Hang Ten Australian Cozy Mystery Boxed Set

by Stacey Alabaster

  But about what? There must have been something I was missing, and the phone was cutting out again. Their engine was broken, and they were trapped.

  “Kieran, where are you?” I asked trying to figure out how far into the ocean they had gotten. But there was no answer.

  “Can you just…stay there?” I asked him as I pushed the boat into the water. “I am coming!”

  I saw someone as I was hanging up the phone. “Claire?”

  She was racing toward me, breathless. “Simon tried to hold me captive in the parking garage. It’s okay, I am free now…long story.”

  I told her that Kieran, Kayla, and Jarryd were all out at sea and there was a stricken look on Claire’s face. “Oh no,” she whispered. “Danielle left the hotel room suddenly. She told me she went out for dinner, but I don’t trust a word she says.”

  “It’s okay,” I said, reaching down to pat my stolen goods. “I’ve got us covered.”

  She looked down at the boat and groaned. “Not again…” she said.

  “Come on, princess,” I said, dragging it to the edge of the water. “You get in first.”

  It seemed as though we had been out on the water for hours, even though only about fifteen minutes had passed. “Woah. The tide has taken us really far out,” I said when I realized the shore only looked like a tiny dot from where we were sitting.

  “There they are!” I called out as I spotted the boat. “Uh-oh,” I said, as I saw the even larger boat coming toward them, looking like it was about to hit it head-on. Actually, it was more of a yacht than a boat.

  And it was dark navy blue.

  “So much for going out to dinner,” I heard Claire grumble beside me.

  “Maybe she was going to dinner on the boat.”

  “We should have gotten something with a motor,” Claire said. Our tiny boat was never going to reach Kieran’s boat before Danielle did. I was trying to row faster, but there was something else in the water. At first, I thought I was only imagining the dark shape below me and I quickly pulled my eyes away.

  But then I pulled them back to it.

  “Claire!” I said, grabbing her as I scurried over to the other side of the boat. She toppled, and I almost pushed her right into the water.

  “It’s a shark,” I whispered, like if I said it too loudly, it might hear and leap right out of the water and snap us up

  She rolled her eyes. “As if it is, Ayl—” But then she stopped talking and her face turned as white as the moonshine above us. “Oh my gosh, you’re right.”

  The fin was poking out just above the top of the water.

  I wasn’t sure which posed a bigger problem of the two, Danielle or the shark, and we were about to get a third one.

  There was a large engine noise coming from the other direction—Simon, on the lifeguard boat.

  The seas were a very dangerous place indeed that night.

  “Shark alert! Shark alert! You need to turn around and head back to shore immediately!” Simon shouted at us through the loudspeaker.

  “We can’t go back,” I said to Claire. “Not while Kieran is still out there!”

  “Alyson, there is a shark in the water!”

  “Oh no!” Claire cried out as Simon’s boat got closer to us. I wasn’t sure whether she was more scared of Simon or of being knocked overboard into shark-infested waters.

  Simon reached us and turned his engine off. I stood up and glared at him. “Well, don’t stop here!” I shouted, pointing at the other two boats. “You need to go and save those three people.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  I pointed to Danielle’s boat. “She is the one who killed Warren Reed. And unless you go over there and do your job, she is going to kill again.” Claire was shaking beside me. I put my arm around her. “After everything you’ve done today, Simon, this might be the one thing you can do right.”

  We had to get into the boat with Simon, but only to avoid the shark. Lesser of two evils.. Back on shore, I took a shaky step back on relatively shaky ground. But boy, was I proud of myself. Not only had I saved everyone from a human killer, I had saved them from a finned predator as well.

  I’d always known there was a shark in the water.

  And now Claire, Simon, and Troy were all going to have to admit that I was right. That I had been right all along.

  Danielle had been dragged back to shore by the coast guard. Claire was about to turn her back to her, but at the last second, she stomped right up to her. “Why did you do it?” she asked.

  Danielle still looked refined, even while she was being arrested. “Because he wouldn’t sign the non-disclosure form.” That was all she said before she was led away.

  I turned around to Jarryd. He nodded. “While we were out shooting, Danielle came across our boat and saw me and Warren, recognized us from our YouTube series. She must have been the only one who had watched it. She handed us scripts and offered us small parts. Even Kayla and Kieran. But Warren read over it and refused to sign the contract. He was going to spoil the movie.”

  “And that would have cost the production company hundreds of thousands of dollars.”

  They’d all been so terrified of Danielle that none of them would come forward with what really happened.

  Kieran raced up to me and gave me a hug. “It’s been a long adventure, Alyson,” he said.

  “Well, there’s still room on my couch,” I said to him. “It doesn’t have to be over yet.”

  He shook his head. “I think it’s time for me to return to New Zealand, Alyson. But you are right. It really is paradise here.”

  Epilogue

  Claire

  I was making good on my promise to myself. It was time to say good-bye to the Dolphin (F)Inn for good. It didn’t take me long to pack up my belongings. The staff had offered me a free week’s stay on the house after the incident in the parking garage, but I had refused. Time to move on. Simon had a new home as well—a jail cell.

  I grinned as I spun around. It had been fun, this little temporary home, but I had the contract in my hands. Now that Danielle was in jail, I would have a new boss to work for back in Sydney at the same production company and a promise from the studio that my salary would still be doubled.

  As I climbed into the Porsche with my bags, I took out the contract and took one last look over it.

  Just to make sure that everything was still in order.

  And then ripped it up.

  I had a new home to get to. An apartment down by the beach of Eden Bay. But then I realized I was actually pretty hungry. Time for one last bowl of cornflakes before I left.

  A Time for Murder

  Hang Ten Australian Cozy Mystery, Book 4

  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 sh
ook 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 probably 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.