Hang Ten Australian Cozy Mystery Boxed Set

by Stacey Alabaster

  “Oh, I’m sure you do,” I said, playing along. “But why don’t I come along just in case?”

  Claire would be thrilled to see me taking an interest in the books. I walked in through the doors and petted the two cats who had made their home in the window. The older of the two, Mr. Ferdinand, gave me a grumpy look when I petted his head like he would much rather just be left alone, and then went straight back to sleep.

  “Good evening!” a jolly, familiar voice greeted us. Maria was wearing a long multicolored smock in marbled shades of purple and violet. “We are closing in about fifteen minutes, just to let you know. Can I help you find anything?” She beamed at me. “So good to see you in here, taking an interest in reading, Alyson.” I wished people would stop being so proud of me for reading. It was a bit basic, wasn’t it? Why couldn’t they be proud of me for my amazing surfboard designs, or the fact that I could down an entire milkshake in ten seconds without taking a breath?

  “You can, actually,” I said, glancing around the shop. “I’m looking for Claire. She told me she had to come in here to take care of some important business?”

  Maria just made a bit of a confused pout and shook her head. “No, Claire has taken the full week off, hasn’t been in once. And she is taking the whole weekend off as well.”

  “So she’s not here?” I spun around to find Simon’s face full of disappointment. Strange. I thought he was just there for the pure joy of reading.

  Maria shook her head. “Sorry, dear.”

  “Do you know where she is?” I asked Maria. She told me that as far as she knew, Claire was meeting Danielle Williamson at her hotel.

  But why would Claire lie to me?

  I told Simon I had to go find Claire. “I am coming with you,” Simon said as we headed out the door.

  “Alyson, what are you doing here?” We were on the first floor of the Flower of Life Hotel. I’d knocked on room thirteen. Unlucky for Claire, who was now sprung.

  She stopped when she saw Simon. “So this is where you hang out, is it?” he asked, glancing around the room.

  “No,” she said. “I’m staying at the Dolphin (F)Inn. This is where my boss Danielle is staying.”

  Simon just seemed to take that information in and nodded. Claire was shuffling around some paperwork and looked agitated like she wanted the two of us to leave.

  “I don’t get it,” I said, looking down at the schedule she had in her hands. “Why did you tell me you were working at the bookshop tonight?”

  “What’s going on?” a loud voice called from the kitchen area. Then a tall woman walked out, holding a glass of red wine.

  Oh, it was Danielle! I grinned at her and greeted her warmly with a bright hello.

  She screwed her face up and looked me up and down. “So, Claire was telling the truth the other day. You really do wake up looking like that, hey? And I can see that you are a stranger to the hair and makeup chair when you are not on a movie set…”

  I could see Claire’s face sort of freeze up with embarrassment, then she looked away from me, unable to meet my eyes as she buried herself in paperwork.

  Well, well, well. Wasn’t so nice to me now that she had gotten what she wanted from me and no longer needed me, was she? And this was the kind of person that Claire used to work for?

  “Well, I think you are the rudest woman I have ever met in my life and I can’t wait for you to leave our town!” The words had already escaped my lips before I could think any better of it, but I had no regrets. This Danielle person looked like she was the kind of person who never had anyone speak back to her. Well, I was going to be that person who did.

  She shrugged and looked over at Claire smugly. Kind of like she was a possession that Danielle owned. “Your friend clearly doesn’t agree with you, seeing as she’s just agreed to come back and work for me full-time.”

  All I could do was laugh at that, it was so absurd. “Yeah, right, I’m sure. Come on, Claire, let’s get out of here,” I said, certain that my best friend would follow me out the door after I had just been spoken to so rudely.

  But Claire remained firmly rooted in place. She still wasn’t meeting my eyes. In fact, she looked like she just wanted to disappear.

  I started to get this lurch in my stomach the same way you do when you miss the bottom step on a staircase.

  “Please tell me this woman was only joking, Claire…”

  She finally looked up at me. Pale as a bedsheet. “I was going to tell you, Alyson. I just needed to find the right time.” She looked hopelessly over at Danielle, who couldn’t have cared less that Claire was in distress. She certainly had no interest in helping Claire out. In fact, she looked amused by the whole thing. “I just made my final decision anyway.”

  I stormed out and didn’t even realize that Simon was still there.

  19

  Claire

  “Thank goodness she’s gone,” Danielle said, waving at the air. “What was that horrible scent that she was wearing? She smelt like a teenage girl’s changing room.”

  I thought that waving the air was a bit much. “It is just the vanilla-scented body spray that she wears.”

  There was a pile of paperwork on the table. I’d only just gotten a quarter of the way through the first stack. “I am going to leave you to look after that,” Danielle said as she finished off her wine and grabbed her coat.

  “And where are you going?” I asked. We had so much work to get through, it was going to take both of us pulling an all-nighter to even get close.

  “I have a dinner date,” she said with a smug little smile, stepping out the door. “Make sure to check in with reception if you leave before I get back.”

  Well, there wasn’t much chance of that. I was fuming quietly as she left, knowing that I wasn’t going to get any sleep that night.

  “What’s wrong?”

  I jumped. “I didn’t know that you were still here,” I said, trying to regain my composure. Where had Simon been hiding that entire time? He told me that he had just been using the bathroom, but that didn’t put my mind at ease any.

  “Looks like a lot of work,” he said. His muscles were bulging as he stepped toward the table. “I could help you out?”

  I had to laugh a little. Simon would be good at helping me if I was drowning or being pursued by a shark, but this wasn’t quite life or death. Well, I say ‘quite.’ If I wasn’t done with all this work by the time Danielle returned, she would certainly consider it a matter of life and death and my head would be on a chopping block

  “Well, maybe.”

  “So what needs to be done?” he asked calmly as he pulled my chair out for me. It was a gentlemanly move. I thanked him as I sat down. Maybe he could be some kind of help. After all, maybe he wasn’t just a beefcake, maybe there were some actual brains in there amongst all the brawn.

  “Well, these are the call times for all the people we need to get in for the green screen work,” I said to Simon, trying to explain it as simply as I could. Because some of the scenes were reshoots, we had to bring people back who were already done shooting and had moved onto other projects. It was going to be difficult to get them all back at short notice. “First things first. I have to call every single person on this list and make sure that they can be there at the correct time.”

  Simon flipped the page over and saw that it extended to the back. “Some of them are not going to be happy to get a call at this time of night.”

  “Exactly.” So the earlier we got cracking, the better.

  “This is just like old times, hey?” Simon said with a grin as he poured the bottle of wine into the glass for me and settled in. “You know, when we used to date.”

  I was a little surprised to hear him say that. “Huh. I thought you didn’t remember me from school.”

  He poured the wine a little too close to the top of the glass. That was far more than a standard serving of alcohol. I had to be careful when I picked it up that I didn’t spill it all over the hotel room carpet. I coul
d only imagine what Danielle would do to me if she saw that on her return. I doubted the job offer would still be on the table.

  “As if I didn’t remember you, Claire.” He laughed. “You were the love of my very young life..”

  I was starting to get a little bit tipsy and a little bit flirty. “Ah. So you were just playing it cool then. I thought so.”

  He grinned and looked a little shyly into his own wine glass. “Yeah… You are very hard to forget, Claire Elizabeth Richardson.”

  That was what I had always thought! Wow. My ego was loving this so much that I almost forgot we were in the middle of a task. I leaned in a little closer to Simon and realized that I was twirling my hair around my finger.

  But then something on the table caught my eye.

  “Hang on, what is this?”

  Simon seemed disappointed that I had pulled away. I thought I heard him let out a little sigh of frustration as I rustled through the stack of papers.

  “It’s the old shooting schedule…” I murmured. Not such a big deal in and of itself. The only reason it had even caught my eye was because it was color-coded in pink with all the call times and all the ones I had seen had the same info blocked out in blue. The pink just caught my eye, that was all.

  “Why don’t you put those down,” Simon said, trying to take them out of my hand. I pushed his arm away and stood up. The dates on the schedule were strange. As was the blocked-out info. Research into shooting locations.

  Danielle had been in Eden Bay a week earlier than she’d told me. She’d been scouring for locations a week earlier.

  My cell was ringing. It was a call from Alyson. “Is Simon there with you? Claire. I don’t trust the guy. Get out of there.”

  20

  Alyson

  I was pacing, waiting to hear back from Claire to know that she had gotten out of there safely, when a text popped up on my phone.

  “SOS.”

  I had no idea who the number belonged to. It didn’t even look like an Australian mobile number. But I didn’t recognize it as a landline number either.

  “What is this?” I asked, stopping an innocent beachgoer who was walking along, trying to mind his own business, when I shoved the phone into his face.

  “Looks like a New Zealand mobile number to me,” he said with a shrug, then tried to get away from me.

  I tried to call it, but the call went dead and couldn’t connect.

  I sent a text back. “Kieran?? Tell me if this is you.”

  It took twenty minutes before Kieran must have gotten reception again, but he was breaking up as he spoke, and I could hear the waves crashing behind him. “Aly…” It broke up again. “We…stuck…trying….” I could hear a scream that sounded like Kayla in the background. And a male voice. Jarryd.

  “Kieran!” I shouted into the phone. “How far out to sea are you?”

  But the call went dead.

  History was about to repeat itself. I was the only one who could stop it. Or this time, Kayla was going to murder again— and Kieran would be the ultimate victim.

  I ran over to the lifeguard chair and flagged down the lady who was sitting up top, trying to explain everything to her as she climbed down the stairs. “He is out there somewhere,” I said to her. “And you have to go find him.”

  “I think Simon is the one best equipped to deal with this,” she said nervously.

  “Fine!” I said stomping away. “I’ll call the coast guard then! Or better yet, I’ll take a boat out there and deal with the problem myself!”

  I shook my head. Looks like it all fell on my shoulders again, as usual. The responsibility of keeping this beach and all the people on it safe.

  Now, if only I could get my hands on a boat.

  21

  Claire

  “I have to go,” I said, pushing past Simon, the production schedule shoved into my purse. Before I went, I grabbed as much of the rest of the paperwork as I could. Receipts. Contracts. I couldn’t stay in Danielle’s hotel room, doing her work for her, until I got to the bottom of why she had lied to me.

  “Wait,” Simon said, trying to stop me from leaving. But there was no way he was going to stop me. After what Alyson had said to me on the call, I had realized something—Troy had told me that he’d seen Simon hanging around outside Alyson’s apartment. I’d assumed he was creeping on Alyson for some strange reason, or it had just been a coincidence. But now I realized that I was the one he had really been looking for.

  I breathed a sigh of relief when I closed the door of my motel room and flipped on the desk lamp.

  What a creep, I thought, shuddering. Lucky I had gotten away in time.

  I unfurled the production schedule and looked over it properly now that I didn’t have someone breathing over my shoulder.

  This one had Danielle’s name printed on the top, but it wasn’t her private schedule. It had the call times for all the members of the staff on it, as well as the times and places of the location scouring. None of it made any sense to me. It was almost as though Danielle had these totally separate sets of production schedules that she kept secret from me. Did she really not trust me with the proper set?

  Had I made a huge mistake in deciding to go back and work for her again?

  My stomach dropped when I turned the page and saw the schedule for this weekend. According to Danielle’s schedule, she would still be in Eden Bay, doing reshoots here.

  So she was shooting that weekend, in Eden Bay? What about all the work I was doing, trying to get people organized to turn up for the Sydney green screen shoots?

  I frowned and tried to make sense. “Okay!” I finally decided that this must have been an old, out of date schedule that had since been updated. A flush of relief ran through me.

  But when I compared it with the schedule that I had been given, I saw that the date on it was even more recent than the one I had been working off of. The one that I had trusted was the correct one.

  I put it down, stunned. Why would Danielle be keeping this from me?

  I picked up my phone, ready to call Danielle and quit there on the spot. And I would mean it for real and for good this time. No more being dragged back in with stupid promises. With money I didn’t even need.

  But then I noticed something else when I flipped the schedule back a few pages.

  “Location scouring — open water.”

  Open water? It looked as though Danielle had not just been scouring beach locations. She had been trying to find a place to shoot in the middle of the ocean. I ruffled through the receipts I had taken with me. I felt sick. There was one there for a boat hire. On the same day that Warren Reed was killed.

  Then I realized what had happened. Oh my god. Danielle was the one who had killed Warren Reed.

  Alyson was not picking up her phone. It was a little dark and I fumbled for my keys as I walked toward the Porsche. No wonder Jarryd had acted so weird when he had seen Danielle on set. He must have been terrified of her. And not for the reasons that people were usually terrified of Danielle Williamson.

  “Thought I would find you here.” A hand was over my mouth. My screams came out muffled as I kicked and tried to get free as he dragged me into the dark.

  How could Simon have known where I lived, though?

  With a sinking feeling, I realized that I had told him that I was staying at the Dolphin (F)Inn. And I made up my mind that if I got out of this alive, then I was going to move out of the motel the very next day. Take it as a sign, as you will.

  22

  Claire

  “You need to let me go,” I begged him. “It’s not just my life we are talking about here. There are other people with their lives at risk if I can’t get out of here in time.” I knew that if Danielle had killed Warren Reed, then the other three must still be in danger. Kieran was already missing.

  Simon backed me into the corner of the parking garage. What was he going to do to me? He was so big. He could easily overpower me.

  “You can’t just b
reak someone’s heart and get away with it, Claire.” He was sniffling, almost as if he had been crying. “And you can’t just leave town and act like they didn’t even exist.”

  “Look. Simon. Can’t we talk about this at some later time… How about over dinner?” I said, trying to smile at him. It took all the will in the world. Meanwhile, I searched around and noticed a camera in the corner. Okay. Good. The garage was being filmed, but was it being monitored by anyone at that present time?

  I looked up at it with a pleading look. If someone is watching, please, I am being held captive!

  “Can we really?” Simon asked. “Go out for dinner, I mean?”

  “Of course we can.” I was still trying to smile at him, but my eyes were trained on the security camera.

  “What are you looking at!” Simon asked, spinning around. I took the opportunity to grab a piece of wood laying on the ground and lift it up, smacking him in the back of the head. As he leaned over and groaned, I wondered if this was the same way that Warren Reed had died.

  But one hit to the head wasn’t quite going to do it for Simon. He got right back up and I had to kick him in the groin as well before I sprinted for the door. I pushed through the door, passing one overweight, huffing and puffing security guard as I went. “Fat lot of good you did!” I shouted, sprinting out of there.

  My heart was still racing by the time I reached the Porsche.

  “Godspeed,” I said, and started the engine.

  23

  Alyson

  I was just about done dragging the rowboat I had borrowed (okay, technically without asking the permission of the owners) out to the edge of the water when Kieran called one last time. He must have only just gotten the last teeny bit of reception. “Sorr…” He was breaking up again. I finally managed to catch what he was saying. “Jarryd wanted to start filming again…” He told me that he thought if he could just get Kayla and Jarryd alone, he could convince them to band together and tell the truth. That there would be power in numbers.