She stirred the sugar into her tea. “I have to admit tonight was sort of fun.”
I laughed. “Big time.”
She looked a little confused, though. “I thought you always got along with Maria?”
I shrugged. “That doesn’t mean I want to see her have a go at my best friend…ah, former best friend, I mean, I guess.”
“But admit something,” Claire said. “You never read the book, did you?”
I shook my head. “Nope. Not even the title.”
Claire leaned in closer and whispered something to me. “I will tell you a secret then—I never got to the end either.”
7
Claire
Okay, okay, it was bad to go to the first book club meeting without ever getting to the end of the book. I could admit that. Being underprepared was not normally my thing. But Jessica had skyped me late the night before, asking me to please convince one of the flighty actresses not to walk, and I just hadn’t had the time to finish the last two chapters.
So, I still hadn’t discovered who had done it. And thanks to the ruckus at the book group, it had not been spoiled for me yet. I supposed sometimes Alyson could be good for something. Once everyone had gone home, I sat down with my cup of tea, Mr. Ferdinand at my feet, and opened the book, ready to savor the ending in peace.
Finally, I got to the last page.
The end.
I closed the book and sat there for a while. Stared into space. Was there suddenly a chill in the shop?
For a while, I just sat and pondered, in silence. Murder in the Windy Reeds had been full of twists and turns as the entire town tried to solve the murder of a young man. In the end, the murderer had been someone I’d never seen coming. Her name was Anna. A young woman who had been desperate right from the start for the crime to be solved, and for everyone to help her. A case, in the end, of protesting too much.
It was funny. Right from the start, that character had reminded me of Alyson.
Oh, it had been a long time since I’d set foot inside the halls of Eden Bay Surf Club. I’d been a junior member when I was under twelve and then a teen member, and very briefly an adult member before I’d left town at nineteen.
There was a buzzing in my pocket.
“Emergency,” the text read.
Jessica. I was sure it was. It always was. I put the phone away again.
There was the overwhelming scent of sunscreen as I walked in the front door and down the long hall to the reception area, which was in front of a bar that served beer on tap. I was really hoping not to be recognized. That was kind of the point that day. Remain incognito so that I could speak to some of the members. I needed to figure out who would want Adrian dead. And I needed to find out just what Alyson’s relationship with Adrian had been.
They guy standing behind the counter had spiky blonde hair and was wearing a shell necklace and a white polo. Shoot. I kinda knew him. He’d been a couple of years below me at high school. His name was Dan Fisher. He tilted his head to the side and I knew I was in danger of being recognized. “I know you?” he asked.
“No,” I said quickly. “I’m new to town. But I am a surfer.”
“You don’t look like you surf,” he said, looking me up and down. Well, not in my present state I didn’t, no. I was wearing a black designer suit and my hair was in a perfect blowout. I also had on my real diamond ear rings. There was no way I would ever risk those in the surf.
“I do. I was close to going pro at one point, actually,” I said. Not the truth. I was only ever a passible surfer. I could have been a pro skater, if I’d really focused on it. But not a surfer. That didn’t matter, though. It only mattered that I was able to say it with enough confidence to sell it to Dan Fisher. “And I want to enter the surf comp in Rushcutter’s Shore next week. It’s a condition of entry that competitors have to belong to a surf club. So here I am.”
He frowned. “Where have you been surfing before now?”
“I’ve always been a lone wolf. I go where the waves take me. Never belonged to one surf club before.”
Either he wasn’t buying anything I said or I had just caught the guy on a bad day, because he rolled his eyes and frowned at me.
“Well, it’s been a tense time around here. We are not currently accepting any new members.”
“Oh. I am sorry to hear that.”
He looked me up and down. That same skeptical look on his face.
“So, you didn’t know Adrian Bailey at all?” he asked me.
Wow. Was I the one on trial or was he?
I felt like it was me. “No,” I said quietly, taken aback. “I never met the guy in my life.”
I let the silence fall between us for a few moments.
“Just how good a surfer was Adrian?” I asked.
“The best,” Dan said. “But you would already know that, wouldn’t you?”
I backed away, feeling my cheeks burning, but there was a new suspicion churning in my stomach.
Whoever killed Adrian might have wanted to take him out of the competition so that they could win it for themselves.
I looked over my shoulder at Dan.
One way or another, I was going to have to get myself on that list of entrants into the competition.
I was so preoccupied as I came out of the surf club that I didn’t even see the person coming in the other side of the entryway.
“Whoa,” a tall guy with sandy, shoulder-length hair and large muscles said. Strange. That voice sounded way too familiar.
I looked up. The sun was shining behind him. Was that… “Matt?” I asked.
He seemed just as surprised to see me. “Claire?” he asked, looking down at me. “Claire Elizabeth Richardson.”
“That’s me,” I said, rubbing my arm where I had banged into him.
He had grown up quite a bit since the last time I’d seen him. Not taller, of course. But he’d certainly become more muscular. “So, I see you are still in Eden Bay?” I said.
He shot me a toothy grin and nodded, his shaggy locks moving back and forth. Just like Alyson, he refused to visit anything resembling a hair salon. He preferred the natural, tousled look. I supposed his ‘look’ was appealing to some. But not to me. I preferred my men far more clean-cut.
He frowned a little—an expression that didn’t seem natural on him.
“What were you doing in there?” he asked me, nodding at the club.
“Just…looking for Alyson,” I said, thinking on my feet. “She’s not here, though.”
“Really?” he asked, causally but skeptically. “From what she told me, I got the feeling that you two aren’t exactly friends anymore.” Oh, I hadn’t realized they’d spoken about me. I felt like he was gently telling me off. “Alyson told me that you hadn’t spoken to her in years…”
“There’s been a lot going on,” I said quietly. “In my life, I mean.” I nodded at the surf club and shivered a little. “And here,” I added. “The past week has been a lot. I didn’t expect to come to my home town and have to deal with a murder.”
Matt nodded in sympathy. For a moment, I thought he might put his arm around me. But he backed away a little. Still, he shot me a smile. “Why don’t you come back to Captain Eightball's? Lunch is on me.”
I glanced around the place. Matt still worked here? I remembered when he’d first gotten the job when he was fifteen, and Alyson and I were just fourteen. We’d thought it was the biggest deal in the world because Captain Eightball's was the coolest place to work. We also thought it was the coolest because it meant we’d be able to get free milkshakes when Matt was working a shift. But that was when we were fifteen years old.
“So, uh, are you the manager now?” I asked as Matt opened the freezer and took out a scoop of ice cream. He placed it in the blender with the strawberry syrup and switched it on.
Matt shook his head while he polished a glass. “Nah. Still just work here casually, picking up shifts when I can. It’s good because it works around the tides, you kno
w? I can surf whenever I want.” My milkshake was finished in the mixer. He poured it into the glass and pushed it toward me.
Of course, as long as his job worked around the tides. Don’t worry about things like career progression, or being able to pay a mortgage, or recognition from your peers.
But maybe there was something else making me so prickly. I felt a stab of envy at his laidback lifestyle. “So you can go surfing whenever you like,” I said, raising my eyebrows. “Must be good for some.”
Matt flashed me one of his wide grins. He still had that dimple in his left cheek. Girls had always been crazy about Matt Faulks when we’d all been in high school. He wiped down one of the counters and picked up a crate of milk bottles, loading them into the fridge. “Surfing helps blow off some of the cobwebs. Clears out the stress.”
Yeah, sure. What did Matt know about responsibility?
I took a sip of my milkshake. Now me, I knew about stress. Jessica was texting me, asking me to do a Skype session with the temperamental actress who was refusing to learn her script. I picked up my buzzing phone and showed it to Matt. “This is stressful. Not working in a cafe.”
There was a flash of hurt across his face. But Matt Faulks wasn’t the argumentative type. He was more the zen type. So he just nodded and kept unpacking the milk. “Some of us like it here, Claire. We appreciate the laidback lifestyle…”
“I don’t mean to judge,” I interjected.
He smiled at me. As much as he tried to make it look relaxed though, it looked a little forced. “Then don’t.”
There was a child, about eight years old, wearing a baseball cap turned to the back, sitting on one of the snooker tables. She was staring down at an iPad that was making cartoonish noises. I squinted. The baseball cap, with its purple wave design, seemed awfully familiar. Hadn’t Alyson had one exactly like that when she was a kid? Or—hang on—was it actually the same baseball cap, just handed down to the next generation? The kid looked familiar too…
I frowned. “Is that…”
Matt nodded and laughed a little. “That’s J,” he said.
My milkshake glass was empty and I kind of wanted to ask for another one. Back in the day, we’d been allowed as many as we wanted, on the house. I felt like my words earlier had put Matt off side, though. He may not want to serve me even if I paid full price. “Wow. The last time I saw her she was only…” Was it? I thought maybe I had seen her again more recently, but my mind was too distracted to be sure.
“A newborn?” Matt asked. “Yep, she has grown up a lot since then.” She sure had.
“So where is Maggie today?” I asked. Maggie was Matt and Alyson’s older sister. She was six years older so our high school years had not overlapped at all and I’d never really known her that well. But she had always been cool and older, and kinda mysterious.
Matt hummed for a moment while he cleaned the counter again. “She’s not so well at the moment,” he said.
“Oh, I am sorry to hear that.”
“Yep. So Alyson and I have been pretty much left to raise J for the time being. We take it in turns, having her live with us. Three nights at Alyson’s, three nights at mine. As for picking and dropping off at school, that falls to whoever is available at the time. But she’s always with one of the two of us.”
I was stunned.
I had no idea that Alyson was essentially the guardian to an eight-year-old.
“Alyson never told me any of this.” I mumbled my words a little, feeling ashamed that I hadn’t known such a big thing about my old best friend’s life. And here I had been, sitting on a pedestal, acting like I was the only one with any real responsibility and that Alyson just skated and surfed her days away.
“Yep. Alyson has J half the time, technically, but to tell you the truth, she probably puts in the lion’s share of the effort with raising her. J really looks up to her. She’s like her little mini-me.”
I glanced over at J, who’d been distracted from her iPad by a bug walking across the floor. “I didn’t know.”
Matt shrugged. “She is a humble girl, my little sister.” Then he gave me a meaningful look. “Maybe you should think to ask her about her life sometime, Claire.”
Yep. A telling off, all right.
And probably one that I deserved.
8
Alyson
I took a few moments to stew. A kinda ‘after everything I did for her, saving her butt at the bookshop, and she still says no?’ thing. But it’s not like me to hold a grudge. The sun always comes up again and there’s always another wave to catch. Well, if she wasn’t going to help me, I was just going to have to do it myself.
So I was going to have to pull a Claire and actually read all these books I had taken from the bookshop. The pile seemed to have grown since J had helped me carry them home that night. I bit the bullet and took the first one from the top. There were icy fields on the cover and the author had a Nordic-sounding name.
It was heavy. And it wasn’t just the hardback cover. I flipped to the back just to check. Five hundred pages? How was anyone supposed to read one of these things in a year, let alone a week? I glanced over at the pile. Let alone ten of them in one week.
Sigh. “Come on, Y, just get cracking,” I told myself. I opened to chapter one. It opened with the description of the ice fields and a red flower growing in the middle of them. This is silly. How can a flower grow in the middle of the snow fields?
Ugh. Maybe Mr. Carbonetti had been right. Maybe this had just never been my thing.
“What are you doing?” J asked as she jumped up onto the kitchen counter where I was sitting.
“Hey! You’re not supposed to be up there. You know that’s the rules. Butts don’t go where our food goes.”
But she ignored me telling her off. She looked at the pile I was struggling with. “Ugh, books.” She really took after me, this one. But she nosily peered into the one I was reading. It wasn’t just the flower that was red. It turned out the red had been caused by a bloody corpse. Yikes.
“They might be a bit adult for you,” I said, picking her up and placing her on the ground when she’d still refused to move even though I’d told her to. “Too much blood and guts.”
But her eyes opened in joy. Darn. I’d just made them sound even more appealing to her, hadn’t I? She was a tomboy and not easily grossed out. I closed the book so she wouldn’t see any details.
Time to get dinner on anyway. I walked over to the fridge and pulled it open. Oops. Kinda slim pickings there. Then checked the freezer. “Party pies or chicken nuggets?” I asked.
“I thought Matt was supposed to be picking me up for dinner?” she said with a pout. Matt’s the better cook. Well, Matt actually cooks. I just reheat. Unlike most eight-year-olds, J had a rather refined palate. I blamed it on all the reality cooking shows we let her watch.
Yeah, he was supposed to have J at his house for dinner that night. But Matt seemed to have become preoccupied. He’d sent me a text telling me he was busy with a friend. Who knows who that could possibly be. Oh well. “Oh, here’s a text from him,” I said, reading it out loud to her. “He won’t be here in time for dinner, but he’ll take you for frozen yogurt for dessert. Deal?”
“Deal!” she said with a grin. In the meantime, I put the chicken nuggets in the oven and set the timer for 25 minutes. Then, while J watched cartoons, I came up with a plan for as soon as Matt arrived.
J was far too smart for her own good. Maybe not book smart, exactly, but she always picked up on what was going on. I could never get anything past her. While we waited for Matt to arrive, I changed into a darker outfit—a psychedelic tee was not going to cut it that night—and packed a small backpack. I was hoping that J was preoccupied with her iPad, but she caught me rummaging around my room for a flashlight.
“What are you doing?” she asked curiously. Suspiciously.
I straightened up quickly. “I’m just heading out for a while, when Matt gets here.” I smiled at her like it was no bi
g deal. “Probably hit the surf.”
J narrowed her eyes. “You never wear a beanie surfing.” She thought about this for a moment and revised it. “Come to think of it, no one wears a beanie surfing.”
“I’ll take it off when I get there. Duh.” Hey, it was chilly out.
I heard Matt’s van pull up in the driveway. J pouted when it was time for her to leave, clearly thinking she was missing out on some sort of great fun. “I thought you couldn’t wait to get frozen yogurt?” I said, pushing her toward the door. Children really go from whim to whim, don’t they?
“What have you been doing all evening?” I asked Matt curiously, but not really caring that much. But when his face turned red, I was suddenly kinda interested for real.
“Nothing. Just catching up with an old friend. I told you that.”
“All right, all right. Calm your farm.” I handed him J’s overnight bag.
Matt took it from me and cast me a look. “You know, we can’t keep doing this,” he said quietly, while J fetched the iPad she had forgotten to pack. “Passing J back and forth like this. It’s not right for her. She needs stability.”
“We’ll talk about it later…” I needed to get going.
Matt stopped. Crossed his arms. “What are you in a rush to get to?”
Fine. I could tell Matt the truth. He was the one person in the world I fully trusted, after all. “I am going to go down to the dark side of the beach.” That was what we’d started calling it since Adrian was killed. “I am going to see if there is anyone suspicious hanging around.”
“Y. That sounds really dangerous.”
“How can it be dangerous?” I asked him. “I’m just going to see which surfers are out tonight. That’s all…and possibly which of them might seem out for blood,” I added quickly. “It will be a quiet little investigation. I promise you.”
Hang Ten Australian Cozy Mystery Boxed Set Page 5
