Hang Ten Australian Cozy Mystery Boxed Set

by Stacey Alabaster

  She didn’t pick up.

  Maybe she didn’t know it was the most important thing to me, then. Or maybe she just didn’t care.

  “J, we need to go!” I called out and strode away from the shop in a bad mood.

  And this time, I knew that there was someone following me. I heard the footsteps. Not heels, though.

  Boots.

  12

  “Wow. I didn’t know that police were supposed to kidnap people,” I said sarcastically, and then had a real worry pop into my head. “Wait. Am I under arrest?” I mean, I hadn’t been cuffed or anything, but maybe this was the new way they were doing it these days.

  Wells gripped the steering wheel as he pointed the car out of town. I’d been inside the car for ten minutes. I’d just dropped J off at Matt’s place and I’d been leaving down his driveway when I’d felt the arms around me again and I’d been pushed into the passenger seat of Wells’s Volvo. “I don’t have the power to arrest anyone right now. Even if I wanted to.”

  “Huh?” I asked, hanging on to the door handle as we took a sharp turn. He was driving fast, as though we were being chased and this was a getaway car.

  “Suspended.” He was breathing a little shallowly, and I could suddenly see how bloodshot his eyes were. I wondered if he had even slept the night before. He was wired, overtired, disgraced. Definitely not happy.

  “So you’re kidnapping me?” I asked in disbelief. “You really think that will get you reinstated on the force?” I tried to pull the door handle, but I couldn’t get it loose. And anyway, what was I going to do? Roll out the door on the side of the busy highway?

  “I’m not kidnapping you,” he said in a slow and steady voice that almost made me believe him. At least, that was what his deliberate tone of voice was trying to convince me. “You can leave now if you want. I’ll pull over.” It was like the time a few nights before when he had grabbed me at Troy’s place. Afterwards, he had seemed to regret it. But he was a man acting out of desperation. “It’s just that you weren’t returning my messages or answering my calls. It was getting frustrating.”

  Yeah, well, I knew how frustrating that could be. But it wasn’t like I was stalking Claire and kidnapping her just because she refused to talk to me. Though I did understand the urge.

  I stopped pulling on my seatbelt and crossed my arms as we left Eden Bay. The sign I had painted—a mermaid with long, purple hair—waved good-bye to us as we took the turn-off. I knew I wasn’t supposed to leave town. But I also wasn’t supposed to ring Claire either and I’d already broken that rule. To be honest, breaking rules kind of gave me a little thrill. And anyway, by that stage, I was happy to leave Eden Bay behind. At least for a while.

  “At least I won’t have to wear a disguise here,” he said as we took the turn-off into Rushcutter’s Cove. “And you won’t have to either. Might be a nice change for you.”

  “Yeah, except for the fact that my parents live here,” I said, shooting him a look out of the corner of my eye.

  “Oh. I didn’t know that.”

  Nope, he wouldn’t have bothered to do his basic research. He really was losing it. I smiled to myself a little as we entered the town and pulled into a parking lot. My smile faded when I realized that I really didn’t want to run into my parents, so the joke would actually be on me if we did.

  But luckily, there was no sign of my parents inside the restaurant Wells had chosen. It was a Friday, so they were probably doing the weekly grocery shop. Fridays had been ‘errands day’ for as long as I could remember.

  The restaurant was fairly full but compared to how packed all the shops and cafes in Eden Bay had been, it seemed like a desert in comparison. I felt like I could breathe for the first time in a while.

  We mutually agreed on a table in the back that had no view and was relatively dark. The waitress seemed surprised.

  Wells seemed more settled now that we were in a different town and were out of sight of prying eyes. He told me this was all off the record. Well, considering that he was no longer a cop, I would assume so. But that still didn’t mean I was going to spill anything to him.

  “So what really happened that night on the ship?” he asked me once our meals had arrived.

  I stared at him with my fork of pasta in my hand. I’d ordered the pesto.

  “I told you in my interview. I don’t know.”

  He rolled his eyes in frustration. “Alyson, we have to work together now. Don’t think of me as a cop right now.”

  Sure. I’d just think of him as a kidnapper then. Easy. “What, you think I’m holding back secret information from you? You think I lied to the police?”

  He smiled at me a little. “You have to admit that you were obstinate. Not exactly forthcoming.”

  I was about to argue with that, but I stopped. Well, that may have been a little true.

  I sighed a little. So much of it had happened in a blur. I remembered being flat-out shocked that Dan was stealing my surfboard and that kind of clouded my thoughts. But my shock had quickly been replaced by anger when I’d realized he was running away from me and it wasn’t just a prank. At the time, I thought that he was just doing it to taunt me. Because we hadn’t gotten along at the apartment. But what if there had been more to it than that?

  “Didn’t you have any hesitancy about getting on the ship with the gas leak?” Wells asked in a genuine tone, like he really couldn’t believe I would risk my life and safety just for a board. And he sounded almost—almost—impressed that I had risked it.

  “Not really,” I said, sticking my fork back into my pasta. “I was just acting on instinct, you know?”

  “The ship could have blown up.”

  I laughed a little. “Yeah, well, see, if I’d stopped and thought about that, I never would have gone on board. Sometimes thinking less can be a good thing.”

  He just looked at me.

  I put my fork down. “Okay. I get it. It gets me in trouble. It GOT me in trouble. Clearly.”

  But he still seemed to admire my gumption. Just a little bit. Maybe he needed a little bit of that himself now that he had been expelled.

  “It’s just temporary,” he pointed out to me. “I’ll be reinstated once this is all sorted out. Once we prove that we got the right guy the first time.”

  We would see if that turned out to be the case.

  “Still. Maybe you can think a little less now and feel a little bit more going forward. Especially now that you are suspended. Turn off your brain for a while.”

  But he didn’t seem to like the sound of that plan. “We can help each other, Alyson.”

  “Why are you so determined to get back onto a force that would discard you so easily?” I asked. It was a very good question too, and it took him a moment or two to answer.

  “I might be getting older, Alyson. But this isn’t the way I want to go out.”

  Sure. That made sense. But still. I sighed and went back to my story. “I followed Dan onto the boat. I didn’t see where he went, not exactly, but I was pretty sure I was still on the same level as him, the one with the dining room.”

  “And you didn’t hear anyone else? See anyone else?”

  I shook my head. “Well, except Claire. I heard her footsteps behind me.”

  Wells frowned. “Did you see her?”

  I thought about that. “Well, no. But who else could they have belonged to?”

  He put his fork down. “Well, Alyson, that is the million-dollar question. That is what we are all trying to figure out.”

  We were just paying the bill and Wells was taking his time to pay the cheque. I almost felt bad that I couldn’t give him more information. “I suppose I ought to drive you home,” he said.

  But I was in no real rush to get back to Eden Bay. Neither was Wells.

  I also didn’t really want to get back into the cars with Wells. Sure, he said he’d take me home, but what if he decided to kidnap me and take me even further south this time? I hadn’t packed my bags for cold weather. />
  We exited the restaurant and I told him I’d catch the train back.

  Oh. Great. My mum.

  She was coming up the side of the sidewalk and by the time I’d seen her, it was too late to duck and hide. She’d already seen me.

  “Alyson!” She rushed up to me, looking astonished. “Do you know what all the papers are saying about you?”

  “What, is there something new?” I asked with a laugh. I didn’t even bother to introduce her to Wells because she barely even seemed to notice he was there. She was busy telling me in a VERY ‘concerned mother voice’ about all the trouble she was having trying to decipher what the newspapers had to say.

  She told me that there was another article about how Claire and I had conspired together to cover up the identity of the real killer. I interrupted her.

  “Yeah, Mum, that’s just what we have been doing all this time! Hiding the real killer. I keep him in my basement except that he escaped the other day and killed again.”

  She had absolutely no sense of humor about the subject. “Alyson, this is serious.”

  “Mum, I’m getting a phone call…” I could feel the vibration and reached into my bag with excitement, thinking that Claire was finally calling me back.

  Oh. It was Rachael, the editor of the Eden Bay Journal.

  “I can run your side of the story, Alyson, if you want to give it to me.”

  I hung up the phone. My mum’s face was worried—she’d heard some of what Rachael had said. About how if I didn’t give MY side, she was going to go with an angle of her own—that Claire and I were both guilty.

  I glanced over at Wells. I’d always said that if I was pushed to it, if I really, really had to, if it came down to either Claire or I, then I would have to do what was right by my family.

  “Alyson, you have J to think about now,” my mum said, pleading with me. “What is she going to do if she doesn’t have a parent left to look after her?”

  I knew what mum was saying. I understood. J had to come first.

  But could I really do it? Could I really turn on my best friend?

  13

  “I don’t see why you need to hide out here!” Mum said as she handed me an iced tea but at the same time glared at the way I was sitting. She didn’t like feet on the furniture and, so she shooed my feet away from the coffee table where I just had my foot rested against the edge—not even the full way on. “Now your name is in the clear, you can show your face again!”

  Well, not exactly in the clear. I’d just deflected the blame onto someone else. That hadn’t exactly made me sleep easily the night before. I didn’t even want the chance that I would run into Princess. At least in Rushcutter’s Bay, there would be no chance.

  My phone was ringing. I was scared to even take the call in case Troy was going to give me a hard time for throwing Claire under the bus. I answered, still sprawled out on the sofa like a teenager, with a very unsure, “Hello?”

  “You did what you had to do,” he said simply.

  “You really believe that?” I asked him. I sat up a little straighter.

  Troy answered back right away. He sounded confident. “I mean, she probably is guilty, right?”

  Well, I wasn’t sure, but I was starting think that was the most logical explanation. And maybe that realization was what was really weighing me down. “She was the only other person on the boat,” I said heavily. “Even with her skinny arms, in a moment of anger, she could have been capable of it. It’s always the cool, calm ones that you have to be careful of.”

  But then, if she’d only killed Dan because she was angry at him for sealing my board, if she was only being a good, loyal friend, then what kind of friend was I for saying those things? I hung up the phone and settled back there on the couch. And didn’t move for the rest of the day. I felt like I was a teenager again, chucking a ‘sick day’ and telling mum that I had a stomachache and couldn’t go to school because I had a test that I didn’t want to take. Then I’d spend the whole day watching daytime TV—soap operas and talk shows and cooking shows—and mum would bring me Vegemite toast and lemonade, even though I actually felt completely fine.

  Mum and Dad had gone to bed hours before, and they’d told me to only have the TV volume on at a low level. “Surely you’ve watched enough by now,” Mum had admonished. There was some old sitcom playing, and I was almost about to doze off when I heard a knock on the door.

  Oh great, I thought. Wells, back again. He really needed to get back to Eden Bay and stop stalking me. What had he been doing, just surveilling the house all day?

  “Hello?” I called out, shivering as I opened the door and stared out into the black night. I couldn’t see anyone and started to think that it was just a branch against the door. Well, hoped that it was just a branch against the door.

  This time, it definitely wasn’t Wells.

  It was Anna, an old acquaintance. Her hair was so black that it actually picked up the glint of the moonlight and looked almost blue. She was my age, roughly, late twenties, but she still dressed like a teenage skater. Well, she was a skater. She was always better friends with Claire than she was with me, but we did get along okay, even if she was a bit surly and brattish.

  “What are you doing?” I cried out, not terribly thrilled to see her. “It’s kinda creepy to just knock on people’s doors in the middle of the night.”

  “Saw ya out and about town yesterday. Figured you would still be here.”

  Great. I should have known that I would be spotted by someone I knew. Rushcutter’s was even smaller than Eden Bay

  “What do you want, Anna?”

  She scuffed her toe a little, and I stepped outside so that we wouldn’t wake my parents. “There have been some rumors down at The Horseshoe.”

  That was a bar she hung out at in Eden Bay, even though she lived in Rushcutter’s Cove. It was local haunt popular with surfers and skaters.

  “What kind of rumors?” I asked, interested.

  “Look at this,” she said, bringing something up on her phone. It was one of those buy/trade/swap sites, and she had the location setting to show only things for sale in the Eden Bay/Rushcutter’s area. She showed me a recent listing from the day that the ship had docked in Eden Bay.

  “Someone was scalping their ticket?” I asked, squinting to look at the screen. There was a ticket offered for $4000 for anyone who wanted to board at Eden Bay. I was surprised that they would fetch that much for them, given the gas leak, but I knew that people really wanted to get on that cruise.

  “Yep.”

  “It seems kind of opportunistic,” I said. That was a lot of money to try and swindle from someone.

  Anna nodded and put her phone back into the pocket of her hoodie. “But the rumor was that whoever ‘sold’ the ticket sold it to multiple people. And got the money off all of them. But didn’t actually give any of them a ticket.”

  Whoa.

  “So whoever did this was scamming people?” I asked. I seemed to be demanding answers out of Anna as though she actually possessed all of them. I figured she must know more than what she was saying if she was there on my parent’s doorstep, clearly wanting help from me.

  She shrugged. “Well, they were committing a crime, that’s for sure.”

  “What else do you know?”

  I knew that a lot of shady things went down in The Horseshoe, and Anna was privy to a lot of them, but she wasn’t being forthcoming. She just stared at me and then said that her info couldn’t be attained cheaply.

  “Don’t tell me you are trying to exhort me,” I said. “You are just as bad as the person who was ‘selling’ this ticket if you are trying to do that.”

  She pouted a little and shoved her hands in her pockets. “I just don’t want to be a snitch, that’s all.”

  “Anna. If Dan was the one who was doing this, then that is a pretty good reason for someone to want him dead. This is important.”

  “I know,” she said, looking at her sneakers. “That’s wh
y I’m here, isn’t it? I just don’t want to be a snitch.”

  “I won’t tell anyone that I spoke to you.”

  She sighed. “The listing didn’t have any real identifying details. But word in The Horseshoe was that the person who made the listing is called Michael. He was a surfer…”

  I already knew exactly who she was referring to. I could hear footsteps coming down the stairway inside and knew that we had woken up Mum—and she wouldn’t be happy. “Thanks, Anna. I’ve got it from here.”

  “Mum, go back to bed! It’s okay. It’s nothing!”

  “It’s not that police fella is it…”

  But I’d already closed the door. She was worried about me. Worried I was going to get into trouble. I told her again to go back to sleep and promised I would turn off the TV and get some sleep myself.

  Michael. I’d known that guy was bad news.

  I wondered whether I should share this information with Wells. But he wasn’t on the force anymore. And I wasn’t sure how—or even if—this was connected to the death of Dan Millen yet.

  If only I’d never spoken to the paper about Claire. She might actually pick up the phone and we might have been able to work together. But for the time being, it was going to have to be me…solo. And I was going to have to take the train back to Eden Bay.

  14

  The train was swaying back and forth, already moving while I tried to find a place to sit.

  I spotted an old friend of mine. My tutor, Maria. I waved in relief and unsteadily made my way down the carriage towards her.

  “Oh, Alyson!” she said, fanning herself with a fan with one hand and holding a book with the other, which she quickly hid from me. She seemed a little embarrassed about what she had been caught reading. Though the truth was that I hadn’t even taken any notice UNTIL she seemed embarrassed about it, and then I took a good look at a cover. There was a man with a bare chest and a man-bun, and he was casting a sultry gaze towards a blonde in a low plunging white dress.