He frowned and leaned forward on his cane. “Yes. I remember thinking to myself that it was strange, as though the earth had already been pre-dug for us, that someone had come in and done the job for us. I felt a little patronized, to tell you the truth. I was perfectly capable of performing the task!”
I stopped. Actually, that made sense, right? Those two guys were old, it would make sense that someone would loosen up the soil first so that they would have an easier time. But there was something else I had to clarify.
“So, hang on… Not only was there this attempt at a hole here—” I pointed to the other one and kept my words slow so that he could keep up with me. Then I saw the look on his face and realized I was patronizing him. Which he hated. “But someone had actually dug up the spot where the capsule was?” Hmm. Almost like they’d been looking for it but missed it on the first go.
He nodded. “That’s right, dear.” He almost sounded like he was having to slow down and patronize ME.
“But who would have done that?” I asked
He shrugged a little, still leaning on his cane with both hands. “I suppose it was just someone from the council, trying to help out. No one has owned up to it, but I suppose they just don’t want to make me feel old and useless.”
I took a step toward him. “You’re not convinced, are you?”
He paused for a moment, then shook his head. And I had my answer. I’d still ring the council to make sure, but this was a real kick in the guts. Princess was right. Someone had tampered with the time capsule in the days before it had been officially dug up. Someone had put the letter in there recently. Not fifty years ago.
I pulled out my phone, about to tell my best friend about the horrible truth. But then I put it away again. I wasn’t quite ready to admit to Claire that she was right.
Maybe because I still wasn’t willing to admit it to myself.
11
Claire
I lay awake, staring at the ceiling. I checked the time again. 5am. I may as well just get up. Not much chance of any sleep now.
I just knew that I could never ever tell Alyson what had happened. This was going to have to be a secret I would take to my grave. Maybe I could write her a letter and put it in a time capsule and wait fifty years for her to dig it up. In fifty years’ time, her anger might die down. Oh, who was I kidding? She would still kill me.
I checked my phone. No new text from Matt. What had I been expecting? I put it away again and tried to close my eyes, hoping that some sleep would come.
But Nancy O’Malley was always up with the sparrows and when I heard bacon crackling in the pan, I couldn’t resist sticking my head into the kitchen. Oh my goodness. She had also made fresh hash browns. Not even frozen ones, but actual potatoes. I could see the peel in the sink. “Plenty to go around, dear!”
I gobbled up my hot, greasy breakfast—food was going to have to be my substitute for sleep that morning. And coffee. She filled me up a second cup and I gulped it down.
“Now look, I don’t mean this to come off the wrong way because I love having you here, dear, but when do you think you might feel safe enough to sleep in your own apartment again?”
I nibbled on a slice of sourdough bread toast and didn’t answer. Well. It all depended. If Alyson was right, and that letter really did come from fifty years ago, then I was probably fairly safe. I had decided that the most recent letter was probably just a copycat one. But if I was right, and the time capsule letter was a recent one, well, then that meant there might actually be some kind of psychopath on the loose.
Either way. I could probably go back to my apartment. Security at the Turtle Dove was pretty tight. And there had been no further threats. But I wasn’t quite ready yet.
“I think I might need another night or two. Just until the police give me some kind of reassurance…”
Nancy reached over and squeezed my hand. “Of course, dear, stay as long as you need,” she said, then got up to clear the dishes. But I could see her reflection in the window as she turned around to switch on the dishwasher. She was grimacing. Just a little. I was outstaying my welcome.
But where else could I go? There was no way, absolutely no way in the world, that I could stay at Matt’s house now. That bridge had been well and truly burned. Ha. Could you imagine showing up at the door of a guy you had kissed for the first time the night before and asking him if you could move in? There really would be a psychopath on the loose then—me.
I knocked on the door. My bags were slung over my shoulders. I just hoped that I was doing the right thing. It would be uncomfortable, but it was better than staying at Nancy’s and feeling unwelcome.
But Alyson welcomed me into the room. She was actually, literally jumping up and down with excitement. She’d already told me it was going to be exactly like the sleepovers we had when we were twelve years old. I hoped not. If I ate that amount of candy these days, I would puke.
“You can have J’s room!” she said brightly, even though it wasn’t really a ‘room’ as such, just a corner of the loft which was divided by a room divider for a bit of privacy. Then she turned to me and looked a little apologetic. “It’s not as nice as Nancy’s place, hey?”
I shrugged as I put my bags down on the floorboards and heard the floor creak. Well no, but nowhere was as nice as the Turtle Dove. It would be a real shame if I had to leave the place for good and start apartment hunting all over again.
Once the excitement had worn off a little, Alyson seemed a little distracted. But when I asked her about it, she said it was just family stuff. I nodded and hoped that she wouldn’t want to talk about it—Alyson’s family was kind of the very last topic I wanted to talk about on that day.
But Alyson did want to talk about it. She was upset about something that J had said. In fact, it was the reason she had spare space for me. “J wanted to stay at Matt’s all week,” she said with a sad little shrug. “I suppose that is fair enough with all the upheaval…”
But I was sure that it would have hurt Alyson’s feelings. As much as she was the fun cool parent, she loved J more than anyone in the world. J was like a little carbon copy of her. That must have been rough to hear.
I tried to turn the conversation to her favorite topic. “I was wondering if maybe we should track down some sort of writing expert. You know, to give us some clues about who might have written the letter.” I’d had a few ideas, actually. “And maybe we can door knock a little, show the letter to old people who would have been around at the time. See if the handwriting looks familiar to any of them.”
I was surprised that for once she didn’t want to talk about the letter. Usually, I couldn’t get her to shut up about it. “Maybe you were right,” she said. “Maybe we should just leave it to the police to deal with.” She put a pillow in a fresh pillowcase and then placed it down on the bed for me.
I noticed that her shoes were covered in dirt and jokingly—well, kind of jokingly—I asked her if maybe she wanted to remove them and place them by the front door.
She didn’t seem to think muddy shoes were a big deal. “Eh, it’s just from the park.”
“You were down at the park?” I asked. Not too much of a big deal, it was just that it wasn’t usually a spot she spent much time in.
“Yeah, just, ah…lost an earring down there.”
Yeah, right. Alyson didn’t even have her ears pierced.
Seemed like there was some sort of ghost haunting the park that evening. A very old ghost with a cane. The night was misty, which meant that we were going to have a clear, sunny day the following day. But in that moment, I shivered.
I used the flashlight on my phone and shone it right into the ghost’s eyes. Right. I did recognize him. He had been one of the two men digging up the time capsule. But what was he doing skulking around here at this time of the night?
I took a step closer and saw all the upturned dirt that was surrounding the time capsule hole. And then I saw what seemed like a second hole a foot away from the
first one.
“Your friend was down here yesterday.”
I jumped for some reason when he spoke. I think I hadn’t expected for his voice to be so deep. “Was she now.” I just shook my head, shining my light onto the ground. “And did she see these two holes?”
He nodded. “Oh yes…” His voice became less deep and more shaky as he told me all about what he’d said to her.
I would have been annoyed if it wasn’t too expected. So typical. No wonder Alyson had been acting so weird. Now she knew that the letter wasn’t fifty years old, and she didn’t want to admit that she was wrong, even if it meant I was actually in danger. But it wasn’t just that—I actually doubted it had even occurred to her that this put me in greater danger. It was also the fact that she continuously held out on me like this, like she liked to hold the secrets over me. Like she was competing with me for who could solve the mystery the fastest. What was the point of even working together if that was the case?
The man, who told me his name was Clive, told me that he had been having grave misgivings about the time capsule since it had been dug up. He’d suspected what I’d believed all along. That foul play had been involved. He was here for the same reason I was—trying to find more clues.
“Why haven’t you told the police anything about this?” I asked, suddenly turning my anger toward him. “Someone tampered with the box. That means that the letter that was placed inside there was fresh, not fifty years old…”
“Oh, as if they will believe a doddering old fool like me,” he said bitterly. Now he was sounding angry at me. I wondered just how agile with that cane he was. Was I about to get a hit to the skull? “They will think I am just misremembering it or making it up.”
I sighed. He may have been right to have that fear. It wasn’t as though Sergeant Wells was particularly open to theories from the public. But now my life was in danger and we had to let someone know that the box had been opened recently. “You need to tell them.”
But even Clive didn’t seem to be convinced. He was scratching his head and second-guessing himself. The more he tried to remember what he saw, the less he seemed to remember anything.
“There was no lock on the box when it was dug up, was there?” I asked him, stepping forward.
He had to think for a moment, but on this fact, he was pretty sure. So was I. I had thought it was unusual.
“No. There wasn’t. Very strange.”
I had no idea if he would remember anything from fifty years ago if he was struggling to remember anything from last week, but I tried my luck anyway. “When the capsule was first buried, was there a lock on it then?”
“Oh, yes,” he said, nodding firmly, as sure as I had ever seen a man. “My dear, my short-term memory may not be worth a dime, but my long-term one is as clear as crystal. That box was locked up when it originally went into the ground.”
“Thank you, Clive. You have been a big help.”
I was going to have to confront Alyson about what she knew.
12
Alyson
I mean, I knew I’d made myself the black sheep of the family at the picnic. And well, on multiple other occasions. But I never expected J of all people to turn her back on me. She was little mini-me. The one person who always had my back. But now Matt was telling me she wasn’t coming out of her room. I knew she wanted to stay at Matt’s for the week and I wasn’t going to push her on that. I’d just asked if she wanted to come over for an afternoon snack and some board games.
“What do you mean she doesn’t want to come over to my place at all?” I was on the phone to him with the board games already set up on the coffee table. I’d never been able to beat J at a game of Monopoly. I didn’t know how she did it. Some sort of secret system. She was always the car.
Matt was caught in the middle. It wasn’t his fault. He was just getting the brunt of it. “Alyson, this isn’t anything personal. There is stuff going on…” he tried to explain.
But I hung up on on him and headed down to the beach to clear my head.
But I couldn’t escape my family, even at the beach. I had my surfboard under my arm as my mum approached me and I turned away as though I hadn’t seen her, almost hitting her with it. Oops.
“Sorry,” I muttered. I was about to take off into the surf, but Mum wasn’t going to let me get away so easily.
“How about I buy you a sundae?” she asked. I still had my back to her but when I heard the word sundae, I peeked my head around my shoulder. Just a teeny bit.
“One of those ones with the brownie at the bottom and the three different flavors of ice-cream?” I asked. There was a chocolate cafe in town that tourists loved but that I only went to as a treat once in a blue moon.
She laughed. She knew exactly which sundae I was referring to. “And the crushed nuts on the top.”
I thought it over for a moment. “Well, I want my own,” I said, starting to follow her back toward town. “No sharing.”
It looked amazing. I thanked the waiter as he put the sundaes in front of us and I immediately reached for my spoon as Mum held back a bit.
Her tone was gentle, but her words were very mum-like in tone. She wasn’t angry. Just very disappointed in me. “You’ve barely said two words to me since we got back, Alyson.”
“I know,” I said. “I’m sorry.” The sundae was my absolute favorite in the world because it had three different flavors of chocolate ice cream—white, milk, and dark—and you could distinctly taste each one even when they got mixed together a little bit. And the brownie at the bottom was cakey and fudgy and made in-house. And it was real whipped cream on the top, not from a can. Perfection. The chocolate shop charged 12 bucks each for one, but it was well worth it. Especially when Mum was paying.
“You know, you and J have an awful lot in common,” she said with a laugh. “Both stubborn, both sulk when you don’t get your way.”
“We can both be easily swayed with bribes of food,” I said with a laugh, sticking the last piece of brownie into my mouth. I told Mum I could easily polish off another one, but she told me I would make myself sick and I should at least wait for that one to go down before I started thinking about eating anything else. It was kind of nice having my mum around, though, and getting to be the ‘child’ for once. To have someone looking after me.
Mum just seemed pleased that we were back on talking terms. She started telling me a slightly boring story about the food they had been served on the plane ride over and how she had had to send hers back when she’d ordered the vegetarian option and it had come with crab in it. “I suppose the airline thinks that seafood is vegetarian!” she said with a laugh.
I just shook my head as though I couldn’t believe the nerve of them. Mum had to be just about the only person I knew from Eden Bay who didn’t eat seafood. Most of us survived on the stuff. It also wasn’t really her style to complain or send food back. “Sounds more like something Tina would do,” I said, pushing my empty sundae glass to the side once I had scraped the last of the remaining syrup out of it.
Mum laughed at that, as Tina was definitely known as the family complainer. She was always the one who was first to call the customer service complaint line when she was unhappy about something and she would always send a coffee back at a cafe if it was too hot, too cold, too milky, or too strong. Definitely not afraid of voicing her opinion. “Yeah, well, she probably would have if she’d been there. Who knows, though? She probably made the poor stewardess’s lives hell on her own flight.”
“Sorry,” I said, interrupting her. “Tina wasn’t on the plane with you?” As far as I knew, everyone who had been at the reunion had arrived on the same delayed flight. Hadn’t that been the whole point?
Mum just stared at me blankly. She had ordered a far more conservative treat—a dark chocolate eclair with a cherry liquor filling. “Surely you knew this?” she said with a laugh. “She came a few days earlier. She would have been at the time capsule opening. You would have seen her there.” Mum
just shook her head at me like I was being silly before popping the last of her eclair into her mouth. Then she looked around for the waiter to bring her the check. But I was not done. There was no way that I had seen Tina at the time capsule opening. Nope. As far as I knew, she had arrived in town the same day as Mum and Dad and Aunt Daisy and all the rest of them.
“The first time I saw Tina was at your welcome home party,” I said. “The one that turned into a surprise party for me in the end.” Ah, back in the days where my family actually wanted to see me. I remembered those days fondly.
Mum looked a little distressed about this. “Well, I guess I just assumed that Tina would have made her way over to see you and Matt at some stage.”
I had to go see Matt. “Sorry, Mum, got to dash.” I gave her a peck on the cheek. “Thanks for the sundae.”
Captain Eightball’s always sort of switched—unofficially—from a cafe to a bar after four pm, and that was when I usually tried to avoid it. Too many loud men at the bar jostling for a position to watch sports on the TV. I had to push past them to get to Matt, who was taking the caps off another bottle of beer.
I had to yell over the jukebox to be heard. “Did you know that Tina was in town for two days before Mum and Dad?”
“Don’t be silly,” Matt said, shaking his head. “Of course she wasn’t.” He handed the beer to a customer and then emptied a giant bag of ice into a bucket for two women who had ordered champagne at one of the booths.
“What do you know, Matt?”
He finally turned to me, leaned over the counter, and looked me square in the eyes. “This is insane. Why would I hide the fact that Tina was here from you? You know as much as me.” There was cheering coming from beside me as some country or other scored a six in cricket.
A Time for Murder Page 6