Murder and Manuscripts

by Stacey Alabaster

  Murder and Manuscripts

  A Hang Ten Australian Cozy Mystery

  Stacey Alabaster

  Fairfield Publishing

  Copyright © 2018 Fairfield Publishing

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Except for review quotes, this book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without the written consent of the author.

  This story is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual people, places, or events is purely coincidental.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Epilogue

  Thank You!

  Bonus Content: Story Previews

  1

  Claire

  It was hard not to think about kissing, and forbidden romance, with the box of books with bare-chested heroes on the cover and all the women gazing up at them adoringly. Nope. There were some combinations that were classic. Mint and chocolate, for one. Me and my Porsche, for another. But books and men? They just didn’t mix. That was what I had decided anyway. In spite of what the book covers might have suggested. Ugh. I almost tripped over another box of old romance books that had been donated as I walked through the aisles of my book shop, Fabled Books. I glanced down and tried not to think about the man I’d just kissed. My best friend’s brother. Nope, did not want to be looking at romance books. I’d get Maria to sort through those when she arrived for her mid-morning shift.

  I pushed the box away. Who needed men anyway? I had so much to focus on. My shop, my friends, and all the amazing new business ideas brewing in my head. Some combos were a bad idea. Men and books, no. But what goes better than coffee and books?

  Nothing.

  And thus a plan was forming.

  I had inherited the bookshop from my grandmother five months earlier and even though I had adored the shop as a little girl, as a grown woman who had just returned from the city, I had found myself somewhat frustrated by the fact that my grandma had made almost zero changes in the thirty years she had owned it. Seriously. There were still books there from thirty years earlier, the kind with yellow paper and cracked spines that practically disintegrated in your hands when you tried to open them. And my grandma had not been a very big believer in the concept of ‘inflation’ either. I wasn’t sure how she’d ever made a profit with the prices as low as she’d kept them. Since I’d taken over, I’d made a few changes, including the fact that I now charged full retail price for new books and I refused to swap secondhand books for new. I was also trying to drag Fabled Books into the 21st century by trying to make it look like a modern, cosmopolitan bookshop

  But so far, every attempt I had made to modernize the place had backfired. I’d tried to paint it white, but that hadn’t worked, so I’d asked my best friend Alyson to paint a design over it, and now I had a mismatched mural of the town on the largest wall of the shop that made it look straight out of the eighties. Then there was no rhyme or reason to the shelving system. Genres faded together, none of the shelves were in straight lines, and I had a recliner in the middle of the shop that Alyson had brought in off the street. I sighed. There was no use denying it. The space was a design disaster.

  But with the mall development about to recommence down by the beach—which I wasn’t mentioning to Alyson, she’d have a meltdown—I needed to compete with the chain bookstore that would be on the ground floor, selling new books at rock-bottom prices and with a brand-new interior, aka no dust and no musty old books. And I heard that one had a coffee shop in it. All I had was mismatched furniture, dust balls, and two antisocial cats that were supposed to attract customers, but half the time ended up scaring them away.

  But there was a corner of the store that was empty. Inviting almost. And I suddenly had a flash of a brilliant idea. “Wow, Claire, you’ve done it again!” I said out loud, actually grinning at myself as I admired my own genius. Because, as I just said, what goes better than coffee and books? I had space—just—for a coffee machine and if I got rid of the old recliner, I could even fit in a table and a few bench chairs. Wow. Maybe I could even bake muffins. I mean, I didn’t know how to bake. But I could always learn! Suddenly, my head was spinning with ideas and I felt a little dizzy.

  I had to tell myself to stay calm. I wanted to tell everyone about my amazing plans, but I knew it was better to keep them close to my chest, at least for the time being.

  There was a knock on the door. I shook my head and waved in slight annoyance to say that we were closed. It was still before 9am and I hadn’t even been to the back to get change for the till.

  It wasn’t a customer, though. It was my pseudo-employee.

  Maria was early for her shift. She came through the door, almost breaking a sweat thanks to the gigantic box of musty old books she was carting. She dumped them right in the corner of my store and grinned at me while she dabbed her brow with a handkerchief. “I think we’ve got a little gold mine on our hands with these ones. I can’t say too much, but they are from a very special source.”

  Maria was a largish lady, quite rounded, and she always wore long dresses in psychedelic colors, jewelry to match, and she had a permanent jolly grin on her face. She was, really, the kind of woman who found herself getting along with most anyone. Except, sometimes, me. I didn’t always think she had the best taste, in any sense, and today was no different. She was heading to the spare corner with the box.

  This is where the coffee machine is going to go. My secret plan.

  “Nope. No more junk in my store.” I crossed my arms.

  “These are books, Claire,” she said, incredulous.

  Right at that moment I couldn’t tell the difference.

  Fine, I thought. I’ll just wait till Maria has gone and then throw the books out. I could maybe pretend they had been sold if she ever asked about them? That would be hard to believe. But she’d probably buy it seeing as she thought they were all so incredible.

  But she had a three-hour shift she had to do first. However, when we had a quiet morning and I had already tripped over the box three times, I decided to do her a ‘favor’ and tell her she could go home early. She wasn’t actually an official employee of the bookshop at all—she just liked to spend her Saturday mornings there. Her real job was as a drama teacher at Eden Bay High School. But I was already online browsing the catalogues for espresso machines and I was ready to do some measuring. Oh, the heck with it, I thought, and pressed ‘order’ on the most expensive one in the online store. Now I just had to make space for it.

  “Bye, Maria!” I cheerfully said as I waved her away. She looked at me a little suspiciously, but probably only because ‘cheery’ wasn’t my usual disposition—more a cool calm. “Cheery” was more a word you’d use to describe Alyson, and she’d always been Maria’s favorite student at school. Not me. I never even liked drama class. Too childish. I wasn’t really one for make-believe.

  I stared down at the box as though it was my mortal enemy. Because in that moment, it was.

  What could I do? Burn them? I looked down at the box and considered my options. Probably couldn’t start a fire right there in the shop. Could take them out to the woods and burn them there?

  Mr. Ferdinand meowed from the second-floor landing and I looked up and sighed. He was right. Hiding them upstairs did seem like the best option until it
was garbage day and I could just dump them in the trash. Maria would be none the wiser. Not as satisfying as burning them, though.

  The box was so much heavier than I had expected. How the heck had Maria been able to lift it in on her own? Now I knew why she had been sweating even though we had just reached the Australian winter and even in Eden Bay, where it was ‘summer’ all year round, things had gotten slightly cooler.

  But I had to get them out of the way. I could call for backup. Hmmm. But then I’d have to tell whoever I asked about my brilliant surprise. I wanted to keep my cards close to my chest for a little while. I started taking a few books at a time, and I managed to get all the books upstairs. The last load was just the box with a few books left in the bottom.

  ‘Upstairs’ was, by that point, sort of like that guilty pantry in the house where you just store all your junk indefinitely and hope that no one ever looks in there because if they did, everything would come spilling out. It was getting cluttered and so full that you could barely walk around up there. You had to step over piles of old books to walk down the aisles.

  I was just trying to think up another solution when I was struck again. Oh my goodness. Yet another brilliant idea. I could take this opportunity not just to get rid of this current box, but to clear out ALL the old books that Maria had snuck onto the shelf in recent weeks. So rather than empty the box I’d been carrying, I started to fill the box up even more, clearing space on the shelves. I could go and get even more boxes that night and fill them up as well! And then slowly but surely, my grand plan of being a bookshop that only sold new books could come to fruition. If Maria ever asked me what happened to all the old books, I could claim that they had all been sold. And just hope that she didn’t try to replenish the stocks.

  I’d filled it haphazardly with a few books when I realized that approach wasn’t going to work. It was like Tetris—I had to stack the books perfectly to make enough space.

  I was just rearranging a few of the books when I jumped back. There was something in the bottom of the box that made my heart stop for a moment. What the…?

  A rope.

  I was having trouble breathing. The way it was tied, and the way it looked. It had been used for something. I took another step back and almost tripped over a stack of books.

  The rope was thick, with fraying edges, and there was a red liquid around it. Maybe still wet, but I wasn’t willing to get any closer to test it out.

  But I knew I had to call the cops. I’d seen too much since I’d been back in Eden Bay to assume this was all innocent. I was pretty sure that red liquid was not paint, if you catch my drift.

  I wasn’t sure if it had been in the box all that time or whether I had knocked it off one of the bookshelves, but I was leaning towards the latter.

  While I waited, I was fuming. Alyson. Why hadn’t she locked up the store like I had asked her to? Why couldn’t she be a normal, responsible human being? Was that really so hard?

  The night before, I’d had to leave the shop early for a dental appointment. Against my better judgement, I asked Alyson to take care of things and to lock up for me at 5pm. Of course, when I had arrived that morning at 8am, the door had been open. Had I been surprised? No. But was I now furious? Yes.

  Sergeant Wells was the one who responded to the call.

  If only a rope had been the end of my problems. Instead, it was just the start. I just didn’t realize it until Wells entered the bookshop, put on a pair of gloves, and picked up the rope, inspecting it with a suspicious gaze, which he then turned to me with.

  “And you have no idea how this would have gotten into the shop?” he asked as he placed it into an evidence bag and then took off his gloves with a snap.

  “I don’t know if it was in the box all along or whether it fell in there while I was clearing the shelves.”

  “Helpful,” he replied wryly.

  Ugh. Sergeant Wells was not known for his compassionate nature. What was I supposed to do, not inform the police when I found a potential weapon hidden in my shop? I was starting to regret it, though. “You’re probably right, it’s probably nothing,” I said, ushering him towards the door. “I’m probably keeping you from more important duties. Unless of course you’d like to buy a book?” Couldn’t help to try and secure a customer with the new bookshop about to open.

  For a moment, he actually stopped and had a look at the ‘plays and poetry’ section near the front door. Huh. Would not have picked him as a play reader. Well, hey, you should never judge a book by its cover. Except that I did all the time—that was how I decided which books to stock in the store. He ran his finger over the spine of an old Henry Lawson collection and for a moment, I thought he might purchase it.

  Thud.

  “What was that?” he asked.

  I jumped and looked over my shoulder. “One of the cats,” I said, then wondered if it was illegal to keep cats in a shop. No, of course not. Sergeant Wells just always made me feel guilty.

  “Didn’t sound like a cat,” he growled and started to make his way up the stairs, his hand lingering over his gun. He put his hand out like he was telling me to stay back, keep my distance, don’t follow him. Well, it was my shop. And I was going to climb the stairs if I wanted to.

  I gulped. Not a cat, no way.

  It was a dead body.

  And it belonged to a member of my very own book club—Nicole Marie Simmons.

  2

  Alyson

  Ah, the fresh smell of eucalyptus. “Will we get to see any koalas around here?” one of the tourists with an American accent asked. I grinned and followed the tourist guide, even though she was getting it all wrong, as she told the tourists that we very well might. I knew there were no koalas in this part of the forest. Well, I could butt in later and tell her that, but for the time being, I was content just to take in the view of the forest. I was enjoying myself and it was better to be content than to be right, for the moment. Lucky too, because I was paying an arm and a leg for the experience.

  We came to a clearing and everyone gathered around while our guide cleared her throat and I was ready to jump in and correct whatever it was she was about to say. After all, I was a local. We were only 45 minutes out of Eden Bay, so I knew the area well. Better than the guide and certainly better than the tourists who’d mostly come from interstate and overseas. I was quietly smug about how much I knew and could impart to these eager ears.

  But when she started to tell us about the particular type of moss growing on the tree stump, I took a step back and stayed quiet. Moss was not exactly my forte. Was it anyone’s forte? I glanced around. Some of the group actually seemed to be interested. Boy. Let’s get back to talking incorrectly about koalas, I thought. And for the first time on the hike, I actually realized I was bored.

  I never usually strayed this far from the beach; the sand was my second home. Well, my first home, you could ever say, as my apartment was right on the beach. And unless I was sleeping or eating, it was a good bet you would find me surfing.

  Finally, the moss chatter was done with and we were moving on, down a trail that was getting more winding and thinner as we walked along.

  We each had a hiking ‘buddy’ who we were supposed to stay next to at all times, to ensure that no one got lost. Mine was a slightly older woman named Savannah who had all new clothes and hiking equipment and had very little experience with nature. She looked nervous every time we came across the tiniest spider or bug. And she had travelled from interstate for the experience. When she asked me where I was from, I told her that I was local, only forty-five minutes away, and she seemed surprised that I was taking part in the retreat when I already lived on the beach. “Sounds like your life is one long retreat already,” she commented as we struggled along towards the back end of the group. Hmm. You would think so. Only not really, lately.

  “I’m trying to break a habit,” I explained as I looked at the map and tried to figure out where we were when the rest of the group got too far ahead of u
s to see. Maybe splitting off into pairs hadn’t been such a good idea. Where was the rest of the group?

  “Ah,” she said and shot me a knowing look. Then I caught her cringing a little.

  Right. Bad habit could mean a lot of things. “Nothing like that,” I hurried to reassure her. “It’s just that you may have heard of me. Well, I will keep my name a secret from you, nothing personal, just for my own privacy. But if you did know my name, you would have heard of me, and you would know why I had to come out here for escape.”

  “Isn’t your name Alyson Foulkes?” she asked me, looking confused. Right. I was wearing a name tag. She laughed a little. “I am sorry to say this, but I have never heard of you.”

  Well, that was a punch to the ego.

  “Well, a lot of people have heard of me,” I said defensively. Then realized I was starting to sound like my friend Claire. She loves being looked at and admired everywhere she went, whereas I am low-key. Or I was at one point in the not so distant past. But now I was starting to get a name for myself, and people WERE starting to stare, and I didn’t like it.

  Except it was kind of irritating me that this woman didn’t know who I was. And I had to spend all night in a tent with her? Oh yeah, should have mentioned that the buddy system extended all day and into the night. There was no escaping your buddy.

  After another hour, we found the rest of the group in a clearing and were advised to set up camp for the night. Our tour guide said we could turn in for bed seeing as it was getting dark. But it was only 7:30? I gulped. No tv. No internet. No phone reception. Just me and the woman who was terrified every time a mosquito came near her.