Hang Ten Australian Cozy Mystery Boxed Set

by Stacey Alabaster

  “I knew it. The day before the time capsule was officially dug up.”

  We had to hide out front for an hour until Deena finally clocked off for the evening break and left reception with a ‘gone fishing’ sign hanging in the window.

  Anyone could have just walked in.

  I was exhausted by the time we got back to the second floor. All my bones and muscles were aching. Alyson just called me Princess and told me to harden up. But something wasn’t feeling right as she knocked on Tina’s door and I hung back for a moment to catch my breath.

  Tina pulled the door back and looked disgusted to find Alyson standing there. I hadn’t even met the woman before. I was surprised to see she had such light Nordic features, short, blonde, curly hair and blue eyes. But maybe Alyson was only so tanned because she spent ten hours a day outdoors. “What are you doing here?” Tina asked, then looked around. “I can see you are not looking after J tonight then.”

  Wow, what was that comment for?

  “Just thought I would say a friendly hello to my cousin,” Alyson said, not taking the bait.

  Tina raised an eyebrow. “At eleven o’clock at night?”

  I didn’t like the attitude she was giving Alyson and so I shoved my way through the door uninvited and started to look around her room. “Hey, what do you think you’re doing!” she shouted at me, clutching at her robe as she ran toward me. I was pulling a real Nancy. Going through her drawers, having a real sticky beak. Not my normal style. But we had limited time.

  There it was. The lock—dirty and rusty.

  “Alyson, get a look of this,” I said, holding it up by the edge like it was a wriggling worm.

  Alyson scoffed. “You’d better admit what you did, Tina. We have the proof, right here! You tampered with the time capsule!”

  “All right, all right!” She grabbed the lock from me and threw it back in the drawer. “I thought I would put a letter in there for you as a joke…”

  “Some joke,” Alyson said, angrily cutting her off. “I could tell the police about this, Tina.”

  Tina shook her head. “There goes your family loyalty again…”

  “As if you’re one to talk!”

  I didn’t know just how heated a Foulkes argument could get, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to find out. They were both red-faced and fired up. But there was something I didn’t understand. If the point was to play a funny prank on Alyson, surely Tina would have wanted to see Alyson’s face for herself. “But you weren’t even there on the day, Tina,” I said.

  Tina shrugged like she didn’t really care. “Yeah. There was a nasty flu going around and I caught it. So what?”

  “So what?” Alyson asked, incensed. “Tina, these were the actions of a crazy person.”

  Tina crossed her arms. “You’re the only crazy person in this family, Alyson.”

  “This is all because I have custody of J and you are just jealous, isn’t it? Because you don’t have any kids of your own?”

  Tina lost the red look from her face. She was hurt. Oh boy. Alyson could really fly off the handle when she was angry, and she did have a habit of saying things she couldn’t take back later.

  “It’s like I said, Alyson, you don’t know how lucky you are. Now, I think you’d better leave.”

  It was nothing unusual for me to have a sneezing fit. But I was usually in the shop when it happened, not outside in the cool, crisp night air. I had to search around desperately in my purse for a tissue. I groaned and realized I needed something else when I felt my head pounding and searched for an ibuprofen.

  “What’s wrong?” Alyson asked, still hotheaded from her confrontation with Tina. “Are there cats around here?”

  I shook my head and looked around. There weren’t. And besides, this wasn’t an ‘allergic to cats’ sneeze. This was something more dire. My throat was killing me, and there were the aches all over my body.

  I remembered back to Nancy sneezing in my apartment while she was still recovering from the flu.

  “Well, at least this is all over now,” I said, struggling to move my legs out the gate of the motel. “Now I can take a few days off and just lay in bed.” Without worrying that I was going to be attacked while I lay there sleeping.

  I thought Alyson was going to agree with me, but she was frowning. “What do you mean, all of this is over?”

  I really wasn’t in the mood to explain the obvious to her. My head had switched from a pounding feeling to a splitting one, and I just wanted to grab some lemonade from the store and have a sort-of early night.

  “I know it’s not nice that one of your family members is to blame,” I said, trying to cover my mouth while I coughed. “But at least we know who put the letter in the box. We know it was a hoax, Alyson. It’s over.”

  I really couldn’t tell what the look on her face was about. Was it relief? Disappointment? Guilt?

  She shuffled along. “Yeah, I guess you’re right.” Ah. I knew what that tone was. It was disappointment. But I knew Alyson. This wasn’t disappointment over the fact that it had been her cousin to blame. This was disappointment because the mystery was solved and she was going to have to go back to her normal life.

  Well. “Normal,” is relative when it comes to Alyson Foulkes.

  “At least you won’t be the black sheep now,” I said reassuringly. That honor was now firmly going to belong to Tina. Then again, I knew that Alyson did have a lot of loyalty, in spite of what Tina had said. She probably wouldn’t even tell anyone what Tina had done.

  It took a little extra effort, and by the time I was finally tucked up in my bed at the Turtle Dove, I was ready to pass out. Since there was no threat to my life, it made sense to move back.

  And I was a little relieved to be out of Alyson’s apartment.

  14

  Alyson

  I wandered around the empty apartment, back and forth, contemplating a surf. There wasn’t really that far to go. I stopped and gazed out at the ocean. That was the reason I loved my little apartment, mostly. The view. And the fact that at any time of the day (or night for that matter), I could grab my board, run down to the beach, and be in the water within three minutes.

  Yep. My prime little spot of real estate. The place I refused to move out of. But when the place was so empty—J gone, Claire gone—was staying, even for such an amazing view, worth it?

  I grabbed my towel and headed out the door.

  “Alyson!” I heard a cheery yet gravelly voice call out to me from the pier.

  Even though she was smiling, I could see in her eyes that Rhonda was very disappointed in me. For a moment, I considered pretending that I hadn’t even seen her. But there was no point. She was the only person on the pier and she was wearing a bright purple tie-dye dress.

  “Sorry,” I said, walking over to her. “I’ll be there for the next workshop.” But I had to admit that what had happened had shaken my confidence in my own gut instinct, as well as my belief in what Rhonda taught. That all the answers were within. Still, it wasn’t cool that I had just run out of the shop like that. Rhonda had always been a good friend of mine. And she’d always been supportive of my business. She’d been the first person I’d ever sold a surfboard to, actually. She’d been part of a golden oldies’ surf group that had to disband after too many broken hips.

  I told her about what had happened with Tina. About how I had been wrong.

  Rhonda reached out and placed a hand on my shoulder. “You need to trust yourself more…”

  I was starting to get annoyed. “Look, I did trust myself, okay!” I said, cutting her off when I could no longer stand to listen to it. “And look where it got me? I almost got thrown out of my family.”

  Rhonda looked a little taken aback, at first, by the way I had spoken to her. And I immediately regretted my outburst. But then her face settled, just like it always did, into one of support. “So it sounds to me like you were right? You believed a member of your family was involved in some way, and in the end, your intuition wa
s right.”

  Huh. I had never stopped to think about it that way. Rhonda raised her eyebrows. There was a twinkle in her eye like she was waiting for me to agree with her. I hated admitting that I was wrong, even when being wrong meant that I was right. Hang on. I was making my head spin.

  “Thanks, Rhonda. You’ve given me a lot to think about. I think there’s something I need to do.”

  Even though I had made things right with Mum—well, Mum could never stay mad with me—with Dad, it was still a little icy on the surface. He didn’t like anyone to make a fuss or a drama, and that was exactly what I had done at the family picnic.

  When I’d asked him to join me for lunch at Captain Eightball’s though, he had jumped at the chance. He was sitting across from me with a strange expression. “I have something to tell you, Alyson.” I could tell from his tone of voice that this ‘something’ was not going to be something I would be thrilled to hear.

  “Oh, yeah? What’s that then?” I asked, taking a sip of my milkshake.

  “I have a date tomorrow,” he said. He was still chewing on his salad, casually, as though this was no big deal at all.

  I was so outraged that I was stunned. “I hope you mean with Mum,” I said. Suddenly, the burger I had just taken a bite of felt heavy in my stomach and I couldn’t get down one more bite.

  He just raised an eyebrow at me like I was the one who was acting outrageously. But that was the thing with my dad. He was pretty unapologetic. He had some fairly old-fashioned views, and always considered himself the head of the household. That his word was law.

  “Actually, it is with a lovely woman who I used to know in my school days.”

  I was about to stand up and run out. It would cause one of those scenes that dad hated, which only made me want to do it more, but Matt was on shift that day and at the end of the day, he would have to be the one to clean it up after I stormed out. So instead, I sat down, ate my burger, then calmly left Dad to pick up the bill. And causally vowed never to talk to him again.

  15

  Claire

  A lot of things had been dug up that week in Eden Bay. But there was one secret that had to stay buried. And I was at Captain Eightball’s to make sure that happened.

  I spotted Alyson—was that her dad with her?—and quickly slinked back out into the garden area. Just a touch too late, though—Matt had already seen me and he followed me out to the kids’ play area and surprised me while I was hiding under the slide trying not to get caught.

  “I, uh, lost an earring,” I said. Unlike Alyson, my ears were actually pierced and so the lie was believable. Almost.

  Matt looked incredibly awkward, like he suddenly didn’t know what to do with his hands. He ran one through his hair, then laced them together and wriggled them about. “I haven’t seen you in a few days.”

  I straightened up and stepped out of the sandbox. There was enough sand randomly strewn around Eden Bay without purposely going and standing in a pit of the stuff.

  “Alyson is right inside there,” I said, feeling as though she was going to spring us at any second. Like we were doing something bad.

  He looked over his shoulder. “So what? You and her are best friends, right?”

  I was surprised that in spite of his awkward demeanor, he didn’t even seem to know what I was worried about. I had to admit that I was a little hurt. He was acting almost like the kiss had never happened. That he didn’t even remember it.

  And now I was going to have to be the one who mentioned it and made it awkward.

  “Matt. Alyson can never know.”

  He laughed. “That you were here today?” He nodded toward the play area. “Well then, you better get back down underneath the slide.”

  I gritted my teeth a little. “If you are making a joke, Matt, it isn’t funny. Swear to me that you will not tell her about the kiss.”

  He sucked in his breath. Almost like I had spoken the unspeakable. “Okay. Fine. It’s not something I’m in the habit of discussing with my sister anyway, you know.”

  Alyson was storming out with her head down. She saw me but didn’t stop. I just straightened up and hoped that I hadn’t been acting too suspiciously.

  “Hey, you! What’s going on, buddy?” I asked casually.

  “Oh, my dad is just the world’s biggest traitor, that’s all.”

  I followed her out the gate, just pleased that she hadn’t asked what I was doing there, while Matt watched us go. I asked where she was going in such a hurry.

  She was heading back toward the Dolphin (F)Inn. “To warn Mum about what is really going on.”

  It seemed like I couldn’t get away from the place. But Alyson’s mum wasn’t in her room. “Let’s try Tina’s room, maybe she’s in there,” Alyson said, which sounded like the most ill-advised plan in the world. I was feeling a little better thanks to a good night’s sleep, but I still didn’t quite have the energy to jump in front of Alyson and stop her from knocking on Tina’s door.

  But before Alyson could knock, she was pushed aside by a cleaning trolley and we both stared into the room in shock. Aside from the furniture that came with the place, the room was empty.

  We looked at each other.

  “What happened to the woman who was staying here?” I asked the cleaning lady. She just shrugged. “Checked out,” she said as she walked past us and headed down the hall.

  “Maybe she decided to turn herself into the police?” I asked. But Alyson shook her head.

  “Nope. She skipped town. The only question is, why?”

  16

  Alyson

  “She did a pretty decent job of making it look old,” Claire said, turning the letter over in her hands.

  “Yeah, well, she’s clever.”

  I sat down on Claire’s dusty blue sofa chair. She only had the one. This was minimalist design really taken to the extreme. I mean, I know it’s trendy and all at the moment to only own, like, fifty items, but I wasn’t a fan of it. Give me a home filled with junk any day of the week.

  “Did you ever get a sample of Tina’s handwriting, that day you made an enemy of everyone in your family?” Claire asked. Her tone with the last part was pretty wry, but I wondered why she was asking when we already knew that the letter belonged to Tina.

  “Why?”

  “Just wondering…” She coughed a little and put the letter back down on the table. “I suppose I’m just a little flat as well, now that it’s all over.”

  “Well, it’s not all over, is it?” I pointed out. “Tina is on the run.”

  Claire had filled up a hot water bottle and sat with it on the floor, seeing as I had taken her only chair. “Or she just left town. I suppose she didn’t do anything wrong to be on the run.”

  “She sent a threatening letter.”

  “True. She can be charged for that. Still, that doesn’t seem to be a reason to go on the run, does it?” Claire seemed to think it was more likely that she was just embarrassed and didn’t want to see any of us Foulkeses for a while. I still hadn’t decided if I was even going to tell the cops. She HAD admitted that the whole thing was just a joke.

  “But what about the letter to you?” I asked Claire. We’d never been able to ask Tina about that one. It just all felt so unfinished. I stood up. “I think we need to go after Tina. We need to find her and ask her some more questions.”

  Claire started coughing violently. “I’m sick!” she cried out. “Please, Alyson, can’t we just leave it be now? For my sake,” she pleaded with me. And when I tried to object again, she cut me off. “I feel perfectly safe now. Tina was just playing her idea of a stupid prank. I’m over it.”

  I decided it was time for me to leave. If she was really that sick, then I supposed I should let her have her one chair to rest in.

  “I’ll walk you downstairs,” Claire said, hobbling over to the door like she was an old woman who had just had a hip replacement. Boy, she sure made a big fuss about having the simple old flu, didn’t she? “I need to get my mai
l from Jeff. He won’t bring it upstairs to me, even when I am sick.”

  Hmm. I stopped and turned to her. “So he can access your mail any time, right?”

  Claire’s nose was red and her eyes were puffy. She looked confused by my question. “Yeah, of course. Why?”

  I shrugged a little. “Never mind.”

  Right as we were heading out the door, we almost walked right into Claire’s next-door neighbor. Nancy came out of her apartment, dressed to the nines.

  “Don’t mind me, girls—just off on a date!” She giggled like a girl. “A lovely young man I knew from my youth, Dan Foulkes!”

  17

  Claire

  I had never seen Alyson move so fast. She was down the lift and out the door of the Turtle Dove before I even reached the ground floor.

  Jeff was watching her fly out the door as I hobbled into reception.

  “You look terrible, Miss Elizabeth Richardson,” he said.

  Even though I knew this was the absolute truth—my face was red and puffy enough to be mistaken for the fact I’d been up all night crying at that stage—I still couldn’t help but take offense. Maybe he only meant to be sympathetic. But I didn’t think it was the doorman’s place to comment negatively on my appearance.

  “Is there any mail for me, Jeff?”

  “There is one envelope,” he said, reaching into my box. “I’m sorry, miss, I didn’t mean to…”

  “It’s fine,” I said, taking the large envelope upstairs with me, not caring in that moment that I was probably making an enemy of Jeff again right after we had sort of made peace. I walked past Nancy’s room and thought about her being out on a date with Alyson’s dad. I couldn’t believe the news Alyson had told me. Even in my ill, woozy state, the thought of that almost made me chuckle. How had the two of them even met up again after all these years? They’d probably used one of those dating apps.