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.
We had the real clue by this stage, but Matt and I were still arguing about where it was actually leading us. Matt said it was still far too early in the hunt for the clue to be leading us back to the beach, but what else could “wave you in?” mean? Matt thought we should have headed away from beach, but instead, we were heading toward it.
Yikes, Anna had caught up to me while I was stopped. I didn’t want the Swedes to see that we were a trio—they seemed ultra-competitive—so I whispered to Anna to hang back a little bit and to act like she was just wandering around the beach alone at night.
“Is she safe, do you think?” Mr. Swede asked, nodding toward Anna who had made her way down the water’s edge and was practical getting washed out with the tide. She didn’t just look ‘alone,’ she looked completely lost.
“Oh yes, I’m sure she’s fine,” I said dismissively. “I think it’s cool these days, to be down at the beach at night like that. She’s probably taking pictures for her Instagram account or something.” Great. Every attempt I made to sound ‘young’ just made me sound even older. But the Swedes just shrugged and nodded.
“So you think that this clue is about the beach as well, I see?” I asked them as I nodded toward the waves. But had it really been that literal? Matt was right. It was tradition for the race to end at the beach and we weren’t even halfway through yet. It went completely against tradition.
Mr. Swede nodded. “Yes, that is what we assumed. But we can’t find the bucket with the next item on the list.”
No. Neither could we. We wandered along the beach, the two teams together, while I tried to keep one eye on Anna to make sure she wasn’t actually, really lost. “Maybe the clue bucket got washed out onto the ocean,” I said. I thought it was kinda funny, but Matt wasn’t laughing. He didn’t like the fact that we were, in essence, temporarily teaming up with the Swedes. I couldn’t see the harm. We were each as lost as each other. And if the Swedes figured it out, I didn’t want them getting away without us and getting the lead.
“So what else could this clue be referring to?” Mr. Swede pondered. “Where else in Eden Bay is there a wave?” He asked the question in such a friendly ‘let’s collaborate’ manner that I felt guilty about the fact that as soon as I figured it out, I would sprint away from him and never look back.
“Well, I suppose people wave at you when they greet you,” I said with a sigh. But that was about as literal as the beach idea, and I couldn’t see how it was the answer to the clue. People waving wasn’t a place?
Mr. Swede suddenly did a little jump with glee. “And where do people greet you in this town?”
I shrugged. “Everywhere?” I didn’t think we had narrowed it down whatsoever. “This is a friendly place,” I said, looking around, even though at night, with
the waves crashing violently into the sand, it seemed a little less friendly. Also, define ‘friendly’ on an Australian beach. There were sharks in the water. Jellyfish. If you went a bit further north, you’d find crocodiles. “You’d be greeted with a wave and a friendly hello in every shop, restaurant, and home in this town. What are we supposed to do, check all of them?”
“Yes, but you are originally greeted at the visitor center when you arrive,” Miss Swede said, nodding at her partner, who was on the right track. Right. I got it. They were staring at each other with a glimmer in their eyes as they thought they’d figured it out. Were they going to leave me in the dust, though?
I inwardly groaned. I didn’t want to go to the visitor center. One of my arch enemies, Sadie, worked there. Not that she worked there in the dead of night, but if it was the site of the next clue, there was a good chance the center would be open and she was there. Plus, it just seemed plain wrong to me that that was the answer to the clue. A bit of a reach. It seemed liked more of the wild goose chase that Alyson had set us on.
I was surprised, however, that the Swedes were still waiting for Matt and I to come along with them. I shrugged at Matt and thought, well, why not? We might as well tag along with them just in case they were right. Then if we saw a bucket of clues at the center, we could grab ours and run off, ditch the Swedes forever and pretend we’d never known them.
Uh oh. We were getting too far away from the beach and losing sight of Anna. I turned around and craned my neck. Where had she gone?
Because the beach was downhill from pretty much every part of town, we were climbing upwards and I was worried that Anna wouldn’t be able to find us too high. She certainly wouldn’t be able to make the ‘wave’ = ‘visitor center’ link on her own. Because, who would, really?
I whispered to Matt, “Pretend you’re taking a bathroom break and go and find Anna…” Meanwhile, I tried to keep the pace as slow as possible. It was difficult with the Swedes and their long legs. But they were willing to dawdle a bit while we waited for Matt to catch up.
I was willing to just stand around quietly and mind my own business. It was a bit of an unspoken rule in the race that you didn’t really make friends with other teams. It was a bit unseemly. But Mr. Swede was full of the goss. “What a day it has been,” he said, laughing out loud as Miss Swede joined in. “I never expected there to be a dead body as part of the game.”
I didn’t really like to hear them laugh about Brett like that. They were only tourists. They didn’t know Brett. To them, I supposed this was just a funny story that they would tell their friends and family when they get back home.
Yet. Here I was, asking questions. “Did you see anything?” I asked. I wasn’t sure why I was asking. I still needed to know who killed Brett. Maybe they could help. If they would just stop acting so jolly about it all.
“We were the third team there,” Miss Swede said. She seemed suddenly a little nervous now that I was pressing her for actual details. She looked to her partner—I wasn’t sure what their relationship was, no wedding rings—for help in answering. “By that time, the area had been… How do you say it? Tapped up?”
I nodded. “The police tape went up. No one would have been allowed in the tunnel.” Alyson and Troy had gone in, and Matt and I had been inside as well. If the Swedes had been right behind us, there was a chance they’d had a peek.
Mr. Swede told me they’d tried to see what had happened, but it had been too chaotic. Instead, they’d focused on getting the pipe, the clue, and getting out of there to find the next clue. Smart move. “We really need that five thousand dollars,” he said, staring into my eyes with a sort of chilling glare.
I laughed a little, feeling nervous and checking around to see if Matt was on his way back yet. “I suppose we could all do with a bit of extra cash.”
“No,” he said, shaking his head. “I mean, we really need it.” He stared down at his partner. “Don’t we, sweetheart?”
Well, I supposed I knew more about the nature of their relationship. It was at least romantic, if not a marriage.
Miss Swede dropped her head, looking sad, like she didn’t want to talk about it. But I noticed her use her right hand to gently touch her left hand where her ring finger was, almost an unconscious action.
I cleared my throat and tried to break the tension. I also changed my tactic a little bit. Decided to play innocent and naive and let the Swedes’ competitive nature do the work for me. If they knew more—or thought they knew more—than I did, they would be only too willing to spill the goss. It’s human nature. Gossip was the ultimate competitive sport.
“I didn’t see anything,” I said with a sad little sigh and a shrug. “And I have no idea what could have happened to the poor guy either. I am sure there is no one in this town who would want to hurt him.”
The two Swedes traded a glance. Mr. Swede turned to me with a raised eyebrow. “Oh, I can think of someone who would want to hurt him. He had a teammate who ran off.”
“How did you hear about that?” I asked, a little too keenly.
He shrugged. “People talk. Other racers.”
I kinda wished Matt had been around to hear all this. Where was he? I was starting to get worried that something had happened to him and Anna. Maybe they had gotten swept away with the tide and were caught in a rip and drowning. Or even worse—maybe they had decided to team up as a duo and leave me behind. He could easily ditch me and run off with Anna and take all the winnings for himself. Meanwhile, I’d be stuck with the Swedes, trying to make another illegal trio. Maybe I should be nicer to them.
I was starting to sound paranoid. Keep it together, Claire.
“So Brett had a partner in the race? Do you know who it was?”
Mr. Swede didn’t know any names, but he did tell me that his partner was a young woman, around my age. They didn’t know anything else, even much about what she looked like.
“Hey, guys!”
I spun around and Matt was there, grinning, his pockets still bulging with all the items we had found so far. Not swept out by a wave. And he had definitely not abandoned me.
And there was Anna behind me. A young woman, about my age. Who I had found skulking around all alone at night, ten hours after Brett Falcon had been killed.
16
Alyson
“Okay,” I said, finally admitting defeat. “This is gross. It kinda tastes like cardboard.” Cardboard that had been dipped in sugar. I spat out the protein bar and wiped my mouth. Yuck. There were still bits of dry surgery cardboard stuck in my throat. I searched for something that actually looked like real food, but the only other food I had was a small bag of pine nuts. I needed a proper meal. Something warm. Not seeds or nuts or protein bars. Plus, I was sick of hearing Troy’s guilt trips.
Troy was ecstatic. The mere mention of real food made the light return to his eyes. He was still looking a little pale, though. “It’s not like we are getting anywhere with this clue anyway” he said, marching along. The wave clue still had us stumped, and I was getting more and more frustrated with it. “So there’s no harm in just sitting down for a while and eating while we think it over.”
Hmm. Maybe it was a tactical move after all. If I got some energy to my brain, it might actually start working again and making connections… Wave… What waved? A person. It couldn’t be a person, though. What, was I supposed to go up to every single person in Eden Bay and ask them if they had a clue for me? Dinner it was. Then maybe a light would go off in my head.
It was almost midnight, though, and there was nothing open in town. All the restaurants and cafes were dark inside, even the fish and chip shop that stayed open till ten or eleven most nights. But then I saw the lights on in Captain Eightball’s.
“Matt must have used his key to unlock it,” I said, gripping the straps of my trusty backpack while I began to run toward it like it was an oasis in the dessert and I hadn’t had a drink of water in days. I burst in through the doors, so hungry in that moment
that I forgot the obvious fact that wherever my brother was that day, another person would follow.
Claire and I stared at each other. Each of us glaring each other down. It was a standoff. If we’d had guns, our fingers would have been hovering above the handles, ready to draw.
“Hey, sis!” Matt called out in a jolly tone as he entered from the kitchen, wearing an apron. “I guess the scent of melting cheese and garlic was a little too much to resist!” He grinned at me. “There’s plenty for everyone.”
Claire spun around and crossed her arms in complete disgust. “Are you really going to serve these two?”
“She’s my sister!”
“Fine.”
Claire knew that he couldn’t exactly turn the two of us away onto the street, starving. I had to wonder what I would have done if the situation had been reversed, though. Letting Matt and Claire starve would certainly give me a tactical advantage.
Matt wasn’t a chef, but with his keys to the cold room, he had access to all of the ingredients from the day before that were still good—enough to make a pizza and garlic bread. I was practically salivating as it started to cook and began to jiggle impatiently. That melted cheese…the garlic…the tomato sauce heating up. Yum, now I could smell the pepperoni and salami as well. How much longer was this thing going to take!
I noticed that Troy was looking a little pale and told him to take a seat in the booth while I fetched him a glass of water. It gave Matt and I a chance to be alone for a moment in the kitchen. He was also looking a little worse for wear, scraggly and unkempt with dark bags under his bloodshot eyes. Looked like he was ready to keel over at any second. Haha, of course the women of the teams were in better shape than the men, doing all the carrying, solving most of the clues. Doing all the heavy lifting.
Hang Ten Australian Cozy Mystery Boxed Set Page 52