Homicide on the Hunt

by Stacey Alabaster

  “Um, then why are you here? Word is the clues go further west out of town before coming back here again.”

  I was about to lie and say that we’d already been to the woods and come back, but that would have actually required a helicopter to get back to the beach in time so I just stood up straight. “Because I have an even better plan,” I said and gripped both straps of my backpack and stomped off. Troy sighed and apologized to the others before chasing after me.

  “Maybe we should stop and wait as well,” he said just as we finally got back to the skatepark after forty minutes of walking. “We don’t know what we’re getting involved with here.”

  Suddenly, I got it. The reason that Troy was so hesitant to keep going, the reason he wanted all these breaks. He was scared. Out of his depth. He’d never solved a murder mystery before. Not up close. Just from the sidelines. Just like with construction on his mall, he never actually got his hands dirty.

  “If you want to quit, now is the time, Troy. I will find a new partner if I have to.”

  The tunnel was just to our left. I was ready to go back in there. But was he?

  “Ahem. Excuse me, you two.”

  Oh no. Officer Wells. My absolute most mortal enemy on the planet. “We need to get out of here,” I said, turning to run in the opposite direction, back to the woods, but Troy pulled me back.

  “We’ve come this far, Alyson.”

  Wells was stomping over to us, ready to ask questions. I immediately got my back up. I was ready to tell him to rack off if I had to.

  But if I acted too much like a brat then he might shut down the whole competition. I hated myself for having to do this, but I took a deep breath, smiled, and even tried to greet him politely. Eww. I felt like a little bit of my soul was oozing out from me. But it was a very brief blink and you’ll miss it smile. I just vowed not to be too antagonistic when he opened his mouth to talk to us.

  “What are you doing here, Miss Foulkes?”

  “Just taking part in the hunt,” I said. Troy was very quiet beside me. I did notice him briefly make eye contact with Wells and then look away again. Wells didn’t even address Troy, instead he spoke directly to me.

  “Looks like you’re headed away from the next clue.”

  Hmmm. That was weird that he knew where the next clue was located. He just shrugged a little when I didn’t respond. “Oh well, it’s better you’re back here seeing as everyone will need to be soon enough,” he said, raising an eyebrow. Hinting that the race was going to be called off.

  “This is an annual town event,” I said, trying not to get too worked up. “You can’t just cancel it.” Then I saw the look on his face. Wow. I got it. He couldn’t call it off. He only wanted to make me think he could.

  “I will have a word with the mayor about how this goes forward,” he said, trying to keep his voice confident, even though I knew he had no actual power.

  But I was pumped. Wells had no jurisdiction, no authority to call off the race, even if he wanted to. And that made me happier than anything. Well, almost anything. Winning would have made me happier. But I was still grinning like a loon when I realized he had no power.

  “You need to stay away from the skatepark,” he said firmly, trying to grasp onto one area of control. But it was weak.

  Sure. For now, we could stay away. But he couldn’t be there to guard the area forever. And he couldn’t guard every part of Eden Bay.

  The best move was to just keep going with the treasure hunt. Ever forward, never back.

  But we were going to need that helicopter if we were ever going to get back to the woods in good time. I mentioned it to Troy as a joke.

  “Well,” Troy said. “I just so happen to have one of those.”

  8

  Claire

  Wells had moved us along and Matt suggested we cut our losses and finally go toward the cemetery. I nodded. but I was still staring back at the half-pipe. I just kept thinking about that time I had fallen, and what life would be like if that day had gone differently. What would have happened if I’d never smashed my wrist? Would I have ended up pursuing skateboarding as a profession? And would I ever have left Eden Bay?

  “You’re looking in the wrong direction,” Matt said quietly.

  I laughed softly. “Yeah. You don’t even know how right you are, Matt.”

  “What are you thinking about?”

  “Do you remember that day?” I gulped a little. “When I fell?”

  He squinted a little. “Hmm, I kinda remember. You broke your…leg, was it? And wasn’t there bone sticking out?”

  Oh. I was a little hurt that his memory of the day was so foggy when it was so crystal clear to me. I guess he’d seen a lot of injuries in the surf over the years. Anyway, who was I to him at the time? Just his kid sister’s best friend.

  “Something like that”

  Matt’s feet were starting to get itchy. He kept glancing over at the cop cars and Wells, looking nervous. Matt Foulkes had a lot of respect for police officers, or anyone in authority for that matter, but they still made him nervous.

  But my strategy was still slow and steady wins the race. It was just that we were going really slow at the moment. Most teams—the ones who were still competing, anyway—were already up to the third clue by then. Or so I’d heard.

  Slow and steady. Slow and steady.

  “We know one thing,” Matt said. “We need to leave the skatepark.”

  I still had the wheel in my pocket. I patted it just to make sure. “Okay, you’re right.”

  I was in no mood to run into Wells right then either. Part of me knew what I was doing—potentially hiding evidence from the cops—but I justified it in my mind. It was just a wheel that I had found on the ground. Innocently. I couldn’t know that it had anything to do with the murder of Brett Falcon.

  I didn’t even know it did.

  But I was still dragging my feet. Matt asked me what was so wrong, why I couldn’t quite leave the skatepark even though two hours had passed.

  “You don’t understand, Matt. I have to solve this one.”

  He thought that I was talking about the clue. That would only get us to the next item on the treasure hunt anyway, and then we’d still be dead last.

  But I was talking about Brett Falcon.

  I stopped walking completely. This was really taking slow and steady to a new extreme.

  “Skating is my thing,” I said, sighing. “Once upon a time, all these guys were my best friends.” Twelve years earlier, Brett and I had been close. Along with the rest of my skater friends, the skatepark had been our second home. I barely even recognized that girl now. I glanced down at my wrist. I still had the scar, though.

  Usually, Alyson was the one with the home ground advantage when it came to solving mysteries. But this wasn’t the surf, or even just some random part of Eden Bay that she knew like the back of her hand. This was the skatepark. Skating was the one thing I knew. And this was my mystery to solve. Part of me was happy that Alyson seemed more focused on the treasure hunt than Brett. Because this was my case.

  Matt reached out and touched my shoulder. “You don’t have to feel guilty about leaving Eden Bay, Claire. You didn’t abandon any of us.”

  That was easy to say. I didn’t quite believe it. “Try telling your sister that,” I said quietly. Then I rolled my eyes a little. “Oh, wait, you tell your sister everything, so you probably will.”

  He took his hand away from me. “Whoa, what do you mean by that?”

  “You told Alyson that you and I kissed.” Uh oh. I hadn’t meant to have this confrontation. Not in the middle of the hunt. Not ever, in fact.

  He stared at me blankly. “No, Claire, I never ever told Alyson anything about that…” He looked offended. “You asked me not to. And I would never go back on my word like that.”

  But I had seen him, with my own two eyes, in the bookshop, pulling Alyson aside and whispering some great secret in her ear about me. I knew it was about me because Alyson had
stared at me with a worried look in her eyes.

  As if that convo hadn’t been about the kiss.

  “So what was it you told Alyson about three weeks ago in my shop?”

  He grimaced and looked at the ground. “I feel rotten for doing it now,” he said, his voice deep with regret. “I had a word to the local council about the fact that you were operating a small cafe without a food and beverage license. I’m not proud of it, Claire. Like I said, I’ll get you those coffee beans for free to make up for it if you still want them. I think I just came clean that day to Alyson because I felt so guilty. I had to tell someone. She was just shocked that you were breaking a law. And I think she was kinda disappointed in me.”

  Oh, so I had been ignoring Alyson’s calls and texts for two weeks over some coffee beans.

  Oh well, I told myself. It wasn’t like she had made a huge effort to contact me and straighten things out.

  “Do you forgive me?” he asked. He leaned in closer and reached for me again, stroking my arm a little.

  Ugh. It sure was hard to stay mad at him when he was looking at me like that. I nodded, just a little, and he moved in even closer, until our lips were touching.

  Well, great. I certainly hadn’t meant to kiss him again. I pulled away. “Matt, that can never ever happen again.” I stepped away from him and tripped over something behind me. “Woah, what is this?” I stopped and looked down at a bucket that I had just overturned. It was full of shells. Shells that had tiny little clues sticking out of them.

  Matt reached for one and pulled the clue out.

  My eyes shone. “I think we just accidentally skipped ahead to first place.”

  Slow and steady. Slow and steady.

  9

  Alyson

  When even a helicopter can’t save you, you are really in trouble.

  Our old friends, Mr. and Miss Swede, were already waiting at the clearing in the woods where the next clue lay, and there is really no way to land a helicopter inconspicuously. I almost told Troy’s driver to turn it around. But that would have just set us further behind. And I was not going to fall behind again.

  “That is cheating!” Mr. Swede was all indignant when we climbed out. “You’re supposed to walk and use your legs for the entire race.”

  Ugh. Tourists. Those were the real cheaters. This was a town event and they were not from our town and… Okay, maybe I needed to calm down just a tad.

  The worst thing was—he was right. We had broken the rules and if they were to be enforced, then we would get a penalty. We’d have to sit out for thirty minutes. Troy’s eyes were practically shining in delight at the prospect of this while Mr. Swede read out the rules from the book.

  “No way, we can’t afford to lose half an hour,” I said, getting desperate. “Let’s make some other kind of deal. I’ll trade you some of the prize money when we win.”

  “No way. You have to sit out for thirty minutes.” Mr. Swede and Miss Swede stomped out of the clearing with their noses in the air. Great. Now they were in the lead. There would be a riot.

  It was going to take us half an hour to decipher the next clue anyway. I didn’t understand this one at all. “Don’t get crabby, just get grabby.” The one saving grace was that Claire was nowhere in sight. Her and Matt probably hadn’t even gotten to the second clue yet. The thought filled me with glee.

  “It is going to be a long walk back into town,” Troy grumbled, looking at the helicopter. We couldn’t risk taking it back. The driver had to leave with the passenger seats empty.

  “Yeah, well, that is kind of the point,” I said with zero sympathy. “It’s a physical endurance as well as a mental one. You should have been training for this.”

  He didn’t respond, but I had hurt his feelings a little. I knew his health hadn’t been the best. In fact, a few months earlier, he had almost died. This race really was probably too much for him. But I just turned away and pretended I didn’t know.

  But I had to wonder how he was going to survive the night.

  The thirty minutes was up. “So stupid that we actually stuck to that,” I said, hopping up. “There was no one around to even see it to prove that we did it…”

  Troy stood up and dusted off his pants. We had the next item on the list, a small toy bird. My backpack was starting to get very, very full. “Yes, but there is a little thing called integrity that should mean something.”

  Woah. Was he really going to talk about integrity? This was the man who cut corners and bent rules to get his multi-million-dollar mall built in a small town that didn’t want it or need it.

  “What is up with you and Wells anyway?” I asked. I was just making conversation. It was going to take us at least forty minutes to walk back into town, and the sun was starting to set. Luckily, I had a flashlight and a spare set of batteries in my trusty backpack. Troy had nothing. Well, he had a helicopter.

  But I wasn’t ready for Troy’s flustered response.

  “I—I just…nothing… We’ve met a couple of times, that’s all….”

  All right. Settle down. “I just noticed a weird vibe between the two of you, that’s all.”

  “Sure wish we had that helicopter,” he grumbled. Then he really laid into me. “Alyson, I am starving now. We have to stop for food as soon as we get to town. And, no—before you push one of those disgusting protein bars on me again, that doesn’t count.”

  “Fine,” I said, gritting my teeth even though I had no intention of actually doing so. We’d just sat out a thirty-minute penalty!

  Troy was exhausted by the time we finally got to the bottom of the hill. It was six p.m. Dinnertime by any normal standards. Time to go home, put the kettle on, and settle in for the night in front of the telly. But this was treasure hunt night. And we were only just getting started.

  “If you start to get cold, just jog,” I said, digging around in my bag for the flashlight, even though I wouldn’t need it for a little while since the town center was well lit.

  Troy had been the one to figure out the clue. We were supposed to head to the local crab farm. The item to collect was a shell, and the shells contained the next clue.

  And here was Princess, waving her shell around in the air. With Matt beside her, giving her a high-five.

  “How the heck are they already here?” I asked. I spun around and glared at Troy as though he had all the answers. Or as though this may all be his fault somehow. I did realize that I was taking out all my anger and frustration on him, somewhat unfairly, and yet that wasn’t enough for me to be able to stop. “They must have cheated!”

  I mean, they MUST have. There was no other explanation for Claire and Matt to be in the lead. We would have seen them up at the cemetery, up at the hill, in the woods at SOME point if they had gone that way. But they had skipped that leg of the hunt all together. I was fuming. I thought there was actual smoke coming from my ears.

  “Let me check the rulebook,” I said, pulling it out of my backpack. An apple fell out and hit the ground. “Oh no!” I cried and reached down to pick it up.

  I don’t know which Troy was more horrified about—that I’d picked food up off the ground and dusted it off or that I had been hiding apples from him. “You’ve had real food in there all this time and you haven’t told me!”

  I handed the apple over to him. “Here you go then,” I said with a straight face.

  He stared at it for a moment. “I am not going to eat food that has been on the ground….”

  “Ugh,” I scoffed and put it back in the bag. “You are sounding like Claire. Believe me, there will be more horrifying things to deal with tonight than food off the ground. That’s nothing.”

  I groaned in frustration when I couldn’t find any technical rules that forbade skipping ahead if you accidentally stumbled on a clue. “But this unfair!” I said, stomping my foot on the ground. It was at this point that Troy said my blood sugar might be a little low, so I ripped the apples back out of my bag and started munching on it furiously while he just
stared at me in horror.

  “See? My blood sugar is just fine.” I threw the core down.

  “I can’t believe you just ate food that’s been on the ground.”

  “Wasn’t the first time, won’t be the last time.” I shot him a look. “And now that I am feeling more like myself again, I can make this decision with a clear head.”

  There was a look of utter fear on Troy’s face as I approached him. “What-what decision?”

  “Sabotage. Claire is not getting ahead in this race.”

  “I don’t want any part of this, Alyson.”

  “Well then, don’t take any part of it then,” I said as I got a pen out of my pocket and found a notebook, tearing out the page. Matt was still hanging about nearby. He was the one holding the shell. He placed it in his back pocket. I could see it sticking out. All I had to do was scribble a new clue, sneak up to Matt, and switch it.

  So the trap was laid. I just had to wait for Claire to walk into it.

  10

  Claire

  A car pulled up and out climbed poor Mayor Strang. He congratulated us on being in the lead, but he looked horrified. He dabbed his head nervously. There wasn’t really time to stop, but I felt bad for the guy. “This was not what was supposed to happen,” he said. “This was supposed to be a fun town event, and now someone is dead.”

  Yikes. Yep. I felt terrible for the position he was in—fifty years of the treasure hunt, and nothing like this had ever happened.

  “It will all be all right in the end,” I said, trying to reassure him. My own spirits were up now that Matt and I had pulled into the lead. Alyson and Troy were stumped over the next clue PLUS Troy was insisting that they stop somewhere for dinner.