked up the bowl—full of both cereal and milk—and wondered if it would sit in my purse without spilling. Of course it wouldn’t. I sighed and shook my head. What an Alyson thing to think of. I needed more sleep.
I could feel eyes on me. My next-door neighbor, a young man with long dark hair who’d either just stepped out of the shower or the sea, was looking at me with amusement. “Um,” I said, laughing a little. “I wasn’t actually going to put a bowl of cereal in my purse. I promise.”
He shrugged. “Saving it for later?”
I sighed and held the bowl out. Maybe I could carry it down to the shop. It was only a five-minute walk. “More like for my cat.”
“Sure,” he said with a wink, his wet hair dripping. He was kinda cute. If you liked surfer types. Which I didn’t. I looked at him a little skeptically. Reporters used tricks, though. He could just be pretending.
“What are you in town for anyway?” I asked, just to try and make conversation.
He smiled at me. “The surf comp next week. Just registered, actually.”
So not a reporter then. The motel was now full of them. Everyone was trying to get the scoop—who had killed Adrian Bailey? If he was pretending to be a surfer, he was sure going the extra mile by signing up for the surf competition.
I held my bowl of cereal. “Mister Ferdinand doesn’t like his cereal too soggy. Better go.”
“Maybe I’ll see you down on the water a little later,” he said. Another wink. A pearly grin. I hurried away. I was only in town for a few days. I didn’t have time for that.
Mr. Ferdinand lapped up the last drop of milk and looked at me with an expectant ‘meow’ as though there was more coming. “Not till tomorrow,” I said, clearing the bowl away. I needed to get the shop cleaned up before the prospective buyer came in. The door opened and I straightened up. But it wasn’t the buyer.
Another day, another old school teacher. This time, my old drama teacher, from before I dropped it as an elective in my final two years and started to study more practical subjects, like science and advanced mathematics. Maria was her name She was a large woman, round and tall, and she always wore colorful robe-like dresses and capes. Today’s dress was in shades of swirling blues and whites. Her grey hair was cropped into a wavy bob.
“No, it can’t be,” she said, taking off her shades and looking at me with her mouth gaping. “It really is Claire Elizabeth Richardson!” You might be wondering about the very long name I was often referred to as. See, at school, I always insisted that everyone call me by my full name—kinda makes me cringe now—but it stuck.
“In the flesh.” I smiled at her and stood up straight. For some reason, I still wanted the approval of my teachers, even after all this time.
“Well, well, well, don’t you look fancy now…” Maria said, admiring my hair and clothes, the way most people did. Unlike Alyson, though, she looked actually impressed, rather than full of judgement.
Whereas some of the teachers were strict and formal and I never even knew their first names, Maria always insisted that we call her by her first name and I was struggling to recall what her surname had been.
Maria waltzed in like she visited the place often. She went straight to the new releases and I realized she was carrying an old—very old, I am talking bent at the spine, torn cover—book with her. She couldn’t want to swap that thing for a brand-new book?
I was preparing to tell her that my grandma’s swap policy was no longer going to be enforced when she left the new sellers and started her way up the small staircase. I breathed a sigh of relief.
“Oh, these are just the best, aren’t they?” she said, pulling out one of the old James Bond books from the secondhand adventure section.
I wasn’t sure about that—I never cared too much for spy novels. Too many guns and gadgets. But I just gave her a friendly shrug. The customer was always right. Even when the customer has terrible taste.
She came up to the counter and placed her purchase down. It wasn’t James Bond, but it was another sixties spy series with a tattered cover. “You know what we should do, now that you are back in town?” Her eyes lit up.
“Oh, well, I’m not back in town for very long,” I tried to say, but she talked over me.
“We should start a book club!”
I was about to argue all the reasons that was impractical and remind her—again—that I was leaving, but the idea actually appealed to me, so I leaned forward and listened.
I’d always wanted to start a book club. Reading a book a week and then discussing it. I liked both the fun aspect and the discipline of it. It was the kind of thing I had no time for in my life in the city.
“How would it work?” I asked, a little intrigued.
Maria was full of answers. She’d never been shy about giving her opinion about anything literature-related. Even though she’d been my drama teacher at school, she’d had many passions as I recalled. She’d been born in Italy and also taught Italian—both the language, and cooking. Before she was a teacher, she had allegedly owned a bookstore of her own, and she was telling me now that she had a podcast on the subject of books that she recorded weekly.
“Fifty listeners!” she told me proudly. “And all in the local area. If we could get even half of them to join, we would have a decent amount of members.”
She was right.
I nodded. “Okay, Maria. You’re on. Let’s trial it. But I get to pick the first book, deal?”
I stuck a sign in the window, just in case Maria’s podcast didn’t work. Maybe her fifty listeners would have other things to do that week. The upcoming surf competition was taking up a lot of attention, now that it was the center of a murder investigation. “Book Club—Meeting weekly, Wednesday nights. Enquire within.” I stood back and looked at the sign, wondering which book I would choose for our first meeting.
But I would be gone by Wednesday night…wouldn’t I?
The buyer had never shown up for our appointment, though.
Even though we’d made a deal, Maria could not keep her opinions about our maiden book to herself. “I think it should be a spy book. Everyone loves them!” Maria had insisted, but I had insisted harder. “Oh well,” she had said, as though the idea had been hers all along. “Murder mysteries are my second favorite genre.” She had flipped over the cover of the book I’d chosen and read the blurb, her mouth falling open. “Well, this is a bit close to home, isn’t it?”
That was kind of why I’d chosen it. A murder mystery set in a small coastal town. But I’d just shrugged. “I wouldn’t know,” I’d said. “I am staying out of all that drama.” And that meant I was ignoring Alyson’s continued pleas for help. It had been a mistake giving her my phone number. Oh well. I could always change it, I supposed.
I jumped when I received another text, assuming that speaking of the devil had conjured her. But it wasn’t Alyson. It was my boss. Well, one of them. The executive producer of the movie that was supposed to start shooting the following Friday.
My phone was blowing up. I was going to have to call her back.
“I’ll be back by Friday,” I said. “That will be plenty of time, Jessica. I promise.” Yes, I could have made it a day or two ear
lier. I could have left right then and there, if I had really, really wanted to. But I wanted to stick around just for the first meeting of the book club. Just for the first one. I needed to know what the other members of the club made of this book. “Murder Amongst the Windy Reeds.” I was three-quarters of the way through and could still not figure out who had done it. I was itching to discuss it.
Dawn Petts-Jones paid me a visit at midday and sighed heavily. “All the controversy is making the buyers a little gun-shy,” she said. I knew what she was getting at. She still wanted me to stay and take over the shop. “You might have to stay for a little while longer for you to sort out the matter.”
But she wasn’t the real estate agent, was she? How did she really know if the buyers were scared off?
“Can’t I just put it up for sale and let Eden Bay Reality deal with it?” I asked.
Dawn bit her tongue. But not for long. She had been friends with my grandma and felt some sort of duty, I could tell. “There was no official stipulation in the will saying that you had to keep the shop and run it, Claire Elizabeth. I just think that when your grandma made the will, that was her intention. Stated blatantly or not.” She had one hand on her hip and the other was tapping the counter with long fingernails.
“Well, it is none of your business,” I said bluntly. “Neither is interpreting the intentions of my grandma’s will. If she didn’t put it in writing, then it doesn’t count.”
Dawn picked up her heavy purse and sauntered out, irritated. I was feeling much the same. Time for an escape from this place.
I needed to head to the shore.
The ice cream tasted as sweet as I remembered it. Soft serve. So creamy, you would mistake it for full cream gelato. And vanilla that tasted like it was from a bean instead of a bottle. I looked up at the owner of the van and shook my head at him. “You know you should be charging double the amount for these cones,” I said, taking another mouthful.
He only shook his head at me and told me that business was just fine. “Enjoy your ice cream,” he said. “Enjoy the sun.”
I sighed and took off my shoes as I stepped onto the sand. I closed my eyes and, for a moment, was totally relaxed with the sun on my face and the ice cream cone gently melting in my hand. Then I heard a voice and jumped.
“So, you’re still refusing to help?”
I opened my eyes and spun around to see Alyson with her unbrushed hair, standing there on the sand behind me. “I don’t know why you are so worked up about this, Alyson. Or why you think we can do anything. Just let the police do their job.”
But she was pouting. Jumpy and jittery. It was very strange. Alyson Faulks was usually the poster child for patience. For not caring about outcomes in general, actually. And yet this had rattled her.
“Don’t you always say that things always work out for the best? In their own time?” I asked, raising an eyebrow at her.
She looked caught off guard. “This is different,” she mumbled before stomping off over the sand.
But why was it?
6
Alyson
Matt passed the strawberry milkshake across the counter to me. Extra syrup all around the side of the glass and extra whipped cream over the top. He threw a tea towel over his shoulder and glanced around before he spoke. “You know, at some point, I am going to have to start charging you for these,” he said.
“Yeah, yeah.” I took a big sip. He’d been saying that for thirteen years.
I stared into the bottom of my empty glass. “You done daydreaming there?” Matt asked with a laugh as he cleared the glass away. Captain Eightball’s was packed that day with tourists, surfers, and of course, reporters. They all pretended they were there to report on the surfing competition in Rushcutter’s Shore, but in reality, they only cared about one thing—turning our idyllic little town into the scene of a gruesome murder. Just because it made a good story. Never mind the fact that Eden Bay had never had a murder before, or that crime rates here were the lowest in the state. No. That wouldn’t sell the Saturday paper, would it!
“What if it was personal?” I asked Matt, staring up at him.
His face was blank. Right. I needed to tell him what I actually meant. “Adrian’s murder,” I said. “What if it wasn’t random? What if someone is targeting surfers?”
“Don’t worry about it, Y,” he said, shaking his head at me like I was just being silly. His manager was looking at him over his shoulder. Whoops. Maybe I should pretend that I was actually paying. I pretended to dig around in my pocket for some money.
“So, you heard that Claire is back in town?” I asked once the manager left and I still had all my coins.
I watched his face change in kind of a funny way.
“Is she?” he asked, straightening his expression. He went back to polishing a glass that was already sparkling clean.
“Yeah. Trying to sell her grandma’s shop. Same old, though…thinks she is too good for the rest of us riffraff down here.”
Uh oh. The manager was back. Matt cleared his throat. Right. I was taking up seats and not actually spending any money.
“Okay, okay, I’m going,” I said. “Remember, it’s your turn to pick up J from school tonight!”
I rolled the skateboard to a stop and peered in through the window of the bookshop. Why was I here again? Claire was never gonna change her mind. Why was the bookshop so full anyway? Ugh. What was this? Some kind of hangout where people sat around and read books? No thanks.
I tried to skate away but almost ran over Mr. Carbonetti. Sorry. Nello.
He smiled at me. Book in hand. It looked like some sort of gory mystery thing. There was a beach on the front cover and eerie-looking long reeds. “Are you coming inside, Alyson?”
I shook my head.
“Hmm. That’s right. This sort of thing was never really your forte, was it? Claire was more the reader, as I recall.”
Oh. That was it.
“Actually, I am coming inside,” I said, hopping off my skateboard. “And I have read the book cover to cover. I can’t wait to discuss it.”
The look on Claire’s face as I walked inside was priceless. “What are you doing here?” she asked.
“I am here for the book club of course!” I said with a grin. How hard could it be to fluke my way through a little discussion? I grabbed some cheese and crackers off a plate and chucked it in my mouth. After all, all books are the same, pretty much, aren’t they? Something happens, then someone does something, then someone else does something different, then the end.
“You’ve read this book, have you?” Claire asked, not buying my story for a moment. She crossed her arms. “Well. I am very interested to hear your thoughts about it then.” The chairs had been set out in a semi-circle at the back of the shop. She pointed to a spare one. I sat.
“Well, I would like to start the discussion,” a booming voice coming from the chair across from me said. I held my tongue and tried not to giggle. Maria. Of course it was Maria. You couldn’t come to any sort of town event—meeting, club, class—without Maria being there and giving her two cents’ worth. She held the book up for everyone to see. “I thought the book had a great twist ending. But I’d really like to talk about the main character…”
She was a bit loud and obnoxious, but Maria had been one of my favorite teachers at school. I’d say “favorite,” except that might be going a bit far because I never really liked any teachers that much—unlike the teacher’s pet in front of me who was sitting up straight and listening to every word Maria said. I shook my head. I had to even laugh a little. Why was Claire always trying to impress someone?
It was Claire’s turn to speak. She seemed a little nervous. I frowned and leaned forward as I looked at the copy of the books she was holding. Hmm. Seemed well dog-eared and used—up until about three-quarters of the way through. What was that about?
She clearly thought she was still in English class. Using big words. Trying to find themes in the book when I was sure there weren
’t any. “I thought that the birds in the story, the ones who land on the sand right before the murder, were highly symbolic…the way they couldn’t fly away was a metaphor, I believe, for the protagonists…”
Maria laughed heartily and cut her off. “I don’t think it was meant to be taken so seriously, dear. You might be trying to be a bit too clever there.” Wow. That was a little patronizing.
I saw Claire shrink a little. She sat back in her chair and turned red in the face. Uh oh. I knew this was always her worst fear. Being made to feel stupid in front of other people. Especially when there was a teacher—or two—in the room.
I sat up and cleared my throat. Spoke with confidence. “I think Claire has a point,” I said, even though I hadn’t even seen the cover of the book until fifteen minutes earlier, let alone read the inside. “I read a few interviews with the author after I was done with the book, and that was exactly what she intended the birds to mean. They were, eh, a metaphor. Just as Claire said. The author also said that anyone who didn’t understand that was a bit of a moron.”
Maria’s face turned beet red.
Claire placed a hand over her mouth. She was trying not to laugh. Maria reached down, picked up her bag, and stormed out of the bookstore, while Mr. Carbonetti tried to distract everyone else with some homemade dip he had brought. “It’s beetroot and garlic,” he announced proudly. We never did discuss the end of the book. The rest of the group began to talk and mingle, and I noticed that Claire breathed a sigh of relief.
“You really know how to throw a good party,” I said once all the formal activities of the night were over.
“Hey, there ain’t no party like an Eden Bay book club party,” Claire said with a smile.
I laughed and wandered over to the tea and coffee table.
Bodies on the Beach (Hang Ten Australian Cozy Mystery Book 1) Page 4