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 why 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.
Romance.
I shrugged. “Nothing to be ashamed of…” I knew that they were pretty much Claire’s biggest selling genre in her shop.
“Well, I figured since I am your English tutor that I should have reading taste that is a little more highbrow,” Maria said with a small laugh. “At least in public.”
I had actually been reading quite a bit lately. Not romance, but the classics. I was finally reading the book version of Picnic At Hanging Rock after years of it being one of my favorite films. I took a seat next to Maria and told her that I had been choosing my classes for the autumn semester and that I was not only taking two English classes as electives but that I was actually going to choose it as my major.
But I was still going to take a few business classes. After all, I did run a business. And it had taken a few knocks recently. I still had a lot to learn.
But Maria was beaming at me when she heard the news. “Well, well, well. I am mighty proud of you, Alyson. Can I take some of the credit for this?”
I laughed and leaned my head back against the plush seat cover. “You can take most of the credit, I think. I never even would have been accepted to the university if it wasn’t for you. I owe you a lot, Maria.”
Claire would also claim that she had a lot to do with my conversion to a book lover, but the truth was it was more my style to do exactly the opposite of what Claire wanted me to do, so I was pretty sure most of my change of heart was thanks to Maria.
Maria looked a little wistful. “I wish Claire felt the same way. She still treats me like I’m her enemy when I try to pop my head in through the door to say hello. Do you think you could have a word with her?”
Clearly, Maria hadn’t seen that day’s newspaper. Been too busy with her nose stuck in a romance book and lost in fantasy instead of reality.
“I, um, I can try,” I muttered, trying to sound noncommittal.
Maria took off her reading glasses. “Ah. Right. I did read a few days ago that people were accusing the two of you of conspiring together. Which is completely ridiculous, of course!”
“We got the right guy,” I said. I was sure of that, at leas
t. “You know Mr. Carbonetti as well as anyone and you know that he is guilty.”
Maria nodded and accidentally kicked open a bag sitting underneath her seat.
“Whoa, that is a lot of books,” I said, glancing into her bag. Looked like she had robbed a library.
She looked a little guilty. “Yes, I took them all with me on my mini-getaway to Rushcutter’s Cove—didn’t even get through a tenth of them so far, of course. And now I’ve been called back to Eden Bay because there is a ‘tutoring emergency’, as it were. One of my students has to take summer school.”
She explained that she had originally bought the books for a much larger, much more far-ranging trip away
“Oh yes?” I asked, only somewhat paying attention as I waited for our stop to be called. This was an express trip, so if you didn’t get off at Eden Bay, the next stop was Sydney, and I definitely didn’t want to end up there. But the train seemed to be coming to a complete stop in the middle of nowhere…or at least, it was slowing down to an absolute crawl. What was going on?
“Sorry for the delay,” a voice came on over the speakers into the carriage. “The extreme temperatures have warped the tracks and we need to slow down.”
Everyone groaned and got more and more agitated as the minutes passed and the heat in the carriage rose. And then, when almost twenty minutes had passed, we all started to worry that we were not actually going to start moving. This was it. The train was done.
“Oh no way, I am not walking back to Eden Bay in this heat!” I cried out. Maria looked even more panicked than I did. Well, a lot more panicked, actually. She was neither in peak fitness nor the prime of life.
“It’s okay,” I said to her. “I’m sure the train will start moving again soon.”
I wasn’t about to sit around and wait to find out, though. I needed to get back to town. We had about five minutes left of the train journey, which equaled a forty-five-minute walk.
Maria was huffing and puffing beside me, but at least she was keeping up. Even with her heavy bookbag, she was managing to keep pace. I was kinda impressed.
“So where was this long vacation you were meant to take?” I asked Maria as I tried to shield my forehead at least from the harsh sunlight that was burning my skin. I was trying not to think of it as forty-five minutes in the blistering sun but just one foot in front of the other. Ten minutes down. Thirty-five to go. I could do it.
She looked a little red-faced, and I didn’t think it was just from the heat. “I feel rather foolish now.”
“Why?”
I stopped just for a second and looked over my shoulder at her.
“Because I was taken for one. A fool, I mean.”
I stopped properly. “You’re one of the people who gave money to the scalper?!”
She hung her head.
I slapped mine. “Maria! Why did you hand over the money before meeting and actually getting the ticket?”
She was super embarrassed about the whole thing. “Because on the website, the poster said that there was so much interest in the ticket that he would be selling it to the first person who gave him the money. So this was the only way I could ’secure’ it.”
“Yeah, well, you secured nothing in the end, didn’t you?”
She looked sad, so I decided to lay off a bit. Anyway, we needed to keep walking.
I felt really sorry for her. That was a lot of money. But if Maria had been cheated out of thousands of dollars, then, well, she could have been angry enough to hit Dan Millen over the head and kill him.
But there was a problem: it was Dan who was killed, not Michael. Anna said that it was Michael who sold the ticket. The pieces weren’t quite fitting together yet.
But my hunch had been right. I had to find out more about this Michael guy. Now he really sounded like bad, bad news.
Like the kind of person you warned your best friend to stay away from.
By that stage, most of the passengers had left the train and were taking the journey by foot. We all would have called people for rides if we could have, but there was no phone reception in the dead area between Eden Bay and the empty fields, so we just trudged on.
I felt like I had been walking for miles in the desert with no sign of water. No oasis. There wasn’t even a mirage of water on the horizon, though there was steam coming from the road.
There was an expensive rental car approaching us. It wasn’t the first car, but it was the first one I had considered actually flagging down. I wasn’t sure, however, if hitchhiking was a good idea. In the end, the car was going too fast anyway and there wasn’t much chance of flagging it down anyway.
“What the—” I spun around, wondering if I was seeing things.
It looked like Claire in the passenger seat. I would know that short, icy blonde bob cut anywhere.
“Hey!” I cried out, but the car was already speeding away.
“Was that Claire?” Maria asked.
“I don’t think she even saw me,” I said, crossing my arms and stomping my foot. I was not in the mood to walk another inch yet alone another mile.
Maria was almost wheezing as spoke. “That guy in the seat beside her!” she said. She was no longer keeping pace, and I’d had to slow down so to match her. “I think that was that Michael guy that we were just talking about!”
Oh, come on, Claire.
I finally had reception, but she didn’t pick up the phone.
15
“Well, I suppose your plan worked,” Matt said, and I couldn’t tell whether he was happy about this or not. He seemed to be swinging between the two. He was pouring drinks at the bar in-between admonishing me. “As long as everyone thinks that Claire did it, then your name remains in the clear.”
“Well, that’s what you want, isn’t it?” I asked Matt. “You want me to have J here while you go and surf around the world!” I didn’t mean to get so worked up about it, but if he was going to sling accusations at me, then I was going to remind him that I was doing this for our family. For him and J.
Finally, the bar cleared out a little and so did Matt’s head. “All right, all right, you’ve made your point.” He nodded, but his hands were still in fists as he leaned over the bar to ask, “Do you really think Claire did it?”
“She was the only other person on that boat.”
“But what about the motive, Alyson?”
“I don’t know! Maybe the gas leak made her hallucinate and she didn’t know what she was doing.”
Matt was looking around for more work to do. And I knew he was only doing that because he didn’t want to respond to what I had just said.
“What?” I asked. “What is it you are biting your tongue from saying? I know you, Matt.”
He gave me a cautious look. “Well, how can you be sure what you did on that ship, if the gas leak was so bad? Maybe you were hallucinating too.”
“Wow.” I stood up and grabbed my bag. I wasn’t about to have my integrity questioned by my own brother.
But truth be told, I was squashing down those same questions because I didn’t want to know the answers.
I was just getting the back of my dress zipped up when a man barged in through the door and I squealed. At least it wasn’t my soon-to-be husband. But it was still someone I didn’t want to see me in my wedding dress.
Not that he had an invitation to the wedding.
Wells came straight at me, and I instinctively took a step back. After all, the last two times I had seen him, he had grabbed me.
“This is a woman’s dress shop,” I said to him. Miss Florence was already back behind the counter, picking up the phone as though she was about to call the police.
She didn’t know that this was the police. At least not right away.
“I thought there was no such thing as gender segregation these days,” Wells said as he glanced around the shop. He was talking to both me and Miss Florence.
I crossed my arms. “Well, I suppose I can’t technically kick you out.”
Mis
s Florence could though, and she was just waiting for a reason to do it.
There was a third woman in the shop. Maria was in the changing room. She’d be waiting for me to give her my opinion on her dress in a moment. It was purple, which I was sure would suit her as it was one of her favorite and most-worn colors. J had put her foot down about having a purple dress and the rest of the wedding party had to follow suit.
“Where is she?” Wells asked as he began to stomp around the shop. That was when I noticed he was wearing his badge again.
I started to get the bad feeling that maybe he had played me, that he had never actually been suspended.
He saw that one of the dressing room doors was closed and quickly checked that there were feet underneath before he charged towards it with his badge out and a pair of cuffs in his hand.
“You can’t just barge in there!” Miss Florence yelled out.
Uh-oh. I was pretty sure that he could, actually.
Maria screamed as the door opened. At least she was decent, with the purple bridesmaid’s dress zipped most of the way up.
It did actually suit her, to be honest.
“Maria. You are under arrest for the murder of Dan Millen.”
J was devastated when she heard the news later that day when I picked her up from Mandy’s house. “Is there still going to be a wedding?” she asked with a pout.
Hmm. Good question, considering that all of my bridal party had either been arrested or wasn’t returning my phone calls. Or were nine years old.
J followed me into The VRI. She was kinda young to be in there, but these days, she had replaced her backward caps with purple hairbows, so she actually looked more at home in the place than I did in my cutoff denim shorts and flipflops. The hostess Emma gave me the same tired look she always did, but this time, she didn’t even bother mentioning that they ‘had a dress code.’ She knew I would come in if I wanted to, regardless.
Surfboards and Suspects Page 9
