Slaying at Sea (Hang Ten Australian Cozy Mystery Book 3)

by Stacey Alabaster

  There were murmurs and gasps as we listened to the news report. Even Claire shut up and listened, frozen as she leaned over her half-finished milkshake. “Following the discovery of the body of Warren Reed, two other people have washed up on the east side of Eden Bay beach.” On what we call the ‘dark side of the beach.’ Darn, I thought. I could have been the one to catch them if I’d just thought to hang out there a bit more! The problem was that not many tourists spent time at that part of the beach because the waves were rougher, and so was the sand. And most of my business came from tourists.

  So, two other survivors. Three other crew members all together, and Kieran was claiming to have no recollection of any of them.

  “Well, he probably has a concussion,” Claire pointed out while we picked up garbage the following morning. I couldn’t believe I volunteered for this. Was I getting paid to wander through the sand and dig out pieces of discarded food and old soda cans? No. I’d thought that being a member of the “Eden Bay Beach Friends Club” meant that I would get to laze around on the sand and make new friends. Instead, it meant that once a month, I had to spend three hours picking up garbage for free.

  “I guess,” I said, shoving another empty grape soda into a plastic bag. At least we hadn’t come across any dog droppings so far. The people further up on the beach hadn’t gotten so lucky and one woman had already abandoned her garbage bag and thrown her arms up in the air in defeat. “I just get the feeling that he is lying to me, Claire.”

  She stood up and took her rubber gloves off. She was clearly done with getting dirty for the day. I was surprised Claire would even touch garbage, but then again, her love of tidiness and her love of cleaning was pretty strong. She stared out into the waves. The storm had passed, but the waters were still a little choppy.

  “Well, someone killed Warren Reed and, according to one of the survivors, there were only four people on that boat, Alyson. So one of them has to know what happened.” She paused for a second and I was sure she was about to say that the answer could be found in one of her books. She didn’t say that, but there was a plan forming in her mind, I could tell by the way her brow creased ever-so-slightly. Claire didn’t like to frown because it caused wrinkles. She also avoided smiling too intensely for the same reason. She mostly kept a still, even expression. But she was staring into the ocean so intently that actual frown lines were forming.

  “Careful, the wind will change and you’ll be stuck like that,” I said as yet another volunteer gave up and threw their hat and garbage bag to the ground.

  “What has Kieran told you?” she asked.

  “Nothing.”

  “But not literally nothing?”

  I shrugged and came across a half-eaten pie that had been thrown into the reeds. Eww. “He said it was a fishing boat.”

  Claire turned to me. She looked like she had an idea, but she also didn’t look happy about it. “And what about these survivors?” she asked.

  I knew a little about them, but only from talking to Matt down at Captain Eightball’s. He always got the town gossip in there. People trusted him with his disarming smile and manner. But he’d passed all the gossip onto his much more proactive sister. “Kayla and Jarryd are their names,” I told her as I put the pie in with the rest of the garbage. “They were out fishing with Kieran, from what I can gather.” There was a sudden noise in the background as a crane started work on the construction of the mall complex. For a moment, I completely tuned out of Claire’s conversation as I glared at the crane. I could feel someone staring at me. Troy Emerald was there to survey the lot, but the only thing he was surveying at that moment was me.

  I turned my back to him. Whoops. I had missed everything Claire had said.

  “So?” she asked me. “Are you in?”

  I glanced over my shoulder for just a second. “Er, sure,” I said, not really listening. Not knowing what I had just signed up for.

  6

  Claire

  First thing I thought of when I woke up was the next day’s plan, and I groaned. Then I said to myself, “No, Claire. You can’t go dreading tomorrow when it is only today.” After all, who knew what horrors this actual day could bring? Just kidding. Kind of. But as I walked to work, I had this strange feeling. Alyson would have told me I was picking up a ‘vibe in the air,’ and I would have told her she was nuts. But I stopped dead in my tracks when I saw an absolute blast from the past. And this time, it wasn’t someone from Eden Bay.

  It was a much more recent past.

  No way. I must have been seeing things. That was the only possible explanation for Danielle Williamson being in Eden Bay.

  She even looked like a movie producer. She had a sleek, dark bob and people stopped and stared as she walked down the sidewalk. Amongst all the surfers and people with bare torsos and flipflops, she certainly stood out.

  I blinked a few times. Maybe I had forgotten where I was. Perhaps I was still in Sydney, still an assistant movie producer myself, and the past two months had just been some weird dream. Maybe I had been in a coma and had just woken up.

  But then I saw the sign above me for the Eden Bay Fish and Chip Shop and I smelled the delicious scent of deep fried fish and Frankfurt sausages. This was definitely Eden Bay.

  Danielle approached me with a warm grin. Okay. Now I knew I was hallucinating or dreaming, because Danielle never smiled at anyone, let alone grinned.

  “Claire,” she said, extending her arms out wide like she was coming in for a hug.

  “Danielle…what are you doing here?” I asked uneasily. I pulled away from the hug and looked her up and down.

  She was dressed the way I used to dress. Smart black pants, designer of course, crisp white shirt, and dark glasses that completely obscured her eyes. “Just thought I’d pay my favorite producer a little visit,” she said. She was a bit like me in that she avoided smiling unless she absolutely had to. Her mouth had already gone back to a thin line.

  There were so many problems with that statement that I didn’t know which one to address first. Firstly, I was no longer one of her producers. I had quit two months earlier, in quite spectacular fashion. I had been on the set of a new movie, first day of shooting, and I’d shoved a coffee into her chest and driven off, back to Eden Bay. We hadn’t spoken since, except through lawyers, because I had been in breach of contract.

  Secondly, I had never been her favorite. Well, Danielle didn’t really have favorites. But if she did, I would not have been it. She preferred the members of staff who bowed down to her and obeyed her every command, and I was definitely not one of them.

  Thirdly, there was no way that she was in Eden Bay to pay me a friendly visit. That was not Danielle Williamson’s style.

  I wasn’t buying what she was trying to sell for even a second. “Seriously. Danielle. What are you actually doing here?” She was no longer my boss, so I no longer had to talk to her in a nice tone of voice. There was a flicker of amusement in her eyes as she leaned back a little and took in my new attitude.

  She laughed. “Okay. You got me. We are using Eden Bay as a shooting location.” She removed her glasses and waved her hand around the town as though she was the queen of it. As though she had just walked in and claimed the town for herself.

  Right. That kinda made sense. I mean, to a certain degree. It was a picturesque location, and it would look stunning on a large screen. It was just that Eden Bay had never been used for a movie shoot location before. It was a kind of ‘undiscovered paradise,’ or at least it had been until a few months earlier. I frowned while Danielle told me that the tsunami disaster movie she was working on had run over budget and that all the beach locations in Sydney were now out of her price range. She was giving me a strange, knowing look as she told me about this. I started to wonder if maybe this was the reason she was being so nice to me. She must have had trouble staying under budget since I had quit.

  “What made you even think of this place?” I asked, feeling self-conscious of the brightly colored, chea
p t-shirt with a crass painting of a pineapple on a surfboard that I was wearing. I hadn’t expected to run into anyone important that day.

  “Well. You did, of course.” She tilted her head. “When you hightailed it out of Sydney to come back to this place, it got me intrigued.” She looked around and did that same royal handwave again. “And it certainly lived up to my expectations.”

  I was surprised that the local council had agreed to it.

  “How long have you been here?” I asked.

  “Just got here today. I’m here for a week,” Danielle said as she put her sunglasses back on. She reached into her purse and pulled something out, a small stack of papers stapled together in the corner, and handed it to me.

  “What is this?” I asked, looking over it with a frown.

  “It’s a release form. If you want to be in one of the crowd scenes,” she said. “We need a lot of extras for all the scenes of people dying from the tsunami. Cheaper to use extras than to CGI them in.”

  I nodded. I knew that. I also knew a thing or two about keeping the budget under control. That had always been my main task. I kept feeling like there was something she wanted to say but was keeping to herself. But she remained silent and snapped her purse shut.

  “Oh,” I said. “I thought you were going to offer me…” I stopped.

  “Offer you what?”

  “Nothing,” I said quickly. It had been a stupid idea. Of course I couldn’t work as a producer again. As if Danielle would want me back again after the way I had quit. “I would love to be in the crowd scene.”

  “So,” Danielle called out as I walked away. “Do you want your old job back temporarily or what?”

  7

  Alyson

  “Ouch!” he said, flinching. He tried to pull his whole leg away, but I held it firm. “If you don’t want to go to the hospital, you really have to let me do this.” I got out the small tub of iodine and Kieran turned his head away as I put some onto a bunch of cotton wool and then applied it to his leg.

  “Yeah, probably better you don’t watch this.”

  His teeth were gritted and there were probably tears in his eyes, only I couldn’t be certain because he had his eyes squeezed shut. As I attended to the wound, I could almost feel the sting, secondhand. The smell of the iodine burned my nostrils.

  A little earlier, Kieran had asked me if anyone knew that he was staying at my place. I said no, apart from the police, of course, who I’d had to inform once we’d found the dead body. But Kieran had told the cops the same thing he’d told me—that he didn’t remember a single thing. So far, they had backed off. But Kieran was still cautious about anyone snooping around. And he definitely didn’t want to speak to the cops again.

  I’d shaken my head as I’d fetched a warm wool blanket from the cupboard and spread it over his legs. “No one,” I’d told him. And that was the way I was planning to keep it. If Matt found out, he would hit the roof. And J would probably be terrified to find out there was a strange man living in her house. I was still trying to figure out what to do about that situation—maybe I’d have to ask Matt to have J at his house for a few extra nights.

  But the question was still on Kieran’s mind, clearly. “What about that friend of yours?” he asked when I was finally finished putting his leg under the sheet again.

  I gulped a little. Troy Emerald. “He won’t say anything,” I said, putting the lid back on the iodine.

  Kieran frowned. “No, not him…that blonde lady who was in here.”

  I was surprised he even knew Claire had been inside the apartment a couple of nights earlier. Hadn’t he been sleeping the whole time? “She won’t say anything,” I reassured him. But I wasn’t so sure. Claire had always been more of a square, more of a stickler for the rules, than I was. If she thought there was a reason to tell someone Kieran was here, she would.

  Maybe I would have to speak to her.

  I sighed and sat down on the coffee table. “I know you don’t want to leave the apartment, but I really think some fresh air would do you good.” I told him that the beach had been fairly empty recently (I didn’t tell him about the false shark alarm) and that we could wait until the sun had almost set, if he was worried.

  He shook his head. “I can’t walk,” he said, flashing me his puppy dog eyes. “At least, not without help.”

  It would be a struggle getting him down the flights of stairs on my own, and I certainly did not want to ask Troy Emerald for help again. I had been ignoring his calls all week.

  But I was worried not just for Kieran’s physical health, but for his mental health as well. He couldn’t just lay on my couch forever. He’d go stir crazy. He’d get cabin fever. Ironically, while he was napping, I decided to surprise him, and quietly crept out the door and down the street for supplies. Of course, I just happened to bump into Troy Emerald while I was at the store, and he asked me what all the cheese and grapes were for. “Not for you, that’s all I can say,” I said a little sarcastically, before I hurried home and waited for Kieran to wake up.

  I helped him up from the couch and walked him over to the other side of the room. Usually it was “my” room, but I had removed the room divider so I had room for the surprise.

  “What is this?” Kieran asked with a little laugh. He was heavier on my shoulders than his lean frame would have implied. He had a lot of muscle.

  “Well, maybe we can’t go down to the pier, but we can make the most of what we have here,” I said, showing him the spread I had prepared. I had put a picnic blanket down on the wooden floor boards, and the design of the picnic blanket looked like sand on the beach. The surfboard on the side, leaning against the wall, was a nice touch.

  I helped Kieran down to the ground and popped open a bottle of sparkling wine. It was nonalcoholic, because he had to take painkillers for his leg injury. But it was sparkling and tasted sweet, so it was just as good as the real thing. We toasted to a sunny evening and to Kieran’s improving health. We held eye contact for a moment too long and I got a little lost in his eyes.

  I jumped when my phone rang, and I pulled my eyes away from his.

  I hadn’t saved Troy Emerald’s number in my phone, but I recognized the number.

  “Sorry about this,” I said. I considered not taking the call, again, but it was a complicated situation and I could only go so long. Troy had been sick, really sick recently, and it could be an emergency. At least that was how I justified it to myself.

  “What is it, Troy?” I whispered, not wanting Kieran to overhear the conversation. I pushed open the door to the balcony and went outside. The weather was calm and peaceful again, like it usually was in Eden Bay.

  “Oh!” Troy said suddenly. “I can see you now.”

  “Huh? What do you mean?”

  “I’m down on the shore.”

  I spun around and stared down at the edge of the waves. Troy was waving up at me.

  It was one heck of a view, I had to admit that. I wasn’t sure I could give it up just for the thrill of having a real room of my own and an extra bathroom. That was what my brother was offering me, you see. He wanted J and I to move in with him full time to make things easier. Sure. That would be easier. But it would also be more boring. And who wants boring?

  “What are you doing down there?” I asked, leaning over the edge just a little.

  Troy sighed and laughed. “I am having to teach myself how to surf…since my pleas for help have been rebuffed time and time again.”

  “Are you sure you are up to that?” I asked, worried about his respiratory system.

  He nodded. “Doc gave me the all clear for gentle exercise.”

  “The waves aren’t always so gentle.”

  There was silence for a moment, at least on the phone. Troy was staring straight up at me, and for the second time that evening, I was getting lost in a guy’s eyes. But I was getting lost in an entirely different sense as well. I didn’t know what I wanted. But I knew that Troy was bad news. And I had a guy waiting
for me just ten feet away.

  “I have to go, Troy.”

  “Is he still staying with you?”

  I ended the call and shut the door. It had suddenly gotten slightly chilly.

  “I’m so sorry about that,” I said, rushing back to Kieran, who was leaning over the bag of grapes I had bought. He leaned back and I saw that he had arranged them into a heart shape.

  “For you,” he said.

  I took a deep breath and sat down. “That it really sweet,” I said, and leaned forward to pick up one of the grapes.

  “When I woke, you said, ‘welcome to paradise’,” Kieran said as he poured another glass of the sparkling wine for me. “And so far, it really has been.”

  “We haven’t even left the apartment,” I said with a laugh as I popped the grape into my mouth.

  “I don’t feel like I need to. Just being around you is enough for me,” Kieran said. He reached for my hand and I held my breath.

  For a moment, it felt like we were going to kiss. But it was too soon. And I kept thinking about Troy down there on the beach.

  “It’s getting late,” I told him, clearing my throat as I started to pack up the leftovers.

  “Let me help you,” he said. I told him not to be silly, he couldn’t even walk on his own.

  After I helped him back to bed and said good night, I tried to sleep myself, but I was just staring up at the ceiling, trying to make sense of all the things I was feeling. Eventually, I got up and walked over to the window and looked down at the sand. Of course, it was dark and Troy was long gone.

  “You’re just being silly, Alyson,” I told myself and pulled the curtain shut. Good decision, Alyson. I smiled to myself and decided to see if Kieran was still awake. Maybe there would still be a little bit of the sparkling wine left.