A Time for Murder

by Stacey Alabaster

  A Time for Murder

  A Hang Ten Australian Cozy Mystery

  Stacey Alabaster

  Fairfield Publishing

  Copyright © 2018 Fairfield Publishing

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Except for review quotes, this book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without the written consent of the author.

  This story is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual people, places, or events is purely coincidental.

  Contents

  1. Claire

  2. Alyson

  3. Claire

  4. Alyson

  5. Alyson

  6. Claire

  7. Claire

  8. Alyson

  9. Claire

  10. Alyson

  11. Claire

  12. Alyson

  13. Claire

  14. Alyson

  15. Claire

  16. Alyson

  17. Claire

  18. Alyson

  19. Alyson

  20. Claire

  Epilogue

  Thank You!

  Bonus Content: Story Previews

  1

  Claire

  A loud “hip-hip-hooray!” came at the end of a rousing rendition of “Happy Birthday,” which I had reluctantly taken part in, while looking around to try and see if this was some sort of joke. Can you sing happy birthday to a town? Who was listening, the trees? The skatepark? The beach? Or maybe we were just singing it to each other. The proud residents. Wow. One hundred years old. We all looked around when the singing ended and smiled. Eden Bay didn’t look a day over ninety-nine. But it sure had been through a lot.

  “See?” my best friend Alyson said as she wrapped an arm around my shoulders. “Why would you want to be anywhere else?”

  I grinned back at her. On a day like this, she was right. It was hot and sunny, eighty-eight degrees Fahrenheit but no humidity and a sea breeze from the beach that was only a few hundred yards away. We were at the park where the main BBQ picnic was taking place, and I was growing hungry after a day of centenary celebrations including a parade and a three-legged race where Alyson and I had come in dead last. The smell of food drifted in the air. Sausages in bread with sauce. Always a childhood favorite, but not something I ate a lot of these days. I did eye the fat, greasy little thing suspiciously as the BBQ chief plonked it into my hand and then asked if I wanted onions on top of it. I shook my head. “I’ve got a date a little later,” I joked. But I did accept a fat serving of mustard squirted over the top.

  Bang!

  I jumped at a balloon popping beside me. A child started to cry before he was consoled by his mother. Alyson leaned over and picked up the discarded piece of broken red rubber. Another balloon got loose and flew into the sky. There were balloons everywhere that week, all the shopfronts had them. They were handed out to the kids at the parade, and there was a clown walking around the park right then making balloon animals. Alyson asked him if he could make her a turtle. The object he returned to her looked more like a bagel in my opinion.

  “When are they actually getting to this thing?” I asked, referring to the time capsule unveiling. Hang on, was it called an unveiling if it was being lifted up out of the ground? More like an ‘uplifting.’ Anyway, Alyson had been excitedly referring to it as an unveiling all week. She’d barely been able to talk about anything else, as had the rest of the town. It was the main event, the reason we were still hanging around the park at this time of afternoon, when we’d usually be at the beach or in the surf. But everyone was tittering with excitement. Well, mostly the older folk to be fair—the people who were over fifty and had actually put something in the time capsule back when it had been buried.

  One of the oldies shuffled over to Alyson and greeted her. I vaguely recognized her as an old neighbor of Alyson’s when she had been a kid. “Hello, dear. Are your parents here?”

  “Nah, they’re getting back to town tomorrow,” Alyson replied. I put my arm around her. I knew how much she had been looking forward to reuniting with her parents after their European vacation, and their plane had been meant to land in time for them to take part in the time capsule ‘unveiling,’ but their arrival had been delayed until the following day, much to Alyson’s dismay. Her parents had grown up in Eden Bay and I knew she wanted to celebrate the centenary with them. She was trying to act like it hadn’t fazed her though.

  At least her brother Matt and niece Jasmine, simply called J, were hanging around, although J had long grown bored of waiting for the time capsule to be dug up and had demanded that Matt take her to the beach to visit the ice cream van. He’d asked if I wanted to come. I’d whispered to him, out of earshot of Alyson, “Sort of. But I really should stay here for Alyson.”

  You could say one thing about Alyson Foulkes. She sure had a lot of town spirit. She had been the one to organize the three-legged race and even though she had not put the original time capsule in the ground, she was the one who had told the local paper about it and made sure it was on the front page that week so that everyone turned up for the digging. Hence the full crowd at present.

  I could see Matt and J in the distance, walking along the sand toward the ice cream truck. J already had a soft serve cone in her hands with a candy bar sticking out of the top. I had to admit, that did look pretty tempting. Maybe Alyson wouldn’t even notice if I left for a while.

  “Where are you going?” she asked, her face falling

  “I…” Sigh. “Nowhere.” I walked back toward the park where the oldies were all shuffling to the site of the time capsule. I couldn’t get a clear view, but I had previously seen the spot and there was a plaque erected near where the capsule had been buried, with the original date of burial and the date it was to be dug up. That date was today.

  “They should have gotten me to do it,” Alyson muttered as she watched how slowly the diggers were going with their tiny spades into the earth. Then she giggled when a pigeon came up and landed on the man’s hat. Even the pigeon got tired of waiting. When no one gave him any food, he flew off for greener pastures. I kept looking at the time. I just wanted to wrench the darn thing out of the ground myself.

  Alyson and I looked at each other. “Should we?”

  “Here, move aside,” I said as Alyson and I took one side of the box each and lifted it out of the ground.

  There was a bit of damp damage done to the box in the fifty years, but other than that, it had held its shape. It was wooden, and it was lighter than I had expected for its size. It had the size and shape of a small treasure chest. There was no lock on it, which surprised me. I wondered why no one had ever been tempted to cheat and dig it up before the official date.

  “It’s kinda spooky, isn’t it?” Alyson asked, looking down into the dirt. “Almost as if we have dug up a grave.”

  I stared at the box. I was sure there were a lot of secrets in there that people had buried. Kind of like a grave itself.

  Alyson and I were pushed aside and asked to return to our spots at the back while the official representatives from the town trust carefully pulled out the items in the capsule and called out the names of any person related to them. It was mostly just historical artifacts. Some people had put in personal items for the next generation, small toys and old family photos, but there was a lot of old town records, maps, and copies of the local newspaper from the time. Alyson looked less than impressed. “Geez, all this stuff you can just find on google now.”

  Yes, but the people who had buried these maps and news clippings could not have possibly known that at the time. They probably thought they were being helpful to the next generations.

  “Well, I don’t know what you were expecting,” I said. “Buried treasure?” Knowing Alyson and her wild imagination, that pro
bably was what she was hoping to find. The box might have looked like a treasure chest, but there was no literal gold or jewels in there. Just a bunch of faded old birthday cards.

  At least the next part was slightly more interesting. We were up to the bit where people had written letters to their future selves or perhaps their children or grandchildren fifty years in the future. There was a stack of old envelopes held together by a rubber band.

  I was actually interested in this part, but Alyson had checked out. “You were right, this is boring. Let’s hit the surf!”

  I had never said the time capsule unveiling was ‘boring.’ I was just more neutral about things in general whereas to Alyson, everything was always the best thing ever or the worst thing ever. And now this had swung into ‘worst’ territory for her and she was ready to take her toys and go.

  “And the final letter is for…Alyson Foulkes.”

  There was a bit of a hush as everyone looked around for Alyson, who was already halfway across the green and about to pick up her surfboard. But she heard her name and turned around slowly, as though she wasn’t quite sure she had heard correctly. None of us were.

  Could they have meant another Alyson Foulkes? Surely the letter couldn’t have been addressed to my best friend? She hadn’t even been alive fifty years earlier.

  She walked slowly back toward the open box and held out her hand. I couldn’t just stand back and watch this from a distance, so I raced over to get a front row view, so to speak. The letter looked old enough at a glance, and it was from the same stack as the rest of them. It certainly did look like it had been in the ground for fifty years with its yellow tinge and browned edges and the fragile way it almost fell apart when she unfolded it.

  Alyson turned to me. “I wonder what this could be!” she asked me breathlessly, the excitement and magic now returned to her eyes.

  “Well, the easy way to find out is to open it,” I said sensibly, growing impatient. But Alyson was savoring the moment with all eyes on her. Everyone else who had received a letter had been in their fifties, sixties, and seventies. Everyone was silent, leaning forward, wondering what could possibly be in the letter addressed to the girl in her twenties.

  I didn’t like the fact that Alyson was getting so excited. She was only going to get let down again when it was junk mail or something, or a letter telling her that she had won a hundred thousand dollars in a sweepstake. It was probably addressed to some ancient Alyson Faulks who had lived in the town fifty years earlier and had accidentally fallen into the pile.

  She finally ripped it open and I braced myself for it to disappoint her.

  But Alyson’s hands were shaking as she read the words out loud.

  “Dear Alyson Foulkes—or should I say, dreaded Alyson Foulkes. You might think that you are special, but as I write this, I am telling you, you are not. You only think you are. But don’t worry, this is not about you. It is about someone you know who has done a terrible thing. You can’t do anything to stop this, my dear, it is just a warning. Seven days after you read this letter, that person will be killed.”

  2

  Alyson

  It was always me. The town novelty. The town laughingstock. I don’t know how I manage it to be honest. A few months earlier, I had made myself famous—well, Claire says ‘infamous,’ whatever that means—when I destroyed a man’s podcasting equipment and he made a whole show about how crazy I was. Then, just when the fuss had died down over that, I became famous again for mistaking a piece of wood for a shark and having the whole beach shut down for a day. Never mind that there actually WAS a shark out there in the end. No one cared about that. They only cared about the fact that I mistook a piece of wood for a predator.

  And now my string of bad luck had struck again. They do say it comes in threes, don’t they? Now I was the girl who had received the impossible letter. The one that made a threat of murder. And again, everyone was talking about it, whispering about me when I walked past. So I was hiding out. Well, kinda. I also kind of loved the attention.

  But it was time to hide. And no one was ever going to think to look for me in a bookstore.

  “Could you make this tea a little stronger?” I asked Claire. She had to let me hide out in her shop. I was her best friend. Those were the rules. She was working, doing the books behind the front desk, while I was kicking back on the soft blue recliner that I had found on the street and encouraged Claire to put in her shop even though she had put up a massive fuss at the time about hygiene and cleanliness. “We don’t know where this has been.” Who cared if you got your furniture off the street? That was where all the furniture in my apartment had come from.

  Claire glared down at me. “You aren’t sick,” she said. “And your limbs are working perfectly fine.”

  I had the letter out and was reading it for the dozenth time. “Yes, but I had had rather a nasty shock,” I said, fanning myself with it. “And I am feeling rather faint.”

  She took the letter off me and threatened to rip it up. “Hey!” I said, grabbing for it, but she had already taken it back to her desk and I was super comfy on my recliner, so I just stayed where I was while Claire took out her reading glasses, which always made me giggle because they made her look about fifty. She read over it. Silently.

  “It’s not real,” Claire declared as she took her glasses off and sat them on the desk.

  I sat up. “It looks real enough to me. It’s made of paper and ink, and I was just holding it in my bare hands until you snatched it off me.”

  She shot me a weary look. “You know what I mean. This can’t possibly be fifty years old.”

  That was Claire for you. She always had to be the party pooper. She always had to go using logic and reason. Why couldn’t she just use a little imagination for a change? Take a leap of faith?

  “And how do you know that for certain?” I crossed my arms.

  She was waving it at me. “You weren’t alive fifty years ago.”

  “Yeah, yeah…” So what if that made perfect sense? There could be other explanations. There were always other ways of looking at a problem. I didn’t know how but I knew that letter was legit. It had been written fifty years ago and put in the ground at the same time. And whoever wrote it meant what they said. In six days’ time, someone was going to be killed.

  And yet here I was, lazing around on a recliner like I was the Queen of Sheba, not doing anything about it except staring up at the slanted ceiling of the bookshop. Were those spider webs up there?

  I sat up properly and finally addressed the issue that we had both been dancing around. The one no one wanted to admit might be true. Even if Claire was skeptical about the age of the letter, she couldn’t deny the contents of it. “What about the threat that the letter contains? Someone is going to be killed in six days, and I’m the only one who can do anything about it.”

  Claire seemed like she was about to say something, that she was going to admit that I was right, just for a moment, as she opened her mouth to say something, but then looked away. “An idle threat. Anyway, the police have been notified.”

  I rolled my eyes. Sure, technically, they had. But the police took it even less seriously than Claire. The letter wasn’t signed, and there was no specific victim identified in it. There was no reason for them to take it as a real threat.

  But how could I just sit back and do nothing? Then the blood would be on my hands when someone was killed in six days.

  “This isn’t our business,” Claire tried to object.

  “The letter was addressed to me,” I said, standing up. I grabbed the letter from Claire as I headed toward the door with it tucked into my pocket. “So that makes it my business.”

  I’d kinda hoped that she would come after me, but she was the only one in charge of the bookshop. Still, she could have closed it for a little while! Or she could have even left the door wide open. I can’t think of anyone who would want to steal a book. They would probably be doing her a favor. Taking some of the stock off of
her hands. She definitely wouldn’t see it that way. She was all about profit, that one.

  I had to head over to my brother’s house anyway.

  “Was there anyone else in our family named Alyson?” I had the letter spread out on Matt’s dining room table. I had already gone to his pantry and helped myself to some cookies, and a glass of juice from his fridge. He had insisted I use a coaster, which he never did. And I wasn’t using one anyway, because when he’d actually tried to find one he couldn’t.

  Matt was distracted that day, nervous about the rest of our family coming back to town. Neither of us had seen our sister Maggie for almost a year, and J hadn’t seen her for that long either. Mum and Dad were bringing her back with them. It had the potential to be an emotional reunion between her and J, but I was trying not to think about that. I was excited to see Mum and Dad and to hear about their recent six-month long trip to Europe. I wanted a love like my parents had. They had been married for thirty years and were still just as in love as the day they’d met.

  Too bad I couldn’t even get so much as a date!

  “Does it look clean enough in here?” Matt had a duster in one hand and a bottle of cleaning fluid in the other.

  I stood up and checked. The white coffee table was sparkling, and I could see Matt’s reflection in it. Just like every other surface of the house. Whoops. There was a circle of condensation where I had my juice glass, but I put my arm over that so he wouldn’t see it.