Homicide on the Hunt

by Stacey Alabaster

I turned it upside-down just to make sure and then ended up throwing the whole bucket down on the ground. “Unbelievable!”

  I knew I was acting like Alyson. I wasn’t sure I cared. I looked around just in case one of the crabs had escaped from the bucket. I mean, not literally of course, they were just empty shells and the actual crabs were long dead or gone onto a new shell. But maybe one of the shells and clues had fallen out somewhere. Maybe we would get lucky. Hey, it had happened before. I shot a pleading look up at the stars. “Come on, cosmos,” I whispered.

  But nothing.

  “There aren’t enough clues because Alyson still has the real one that belonged to us!” I said, taking my phone out of my pocket. I was going to ring her and demand she tell me where to find the next clue. At least we still had our original crab shell. That was something. We needed most of the items to prove that we hadn’t cheated somehow.

  “She is not going to answer her phone in the middle of the race,” Matt said, almost laughing. He thought it was such a ridiculous idea. “She won’t even take a bathroom break. You think she is going to take a call from her biggest rival?”

  I put the phone away. I didn’t like that Matt had called Alyson that. Maybe in that moment it was true, in the race at least. I just hoped that when the race was all over, we could go back to being friends. Or was this going to destroy our friendship forever?

  I turned the bucket upside-down and sat on it glumly.

  “Don’t look so sad,” Matt said. “We can still get back on track some other way. The rest of the teams can’t have gone that far.”

  I shook my head. “It’s not that.” I picked up a stick and stuck it into the dirt. “I got some crazy news today, Matt. I only told you half of it before.”

  There was nowhere to sit so he just kind of stood there a little awkwardly, towering over me. “Do you want to talk about it?”

  “No. Yes.” I sighed. I kept playing with the stick for a moment. “I got some news from Dawn Petts-Jones.” I looked up at Matt. “Deep dark secrets in my family. Apparently, I have a cousin I never knew about.”

  Matt let out an elongated “woah.” He shook his head. “How is that possible?”

  I shrugged. I still didn’t have all the details, let alone the proof. “Apparently my uncle had a daughter that was a secret from the rest of the family.”

  “That is super trippy,” Matt said. He paused for a moment. “But hang on, what does this have to do with Dawn Petts-Jones?” He knew Dawn; she was his solicitor as well. Well, she was pretty much the solicitor for everyone in Eden Bay. It was kind of slim pickings as far as legal representation went.

  I could hear the worry in my voice as I spoke. “Apparently, this cousin—this FEMALE cousin—has a claim on the ownership of the bookshop, because of the apparently ‘ambiguous’ way my grandma worded her will.”

  Matt shook his head. “Nah, that can’t be right.”

  I sighed. It didn’t seem right. And it didn’t seem fair.

  “What are you going to do?” Matt asked. “Are you going to fight it?”

  “Of course,” I said quietly. I could hear that my voice lacked conviction. Not because I didn’t want to keep my bookstore, but because the whole thing still felt like a dream. A nightmare. One that I didn’t want to face yet. I didn’t want to think about fighting it, or what would happen if I didn’t win.

  I stood up. This here in front of me was one fight I could win. I wasn’t going to let Alyson take the victory—or the prize money—away from me. “We need to do whatever it takes to win,” I said, dusting myself off. Even if that meant finding the other teams and tagging along for a bit.

  “Don’t you think it’s strange that the race is still going?” Matt asked as we headed back into town. I could hear voices coming from the town center.

  “No. Why would it be strange?”

  “I just thought that with Brett’s body being found, the whole thing would be called off, sooner or later.” Matt shrugged. He stopped to look at me. “Don’t you think there’s a chance that while we were in The Horseshoe, it actually was canceled? Maybe that’s why all the clues at the crab farm are gone. They’ve been removed,” he suggested.

  I shook my head. “Nah. The bucket was still here.” If the race had been canceled and the clues removed, they would have taken the bucket as well.

  We were just too late. Out of luck.

  Or were we?

  As we got back into town, I noticed that the other teams were starting to head down the hill, in the direction of the pier. But there was one girl on her own, studying a clue under a street lamp. I heard her muttering something about a “Village.” I turned to Matt and whispered, “This must be the next clue!” At first, I was just trying to get close enough to her to overhear and maybe ride on her coattails. But then I realized, with a start, that I actually knew her. A memory from ten years ago smacked me right in the face.

  “Anna?” I asked, shielding my eyes from the glare of the street lamp. When she didn’t look up, I wasn’t even sure I had the right girl. That said, she had barely changed since our high school skater days. She was still wearing the same red plaid flannel shirt she had worn a decade earlier and her hair was still dyed an unnatural shade of goth black. No, surely I had gotten it right.

  “Anna?” I repeated. “How are you?”

  She finally raised her head and glowered at me for daring to ask how she was. “I don’t even know you,” she said in this bratty tone that made her seem younger than she was. She was my age, even though we had gone to different high schools. She’d attended Ruschcutter High, even though she had hung out at the Eden Bay Skatepark every day after school. She was part of the same group that Brett and I had been in.

  Yet here she was claiming not to know me. Well. Yeah, I had changed a fair bit over the years. But for the better, thank you very much. My hair, once long and unkept and unbleached, was now chopped into a short, chic bob and dyed an icy platinum. And I had traded in my sneakers for heels and the flannel for designer blazers. And I looked far better for it.

  “It’s me. Claire.” I had to cringe for a moment before I realized how I was going to have to actually introduce myself. I hated that I had once insisted on going by my middle name as well during my precocious youth. I hadn’t gone by my full name in years. But sometimes giving people my full name now was the only way to jog their memory. “Claire Elizabeth Richardson.”

  “No way,” she said, her mouth dropping open. She had the clue pulled out and I tried to subtly lean forward and read it. But I couldn’t make it out upside-down. Except for the word “Village,” which I only knew because I’d heard her say it. Was that a ‘people’ at the start of the sentence as well?

  “I thought you had moved away. Or died,” Anna said with a shrug.

  Gee, thanks. Didn’t have any interest in attending my funeral then?

  “Nope, still alive. I did move, though, to Sydney.” I was always proud of that fact. It showed that I was able to escape the small-town fate. Even if I had been dragged back to it. “I’ve been back for about five months,” I said with a little shrug as I realized that was a long time to be back and not even say hello or try to make contact. Hey, it wasn’t like I was obliged to track down everyone I’d once skated with, was I?

  Anna didn’t seem that fussed about it. Well, she couldn’t show that she was, could she, or else her super cool I-don’t-care facade might have cracked. “I’m still in Rushcutter’s,” she said. Oh well, great, then I had an even better excuse for not getting back into contact with her. Rushcutter’s was a twenty-minute drive on a good day, and I’d only been there once since being back in the area.

  Beside me, I could hear a throat being cleared. “I’m Matt,” he said, extending a hand to introduce himself as I realized I still rudely hadn’t done it for him.

  “Right, Matt, this is Anna. We knew each other back in our skating days…”

  He nodded and she nodded back, the two of them exchanging a knowing ‘cool person
’ look. I suddenly felt very old and uncool.

  “So what are you doing here?” I asked her. “Eden Bay, I mean. Tonight. Under this street lamp.”

  She shoved the clue into her pocket and kicked the pavement. There was something about her that really reminded me of Alyson. Except that Anna was a bit more goth and sullen whereas Alyson was always relentlessly cheery in a way that would drive you up the wall when you hadn’t had enough sleep or coffee or paracetamol. But they both shared the same brattiness.

  “Breakin’ the rules,” she said with a small shrug like it was no big deal and at the same time, she was secretly worried that she was going to get sprung.

  Matt and I exchanged a glance. “Breaking the rules in what way?” Matt asked.

  Anna addressed her answer toward him. I was slightly offended, seeing as I was the one who had actually been her friend and she had literally only met Matt thirty seconds earlier. “I wanted to take part in the hunt but I couldn’t find anyone to partner up with, so I’ve just been doing it on my own.”

  She kicked the pavement again and waited for our answer, pretending that she didn’t care what we were going to say. But she clearly cared. And she wasn’t going to like Matt’s response.

  “But the rules are strict. Teams have to be two people,” Matt said, sounding genuinely outraged. What was with the Foulkes siblings and their sudden reverence for ‘the rules’ when it came to the treasure hunt when they never cared about them at any other time of the year? I saw the look on Anna’s face. Betrayed by her new bestie. Maybe she should direct her words toward me next time.

  Anna scowled at Matt, then at me. “Oh, big deal!” she said as she pulled the clue back out and then started to turn her back to me. “Everyone stretches the rules in this race.”

  I stepped in front of her. “But what were you going to do when you got to the end? What if you won? How were you going to explain the fact that you don’t have a partner?” She’d never get the prize money. It would be automatic disqualification.

  “Yeah, well, not much chance of me winning now, is there?” She pouted a little and I could tell that even though she was putting up a brave front, she really did care about winning the race. She almost looked like she was about to cry. She was far too cool to actually do that, of course. But she looked like she was about to break. It had been a long, rough afternoon and night for all of us.

  I looked over at Matt. What I was about to suggest, he really may not like.

  “Well, seeing as how you’re breaking the rules anyway, why not go one step further. Or rather, two steps further?”

  “What do you mean?” Anna asked, looking at me and then at Matt.

  It was my turn to shrug. No big deal. It was just breaking the rules. “Why don’t you team up with Matt and I? Make a trio.”

  Matt hadn’t spoken a word to me in almost ten minutes.

  “It was strategy,” I hissed at him, keeping my voice down as we headed toward the construction site, so that Anna couldn’t hear us. It was kind of like we were arguing about our rebellious daughter and what we were going to do with her, and I didn’t want her to get her feelings hurt. This had nothing to do with her, it wasn’t personal. It was between her father and I. “Anna had the real crab shell clue. We never would have known to go to the new mall if we hadn’t teamed up with her.”

  “We would have figured it out.” He was still stomping full steam ahead and refusing to look at me.

  I decided to play the guilt card. I stopped and stared up at Matt and asked him to stop. “If you had been guarding the clue properly the last time, Alyson could never have switched it and we never would have gotten so far behind.”

  He crossed his arms. “That is really not fair, Claire.”

  I actually thought it was a pretty good point now that I had come up with it. Pretty hard to argue with as well.

  “Come on, Matt, be a good sport. This race is supposed to be fun.” Supposed to be. It was never supposed to be a matter of life and death with best friend pitted against best friend and every relationship in my life tested and stretched till breaking point.

  Fun.

  Matt was starting to relent, but he still had concerns. “We’ll be disqualified if we cross the finish line with three people…”

  Behind us, Anna had found the next bucket and the next clue. She called out to us and waved it in the air.

  “We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it,” I said, keen to get going. “Listen, Matt, if you really have that big a problem with it then, well, you can call it quits and Anna and I can be a team on our own.” I was willing to go where the clues were. So far, Anna had been a little star at finding them. Better than Matt had ever been.

  Not that I actually wanted Matt to drop out. I wanted us to continue to be a trio. But if I absolutely had to make a choice…

  For a moment, I thought he was going to call my bluff on that little ultimatum and actually go home to bed, but there was no way a Foulkes sibling was going to drop out of the race just because they had to break a rule. I knew that only too well. He just huffed and puffed for a moment and then returned to Anna to look at the next clue.

  “…we’ll wave you in,” I heard Anna reading out loud, and I smiled at them both like a proud mum as I reached them.

  “I hope you know what you’re up to, Claire Elizabeth,” Matt whispered to me as we started to make our way from the site. “And I hope Anna can be trusted.”

  “She can. She’s a friend of mine. And you can trust me. We need her on our team.”

  But there was another reason I wanted Anna on our team, a reason I wasn’t sharing with Matt. And it had nothing to do with how good she was at finding and keeping clues.

  She was my closest link to Brett Falcon, and the best shot I had at solving the mystery of who had killed him. That was what was most important to me. And at that stage, I didn’t even care if we ever finished the race. Just don’t tell that to Matt.

  14

  Alyson

  I could see the St John’s ambulance flags up ahead. There were two paramedics, attending to a young woman who looked like she was being treated for dehydration. As we got closer, I could hear the female paramedic telling the patient, firmly but gently, that she needed to drop out of the race. The parched young woman just shook her head and said that no way, that was impossible. She would never quit.

  Yikes.

  They always had a medical tent set up, every year. It was just par for the course. Part of the scenery of the race. I looked away from the woman and the next waiting patient, who looked like he had a sprained ankle, and justified it to myself. If they weren’t fit enough to take part in the race, then they should have just stayed home. And if they weren’t clever enough to figure out that the race had been canceled, that was also on them.

  But I’d gone strangely quiet.

  “Are you feeling guilty?” Troy asked me.

  “Why… What for?” I asked, far too defensively

  “For sending Claire and your brother on a wild goose chase. Of course.”

  Right. He already thought I had ‘enough’ to feel guilty about. And he didn’t even know about the stunt I had actually pulled, pretending that the race was still on even though it was technically and officially canceled. I still wasn’t sure how I was going to play it when we crossed the finish line first and there was no trophy, no prize money, no judges to make sure we hadn’t cheated. Just nothing. Well, not nothing—there would still be the thrill of the victory. The only problem was that if a different team won, there might actually be a riot. And the lie could get traced back to me. Well, as long as we won and no one else did, it would all be fine.

  “Nah, that was just a harmless prank, I’m sure they’re back on track by now.” Actually, I was sure they were. A glance over my shoulder down the hill showed a woman with an icy blonde bob stalking her way around the construction site. I could only imagine the scene that would ensue in the unlikely event that Princess crossed the finish line first and
found out there was no prize money and she had missed out on her fourteen hours of precious beauty sleep for nothing.

  “Come on, we need to hurry up,” I said to Troy. In a bid to get him to get a crack on, I decided to full butter up his ego. “You are far better at solving the clues than I am,” I said, fluttering my eyelids at him in an overexaggerated fashion. “Read it again.”

  “I don’t know what this means,” he said in frustration when he’d read it for the fifth time. We agreed that the wave mentioned in it couldn’t be referencing the beach. It was too obvious. But we were at a standstill, and Princess and Matt were closing in on us.

  For the first time in the race, the clue had completely stalled us.

  15

  Claire

  There was a smug feeling starting to grow in my stomach. A spring in my step. I was struggling to keep the smirk off my face now. The clue bucket at the construction site had been almost completely full to the top. That meant that we were either first in the race, or we were very close to it. There was no sign of Alyson and Troy anywhere.

  Maybe the scent of sweet, sweet karma had washed over us after all.

  I gulped. There was a couple walking toward us and I noticed that the woman had a small toy hammer in her hand. Right. So they had already been to the construction site. Well, perhaps we didn’t have a clear lead, but we were at least equal.

  I studied the couple. Both tall, blue-eyed, and tanned with light hair. They must have been Swedish if the blue and yellow flags on their backpacks were any indication.

  “Good evening,” the man said, shooting me a wide grin. I was walking a little ahead of Matt and Anna was walking a good few paces behind him. We had all agreed that we would walk like this for plausible deniability. We could claim that any one of us was not officially in the race and was just innocently walking about at night alone if anyone questioned just how many of us there were in the team.