Hang Ten Australian Cozy Mystery Boxed Set

by Stacey Alabaster

  It didn’t sound like he was lying. He wasn’t getting overly defensive. He sounded surprised to hear that Kate had said that, but not in an over the top way.

  I leaned back on the sofa. There was an awkward distance between us now. It was like it was wrong to touch. Wrong to even get too close. Because I had to know some things before I could get close to him again.

  Keep it cool, Claire.

  “So, what actually happened between the two of you then?” This wasn’t a conversation I had ever wanted to have with him, but now that Kate had dropped that bombshell, I wanted it cleaned up. I wanted to know the truth even if it hurt to hear it.

  Matt leaned forward with his elbows on his knees. “This is a little difficult for me to talk about…” He paused and cleared his throat.

  I didn’t stay as cool as I would have liked. In fact, I immediately jumped to the worst possible conclusion based on what he had said. “Great. So, she was telling the truth. You are still hung up on her then.” I turned away from him and slunk to the side of the couch so that I was as far away from him as it was possible to get.

  “No Claire that’s not what I am getting at.” He shook his head and looked at me a bit sadly. I didn’t know what there was to feel so sad about. Did he still love Kate or not? “Just hear me out, okay?”

  I took a moment to compose myself and nodded. “Go on then.”

  Matt was firm when he spoke. “It is over between Kate and I…long over. That was why she left town. I broke up with her, no matter what she has tried to tell you.”

  “Okay then,” I said, interrupting. I realized I still sounded a bit sullen. “Why did you break up with her then?”

  He cleared his throat. “This is the difficult bit. But, since you really want to know, I will tell you. I was at a stage in my life where I was ready to settle down. Start a family. And Kate was just not ready for that. We were at completely different stages of life. I realized she was not the one for me.”

  I held my breath for so long I almost passed out until I remembered to breathe again. Wow. Okay. Not what I had expected him to say at all. I didn’t even know that was where he was at in his life. He already had J living with him. She was practically his daughter, even though she was technically his niece. But he wanted kids? Of his own? Like, right now?

  ‘Cool’ was suddenly the word. I went ice cold. I could feel a chill all down my spine and felt like I was paralyzed and couldn’t move. I tried to lean forward a little just to see if I could. All I could see were stars.

  Matt glanced over at me. “Are you okay?”

  I smiled a little and tried not to look fussed. At least not in front of him. This was the very thing that he had broken up with Kate over, so I couldn’t let him know what my true feelings on the matter were. Instead, I coolly stood up and asked him if he wanted another drink of water as I was going to the kitchen to fetch myself one.

  Then I freaked out in the kitchen. Silently, of course. J was asleep already. Which was a very rare thing. No one wanted her waking up because Auntie Claire was having a breakdown in the kitchen. And Matt was ten feet away. I had to open my mouth and scream silently into the void.

  I returned with the two glasses full of water. My hands weren’t even shaking. That was how cool I could play it. Kate hadn’t seen anything yet.

  But I didn’t say anything. That was what almost gave me away.

  “Is everything alright?” Matt asked me as he turned on the TV and Rugby Union started. I had no interest in the game. But at least the sound of the overexcited commentators, declaring this to be the ‘defining match of the decade,’ filled the silence. I could almost pretend things were normal.

  I smiled at him and handed him his glass. Still not shaking. “Of course. Everything is sweet.”

  But everything had changed.

  6

  Alyson

  I stared at my surfboards, painted in psychedelic landscapes. It was an offer that no sane person would turn down, right? I just couldn’t figure out if I was a sane person or not. A lot of people would say not.

  If I took the job, no longer would I have to painstakingly paint my designs by hand on individual boards. No more trying to find clients and customers on my own. Worrying about where my next meal was coming from. And I’d have the opportunity to have people all over the world have “Y Designs”—Y because I spell my name with a Y in it—on the boards. And t-shirts. And postcards. They had even said they wanted to have a strong social media presence and that my style was perfect for cartoons with funny captions and the potential to be turned into memes, whatever that meant. I mean, it was all very exciting.

  But was that what I wanted? It all sounded good in theory. But so did drinking a milkshake, and we all knew how that had turned out for Arthur Hannon. Apparently, the autopsy had been done and the whispers confirmed a poisoning. We just didn’t know the substance. The loose lips weren’t quite that loose.

  I had been slow returning the phone call, giving my decision. But now they had emailed me. There was a contract. My yearly salary would be more than I made in five years selling surfboards on the beach. I thought about what this could mean for my family, how much I could give to J and Matt. J could ago to private school. Matt wouldn’t have to worry so much if he couldn’t find another job immediately. Not that I’d see Matt and J that much if I moved to Brisbane.

  The offer wouldn’t last forever. I had two weeks to give them my answer. Seemed like both a lifetime and a few seconds away.

  Then there was Maria. She’d rang me again that morning to ask if I was going to take the mock exam that afternoon. I told her I was too unprepared. She’d just sighed at me briskly and told me that I’d had plenty of time to prepare and that she had given me plenty of notice. “I feel like I have wasted the last six months tutoring you,” she’d said, sounding bitterly disappointed in me. I hadn’t wanted to disappoint my favorite teacher from high school.

  But she didn’t know the conflict I was struggling with. If I took the job, the deal, then going to university would not be an option. So, I really would be wasting Maria’s time then.

  I needed someone I could discuss it with, but there was no one I could tell who wouldn’t completely freak out. Everyone would want me to stay in Eden Bay. They all needed me here. J, Matt, Claire. Even Maria. I couldn’t bear to hear that same disappointed tone from anyone else.

  Especially Claire.

  Claire looked about as happy and full of life as I did when we met down on the pier for an ice cream from the ice cream van. Hey, we had to get our dairy fix somehow. Ice cream still seemed safe to eat. Cones were just a dollar each and it was a hot day, so we were going to pile them high. Claire ordered a double scoop of chocolate, I got mint choc chip and strawberry, and Claire just frowned and asked me how I ate that when the flavors clashed.

  “I kinda like how they mix together,” I said. “Mint and strawberry are complimentary flavors anyway. Nice weather, isn’t it? I love how we pretty much just skip straight from winter to summer here.” I was making small talk, trying to figure out how to tell her that I might be leaving Eden Bay.

  You see, I had given Claire a hard time about moving away from Eden Bay. Well, ‘hard time’ was probably an understatement, to be fair. I had considered her actions traitorous and borderline unforgivable at the time, and I had never been able to understand how anyone could want to leave a place as beautiful as Eden Bay to start with.

  But it was a big world out there.

  Claire was being too quiet. I was starting to get the feeling she was hiding something from me as well.

  “What’s with the outfit?” Claire finally asked. I’d been wondering if she was going to comment on it. Not my usual fare.

  “I’ve got a waitressing shift tonight. At The VRI.”

  Claire just shook her head. “Umm, what?” She blinked a few times and frowned like she was sure she had just misheard what I had just said.

  She hadn’t misheard me, though. “I am trying to figur
e out if the manager is hiding something.” I filled her in only scheme and told her how happy Reinhold had been when we’d been speaking about Arthur’s death. Even though he’d tried to hide it.

  Claire looked impressed. “You’ve done really well on your end. I’m following a few leads of my own,” she said and struggled to actually name one of them. “Well, you know, there’s…umm.” She was struggling big time.

  “Okay, you seem totally distracted. What is actually going on?” I asked.

  I always knew when she was keeping something from me. She thought I didn’t because she always had her cool princess act going on, but when she was hiding something, she was rattled and nervy and her appetite went down. She had barely made a dent on her cone even though the sun was blazing and we shared the same love for sweet, cold desserts.

  She stopped eating her ice cream. Stared straight at me. Almost like she was accusing me of something, but not quite. “Did you know that your brother is ready to start a family?”

  I scoffed and almost chocked on a choc chip. Yeah, right. “Don’t be silly,” I said. Talk about someone getting her wires majorly crossed. “Matt is nowhere near ready for that. You’re just imagining things. Reading stuff into something he’s said.”

  She shook her head in annoyance. “I’m not you, Alyson. I don’t jump to conclusions. I get the facts. And I got this straight from the horse’s mouth. Matt told me that he wants to settle down. Have kids. Get married. Like…right now.”

  I was still taking what she’d said lightly. “But how is he going to start a family and become a professional surfer at the same time?” I asked wryly. Of course he was never going to become a professional surfer. I just didn’t know how he thought these ideas were compatible in his head. Maybe he thought that Claire would just stay at home and look after the babies while he surfed his way around the world.

  Claire and Matt married? Having babies? Claire as my sister-in-law? We had always been more like sisters than friends, but I had never thought she’d actually end up marrying my brother and becoming a Foulkes for real. I started to feel funny. A little bit dizzy. Like the earth beneath my feet was moving.

  But I needn’t have worried, because Claire was practically having a panic attack. Oh, wow.

  Very out of character for her. She was usually cool calm and collected. Princess, I called her. But Princess was not getting her way and princess was not happy. And she was struggling to breathe. I took her ice cream off her and told her to take a second. To just breathe.

  She shut her eyes for almost a full moment, then opened them again, but she still didn’t look like herself.

  “What are you going to do?” I asked. Suddenly I realized just how real this all was to her. There was nothing to laugh or joke about.

  She could only just barely speak again. “I…I don’t know, Alyson. You tell me.”

  Gosh. She never asked me to tell her what to do. I glanced up at the sky just in case a pig was flying by.

  I didn’t think it was my place to go giving advice. After all, I was hardly unbiased. “Maybe just don’t do anything rash,” I said and realized how weird it was to hear those words come out of my mouth. Normally, it was Claire telling me not to be rash. Normally, I was telling her to be more rash.

  She nodded but didn’t look so sure. I think she did want to do something rash. She wanted to break up with my brother. Look, I may have felt funny about the two of them dating, but that didn’t mean that I wanted to see my brother get his heart broken.

  I needed to change the subject, even if that meant breaking some difficult news of my own.

  “I got an offer,” I blurted out.

  Claire looked confused. “What sort of offer?”

  My ice cream was starting to melt and so was Claire’s, so I handed hers back to her and gobbled down all of mine before I spoke. May as well just come out with the whole thing. I told her about the deal. “I’ll have a yearly salary. And bonuses, depending on how well my designs sell. I might even be able to have my own sub-brand as an offshoot from the main brand.”

  “Woah,” Claire said. She nodded and looked properly impressed as she looked me up and down. “You’ve done well for yourself, kid. Looks like you won’t have to waitress for too long…”

  I wasn’t sure how to react. Because that hadn’t been what I’d expected her to say. “You think this is good news?” I asked unsurely. I had been expecting her to give me the same hard time that I had given her about leaving. Didn’t she think that I would be abandoning her and everything that I stood for?

  “Of course,” she said. “This is amazing. I’m so proud of you,” she said, pulling me in for a hug. “You’ve got to do what is right for you.”

  I hadn’t realized how relieved I would be to hear her say that until she actually said it

  She leaned back and looked thoughtful. And also a little bit manic. “Hey, maybe I should come with you,” she said. “Maybe we should both escape from this place.”

  7

  Alyson

  I couldn’t believe how nervous I was. I felt like I was on my first day of school as I walked through the front doors of The VRI and introduced myself to the rest of the waitstaff and front-of-housers. They all sort of looked me up and down like they were deciding whether or not I was allowed to be a part of their clique.

  It looked like they had all decided no.

  The uniform was black pants and a white shirt. Because the shirt needed the logo of the restaurant embroidered on it, it had to be purchased from the uniform shop. I noticed that mine was the less crisply pressed of the bunch.

  No one was talking to me. Wow. This really was like my first day at school.

  I was actually grateful when Reinhold made an appearance and introduced me to everyone and told them all to make me welcome and go easy on me. Then he told them to all get back to work, polishing glasses and setting tables and lighting candles.

  He turned his attention to me and asked if I had had any trouble getting the uniform. I shook my head, even though it was an expensive purchase for just one shift. Apparently, I could claim it back on my tax return. He was slightly sterner with me now than he had been during our previous meeting. Asking me plenty of blunt questions about how prepared I was.

  “Do you know how to use a coffee machine?”

  I nodded and said that I could make every kind of coffee. Although it had been years since I’d actually poured an espresso shot with a proper coffeemaker, and this machine looked space-aged compared to the one at Captain Eightball’s.

  “I know how to make a killer milkshake,” I said, trying to make up for my recent coffee inexperience, then realized what I had just said. There was dead silence amongst the group, who were still watching my every move. And one of them coughed to try and break the awkward silence.

  “Back to work,” Reinhold reminded them again.

  One girl, a young woman named Celeste who was probably still in her teens, seemed particularly interested in me and what I was doing working there.

  “Hey, aren’t you Matt Foulkes’s sister?” she whispered while we set the back tables, out of earshot of Reinhold and Emma.

  Oh. I wasn’t sure how much personal information I should give out. “What it is to you?” I asked, immediately getting my back up.

  Celeste looked around, and I noticed that other members of the team were watching. Maybe someone else had put her up to this. “People are saying that he is the one who killed that guy with that milkshake, so we’d better watch out for you,” she said in a sly tone that I knew was meant to throw me.

  Well, now I was really wishing I hadn’t said the thing about the killer milkshake.

  And now I was really nervous. My hands were shaking as I set the cocktails down in front of my first customers. “I’m so sorry,” I said, apologizing for the liquid that had spilled over the side of the glass.

  The customer was a lady in her late thirties wearing a button-up blouse and blue jeans. Dressy but causal at the same time. �
��Oh, that’s quite okay dear,” she said with a laugh. She was good-natured and kind and said that she understood that it was my first shift. I only hoped that all my customers would be like that.

  But they weren’t, of course. The VRI had high standards and most of the customers couldn’t have cared less that it was my first shift. They expected me to know the menu by heart, to memorize orders and to know what regular customers wanted before they even ordered it, like I had worked there for years.

  And every table in the house was full. That meant that I didn’t just get to ‘shadow’ another waiter for my first shift—I had to just jump right in because they needed all hands on deck.

  “Is it always this busy?” I asked Celeste as she raced by with another plate.

  She actually shook her head. “Maybe it’s because this is still one of the only safe places to eat in Eden Bay.”

  Another dig. Great.

  I’d been run off my feet and it was 9pm before I even got a chance to go into the kitchen, which was near Reinhold’s office. I sidled up beside the ‘dish pig,’ who was named Craig—a very tall large man with curly hair and arms the size of logs—and took an extra-long time scraping the plate off into the bin.

  Reinhold was whispering something to Emma in his office and she was giggling.

  “What is up with the two of them?” I asked Craig.

  He shrugged and turned away from me, back to the steam of the hot tap. I got it. They were a close-knit circle and I was a newbie. They didn’t trust me to be part of their ranks yet. But something was clearly going on. The way Emma was giggling and flirting told me that this was not just a platonic employee/employer relationship.

  Reinhold caught me staring at them and glared at me. I quickly looked away and started scraping the already clean plate. Craig grabbed it off me and rolled his eyes before I scooted back out the front.