Bodies on the Beach

by Stacey Alabaster

  J’s mum, my sister, had been unwell for a few years, unable to look after J properly, so me and my brother Matt looked after her in the meantime, taking turns to have her stay with us. Matt reckoned we should all move into the same house together to make things easier, but I still liked my independence. Or what I had of it. Being 26 years old and a surrogate mother to an 8-year-old could have made me weary, if I’d let it. Instead, I just took every day as it came.

  Her mouth dropped open.

  “Ha!” I said with a grin. “I didn’t think so, little miss.” Called her bluff there, hadn’t I?

  “Oh, but Auntie Alyson,” she grumbled. She never called me auntie. Just Alyson, or my nickname “Y,” usually sufficed.

  But she wasn’t going to win this argument. No way I was getting any kind of fancy haircut.

  “Come on, sport!” I said, throwing my skateboard back on the ground. “I’ll race you down to the beach!”

  This time, I was slightly steadier. Slightly. I was flying down the pavement when a blonde woman in a fancy suit stepped right out in front of me and I flew straight into her side. My board kept going, though.

  I stopped. Spun back around. No way. It couldn’t have been.

  “Just wait here a minute, will you, J?” I said, tossing her a two-dollar coin so that she could buy an ice cream cone from the parked van. “I need to check something out.”

  Just as I was backing away, Matt turned up, his long hair wet from the waves, surfboard under his arm, waving to me to let me know that he would take it from there so I could leave if I wanted. Matt was the best brother you could ever ask for. He was just one year older than me and he’d taken on the role of caregiver to J without ever a word of complaint.

  I skated back up the footpath to find the person I had hit. Just to be sure it wasn’t her. Just to check.

  I was certain it could not be Claire Elizabeth Richardson.

  Could it be?

  I stopped and looked up. Fabled Books. Her grandmother’s shop. Uh-oh. It had to be her then. What was she doing inside, though? Mable had passed nearly two months earlier, and the funeral had been held out of town and her ashes scattered at a beach in Sydney where she had grown up as young girl seventy years earlier.

  I peered in the window, my skateboard under my arm. Suddenly, the blinds were drawn.

  Rude!

  Well, if Claire didn’t want to say hello to me, or be friends, that was her loss! She had kind of turned into a snob ever since she’d gotten her big, important job making movies and moved to Sydney. Everyone knew that she was totally stuck-up now. How we had ever been best friends, I didn’t know! Maybe I was better off without people like her in my life anyway.

  For a moment, I felt a little hurt. But then I decided to shake it off. That’s what you’ve got to do right? Just keep riding.

  I grabbed myself an ice cream cone and chucked my skateboard down. It was time to switch it for a different kind of board.

  I grinned and looked out across the waves. It was time to hit the surf.

  There is a moment when I’m in the waves where everything comes together, and things finally make sense, where I feel tiny and huge at the same time. In that moment, I feel like I can see the beauty of the whole ocean, even if I am only enveloped in a tiny fraction of it. Time seems to stop. Those were the moments I lived for. That’s why you couldn’t ever get me away from the beach, or the water.

  We were supposed to swim—and surf—between the flags. But that was five hundred meters south, on the part of the beach where the lifeguards could keep careful watch over us, on the other side of the rocks. The part where the tourists gathered and the waves were less wild. So, technically, I wasn’t supposed to be at this section of the beach. But I liked the quiet seclusion of it. It also had far superior waves. All of us surfers practiced down here, when we could get away with it and not get sprung. And with the upcoming surf competition, we needed all the practice on rough waves we could get. So, while J was with Matt, I was taking advantage.

  Perched on my board, sitting down to catch my breath and reset, I looked back over the sea and sighed. “Why would anyone ever want to leave this place?” I murmured.

  Sure, it was a quiet life, and I was sure it lacked the glamor of a life like Claire Elizabeth Richardson’s—don’t you think there are too many Is in her name?—but I was happy with my little business, painting surfboards on the beach. It was a modest living, sure, but it was enough to get by. I didn’t have a shopfront or anything. Mostly, I just sat on the sand near the water, with my designs laid out for display on top of a few beach towels, and let business come to me. But I did have business cards. “Y Designs.”

  I dried my hair and glanced around, but there was no sign of Matt and J anywhere. And the sun was starting to set early. Those same pink hues were back in the sky. I thought again about what kind of warning they could be. Maybe not the devil’s, no, but an angel’s? I still reckoned it could be. That same eerie weird feeling from that morning came over me as I backed away from the water.

  The waves were a little too rough by then, and I started to think I’d better get back to the civilized part of the beach, where there were lifeguards and locals and a scattering of tourists.

  As I turned around, I saw an object—dark, flat, and about six feet long, laying in the sand.

  At first, I thought it was probably nothing, then got worried it was an animal that had washed up on shore. A small whale, maybe. How big are whales again? I wondered to myself as I ran up to it. Probably not a whale. But the object was dark and slippery. I really hoped it wasn’t a dolphin.

  A strange calm always comes over me in emergency situations. Well, I suppose I am always pretty chilled out. But even more so when something truly startling happens. Like seeing a dead human body on the sand in front of me. I just sort of looked at it and blinked a few times.

  “Oh. Gosh.”

  Then, I have to admit, a little bit of panic started to set in. I recognized the victim.

  I turned around and called out for help.

  Soon, the beach was full of people. Fuller than I had ever seen it. Police cars. An ambulance. Rubber-Necking tourists and locals shocked that anything like this could ever happen in our town. And my little piece of paradise was no longer remote and secluded. Nor peaceful.

  I knew one thing. If that had been Claire Elizabeth Richardson that I’d seen earlier, I was going to need her help.

  3

  Claire

  “Mister Ferdinand! Mister Ferdinand!” It was getting dark as I walked through the empty backstreets, calling his name one last time. I sighed, wondering if it was too late in the night to put up Missing Cat photos around the streets. My grandmother would be so upset if she knew that I’d lost him. Maybe he was wandering the streets trying to find her. Cats don’t really understand death, do they?

  Maybe I should go door to door. Unfortunately, I knew that right then, most people in Eden Bay were more concerned with an issue other than a missing cat. I heard the final emergency vehicle pull away from the beach and wondered what had taken place down there. Oh, well. None of my business, was it? I’d be gone in a few days.

  I trudged back to the bookshop feeling downhearted about Mr. Ferdinand, leaving a plate of cat food in front of the door in case he came back, before I locked up. Just as I was turning the key, I saw a figure with long, golden honey hair, matted from seawater, walking toward me. In her arms, she had a ball of grumpy-looking grey fluff. “I assume you’ve been looking for this guy?”

  “Mister Ferdinand!” I exclaimed, dropping my keys as I ran toward them, scooping the cat out of her arms and hugging him before turning my back to Alyson.

  “Where did you find him?” I finally asked, quietly.

  “Hiding behind the garbage bin behind the fish and chip shop. I recognized him right away.” Alyson reached out to give him a pat, but I backed away a little. It was late and I needed to get him inside. And I had no intention of getting into a conversation wit
h Alyson Faulks.

  I finally managed to mumble a “thank you” before I started to walk away.

  “Were you even going to say hi to me while you were in town?” Alyson called after me.

  I turned back. “I wouldn’t have had time. I’m not even staying the night!” I lied, knowing that my motel was already booked and paid for. She didn’t need to know that.

  I unlocked the door to put Mr. Ferdinand back inside, hoping that Alyson would take the hint and skate on by again. But she walked up to the door. “How’d he escape anyway?” she asked. “I didn’t think he’d ever left the bookshop in seventeen years.”

  I didn’t want to admit that it had been my fault. “I, um, stepped outside with him while all the fuss was going on down at the beach,” I said, fumbling with the keys again. “He got spooked and jumped out of my arms. With all the people crowding around, he got lost.”

  Alyson’s face was grave. “I was down there when it happened,” she whispered.

  In spite of myself, I became suddenly intrigued. “You were?” I asked. “What happened?”

  Her eyes grew wide. “Someone died. I found the body on the beach.”

  For someone who’d just seen a dead body, she looked pretty calm. But that was Alyson for you—not even a corpse could shake her.

  “Well, I, uh, better be getting back to Sydney,” I said, trying to excuse myself. But she reached out and grabbed my arm.

  “Claire. I need your help.”

  Seventeen years had flown by. Well, some of it had dragged. But mostly, it had passed in a blur. Alyson and I had first met when we were nine years old. My mum, newly single, dragged me down to the coast from Sydney, where I had lived all my life up until that point, for a ‘holiday’ in Eden Bay so that she could reset. We were only supposed to stay with my grandmother for a week or two. Instead, we stayed put for the next ten years. For my mum, it was probably great. But for me, it meant a new school and no friends. I stubbornly refused to even attend my new school on the first day. I stood at the gates with my arms crossed till my mum had to actually physically pick me up and carry me to my fourth-grade classroom.

  Eden Bay Primary had been nothing like the private school I had been to in Sydney. Class sizes were bigger, the kids were rougher, and everything seemed covered in sand. Not only did Eden Bay not have any private schools, by that point, we couldn’t have afforded one even if they did, so as my mum said, I just had to grin and bear it. But it was like being on another planet

  On that very first day, we had what was called ‘computer class’ where we all had to sign in to a computer and pick an email address for ourselves. This was seventeen years ago, remember. But I had no idea how to even turn on the computer in front of me. I didn’t want to embarrass myself on my very first day. I was panicking. Afraid that I would look stupid in front of all my new classmates if I couldn’t figure out how to do it. I always wanted others to see me as ‘smart.’ But there was no one I could ask for help. Certainly not the teacher, who had been dismissive and not very welcoming when I’d walked in. Before I became the confident woman I am now, I was always too afraid to raise my voice, to put my hand up, to be heard. Sitting beside me was a dorky-looking girl with glasses and a messy braid that had fly-aways everywhere. Maybe not the kind of friend I would normally make, but she grinned at me and realized I was in trouble. She leaned over and showed me how to start the computer and make my email address. And after that day, we were best friends.

  But now it was Alyson who needed my help, not the other way around. Well, that was what she was saying anyway.

  But how could I possibly help her? “What do you want me to do, exactly?”

  Alyson, even when she was being serious, always looked like she was about to do something naughty. She had a glimmer in her eyes. Uh oh. That usually meant she had cooked up some kind of scheme and expected me to go along with it. But we weren’t kids anymore. I couldn’t get dragged into any schemes. She smiled. “Let me show you something.”

  Alyson was taking her sweet time ‘showing’ me this apparently incredibly important thing. Even after a murder had just taken place on her local beach, she was languid, lazy, as she idly skated down to the beach. Even though I was walking, I was keeping a slightly quicker pace. I knew how to be brisk. She stopped and picked up the board. “You still remember how to do this?”

  I rolled my eyes. “I remember,” I said quietly.

  “Oh. So you still skate?”

  That stopped me in my brisk tracks. Look at what I was wearing! The way I had my hair styled. The three-hundred-dollar shoes I was wearing. And she thought I still skated? Please.

  “Of course not.” I wasn’t trying to sound judgmental… Okay, maybe I was. “I’ve got actual responsibilities. I can’t spend my days down at the skatepark like some people.” It was fine for people like Alyson—well, fine is a relative word—to still pursue such juvenile hobbies. They didn’t have anything else to worry about.

  Alyson looked at the ground. Maybe what I had said had hurt her feelings. Sometimes it was difficult to tell if she even listened to something you’d said though, let alone taken it to heart. “You were always a better skater than I was,” she mumbled.

  True. I had always been the skater, and she had been the surfer. We were both okay at the other one, but we’d had our specific talents. Of course, some people would tell us that both skating and surfing were not the ‘correct’ hobbies for young girls. That we should have been playing house or dressing up dolls or something. But when people told me I couldn’t do something, or that a ‘girl’ wasn’t supposed to do something, that only made me try five times harder to prove myself. Alyson was the same way. That was one of the things that had always bonded us, made us the same, even when we were so different in many other ways. Strange to think that once our differences had made us unique and made our friendship stronger, and now they seemed so extreme that we had absolutely nothing in common. Nothing to talk about.

  “I guess you don’t surf any more either?” Alyson asked as the beach approached.

  I shook my head. No. Part of me missed it. But that was another part of me I had left behind.

  “Ha, I should have known,” she said haughtily as she put the skateboard back down for the last part of the journey. “Another thing that you think you are too good for now!” She went too quickly and slipped off the edge of the board, flipping it over as she tumbled off. She had to pick herself up and then pick up the board—a disgrace, if you asked me.

  For a moment, I was tempted to rip the skateboard out of her arms and show her how it was done. But I was hardly wearing the right footwear for those sorts of shenanigans.

  Finally, we reached the beach. I took a deep breath and inhaled the salty smell while the seagulls cawed above us. I had been hoping to visit town without needing to come down here. Too messy. Sand that got into everything. Seawater that threatened to turn my icy locks yellow. Too many screaming tourists.

  Though right then, it was close to deserted. Very unusual for Eden Bay. But this was an unusual day.

  I stepped uneasily onto the sand, trying to resist the temptation to tell Alyson how much my shoes cost. The flip-flops she was wearing couldn’t have cost more than a couple of dollars. She probably got them from one of those vending machines down at the surf club. She would tell me off for worshipping designer brands.

  But she saw me pause at the edge and jumped in with a snarky comment. “Come on, princess. Don’t tell me you are scared of a little sand on your shoes.” She chuckled when she realized just how reluctant I was. “Just take your shoes off then!”

  There is a joke that everything in Australia is trying to kill you—but there is a hint of truth to the joke. Especially on the coast, which looks serene at first glance, but there are riptides in the water. And on the sand and in the shallow parts of the water, you’re dealing with a whole host of dangerous creatures, including jellyfish.

  And then there are the people. It wasn’t just the nature an
d wildlife we had to worry about now. There was a killer on the loose.

  I looked around to make sure there were no jellyfish on the shore. They could wash up pretty far onto the sand when it’s low tide. And the tide was particularly low right then. “It’s dark. I can’t see if there are jellyfish or not.”

  Alyson rolled her eyes a little. “You aren’t going to die because you step barefoot onto the sand.”

  But what about my fifty-dollar pedicure? That would be killed.

  Eventually, I decided that my shoes were more valuable than my pedicure, so I pulled them off and took a deep breath, sinking into the sand for the first time in years. Yes, Sydney had beaches of course. But the movie studio where I worked was at least an hour’s drive. And unless there was a beach on set, I didn’t go near one. Strange how a sensation like that had the power to take me straight back, and I felt sixteen again. I could no longer keep up my brisk pace. I had to take long, languid steps like Alyson as she led the way.

  We were on the touristy section of the beach, the one with the lifeguards and the flags that you were meant to stay between, but I knew that Alyson didn’t care about rules like that. This wasn’t the spot where she surfed. But it was the spot where she sold her surfboards and that’s the spot she seemed to be leading us toward. She made money two ways, as I remembered, and I assumed she hadn’t changed her business model since I’d left town. One—she found old surfboards and fixed them up, polishing rough patches and gluing together cracked parts, then added her designs to them and sold the whole surfboard. Two—she painted, or sometimes re-painted, the surfboard that a customer already owned. The second way earned less money, but it was the more common request.

  “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.