It smelled like mahogany and cinnamon candles as I walked in. And it was way too quiet. I was used to places that blasted 90s pop songs on the jukebox as soon as you walked in. And I was also used to places that had plastic tables and booths. Not a plastic table in sight in The VRI.
A woman rudely stepped in front of me. She was wearing a buttoned-up white shirt that went all the way to her chin and her name tag said “Emma.” Underneath her name, it said she was the hostess. More like the guard dog. And I was not getting past her apparently. Not without the secret word.
She looked me up and down. “We have a dress code here.”
Wow.
I tried to step past her again.
She stood in front of me. “Seriously. It’s a strict policy. No opened toe shoes.”
“And it is also a policy to be incredibly rude to potential staff members?” I asked her.
She went red.
“I am here about a job,” I said with confidence. That hadn’t been my original plan, but I was winging it. Maybe if I acted with enough authority, she would think that I was there to steal her job and drop the attitude a bit. “And I need to speak to Reinhold Walker. He will be more than impressed with my resume, believe me.” I tried to give her my best ‘Claire’ look, the one she gives to people when she needs them to know that she is on the same level of importance as the queen.
I’d gotten lucky in the sense that they were actually looking for waitstaff and had advertised in the local paper. I just hadn’t known that. Hmm, maybe I should actually start reading that thing. Ugh. Reading made me think of Maria and my mock exam. Who needed books and newspapers anyway? TV and music were way better in my opinion.
I twiddled my thumbs at a table while I waited for Reinhold to appear for my interview.
I didn’t know why a restaurant manager needed to wear a suit in the middle of the day. Especially in the middle of a hot day.
But he was pretending he was comfortable as he sat down and undid the middle button of his jacket. I was actually a little chilly in the stone cold of the air conditioning and I shivered. Maybe that was why they had a dress code: so that you didn’t freeze to death.
Reinhold wore thick glasses, and he seemed bemused by my appearance but nowhere near as snobby as the hostess had been. In fact, he didn’t mention my breaking of the ‘dress code’ at all. He actually seemed open to me getting the job, like he genuinely wanted to get to know me. “What experience do you have?”
I answered honestly. “I have waited tables for a couple of years at Captain Eightball’s.” I neglected to mention that most of that experience had been in my teenage years, ten years ago. He didn’t need to know that. I needed info from him, not the other way around.
“This is a little more sophisticated than Captain Eightball’s,” he said, barely even trying to hide the disdain in his voice as he said the name of the restaurant.
I sat up straight. “It is a busy restaurant and always full.” I glanced around The VRI, which was eighty percent empty at that time of day. “Unlike this place… So I had to learn to work quick and think quick. Act on my feet. And I think that gives me plenty of experience.”
But I had to remember to watch my tone. After all, I was trying to worm my way in to Reinhold’s world so I could get information from him, not get myself kicked out. I hadn’t meant to diss The VRI. Just prove my worth.
He nodded and took a few notes. “How many plates can you carry at one time?”
“Three,” I answered confidently. There were probably other waiters at The VRI who could juggle a dozen up their arms at once, but three was still more impressive than two. Reinhold seemed impressed enough anyway as he took notes. He glanced up at me and peered through his thick frames. “You’ve got the right look, and that is important.”
I was surprised to hear that, seeing as I was wearing flipflops and a cut off t-shirt, but then I realized that what he really meant was that I was young and attractive and could probably get good tips.
“Oh. Okay,” I said, not really sure how to respond to that one.
But now that I knew I was at least in his good graces, I could test my luck a little. Emma was glaring at us from the sidelines but when she caught me looking at her, she quickly looked away and started vigorously polishing cutlery.
“I was in politics for a while,” I said, flipping my hair over my shoulder and rolling my eyes like I was just so over it. “Shame to hear that Arthur Hannon is dead.”
Reinhold held my gaze for a long while. Wow. It pretty obvious that he was trying to keep a straight face. Trying to keep all emotion at bay. He wanted to smile. He probably wanted to leap up and clap and cheer.
But it was in awful bad taste to revel in someone’s death. Was he going to show that much bad taste? Maybe not on our first meeting.
He chose his words carefully. Just like Rose had. “Hmm, yes. It is always tragic when we lose someone in the community.” He adjusted his tie. “Eden Bay is a small place. Getting smaller, it seems.” His voice was deep, and it was hard to tell what the emotion was, precisely. It was almost like he was trying to sound sad but at the same time, he was trying not to laugh. In the end, he just sounded strangely deadpan and gravelly.
I tilted my head to the side and tried to play innocent. “Oh, you didn’t know Arthur well, did you?” I placed a hand to my chest. “Oh dear, I’m so sorry if you did. I didn’t mean to bring up a sensitive topic.” I was really overplaying the ‘apologetic’ act, but he didn’t know I was being fake so it was all good.
Reinhold was still playing cool, but there was a smile dancing on the corner of his lips that was threatening to break out into a full-on song and dance number.
He stood up. Clearly my interview was over. “I would like to start you on a trial basis. Can you work tomorrow night?”
He reached out for my hand and took off his glasses as I stood up as well and realized how much he towered over me. But was I about to shake hands with the devil himself?
I raised an eyebrow and reached out my hand to shake his. “You bet I can.”
5
Claire
The longer this all dragged on, the guiltier Matt looked. At least he hadn’t been arrested yet. It wasn’t like the police had a lick of proof that he did it, but that barely mattered. The rumors had started, and everyone was talking about Matt Foulkes like he was a killer. People were whispering—did he do it on purpose or as an accident? I knew the answer. Neither. But I was only one voice. I had to find the real guilty party before the mud fully stuck.
The problem was that we had a long suspect list. Probably the longest suspect list we had ever had.
Any single person who worked in a bar, restaurant, or cafe in Eden Bay had a motive to kill Arthur Hannon. He’d been threatening to bring in a law that would have been damaging to the profits of a lot of local businesses. Of course it was the owners who were the mostly likely suspects, not the simple waitstaff and baristas
I glanced out into the ocean as I walked along the pier.
What about the managers?
They were somewhere in the middle.
I was there to meet Matt. He’d texted me that he would be finished by five. But I wasn’t too confident.
Another day spent catching waves. Don’t get me wrong, Matt always surfed a lot, but just the regular amount that an amateur surfer did. This was now excessive. Bordering on obsessive. Ten hours a day, dawn to dusk. He was even paying for afterschool care for my niece J, short for Jasmine, so that he could surf. I didn’t know how he was affording that when he didn’t have any income coming in.
But he had gotten the crazy idea in his head that he could actually make a living as a surfer. Hit the pro circuit. Get an advertising deal. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that was never going to happen. Alyson, who was a far better surfer than he was, had a small sponsorship deal and even she still had to work to make a living.
Matt really needed to get back to work. As in, Captain Eightball’s. Or ma
ybe another restaurant. Just a real job that didn’t involve him being in the ocean ten hours a day, turning into a raisin.
Matt finally climbed out of the water and waved to me, running over.
He was breathless and exuberant, hoping that I had been watching him in the water. Well yeah, I’d been watching all right. Watching and wondering how to break the tough news to him.
“See?” he said, shaking himself off with a wide grin. “I’ve still got it. I should never have given up the chance go to pro.”
I frowned a little, trying to remember what chance that had been. Nothing was coming to mind.
“If I can get some scouts down here to take a look, I might have a chance.” He was still breathing heavily. “Or maybe I ought to head to Sydney, or Brisbane. Or maybe even overseas, to Bali or somewhere.”
I thought he was starting to lose the plot a little.
“Sure. You were amazing today,” I said, wondering how long I could keep this up. I mean, sometimes you have to be cruel to be kind, but it wasn’t quite time for that yet. It would be soon, though.
“There are other jobs,” I said quietly as we sat down on the sand. Then immediately wondered if I had said the right thing. I saw the look on his face change. What he wanted was unconditional support. But was it right to give that when supporting these crazy notions could actually put him and his family in danger?
“Thanks for your support, Claire,” he said sarcastically as he started to dry himself off with the towel. At least that meant he wasn’t getting back in the ocean. I hoped. “I would have thought you would stick by my side with all that I am going through.”
I was so angry at hearing that that I struggled to keep my cool facade. Well, I wasn’t going to stand for that. “Speaking of people who are supportive, do you know that Kate is back at Captain Eightball’s? And that she has taken your job?”
Kate barely even looked one way, let alone both ways, before she stormed across the road. Her long legs were striding like she was taking two paces at once, and her long brown hair was swinging from side to side. She sort of looked like Wonder Woman. And she was on a mission. To destroy me.
I thought about ducking behind the counter and pretending that I wasn’t in the shop.
Too late. She had already pushed the door open so fast that the bell above didn’t just jangle, it almost crashed and fell to the floor. Mr. Ferdinand, my ginger cat, squealed and ran out to the back out of harm’s way.
“Thanks a lot,” she said, crossing her arms. “You told Matt.”
Well, it was rich to come in to my shop and give me a hard time about it.
“Well, he was going to find out eventually, wasn’t he?”
She rolled her eyes. “But of course, he had to find out from you, didn’t he? Because you definitely don’t have any sort of ulterior motive.”
“And what ulterior motive would that be?” I asked, making sure to keep my voice calm and cool. I didn’t want her to know that she had rattled me. She hadn’t—yet. If I just stayed calm, she wouldn’t.
“You want to stop Matt and I from ever getting back together,” she said with a breathless intonation. “There, I’ve said it.”
I made sure I took my time before answering. That way I would stay in control of the situation. That had not necessarily been my plan. I’d just wanted him to know the truth. Though to be honest, I kind of regretted the fact that I had blurted it out to Matt the way that I had—not very cool, calm, and collected of me.
“I don’t need to do that,” I said with a cool little shrug. “Matt and I are together, and I don’t consider you any kind of threat.” I even managed to smile thinly at her. It was true. Sort of. As long as she believed what I was saying, that was all that mattered.
She scoffed and rolled her eyes. I had rattled her even if she hadn’t rattled me.
Her voice was getting more and more high pitched. “Umm, yeah, like I believe that. It is pretty obvious you have always been jealous of me. Even when you try to hide it with that princess act. Do you think people can’t see through that stuck-up snob exterior?”
Okay. Now I was bristling. Kate and I had never come head to head like this before, but maybe it had been a long time coming. It certainly seemed like she’d had these things on her mind for a while.
“Like I said.” I blinked a few times. “I don’t care that you and Matt dated once upon a time. It seems as though you’re suffering from some jealousy problems, Kate.”
But she had one final thing to say before she waltzed out and left the bookshop for good.
“It’s fine. I broke up with him, so it’s not like I am jealous. If anything, you should be the one who is worried. Because Matt is still in love with me.”
It was like a bomb had been dropped and my ears were still ringing when I got back to Matt’s house that evening. He was frying up a steak, finally out of his wetsuit, which was laid out in front of a heater so that he could presumably put it on as soon as the sun came up the following morning.
I just nodded when he asked me how I liked my steak, and he had to repeat the question. “Er, rare.” Actually, I preferred it blue—usually—but that night, my stomach was more tender than usual.
J made plenty of conversation over dinner, so I thought I’d gotten away with not saying anything. She was excited because year three were putting on a play and she was planning on being King Arthur. Matt was entranced by her tales, so I thought that he wouldn’t even notice that I was barely paying attention and that all I was doing was pushing my mashed potatoes around my plate and not even eating. But as we cleaned up the dishes later on, I realized that Matt had noticed my peculiar nature that evening.
“What’s wrong?” he finally asked. “You’ve been almost silent all night. It’s like we were having dinner with a mime. A mime with very little appetite.”
“I just have a lot on my mind with Arthur’s death and the bookstore and everything. I’m sorry.”
He shook his head. “Nah, it’s more than that, Claire. You can barely look me in the eye. It’s something about me that is troubling you.” His expression was heavy, and he had to look away from me. His voice was low. He sounded betrayed. “You think that I did it, don’t you?”
He left the dishes and headed into the living room. I closed my eyes and groaned a little as I scraped the last bit of my mashed potatoes into the Tupperware for leftovers.
Oh no, that was the last thing I wanted him to think. I realized how my silence and despondency could have been misinterpreted as suspicion. It made sense.
I followed him in to the living room and sat beside him on the sofa.
I gulped. “No, no, Matt, it’s not that at all.” I cringed when I realized I was going to have to admit what was really bothering me, that I was going to come across like the jealous girlfriend.
Probably because that was exactly what I was.
“It’s Kate.” I mumbled the words and he actually made me repeat them, much to my abject horror.
“What about Kate?” he asked in surprise.
I took a deep breath. When I finally spoke, my voice sounded shaky. “She told me that you’re still in love with her, Matt.”
He held my gaze for a few moments, and there was a strange look on his face. And then he looked away. “I don’t know why she told you that, but it’s not the truth.”
It didn’t sound like he was lying. He wasn’t getting overly defensive. He sounded surprised to hear that Kate had said that, but not in an over the top way.
I leaned back on the sofa. There was an awkward distance between us now. It was like it was wrong to touch. Wrong to even get too close. Because I had to know some things before I could get close to him again.
Keep it cool, Claire.
“So, what actually happened between the two of you then?” This wasn’t a conversation I had ever wanted to have with him, but now that Kate had dropped that bombshell, I wanted it cleaned up. I wanted to know the truth even if it hurt to hear it.
Matt
leaned forward with his elbows on his knees. “This is a little difficult for me to talk about…” He paused and cleared his throat.
I didn’t stay as cool as I would have liked. In fact, I immediately jumped to the worst possible conclusion based on what he had said. “Great. So, she was telling the truth. You are still hung up on her then.” I turned away from him and slunk to the side of the couch so that I was as far away from him as it was possible to get.
“No Claire that’s not what I am getting at.” He shook his head and looked at me a bit sadly. I didn’t know what there was to feel so sad about. Did he still love Kate or not? “Just hear me out, okay?”
I took a moment to compose myself and nodded. “Go on then.”
Matt was firm when he spoke. “It is over between Kate and I…long over. That was why she left town. I broke up with her, no matter what she has tried to tell you.”
“Okay then,” I said, interrupting. I realized I still sounded a bit sullen. “Why did you break up with her then?”
He cleared his throat. “This is the difficult bit. But, since you really want to know, I will tell you. I was at a stage in my life where I was ready to settle down. Start a family. And Kate was just not ready for that. We were at completely different stages of life. I realized she was not the one for me.”
I held my breath for so long I almost passed out until I remembered to breathe again. Wow. Okay. Not what I had expected him to say at all. I didn’t even know that was where he was at in his life. He already had J living with him. She was practically his daughter, even though she was technically his niece. But he wanted kids? Of his own? Like, right now?
‘Cool’ was suddenly the word. I went ice cold. I could feel a chill all down my spine and felt like I was paralyzed and couldn’t move. I tried to lean forward a little just to see if I could. All I could see were stars.
Milkshake Murder Page 3
