Hang Ten Australian Cozy Mystery Boxed Set

by Stacey Alabaster

  “Hmm,” he mused. “Sounds like this could be turned into a complete film series with sequel upon sequel.”

  I shrugged. “Maybe it would work better as a TV series.” And then I added, quietly, “Or just as a book series.” I looked up at him with heavy eyes. I really, really didn’t want him to go getting my hopes up. About anything. Did he get that?

  “Claire, I know you probably think I am just BS-ing you, but I am being serious. I don’t say things just because I like to hear the sound of my own voice.”

  I nodded. “I appreciate that, Michael”

  He hesitated for a moment. And then sighed, just a little. “I suppose there would be one problem, though.”

  Ugh. I knew it. There was always a problem, wasn’t there?

  “Just break it to me now,” I said. “Before I get too invested.”

  “Well…” He cleared his throat a little bit before he went on. “Since this morning, I have to admit that I have had some second thoughts about the two of us working together.”

  I could feel a little prickle at the base of my neck. Wow. Okay. I guess I really hadn’t impressed him that much after all.

  “Okay. Thanks for telling me the truth,” I said and returned to my steak, even though the nauseous feeling was starting to reappear.

  “No, no, Claire, you’ve misunderstood me,” he said with an uneasy little laugh and now it seemed like he was the one who was about to blush. “I just meant… I am not sure how professional it would be.” He held my gaze for the longest time so that I fully got the meaning of what he was saying.

  I finally broke eye contact and looked down into my food, trying not to smile. I was still feeling a little sick in the stomach, but this time in a good way. But it was all so confusing. An image of Matt fluttered across my mind. We were just so different, and Michael and I had so much in common. I took a deep breath. Matt and I were over.

  It seemed strange after the terrible start we had gotten off to, to have him sitting across the table from me like this, making me feel like this. And it also confused me.

  “So, what do we do?” I asked. I was fighting the smile still, not wanting to give too much away, but it came out, just a little at first, and then I could feel it breaking out all over my face. A sense of excitement built within my stomach. I normally didn’t throw caution to the wind and let myself fall for a guy so quickly—that was definitely more of an Alyson move—but something about him drew me in.

  “Well, first things first,” he said, staring into my eyes. “I think we should kiss.”

  “What, right here?” I blurted out, feeling a little shocked.

  “Why not?” he said with a grin.

  I wasn’t the sort of girl who would usually kiss a man in a restaurant. But something took over me and I leaned across, closed my eyes, and pressed my lips to his. And it felt right.

  Then I opened my eyes. A familiar face was staring at me from the other side of the bar.

  Matt had been watching.

  He threw down a tea-towel and stormed out.

  “Michael, I’m sorry! I’ll be right back!”

  I ran out after Matt. Even though we weren’t together anymore, I still cared for him, and that was a dumb and thoughtless thing to do right in front of him.

  “Matt, I thought it was your day off,” I tried to explain.

  “There are no days off at the moment, Claire. You ought to know that.”

  “I’m sorry, Matt. I shouldn’t have done that. But what are you getting so upset for? You and I broke up.”

  “I am just worried about you. You don’t even know that guy.” Matt pointed back towards the restaurant. “He is a surfer too, you know, and he was angry at Dan Millen the day he was killed. They were in a massive fight.”

  “What— What are you talking about Matt?”

  I wasn’t sure how he even knew any of this stuff and then I realized. It must have been Alyson. She must have been running her own investigation and found that out.

  “What do you know about him?” Matt asked. “Do you know that he makes movies?”

  “I know that he is a film producer,” I said. I knew that only too well.

  “Well, he wanted Dan Millen to give him the rights to his life story, so that they could make a movie about it. But Dan refused to do it. Michael was furious about it.”

  Oh gosh.

  They did share a cabin.

  But no, no, no. I couldn’t believe this was true. I couldn’t bear it. And so, to cover up my own fear and disappointment, I just stared at Matt and said, “You’re jealous, Matt. Making up stories is pretty pathetic. I’m just glad I’ve found someone now who wouldn’t act like that.”

  And then I walked away from him, pretending like I meant it, and went back inside to where Michael was waiting for me.

  Matt never came back inside that day.

  And that persistent phone call would not give up.

  After I was done eating, I finally answered it. “What?” I asked angrily. “Who is this?”

  Of course it was Alyson.

  We hadn’t spoken for a week. It was so strange to hear her voice.

  “I knew you wouldn’t answer on my number.”

  “Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t hang up on you right now on this one.”

  “Claire. Please. I really, really need your help.”

  Part II

  Alyson

  8

  There was something that Byron had said to me once, in one of our one-on-one sessions. “Ask for suffering and it will be removed.”

  “Huh?” I’d said at the time. I’d been to see her because I had just completely blown a surf competition and hadn’t even placed, and I was having what I could only describe as an existential crisis. “But if I am not a surfer, who am I?”

  She’d just shrugged in the peaceful Byron way she always did. “An artist? Or how about anything? Or how about nothing at all?”

  At the time, she had just sort of irritated me. I’d been suffering and she’d told me to ask for more of it? No thanks. I didn’t even understand. It just seemed like nonsense advice and usually Byron was so good at putting my mind at ease.

  But now I think I knew what she meant. Kinda. Sort of like, if you WANT the suffering and you get it, then that will make you happy because you got what you wanted and hence you wouldn’t suffer. That kind of thing always made my head spin. Maybe it was a maturity thing, but I was finally starting to see what she meant.

  And there was no time like the present to put my new Zen practice to use as I looked around my already messy living room. There was an overturned bag with all the contents strewn across my wooden floorboards. And there was the scent of cheap men’s deodorant filling the entire apartment. It got far worse and suffocating when my guest took out a can and sprayed it heavily all over his body. I had to run to the window and push it open. Deep breath, deep breath. The 100-degree air hit me in the face and all the cool air from my apartment left along with the deodorant fumes.

  Give me some more suffering!

  Well, I asked for this, didn’t it? Did that alone elevate it? I signed up at the town hall meeting and now Dan Millen was living with me and driving me bonkers. And it had only been an hour and a half. At first glance, I thought we were going to get along like great guns, but he was turning out to be a diva with high demands. He’d already asked me to freeze some ice for him and to carry his bags up the stairs for him—he claimed he couldn’t strain himself in case he injured himself before his big surf tour. I couldn’t believe it. I’d never carried bags for anyone in my life, let alone a grown man.

  “More ice than that,” he said with a frown as he saw me fill up one tray. “I need it for my ice packs as well as my drinks.”

  I slammed the freezer door shut. “Well, I will have to pick up some more trays at the store later. For now, this is all I have so you will have to just make do.”

  He cast an eye at my artwork on the wall and didn’t even bother asking if I was the o
ne who had painted them. But when he saw a couple of my surfboards—with my own designs on them—his face changed, and they took his full attention. “Nice setup,” he said, looking at them strangely.

  “Thanks,” I said, unsure of whether that was actually a compliment or not.

  He glanced at me over his shoulder. “How much do these go for?” he asked me. “You must be able to charge a pretty penny for them.”

  Again, it SOUNDED on the surface like a compliment, but he was almost accusing me of something. I just wasn’t quite sure what. I wondered if maybe he had seen my designs somewhere before, or if he knew about the offer I’d gotten to sell out to a major surf brand company. I hadn’t taken it in the end. Going international—and selling out in general—wasn’t really my vibe.

  I just shrugged it off. “Ah, I make a living from them, but that’s about it.” To be honest, I probably could have charged more for them, but I liked to keep the prices fair and my customers happy with their one-of-a-kind custom designs. Still, Dan kept staring at the boards, and it was making me feel uneasy.

  I tried to make conversation, but all I wanted was to be back on the beach—not babysitting my new house guest who was already complaining about the sofa and hinting that he should be the one to take the bed. You know, because he was a professional surfer and all. He only mentioned that fact every five seconds in case I forgot it.

  You would have thought he would be grateful to have somewhere to stay, but instead, he was rubbing at his shoulder again and now flat out telling me that he needed to be on a posture supported mattress. “You’ll be fine on the couch,” I said, unwilling to give him my bed. I don’t know why I was being so inhospitable. It wasn’t like me. It was just, after all that had gone down over the past year, and all the times I had been burned, I had become untrusting. Especially of strangers.

  Then again, sometimes you couldn’t even trust those closest to you. I’d learned that lesson as well. But right then, I was feeling pretty good and cozy in my life and those that were close to me. I had Claire, and Troy, and my bother Matt and my niece J and those were all the people I needed to rely on. I knew that none of them would ever betray me.

  I told Dan that I needed to get back to the beach to paint some more boards before the sun totally set. I’d already lost hours with this whole ‘adopt a passenger’ scheme that the mayor had guilted us all into. “You can come down to the beach with me and surf.”

  Dan glared at me. “I don’t need the practice, thanks very much. What I need is rest and a comfortable mattress.” He lay back on the couch and rolled his eyes.

  “Come on,” I said, feeling a little uneasy while I waited for him by the door. He wasn’t really just going to lay there and not move, was he?

  He sat up a little and stared at me. “You can leave me alone in the house. I’m not going to steal anything.”

  I glanced over at my surfboards and he caught me doing it. Whoops. “I’d rather you weren’t here alone while I’m out. You can come with me if you don’t want to surf and hang out for a little while…”

  “Don’t bother doing me the favor,” he said, pushing past me in a huff. “I got my own things going on.”

  Indeed, he did.

  But not for long.

  Those were the last words that Dan Millen ever said to me.

  The air inside the police station was so hot and suffocating that I felt like I was going to pass out. I was sure that they must have done that deliberately, but Wells just claimed that the air conditioning was broken. “There has been an enormous stretching of the town’s resources lately,” he said. “You may have noticed.” Then he looked at me pointedly as he took a seat across from me at the table, which was sticky for some reason. “Though there is one less person to worry about now.”

  Wow.

  I didn’t say anything. I didn’t have a lawyer with me—well, I didn’t have a lawyer at all—and I knew from past experience that when I tried to defend myself, I usually just ended up making things far worse.

  But of course something slipped out. Wells was antagonizing me—he always did that. Trying to make out that Dan Millen was some innocent angel who had never done anything wrong in his life. Well, I had only lived with him for just under two hours and believe me, I could tell you he was no angel. And not innocent either. “He stole from me!” I cried out, as though justice could still be done, as though Dan could still be held accountable for his actions. But my surfboard was laying at the bottom of the ocean. Another one, lost to the sea. “Am I ever going to get my property back or do the police just conveniently not care about that?”

  But Wells had one big question for me as he settled across from me. “Why would a pro surfer want to steal a surfboard?” It seemed like a real question too, like he couldn’t quite wrap his head around it.

  I shrugged. There were plenty of reasons that people stole things that had nothing to do with money, and Wells should have known that. Maybe he was losing it a bit, forgetting things, forgetting how human nature operated. Too much time on the force was turning his brain to mush.

  “Maybe to teach me a lesson,” I grumbled. Which was the real reason I thought Dan did it.

  Wells’s ears pricked up this. Even though everything we said was being recorded, he was still scrawling little notes in a notebook. But he stopped his pen and looked up at me. “Why would he want to do that, Miss Foulkes?”

  “Because he thought I didn’t trust him. I wouldn’t leave him alone with my stuff, with my boards in the house. It’s like he was just mocking me.” I frowned and thought about it. The way that he had looked at my boards in such a strange way. Something just wasn’t right there.

  There was just the slightest hint of a smile forming at the edges of Wells’s lips. “So that must have made you pretty angry,” he said. “It’s very irritating when people purposely try to annoy you.”

  I glared at him and pointedly said, “Oh yes. It’s VERY irritating when people try to purposefully antagonize you.” Because I knew exactly what he was doing. This wasn’t my first rodeo. It certainly wasn’t my first time in this police station either. And Wells and I had a long and storied history. I wondered if this was going to be the final chapter. I made up my mind that as soon as I was allowed to leave, I would never be back in that place ever again. And I would never have to deal with Wells ever again.

  But the look on Wells’s face was only growing smugger and smugger. He wasn’t letting me go anywhere.

  “Seems to me, Miss Foulkes, as though you are the only one with both the motive and the opportunity to have killed Mr. Millen.”

  “You would love it if I did this, wouldn’t you?” I asked him, staring back up at him defiantly. “All this time, you’ve wanted to put me away, and this would just be neat and tidy for you.” I raised an eyebrow and leaned back. “But if you ask me, all this is doing is showing a complete lack of imagination. You’re just pinning it on the easiest target so that you can get an early night and get home to your rose garden.”

  “All I am interested in doing is arresting the guilty party,” he said, his face turning red as he tried to back up and compose himself. Take back control of the situation. But some of the fight had gone out of him. He looked deflated. Even his chest looked flatter. It was very strange. I wasn’t sure it was just me that had rattled him, though. Something else had gotten to him.

  He coughed to clear his throat, which also gave him in a second to get some control back. He picked his pen back up and glanced through his notes. “I suppose you are right, Miss Foulkes. After all, there is someone else who had opportunity, and possibly even motive, tonight.”

  I was confused. “Who?” I asked, already hating that I was engaging with this conversation. My tactic had been to remain quiet and now all I was doing was talking like a regular little Chatty Cathy.

  “Claire Elizabeth Richardson,” he said flatly. “She was on the boat with you, wasn’t she? And she is a close friend of yours. She might have been almost as angry as y
ou were that your property was being stolen from you.”

  I shook my head. There was no way that Claire could have done it. The idea was actually pretty laughable. She wasn’t strong enough, for one thing. That was probably the main thing, actually. But secondly, she was too cool calm and collected. Even if she didn’t have skinny little spaghetti arms, she didn’t have the temperament to kill. At least not in the heat of the moment like that. She didn’t get angry. She got cold. If Dan had turned up poisoned two weeks later, then MAYBE I would have suspected Claire. But even then, no. There was no way my best friend was capable of anything like that.

  But it was strange… My recollection of what had happened on that ship was foggy. Wells asked me again what I had seen. I just shrugged and said nothing. I didn’t want to tell him anything anyway. I’d heard footsteps, that was it. Then I’d seen Dan go over the side of the ship.

  But there had been that gas leak.

  And I really couldn’t fully remember.

  All I knew for certain was that I hadn’t been the one to hit Dan on the head and push him overboard.

  Right?

  I didn’t even want to think about that, so I quickly straightened up and asked Wells if he was actually going to charge me with anything or whether I was free to go. “I mean, you don’t have any actual proof that I might be guilty, do you?”

  He didn’t reply right away, and that was what tipped me off. That was what made me realize that he WAS losing it in his middle age. Not as sharp a young cop as he had once been. Because he was trying a new tactic—only he blew his own bluff by not delivering it confidently enough. “You know that friend of yours is telling us some very interesting things.” He nodded to the room next door. “In fact, before I came in to have this chat with you, she told me that you were angry with Dan. And that she saw you running after him.”

  I leaned back again and took this all in. I was slightly concerned, but more than that, I was highly skeptical, so I just held Well’s gaze. That couldn’t possibly be true. I was ninety-percent sure that I was the first of us to be interviewed, for one thing. Secondly, Claire had no idea that Dan and I hadn’t gotten along back at my apartment. I’d been too busy to tell her and even if I’d had time, I wouldn’t have bothered because she already knew that I wasn’t happy about the adopt-a-stranger program. No point to complain about it anymore than I already had.