Bodies on the Beach (Hang Ten Australian Cozy Mystery Book 1)

by Stacey Alabaster

  “Ta-da.” Alyson pointed proudly to her display. There were eight or nine surfboards spread out on gigantic beach towels. Some were display only, just so she could showcase her design talent. Some were actually for sale. Of course, like everything else in this town, they were underpriced.

  The designs were a little…psychedelic for my tastes. Why use one or two colors when you could use several dozen, right? There were a lot of crazy patterns. And a lot of swirling sunsets in pinks and oranges. I preferred cooler colors. Blues, purples. And if I ever decided to surf again, I would get one that was painted gold. “If,” but there wasn’t much chance of me ever getting in the waves again.

  I realized there was no one else around. “Who’s been watching these?” I asked curiously as I glanced around the almost empty beach. Surely Alyson had left her brother Matt in charge of her ‘store’ while she had been finding me. Matt Faulks. Geez. I hadn’t thought about that name in years. Matt was a year above us at school and one of the best surfers in the entire state. He was friendly toward me but always treated me like a kid, even though I was only a year younger. At the time, I’d thought he was the coolest guy alive. Not that I’d never admitted that to Alyson. She would have teased me and said I’d had a crush on him. I didn’t, of course.

  Alyson acted as though I had just asked a very silly question. “No one.”

  “You just leave these here all day?” I asked, aghast. The combined cost of all the surfboards would have added up to a few thousand dollars.

  Alyson shrugged a little. “Sure. There’s no crime here in Eden Bay.”

  “Ummm.” She was kidding me, right? I mean, she did kind of have the memory of a goldfish and lived in three-second intervals which then reset. But surely even Alyson Faulks couldn’t have forgotten that a murder had taken place on the beach three hours earlier.

  “Right.” She gulped. “Until today.”

  “Did you know him?” I asked, staring at the sand.

  I could see Alyson’s shadow. She was nodding. “His name was Adrian. He was a member at the surf club.”

  I shivered as a wave came crashing in. “Is this what you wanted to show me then? Your designs?”

  Alyson nodded a little, nudging one of the surfboards with the toe of her bare foot. “Claire, this murder is going to be really bad for my business.”

  I thought ‘business’ was a pretty generous term for leaving surfboards laying around on the beach all day. As she nudged another board, I saw a ‘half price special’ sign come loose. Geez. Didn’t anyone in this town have any sense of how to make money?

  “How will it be bad?” I asked her.

  “Didn’t you see the beach earlier?” Alyson asked me. “There were crowds and reporters everywhere. Tomorrow, it’s just going to get worse.”

  I was confused. “I would have thought that more crowds equaled more money?”

  Alyson sighed stubbornly. “I don’t want grubby reporters buying my designs, do I? I have a loyal local customer base here. They are going to get scared off. Especially if this town becomes a tourist attraction for all the wrong reasons.”

  Why was she getting so desperate and upset about this? “But tourists want to buy surfboards as well,” I pointed out. Surely she didn’t care who she got the money from as long as she got it? Then again, who knew what went on in Alyson’s head.

  “And what kind of ‘tourists’ will the town have now?” she asked defensively. Out of character for her. “No. This will ruin the town. We’ll get a bad reputation. Everything will go downhill.”

  I couldn’t help thinking there was more to the story. Such as, the reason I was needed.

  “I still don’t know what you’ve dragged me down here for…” I looked over my shoulder. I could see the neon sign of the motel I was staying at flashing. The Dolphin (F)Inn. Not exactly a five-star resort, but the only place that had any rooms available. I’d gotten lucky. Alyson was right—by tomorrow, there wouldn’t even be a space to park a caravan.

  Alyson was acting a little bit sheepish. “I know you need to be back in Sydney by tonight.”

  I tore my eyes away from the motel. “Er, that’s right. Yes.”

  “But do you think you could stick around for a little bit longer?” She looked at me with pleading eyes. Wow. Not what I had expected her to say. I thought she’d be as eager to see me go as I was to leave.

  Did she want to hang out? Be friends again? For a second, I considered it. “Why would I stick around?” I asked uncertainly.

  Alyson took a step closer, sinking into the sand as she went. That mischievous look was back in her eyes. “Because I need you to find out who killed Adrian.”

  Um. Okay. What? My head was spinning from this request. “And how am I supposed to do that, exactly?” I asked with an amazed laugh.

  “Because, Claire, you’re the expert!”

  Wow. Okay. That was news to me. I had to take a few moments for this news to sink in. Did she for some reason think that I had moved to Sydney to become a detective? Or maybe she thought I had moved to Sydney to start a new life as a serial killer. Sometimes it was difficult to know what was going on inside her brain.

  “You are going to have to explain this one to me, Alyson.” I braced myself. Alyson was not exactly known for her logical trains of thought. She was the kind of person who said something, and then in the middle of the sentence, suddenly thought of something else, then went off on a tangent, leaving the other person with vertigo while they struggled to follow what she was saying.

  “What is it that you love the most?” Alyson asked. “Besides leaving your home town and all your friends behind. Oh, and money, of course… I am only joking!” she quickly added when I got heated up. Sure. She said it in a way that sounded like a joke, but I knew she wasn’t joking. Not deep down. Alyson could shake things off when she wanted. And she could also hold onto things like a dog with a bone.

  “Okay, I am leaving,” I said, grabbing my shoes and heading for the safe, dry footpath that would lead me back to the motel. I’d have to wait till Alyson had her back turned before I headed in that direction of course. But I was leaving.

  Alyson grabbed my arm. “Okay, okay. Forget that. Come on. It was a serious question. What do you love the most?”

  I sighed. “I don’t have time to play guessing games.”

  She sighed. “You love murder mysteries!” she exclaimed. “Well, reading them anyway.” She seemed incredibly satisfied with this statement. There was a glint in her eyes and I could tell she thought she’d just had the best idea ever. This was a child’s logic, though! I like reading murder mysteries, so I must be great at solving them?

  “Alyson, just because I used to love murder mysteries does not mean that I know how to find out who killed Adrian.”

  “Of course you do. Just take what you have learned from books and apply it here! Come on, Claire. You were always the brainy one. Mister Carbonetti loved you, always said you were the best student in English class.”

  Ha. She was jealous. Always had been.

  I shuffled my feet in the sand for a moment. “What is it that you expect me to actually do?”

  “Help me,” she begged. “Stay in town until we can figure out who killed Adrian, and stop them from doing it again.

  I shook my head. “This is absurd, Alyson. I’m leaving now. Like I told you, I have to be back in Sydney tonight.”

  “So that’s it?” Alyson called after me. “You’re just leaving again, just like that?”

  I looked over my shoulder for a moment while I returned my shoes to my feet. “Yes.”

  4

  Alyson

  Even the ‘touristy’ part of the beach seemed wild and windy that night, as though reeds had sprung up from nowhere and were suddenly being blown back and forth. The sky was no longer pink, it was blood orange. But this was the true calm before the storm. I knew what would happen the next day—I’d wake up and the incident would be all over the national newspapers as I ate my breakfast. Not
that I ever read the newspaper. Or ate breakfast. You know what I mean, though. Nothing would ever be the same.

  I stomped back up the sand. How could Claire just refuse to help like that? She probably just didn’t want to get her designer clothes dirty! Typical. Refusing to help anyone she thought was ‘below’ her. Which was everyone these days.

  If I could just convince her to stay and help, to put that brain of hers to good use, then maybe I could stop all the bad things from happening to the town. All the things that a murder investigation in Eden Bay would bring. Claire could help if she really wanted to. It was just that she didn’t.

  Well, she was heading back to Sydney anyway. There was no point in getting all worked up about it now.

  I sat down on the pier and furrowed my brow for a moment while I looked back at the waves. Hmm. Maybe I didn’t need Claire. A new plan started to come to me. Ha! Just because Claire had been the brain at school didn’t mean she was now! Maybe I could be just as smart as she was.

  All I needed was access to the one thing she had.

  The bookshop was closed and locked up. I pressed my face to the window for the second time that day. I probably hadn’t set foot inside a bookshop, or a library, since I was at high school and even then, I’d always had to be dragged there by Claire. I was happy to just miss an essay due date or not hand in an assignment all together—who cared about the consequences or a few “Fs” on my report card? But Claire always worried that my failing a subject reflected badly on her as my best friend, so she’d always pulled me into the library when I didn’t want to be there. And admittedly, there had been quite a few times when she had helped me with a book report or a difficult assignment, and even done some of the hard parts for me.

  And, of course, there had been the times where we had hung out in her grandma’s bookstore after work, with Claire reading and me sitting on the front counter, counting down the minutes till we could leave and I could catch a wave. Back in those days, Mable had never locked the door. And she’d never had a problem leaving two young girls in charge.

  I pulled on the door just a few times to make sure. Darn. I didn’t know why it was even locked anyway, it wasn’t like there were any break-ins in Eden Bay. Probably just Claire being overly paranoid. Or city life had gotten to her. Made her think that everyone was out to steal from her.

  I spotted the cat door. I couldn’t…could I?

  Well. I couldn’t.

  But I knew someone who could.

  “J is already in bed,” Matt said groggily as he scratched his head. He looked like I just woke him from a deep sleep. Strange—Matt was usually a bit of a night owl. Even when he had an early morning wave to catch, he’d usually just stay up all night, surf, and then sleep till mid-afternoon.

  “Oh, please,” I begged, even holding my hands up in a pleading way. “Just wake her up. Just this once. It’s really important, Matt.”

  He shook his head, his messy shoulder-length hair swaying from side to side. “She has school in the morning!”

  “Eh, she can take the day off.” No big deal.

  He shook his head. “I hate it when you make me be the responsible one, Y. No, she can’t just take the day off school. You know her teacher will get on our back about it.”

  Sure. She’d already missed two days that month and Miss Pearl had wrung both Matt and I when we hadn’t produced a note from the doctor providing a reason why. But that was because J had been faking a fever to get out of having to do a presentation and the doctor had refused to give her a medical note. Which I thought was a little unfair. I also thought it was unfair that Miss Pearl made the shyer students do presentations when they didn’t want to. And I’d told her that. I wasn’t Miss Pearl’s favorite ‘parent’ to have to deal with.

  But I wasn’t going to take no for an answer right then.

  “Come on, Matt!” I whispered. “This is an emergency!”

  J shook her head and looked down at the door I was pointing at. “I can’t believe you’re asking me to do this,” she said, shaking her head at me. She’d been a bit grumpy when I’d shaken her awake, sure, but when she’d heard that I’d needed her for a caper and that she could have the next day off school as a reward, she’d sprung out of bed and raced for the front door. But that was all before she’d found out I wanted her to crawl through a cat door.

  I snatched the backward baseball cap off her head. “You’re the only one of us small enough to get inside! So, go for it!”

  I kept watch out front while J went inside to get the books. I’d told her to keep a look for the murder mystery section, which I thought was on the top level, and to grab as many as her arms could carry. In the meantime, I would make sure no one sprung us. Matt had already told me that if anyone asked about it, he knew nothing, that I’d taken J of my own accord and told Matt nothing about what I was up to. Even though I had told him the entire plan with great excitement.

  But we were just borrowing a few books, weren’t we? That was hardly an arrestable offense. In regard to the breaking and entering… Well, we weren’t breaking anything. J was just ‘entering’ through a cat door. It was perfectly reasonable to claim that she mistook it for a child’s door, and that any child was allowed and encouraged to enter.

  I let my mind wander to the thing that was both large in my brain and difficult to think about. I had no idea who in this town would want Adrian dead. He’d always been a mate of mine, even though we’d never been super close. Adrian had always kept the other surfers at the surf club kind of at arm’s length. I think it was because he was known as the ‘best’ of all the local surfers and some people could kinda get jealous of him. They treated him differently. Like he was above them, or some sort of threat to them, and it created a distance between him and the others.

  That said, he was always friendly, helping out for free at the surf club when we needed volunteers to run the kiosk. And he even babysat for J occasionally when both Matt and I were busy. It still hadn’t sunk in that he was gone.

  I heard a familiar voice call my name “Alyson?”

  It was Mr. Carbonetti. Yikes. He’d caught me daydreaming. Worse than that, he’d caught me keeping guard while…

  Oh, shoot. I felt like I was about to get a schoolyard detention. I placed J’s cap on my own head and tried to act all casual. Luckily, it was fairly dark inside the bookshop, so if he looked inside, he hopefully wouldn’t see anything.

  He told his dog to sit and the poodle listened, though it gave me a suspicious look. “What are you doing out here so late?” Mr. Carbonetti asked curiously. It had been almost a decade since I’d been in school, but I couldn’t remember what his first name was.

  The teenage me reared her ugly head. Why did I have to answer to him? Suddenly, I was back on the oval of Eden Bay High…I never liked the way the teachers had talked down at us, and all the arbitrary rules that we had to follow but they didn’t. “I could ask you the same question.” I raised my eyebrows.

  He seemed a bit amused by that. To be fair, Mr. Carbonetti was one of the better teachers at Eden Bay High. He was young and understood what the kids were going through. He never lauded his power over us and he only doled out detentions for serious crimes like smoking or getting into a fight. Some teachers would give you a detention just for looking at them the wrong way during class. “Well, yes, that’s quite true.”

  Just when I thought I was about to get rid of him, there was movement inside the shop and Mr. Carbonetti caught it. J was making her way down the stairs and I saw she had her arms full of books. Which was good. But bad.

  “Probably just the cat running around in there,” I said, moving to my left to block Mr. Carbonetti’s line of sight.

  He looked down at the cat door and then back up again, peering through the window. J ducked behind a bookshelf, but she wasn’t quick enough and Mr. Carbonetti had spotted her.

  He was pulling his phone out of his trouser pockets before I even had a chance to explain. “I am going to tell Claire al
l about this!”

  “No point,” I said, shrugging like I just didn’t care. “She’s already back in Sydney!”

  “No, she’s not,” he said as he held the phone up to his ear. I was confused as I listened in to the call. I heard Claire’s voice on the other end. “Yes. Just up the road at the motel…”

  Right. So she hadn’t gone back to Sydney at all. She was staying at the Dolphin (F)Inn. I could feel my cheeks burning.

  It didn’t take her long to arrive. She was barefaced this time, and her glam hair was tied back in a ponytail. She was wearing jeans and a tee. She almost looked like the Claire I used to know. Almost. “I’ll take it from here, Mister Carbonetti,” she said, barely giving me a glance. Like the two ‘adults’ were talking about the naughty child standing right here. And I didn’t mean J, who was standing, sullen, beside me. I meant me.

  “Gosh, I think you can call me Nello now after all these years,” he said

  Nello? That was his first name? Claire thanked him again, and him and his poodle were on their way while I stood there defiant, my arms still crossed. Once again, I was in trouble.

  “Why did you lie to me?” I asked, wanting to get the first word in. “Why did you tell me you were going back to Sydney when you are still here?”

  “Why did you break into my shop?” Claire was livid. “You’re lucky I don’t call the police right here and now…”

  “I just wanted to borrow a couple of books, that’s all.” J had them in her hands. She held them out to me, but Claire snatched them off her.

  “I think these belong to me,” she said sternly.

  “Sorry,” J said contritely, sounding very sorry for herself indeed. I reached out and pulled her in for a hug.

  “Hey, this isn’t your fault, kiddo. The blame is fully on me.”

  “Oh, I realize that,” Claire said. “Stealing is a crime, Alyson.”

  “Well, I would have asked to take them if I’d realized you were still here, wouldn’t I? I thought you’d gone back to Sydney. I don’t have your phone number…”