Hang Ten Australian Cozy Mystery Boxed Set

by Stacey Alabaster

  She put the receiver down, but it missed the phone. “J is missing.”

  “I’ll go with Matt,” I said, making the executive decision. “You go and find your mum.”

  “I told you—lock on the bedroom door,” I said when I greeted Matt inside his house. By that point, I was starting to get most of my executive functioning back, even though my nose was still running.

  “Woah,” he said. “You look…Umm. Rough. Sorry?”

  “Long story. Nancy drugged me so that she could…” Then I stopped myself. One drama at a time. It wouldn’t do Matt any good to know that his mum’s life was in danger while J was missing.

  “Do you think she’s at the skatepark again?”

  Matt shook his head. “Police have already checked there.”

  “Oh no.” I had a sudden thought, even though my head was groggy and it was a little like trying to decipher a dream into reality. “Tina.”

  “What about Tina?”

  “We need to go back to the Dolphin (F)Inn.”

  That was what Tina’s letter had been about. The one that hadn’t quite made it into the time capsule. I tried to explain it to Matt as we raced over to the motel, wishing that I was clear-headed enough to drive my Porsche. “I can do it,” Matt said.

  “But you’re not insured!” I cried out. He shot me a look and I knew we didn’t have a choice. I was really about to let Matt drive the Porsche. I held on and prayed while he wrecked the gear box trying to get my precious baby up the hill.

  “Tina’s letter made a similar threat as the original one,” I told him, my eyes closed, my teeth gritted. “She must have been threatening to kidnap J.”

  Matt parked the car while I ran up to the second floor. Just as I’d thought—Tina checking out had been a bluff. I knocked on the door while Matt raced up behind me and pushed me out of the way when a startled Tina opened the door, a crying J behind her.

  “Far out, Tina,” I said, shaking my head. “You’ve gone way too far.”

  “She is better off with me!” Tina cried out. “You guys are not equipped to deal with her.”

  J was still crying.

  Matt knelt down and comforted her. “J. You can live with me full time, okay, if that is what you want? And don’t worry. I will talk to Aunty Alyson and sort it out. She will have to listen to me.”

  But we had another problem to deal with. I turned to Matt, took a deep breath, and told him everything.

  “We need to break down the door,” Alyson said. We were back out in the hallway, but this time, in front of Alyson’s mum’s room.

  Alyson’s dad was coming out of his room toward us. That meant that for sure his date was over, and our worst fears were probably happening right then. “Oh, hi, Claire. Long time no see,” he said obliviously as he stopped for a chat. Now was not the time nor the place, Mr. Foulkes!

  “I was just coming to see your mother,” Mr. Foulkes said. “What’s going on, Alyson?”

  “Dad, what did you say to Nancy?” Alyson asked, temporarily giving up on her attempt to break the door down.

  He sighed. “Not that it is any of your business, but I told Nancy that even though it was lovely to catch up with her again, I still very much had feelings for my wife and I would like to reconcile with her.”

  “Well, great, Dad. You just signed mum’s death certificate. Thanks very much. You should have kept dating Nancy! Can’t you see that.”

  His face turned red. “Alyson. I simply cannot win with you!”

  He definitely had a point there.

  But maybe Alyson did as well. If her dad had gone back to Nancy, she probably would have forgotten all about her plans to kill whoever it was who had wound up married to the man she loved. It was probably just a note written in anger as a twelve-year-old girl, but now that she had been dumped again, it was all new. Fresh. Bloody.

  There were sirens coming from two floors below.

  The cops.

  Oh great. It was Sergeant Wells. He was pummeling his way up the stairs. Staring us down as though WE were the criminals. Well, to be fair, it was the second time that Alyson had attempted a break and enter that night alone. But still.

  “What are you four doing here?” he asked, shining the flashlight right in my eyes. I squeezed them shut so that he couldn’t see the state of them. Really not worth explaining in that moment.

  “This is no time to have a go at us innocent citizens,” Alyson said. She pointed to the door. “There is a potential murder going on in there.”

  For once in his life, Sergeant Wells actually listened. And was useful. He made us step aside as he broke the door down and then I watched, impressed as he held up his weapon and forced Nancy to drop the brick she was holding over Alyson’s mum’s head.

  Matt reached out and grabbed my hand. I squeezed it back quickly, then dropped it before Alyson saw. Uh-oh. My heart was pounding as Nancy was taken away. I supposed a room had just opened up at the Turtle Dove.

  “And that is why you should always listen to me,” Alyson proclaimed triumphantly. She took a few deep breaths and looked proud of herself. “And so should I.”

  She was right. She should always trust her intuition. Well. Within reason. A lot of the times, she was very, very wrong.

  My head was starting to thump again. Alyson and her parents had a lot of catching up and comforting to do. I was only going to get in the way.

  “See ya tomorrow, Alyson.”

  “See ya tomorrow, Princess! Or should I say, sister?”

  Like I said… Uh-oh.

  Epilogue

  Alyson

  “And to celebrate the end of the centenary celebrations, we will lay in the ground a new time capsule to be opened in another fifty years’ time.” Clive had to stop speaking to catch his breath. Oh, gosh. Was the man about to have a heart attack? I was about to step in. Take over. Like usual. But he regained his ability to speak and continued on with the ceremony as though nothing had happened.

  I did the math. Wow. I’d be in my seventies. But I would be here, in this spot, to witness it being opened. I vowed to that right then and there.

  “Hold up!” I said, right before the box was lowered into the ground. Clive gave me a tired look, but he waved and muttered under his breath while I stepped forward and started riffling through the box. “I want to check every last one and make sure there is nothing threatening in here.”

  And I did. Even though it took twenty minutes, and even though Claire rolled her eyes through every second of it.

  “All clear!” I announced as the crowd groaned and clapped at the same time. Before I closed it, I put a letter in there myself, for J, to be opened in fifty years. To tell her that she had always been loved, by everyone in her family, even if we had occasionally made silly decisions.

  I caught sight of Sergeant Wells in the background, giving me a slight nod of approval. I may have even seen him smile.

  A balloon burst. And I jumped a mile. But it was all right. On that sunny afternoon, we were all safe.

  Murder and Manuscripts

  Hang Ten Australian Cozy Mystery, Book 5

  1

  Claire

  It was hard not to think about kissing, and forbidden romance, with the box of books with bare-chested heroes on the cover and all the women gazing up at them adoringly. Nope. There were some combinations that were classic. Mint and chocolate, for one. Me and my Porsche, for another. But books and men? They just didn’t mix. That was what I had decided anyway. In spite of what the book covers might have suggested. Ugh. I almost tripped over another box of old romance books that had been donated as I walked through the aisles of my book shop, Fabled Books. I glanced down and tried not to think about the man I’d just kissed. My best friend’s brother. Nope, did not want to be looking at romance books. I’d get Maria to sort through those when she arrived for her mid-morning shift.

  I pushed the box away. Who needed men anyway? I had so much to focus on. My shop, my friends, and all the amazing new business
ideas brewing in my head. Some combos were a bad idea. Men and books, no. But what goes better than coffee and books?

  Nothing.

  And thus a plan was forming.

  I had inherited the bookshop from my grandmother five months earlier and even though I had adored the shop as a little girl, as a grown woman who had just returned from the city, I had found myself somewhat frustrated by the fact that my grandma had made almost zero changes in the thirty years she had owned it. Seriously. There were still books there from thirty years earlier, the kind with yellow paper and cracked spines that practically disintegrated in your hands when you tried to open them. And my grandma had not been a very big believer in the concept of ‘inflation’ either. I wasn’t sure how she’d ever made a profit with the prices as low as she’d kept them. Since I’d taken over, I’d made a few changes, including the fact that I now charged full retail price for new books and I refused to swap secondhand books for new. I was also trying to drag Fabled Books into the 21st century by trying to make it look like a modern, cosmopolitan bookshop

  But so far, every attempt I had made to modernize the place had backfired. I’d tried to paint it white, but that hadn’t worked, so I’d asked my best friend Alyson to paint a design over it, and now I had a mismatched mural of the town on the largest wall of the shop that made it look straight out of the eighties. Then there was no rhyme or reason to the shelving system. Genres faded together, none of the shelves were in straight lines, and I had a recliner in the middle of the shop that Alyson had brought in off the street. I sighed. There was no use denying it. The space was a design disaster.

  But with the mall development about to recommence down by the beach—which I wasn’t mentioning to Alyson, she’d have a meltdown—I needed to compete with the chain bookstore that would be on the ground floor, selling new books at rock-bottom prices and with a brand-new interior, aka no dust and no musty old books. And I heard that one had a coffee shop in it. All I had was mismatched furniture, dust balls, and two antisocial cats that were supposed to attract customers, but half the time ended up scaring them away.

  But there was a corner of the store that was empty. Inviting almost. And I suddenly had a flash of a brilliant idea. “Wow, Claire, you’ve done it again!” I said out loud, actually grinning at myself as I admired my own genius. Because, as I just said, what goes better than coffee and books? I had space—just—for a coffee machine and if I got rid of the old recliner, I could even fit in a table and a few bench chairs. Wow. Maybe I could even bake muffins. I mean, I didn’t know how to bake. But I could always learn! Suddenly, my head was spinning with ideas and I felt a little dizzy.

  I had to tell myself to stay calm. I wanted to tell everyone about my amazing plans, but I knew it was better to keep them close to my chest, at least for the time being.

  There was a knock on the door. I shook my head and waved in slight annoyance to say that we were closed. It was still before 9am and I hadn’t even been to the back to get change for the till.

  It wasn’t a customer, though. It was my pseudo-employee.

  Maria was early for her shift. She came through the door, almost breaking a sweat thanks to the gigantic box of musty old books she was carting. She dumped them right in the corner of my store and grinned at me while she dabbed her brow with a handkerchief. “I think we’ve got a little gold mine on our hands with these ones. I can’t say too much, but they are from a very special source.”

  Maria was a largish lady, quite rounded, and she always wore long dresses in psychedelic colors, jewelry to match, and she had a permanent jolly grin on her face. She was, really, the kind of woman who found herself getting along with most anyone. Except, sometimes, me. I didn’t always think she had the best taste, in any sense, and today was no different. She was heading to the spare corner with the box.

  This is where the coffee machine is going to go. My secret plan.

  “Nope. No more junk in my store.” I crossed my arms.

  “These are books, Claire,” she said, incredulous.

  Right at that moment I couldn’t tell the difference.

  Fine, I thought. I’ll just wait till Maria has gone and then throw the books out. I could maybe pretend they had been sold if she ever asked about them? That would be hard to believe. But she’d probably buy it seeing as she thought they were all so incredible.

  But she had a three-hour shift she had to do first. However, when we had a quiet morning and I had already tripped over the box three times, I decided to do her a ‘favor’ and tell her she could go home early. She wasn’t actually an official employee of the bookshop at all—she just liked to spend her Saturday mornings there. Her real job was as a drama teacher at Eden Bay High School. But I was already online browsing the catalogues for espresso machines and I was ready to do some measuring. Oh, the heck with it, I thought, and pressed ‘order’ on the most expensive one in the online store. Now I just had to make space for it.

  “Bye, Maria!” I cheerfully said as I waved her away. She looked at me a little suspiciously, but probably only because ‘cheery’ wasn’t my usual disposition—more a cool calm. “Cheery” was more a word you’d use to describe Alyson, and she’d always been Maria’s favorite student at school. Not me. I never even liked drama class. Too childish. I wasn’t really one for make-believe.

  I stared down at the box as though it was my mortal enemy. Because in that moment, it was.

  What could I do? Burn them? I looked down at the box and considered my options. Probably couldn’t start a fire right there in the shop. Could take them out to the woods and burn them there?

  Mr. Ferdinand meowed from the second-floor landing and I looked up and sighed. He was right. Hiding them upstairs did seem like the best option until it was garbage day and I could just dump them in the trash. Maria would be none the wiser. Not as satisfying as burning them, though.

  The box was so much heavier than I had expected. How the heck had Maria been able to lift it in on her own? Now I knew why she had been sweating even though we had just reached the Australian winter and even in Eden Bay, where it was ‘summer’ all year round, things had gotten slightly cooler.

  But I had to get them out of the way. I could call for backup. Hmmm. But then I’d have to tell whoever I asked about my brilliant surprise. I wanted to keep my cards close to my chest for a little while. I started taking a few books at a time, and I managed to get all the books upstairs. The last load was just the box with a few books left in the bottom.

  ‘Upstairs’ was, by that point, sort of like that guilty pantry in the house where you just store all your junk indefinitely and hope that no one ever looks in there because if they did, everything would come spilling out. It was getting cluttered and so full that you could barely walk around up there. You had to step over piles of old books to walk down the aisles.

  I was just trying to think up another solution when I was struck again. Oh my goodness. Yet another brilliant idea. I could take this opportunity not just to get rid of this current box, but to clear out ALL the old books that Maria had snuck onto the shelf in recent weeks. So rather than empty the box I’d been carrying, I started to fill the box up even more, clearing space on the shelves. I could go and get even more boxes that night and fill them up as well! And then slowly but surely, my grand plan of being a bookshop that only sold new books could come to fruition. If Maria ever asked me what happened to all the old books, I could claim that they had all been sold. And just hope that she didn’t try to replenish the stocks.

  I’d filled it haphazardly with a few books when I realized that approach wasn’t going to work. It was like Tetris—I had to stack the books perfectly to make enough space.

  I was just rearranging a few of the books when I jumped back. There was something in the bottom of the box that made my heart stop for a moment. What the…?

  A rope.

  I was having trouble breathing. The way it was tied, and the way it looked. It had been used for something. I took another ste
p back and almost tripped over a stack of books.

  The rope was thick, with fraying edges, and there was a red liquid around it. Maybe still wet, but I wasn’t willing to get any closer to test it out.

  But I knew I had to call the cops. I’d seen too much since I’d been back in Eden Bay to assume this was all innocent. I was pretty sure that red liquid was not paint, if you catch my drift.

  I wasn’t sure if it had been in the box all that time or whether I had knocked it off one of the bookshelves, but I was leaning towards the latter.

  While I waited, I was fuming. Alyson. Why hadn’t she locked up the store like I had asked her to? Why couldn’t she be a normal, responsible human being? Was that really so hard?

  The night before, I’d had to leave the shop early for a dental appointment. Against my better judgement, I asked Alyson to take care of things and to lock up for me at 5pm. Of course, when I had arrived that morning at 8am, the door had been open. Had I been surprised? No. But was I now furious? Yes.

  Sergeant Wells was the one who responded to the call.

  If only a rope had been the end of my problems. Instead, it was just the start. I just didn’t realize it until Wells entered the bookshop, put on a pair of gloves, and picked up the rope, inspecting it with a suspicious gaze, which he then turned to me with.

  “And you have no idea how this would have gotten into the shop?” he asked as he placed it into an evidence bag and then took off his gloves with a snap.

  “I don’t know if it was in the box all along or whether it fell in there while I was clearing the shelves.”

  “Helpful,” he replied wryly.

  Ugh. Sergeant Wells was not known for his compassionate nature. What was I supposed to do, not inform the police when I found a potential weapon hidden in my shop? I was starting to regret it, though. “You’re probably right, it’s probably nothing,” I said, ushering him towards the door. “I’m probably keeping you from more important duties. Unless of course you’d like to buy a book?” Couldn’t help to try and secure a customer with the new bookshop about to open.