I knocked on the door to room 304, the room number that Claire had given me in case I needed it. I looked over at Yalcin. “Just warning you, this is usually the spot where we need to break the door down.” I was preparing myself. Getting my shoulder ready. But I heard footsteps and Claire pulled the door open. I looked her up and down and tried not to burst out laughing.
She was dressed exactly like Lola Bloom in a sparkling pink jumpsuit and a long blonde wig. The false eyelashes made her look like a bug.
“Oh thank goodness you’re here. Alyson, I don’t think this Zan guy is for real. I don’t think he really works at a record company.”
Yalcin looked stunned by Claire’s outfit as well. She covered herself up a little and told me that Zan had promised to talk to his record company about getting her a recording contract if she dressed up as Lola Bloom and pretended to be her.
I whispered to her, “And you were just going along with it?” Then I got a little offended. “And you were going to miss my surf final for this?”
She turned red. “I am so sorry, Alyson. I really have been the worst friend in the world, haven’t I?”
I cleared my throat. “Ahem. Zan.” He jumped out of his seat and looked up at me. “The jig is up, Zan. You can go home now.”
“You know I never wanted to hurt Lola,” Yalcin said as we entered the bar. “I just thought she liked me, that’s all.”
I stopped and nodded. “I know,” I said. I was looking around for Claire. I’d given her space to change out of her outfit and told her I’d meet her at the bar for her set later.
But she was nowhere to be seen and karaoke had already started. Wow. Was that Dovey? I never knew she could sing. I stared at her on stage, shocked by how talented she was. And hang on, who was watching J if Dovey was up on stage?
I saw her sitting all alone on a seat in front of the stage and rushed over to her, shooting a glare at Dovey. “I’m nine now!” J shrieked as I told her to get up.
“That is not old enough to be in a bar on your own, young lady.”
She pouted at me.
Yalcin stopped for a moment, transfixed by Dovey’s voice.
But he had never heard Lola Bloom sing. That was why he didn’t recognize her voice, didn’t realize it was so familiar.
It was Lola’s voice.
My head was spinning. But there was no time to focus on that right now. It was J’s bedtime.
“So what about you? Are you seeing anyone?” Yalcin asked me hopefully as we said good-bye out in front of the bar.
I thought about Troy Emerald back in Eden Bay. No. I definitely was not seeing him. He was my worst enemy. And yet. Yikes. Things were complicated.
I leaned over and kissed Yalcin on the cheek. “It’s been fun hanging out with you. But I go home tomorrow.”
22
Claire
It was technically Lola Bloom’s concert day. The news was full of stories about outraged fans who had yet to receive refunds from organizers who apparently could not pay. I switched off the TV. Alyson and I would be leaving the city later that day. I wanted to put the whole trip—and Lola Bloom—behind me.
“That was humiliating,” I said to Alyson as I met her in this disgusting-looking burger joint for our final lunch in the city. Apparently, it was J’s favorite. “I never want to sing ever again.”
Alyson munched on her cheeseburger and laughed. “Aww, but the world will miss your beautiful singing voice.”
I just stared at her and shook my head. She always had to be a smart aleck, didn’t she?
I reached into my pocket and handed her the medallion I’d been holding onto. She just stared at it. “Is this some kind of a joke?” she asked.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, you must know that I missed the surfing final.”
“I did know that,” I said, feeling guilty. She had missed it solely because she had thought that my life was in danger at the hands of Zan. Only my pride had been, in the end. “But I found that in the hotel room.”
She took it off me and turned it over. “These are only given to people who actually place in the final.” She shook her head. “Only someone like Curtis would have had this.”
“Who is Curtis?” I asked her, blinking a few times.
“He’s, like, my liaison at the competition…the one that I report to…one of the organizers.”
We both just stopped and looked at each other.
I put my veggie burger down and kept my voice low. Luckily, J was distracted by a game on her phone that she was playing with greasy hands. “Curtis was the one who organized your accommodation, wasn’t he? Alyson, we always thought it was strange that you were at The Onyx.” My heart was beating faster. “He must have known that Lola was staying next door. Alyson, he was in your room. He had access.”
Alyson gulped and nodded. But then she shook her head. “No way, Claire… You haven’t met this guy. He is really, really nice.”
“Yeah, they always seem nice, don’t they?”
It was always the nice ones you had to suspect the most. Alyson should have known that by now.
“Where is Curtis now?” I asked her.
Alyson finished off the last bite of her burger. “I don’t know. He’s probably gone back to Brisbane. He hasn’t spoken to me since I missed the final.”
I checked the time. “Shoot. If we don’t get back to the hotel and get you checked out, you are going to have to pay for an extra night.”
There was a knock on the door while Alyson was doing the last of her packing. “Housekeeping!”
Oh, right. There would be someone else staying in this room very soon. Quite probably that night. I opened the door and let her in. It was our old friend, Pink Hair.
“Oh no!”
Alyson looked like she was trying to find somewhere to hide. How was she going to hide from a maid who was there to clean and check every nook and cranny of the room? She ducked behind the sofa but then quickly stood up again when she realized she was defeated.
“I thought I told you to stay away,” she said in a low voice as she looked Alyson up and down. Whoa. I remembered how weird she had been with me and Bianca the other day. What was this lady’s problem?
“I am checking out today, okay!” Alyson cried. “So I am never going to tell anyone that you stumbled across some secret plan or whatever crazy thing you said to me…”
I turned around to look at her as if to say, “What?”
Alyson just rolled her eyes and did a spinning gesture with her finger at the side of her temple to signify that the woman was crazy. But I wanted to hear more about this plan.
“What did you stumble upon?” I asked the maid. She just glared at me.
“Nothing!”
“Come on. This is important.”
She stopped pushing her cart and stared at the carpet. “When I was cleaning Lola’s room and I found her body, I overheard that man…Andre or whatever he is called…talking about what they were going to do to ‘fix’ the situation.”
Alyson and I stared at each other. “And what was that?” I asked her.
The maid looked scared. “He said he was going to replace Lola Bloom with someone else. And that as long as no one knew Lola was dead, they wouldn’t lose any money. He told me to go away and never come back into Lola’s room. He threatened me.”
“But you were back in there the other day!” Alyson exclaimed.
“Because management told me to go in there and clean it,” she said, worried. “But I knew that if Andre saw me back there, he was going to hurt me.”
Replace Lola with someone else? I knew all about how easy she was to impersonate.
Especially if your voice sounded exactly the same.
As Alyson and J and I hurried—almost sprinted—down the corridor, I just turned and shook my head at her.
“You were really going to be scared off by a maid who was just doing her job?”
But she just threw it right back at me. “You are th
e one who ran away to a completely different hotel just because you got a few scratches on your car.”
“Fair point.”
“What are you going to do about Bianca?” she asked, but it was not the time nor place to have a conversation while we were sprinting down a hallway to avoid a late checkout fee. She’d told me that she’d seen Bianca try to attack my car. The sad part was that I wasn’t even surprised.
And we had bigger things to worry about. Not just the late checkout fee, but the real killer of Lola Bloom.
But now it had all become clear. Andre and his team had decided to replace Lola with Dovey. But that plan had been ruined now that Lola’s death was public.
And was someone else going to pay?
23
Alyson
Claire was down in the lobby with J, trying to stall for time while I tried to find Dovey. She didn’t answer the door to her hotel, even after I knocked and shouted.
But someone else did.
I took a deep breath. No time for intimidation. I grabbed my phone and found one of Lola’s tracks and pressed ‘play.’ “I know whose voice this really is,” I said.
Andre dragged me inside. “What do you think you’re doing?” he asked, ripping the phone from me.
I straightened up. When was this guy going to stop trying to intimidate me?
“Dovey was the real singer on Lola’s tracks, wasn’t she?” I grabbed my phone back. “So what happened? Was Lola about to come clean on the whole scheme, so you had her killed?”
“It wasn’t me who killed her!” Andre shouted. “I was only trying to protect…” He stopped talking and I rolled my eyes. Yeah, right. They are always ‘just trying to protect’ someone. It was never their fault or their responsibility
The door opened and in walked Dovey. She grinned at Andre, but her face dropped to the floor when she saw me.
Oh my gosh.
“Alyson, what are you doing here?”
I suddenly got it. Dovey, the unappreciated hair stylist who had been the singer for Lola Bloom all these years. She was the one Andre was trying to protect. “So, what was the plan?” I asked her. “Kill Lola so that you could finally take her spot on stage and have the limelight?”
Andre looked devastated. He never wanted Lola dead. But when Dovey had killed her and the concert was already sold out, he’d been forced to let Dovey have her way.
But Dovey was the real murderer.
And I was the one who knew her secret.
Gulp.
24
Claire
Alyson had never arrived in the lobby. And she wasn’t picking up her phone. I jumped when my phone rang and it was Matt. Should I answer it? I could hear the shake in my voice when I did, and he immediately knew something was wrong. He told me he was ringing to check on J but Alyson was not answering any of his calls.
“J is fine!” I said in a way that was way too cheery and forced.
“Claire, what is going on? I saw the competition on TV… Alyson didn’t even compete.”
The competition. Right. That gave me an idea. “She just had a stomachache, Matt…” I paused and right before I hung up the phone, I said, “By the way, she knows about us.”
I heard the silence on the other end of the line. It wasn’t the time to talk about that right then, though.
“Come on, J. We are taking one last trip to Bondi Beach.”
I searched through the beach for Curtis. The organizers were still there packing up and tidying up loose ends. There was still signage up from the competition. He couldn’t have gone back to Brisbane yet, right? All I knew about this guy was that he was tall and blonde and ripped. So, like eighty percent of the guys on the beach then.
J pointed to a guy. “That’s him.”
I put out my hand to give her a high-five. “You always come to the rescue, J.”
“Hey there,” I said, racing up to him. “I am Claire, Alyson’s friend. She seems to have disappeared off the planet.” But he was furious at the very mention of Alyson’s name.
“Well, it was a waste of my time, wasn’t it, getting her to come up here. We spent a lot of money and time to make sure that Alyson could compete and then she didn’t even show up for the final.”
I tried to tell him that it was all my fault, that she was just being a good friend to me, but he just looked dismissive, like he wasn’t buying this flimsy excuse.
“I need to get back to pack up, Claire. Sorry.”
I just stared at him. I didn’t want to say this to him in front of J, but there was no other choice. “Did you kill Lola Bloom?”
I thought he was going to run. Or laugh. Or defend himself.
But he just stared at me blankly. “I have never even seen Lola Bloom in the flesh. Sorry, but her music just wasn’t my thing.”
“So you never went inside The Onyx.”
He shrugged. “I—I don’t think so. No.”
Ha. “But I saw the medallion you dropped in the hotel room.”
He blinked a few times. “I must have dropped it in there while I was checking it out.”
“Ah! So you were in the room?”
“Yes, but only to make sure that it was up to standard for Alyson.”
I gulped and looked over my shoulder at The Onyx. Had we—had I—gotten it completely wrong?
“Is something wrong with Alyson?” He looked genuinely worried now that I was worried, and I saw that Alyson was right about him. He was a genuinely nice guy.
I nodded and tried not to say too much in case it scared J. But I stared at him meaningfully, hoping that he would understand.
He got it. “Okay. We need to go find her.”
The concierge was as unfriendly as ever when we returned, but Nigel was not going to mess with Curtis. He told Nigel that he was the organizer of the international surfing competition and that if Nigel did not cooperate, he would take his business elsewhere the following year.
Nigel nodded and let us onto the first floor.
He winked at me. “See? Got it all under control.”
I was feeling terrible for ever having suspected the guy. But where was Alyson, and who had her? I asked Curtis to watch J for a moment while I ran down the hallway and checked Alyson’s room. Empty. But I heard screams coming from the room next door. Curtis and I stared at each other.
“This is usually the time where we break the door down,” I said. J looked excited. Curtis looked worried, but he nodded. With muscles like that, it wasn’t going to be a problem for him.
One mighty crash later and the door was down. And there was Dovey and Andre, trying to shove Alyson into a closet. “Dovey did it!” Alyson shrieked. “She wanted Lola’s fame for herself!”
“I should have known…” I said, shaking my head. I had thought her voice was too familiar. Dovey tried to make a run for it, but Curtis caught her. He had turned out to be the hero after all. While he held a struggling Dovey, I called the cops.
“You should have this back,” Alyson said, handing him the medallion while Dovey and Andre were being taken away.
Curtis looked it over and handed it back to her. “Nah, I reckon you’ve earned honor third place, kid.”
Back in the lobby, I had someone waiting for me. Bianca had her luggage beside her and the concierge was tallying up her final bill.
Bianca smiled at me sheepishly. She really had some nerve. She took off her leather coat and handed it to me. “I saw you admiring it.”
“I don’t want your jacket, Bianca,” I said. Even though I definitely did want it, I refused to take it.
“I know you love that car. I thought that if I damaged it a little, threatened it, you might just leave Sydney and forget about the whole thing, forget about the fight I mean, and let me have the shop.”
I just shook my head. Did it really mean this much to her? “I don’t know what to say, Bianca.”
“I’m so sorry, Claire.” She looked up at me and her eyes were watery and huge tears dropped out of them. She quickly w
iped them away with the back of her hand and smiled at me. “I never had a cousin before, or any family really, and I know that I have screwed it up. If you never want to speak to me again except through the lawyers, then I understand. But I do hope to visit Eden Bay one day soon. It sounds like an amazing place.”
J and Alyson returned to the lobby hand in hand and we finally got to check out.
Nigel tried to make us pay the late checkout fee.
But I fought back. “Do you know what we just had to put up with in this very hotel?”
“Yeah,” Alyson said. “I almost got killed up there!”
In the end, we got it waived.
Epilogue
Alyson
Another mermaid, this time with purple hair, waved us back into town and welcomed us to Eden Bay. The population now read 5050. And I wondered if that was going to increase any time soon. I glanced over at Claire. I certainly hoped not.
“Surely you charged for that one!” Claire said, her mouth agape as we took the final turn into Eden Bay.
“I told you, it was all good will…” I needed to get the town’s people on my side if I was going to run for mayor. But if I had to get back up on my ladder and update the population tally again, then I was going to charge for it, believe me. I couldn’t keep giving my art away for free.
The gold from the Porsche shimmered in the sun as we took the final turn into our home town.
This was going to be the last time I ever rode in the Porsche. And no, not because Claire was banning me after I accidentally spilled some of my purple slushy on the white seat.
Princess was selling the Porsche. To save the bookshop. She was choosing one baby over another.
I thought she was definitely making the right choice.
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