Hang Ten Australian Cozy Mystery Boxed Set

by Stacey Alabaster

  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.

  “Don’t stress,” I said, taking a seat again. “Anyway, you never answered my question.”

  Matt shook his head. “I never heard of another Alyson.”

  I frowned. “So it wasn’t a family name or anything? Then who was I named after?” It wasn’t something I had ever asked about before, at least not that I could remember. As far as I was concerned, there was only one important thing when it came to my name—and that was that it was spelt with a Y. Sometimes I gave my full name out like that. “It is Alyson with a Y.” That was why a lot of people just called me ‘Y’ for short.

  “I suppose Mum just liked the name. She picked it out,” Matt said as he went over to the cupboard. I assumed he was putting his cleaning supplies away, but instead he pulled out another bottle of cleaning liquid, this one specially made for glass, and headed toward the windows. I will say this for my brother. He must be the only guy I’ve ever met who was this obsessed with cleanliness and with impressing his parents. I don’t know where he got if from. Both J and I were pretty much content to live in a pigsty, and I pretty much just rode the wave of being the favorite child. I never tried to impress anyone anyway.

  Matt was only one year older than me, so I wasn’t sure how accurate his memories of the events surrounding my birth could possibly be. How did he know Mum picked the name? I decided to look into it.

  I checked the time. “The plane should be getting in right about now.” There was no airport in Eden Bay, certainly not an international one, So we’d have to wait for Mum and Dad to arrive at the Sydney airport, get through customs, and then take the train to Eden Bay, which took about an hour. So we still had a couple of hours before they got in. But it was getting close.

  “Where is J?” I asked, looking around. Matt and I took turns having J stay with us. Even though it wasn’t a strict schedule, we usually took one week on and one week off. It was Matt’s week to have J. It had been school hours when I arrived so I hadn’t thought anything of J not being there, but now it was after four o’clock.

  “On a play date with that girl Mandy from school that she became friends with last week.” Oh, right, Mandy, the girl who she’d been ‘enemies’ with up until a week ago but was now her best friend for life. It could get a little tiring trying to keep up with it all. Then again, I couldn’t really judge. I remembered how I had been at her age. It was actually the same age—J was almost nine—that Claire and I had first met and become best friends. And to be honest, my first impression of Claire was that she was a bit of a snob. Almost two decades later and that opinion still hadn’t changed, actually. But she was still my best friend.

  “You’ll need to pick her up soon so that she can be here when they arrive.”

  Matt shook his head. “She’s staying at Mandy’s for dinner. She insisted.”

  I was surprised to hear that. Surely J knew what day it was? “Isn’t she excited to see her grandma and grandpa?” J always loved seeing them after they had been away. They always bought her presents, for one thing. And it was unusual for her to go so long without seeing them. My parents actually lived in the next town over these days, in Rushcutter’s, but they had rented out their house while they had been away for
six months and the tenants were still there for another week or two. As far as I knew, they would be staying at Matt’s house until they could move home. Matt was going to have J stay with him the entire time as well so that they could all catch up and have quality family time.

  Matt finally put the bottle of cleaning fluid down and frowned. “It’s weird. She was acting a little strange when I was talking to her about Mum and Dad staying here. Distant. Like she wasn’t that excited about it.”

  I shrugged. “Well, that’s kids for you. She’ll be over spending all her time with Mandy soon enough and she’ll move onto the next thing.”

  I returned my attention to the letter and re-read it.

  Matt eyed it carefully. “I think you should put that thing away,” he said, grabbing a broom from the closet. “It’s got bad vibes.” He shivered a little. Ah yes, if only it was as simple as putting the letter away and it just disappearing.

  But he was right. It had bad vibes all right.

  Claire could say that it was none of our business all she wanted. Maybe it was none of her business. It wasn’t addressed to Claire Elizabeth Richardson. But from the clues, it seemed as though the victim was going to be someone I knew and cared about. And the implication was that it was all going to be my fault.

  I thought about that again—someone I know and care about. And my family were all arriving in town that night.

  3

  Claire

  Ah, the sweet smell of dandelions in the late afternoon. And some sort of vanilla essence. The lobby always smelled like there were cookies baking somewhere nearby. A nice way to be welcomed home after a hard day. The walls were painted an expensive-looking navy matte blue, and the desk and vases were white. Quite nautically themed, really, like most places in Eden Bay. But this place was decorated in far better taste. There were times that I walked into the lobby and thought for a moment that I was still in Sydney.

  I smiled at Jeff standing behind the desk, waiting to greet me the same way that he greeted all the residents of the Turtle Dove Apartment Complex.

  It was the only place in Eden Bay that had a doorman to greet you when you got in. I liked the touch of luxury.

  Jeff was a tall man with a slightly balding head and tanned skin, who always wore a navy suit that matched the walls. If it wasn’t for the fact that he was always darting about, grabbing the door and mail for the residents, he would have camouflaged right in. “Hello there, Miss Elizabeth Richardson.” With his tone of voice, he always made it sound like I was an old friend.

  Oh. He had mistaken me for someone with a double-barreled surname. Elizabeth was just my middle name, not part of my surname. But I didn’t stop and correct him. I kind of liked how it sounded.

  “Any mail for me, Jeff?” I asked. He used his white-gloved hands to reach into my mailbox, number 55, and searched. I’d only been in the apartment building for a week, but that was plenty of time to have received mail. I was a little bit thrilled when he dug around and produced three or four different items for me. It had taken me a little while to decide whether or not I belonged in Eden Bay again after having fled for Sydney when I was nineteen and getting a high-powered job as a movie producer. For several months after ‘moving’ back to Eden Bay, I’d stayed in a motel called The Dolphin (F)Inn. All very temporary and transient. But now I had a place of my own and having mail officially delivered to the address just sealed the deal. I was back in Eden Bay. Really back.

  “Thank you.” I beamed at Jeff and leafed through the stack.

  Ugh. Just bills. Disappointing. But then again, what had I hoped for? A letter from fifty years in the past, threatening to kill someone I knew in five days’ time?

  “Everything all right, miss?” Jeff asked me. He must have seen the look on my face as I’d thought about the letter.

  “Yes, just a long day. Have a wonderful evening, Jeff.”

  “You have a wonderful evening too, Miss Elizabeth Richardson.”

  It was an uneasy feeling, for sure, knowing that threat was there, written in ink. Even though I was one hundred percent positive that the letter was not real, it still played in the back of my mind.

  The threat was directed at someone Alyson knew. I was someone Alyson knew.

  I decided I was not going to think about that at all that night as I took off my shoes and relaxed on my sofa, intending to open a bottle of Bordello. If I could just be bothered to get up that was. I hadn’t brought much with me to Eden Bay. My apartment lease in Sydney had come with furniture and appliances, so none of that was mine to take. And I still hadn’t been out shopping for any kitchen items or anything, so the apartment was pretty bare except for the absolute basics: a sofa, a bed, and my laptop. Alyson had told me that I could find whatever I needed on the street if I just went out during the hard rubbish collection nights and had a good forage. Could you believe that? Getting furniture off the street? It was bad enough that I had let her convince me to allow that hideous recliner with the sunken cushions in the shop.

  I was close to dozing off for a nap when I was awoken by a knock on my door. I was startled and sat up. I caught sight of the face I was making in the mirror on the far side of the wall. The whole reason I had chosen the Turtle Dove was because there was no chance of random people knocking on my door and disturbing me. I was on the fifth floor, no chance of anyone off the street just knocking on my door to ask for favors. I wasn’t like Alyson. I didn’t like neighbors turning up for a chat and a cuppa. And unlike Alyson, I never humored door-to-door salesmen by listening to their pitches for twenty minutes. I was more the sort of person to turn the lights off and pretend I wasn’t home.

  No, this was not good enough, especially not for the monthly rent I was paying on the place.

  I sat up feeling livid. Then quickly phoned Jeff.

  “Good evening, Miss Elizabeth Richardson. I trust you’re doing well and having a pleasant…”

  I immediately cut him off. No, I was not having a pleasant time in my new apartment. Not one little bit.

  “Why is there someone knocking on my door? I thought everyone had to be approved by you before they could come up to my floor, and I haven’t given my permission for anyone to visit me tonight.”

  I hadn’t meant for my tone to be quite so pointed. I just couldn’t understand how this trespass had possibly happened, and I needed someone to be held accountable for it. I couldn’t afford to live somewhere where the security was quite so lax. Eden Bay looked like a cozy place from the outside, but a lot of crazy stuff had happened recently, and there were people writing letters threatening to kill other people.

  “I didn’t let anyone up without your permission, miss…” Jeff sounded alarmed, defensive now that I had gotten so angry with him. “If there is someone knocking on your door, it is someone from your floor. Perhaps your next-door neighbor is just paying you a friendly visit…”

  I walked over to the peephole and saw a blonde woman who looked to be in her late fifties standing there with a beaming smile. She looked vaguely familiar to me. A woman I had seen in the lobby a couple of times as I was coming and going. “Oh.”

  “Is everything okay now, miss?”

  “Sorry my earlier tone was so abrupt, Jeff.”

  I hung up the phone and vowed to buy Jeff a gift basket to drop off in the lobby the next time I saw him.

  So there was no random door-to-door salesman at my door. But now I was stuck with another problem. I just wanted to relax that evening and have a glass of red wine. Could I—metaphorically, because there was no way to see into my apartment—turn the lights off and pretend not to be home?

  I slunk away and hoped that she would get the hint.

  She knocked on the door again and called out, “Hello?”

  I sighed. It looked like this woman was not one to take a hint then. “I heard the door open and shut a little earlier, so I thought I’d come over and introduce myself…”

  Fine.

  “I’m Nancy OMalley.” She had blonde hair i
n curls, possibly a perm. She was wearing a pastel pink suit and too much blush on her cheeks and bright pink lipstick. Possibly false eyelashes, but it was difficult to tell.

  I had lived in an apartment block in Sydney quite similar to this one, and in the two years I had been there, I had never spoken to the people who lived next door to me, not once. But this was Eden Bay. Where—even if you paid top dollar for the most private housing—people were still going to stick their noses in your business.

  Nancy smiled at me again. “Can I come in?”

  Uh, no?

  But she had already pushed her way in through the door and was oohing and ahhing as she looked around my threadbare space

  “This layout seems a little bigger than mine…” she said, spinning around almost toppling over. She wasn’t a large woman, but she was a little round. It probably looked bigger than it was because of the lack of furniture. She eyed me suspiciously. “How much are you paying per week?”

  I bristled a little. It wasn’t the polite thing to do, to ask how much other residents were paying. The exact price was kept private on the real estate listings and was only given to people who seriously inquired about renting. To be honest, the only reason I could afford the place at all—on a bookshop owner’s salary—was because I still had savings from my movie producer’s job and my annual leave and sick leave payouts.

  When I didn’t answer, she just shrugged and started to pull out drawers next to my kitchen sink.