He shook his head. “No.” He gulped and glanced around him like there was someone lurking in the shadows waiting to attack him. “And it’s not the sergeant that I am worried about dealing with…” He glanced back up the slight hill that led the way into town. “It is all the unhappy racers when I break the news to them. We may have a town revolt on our hands, Miss Foulkes.”
A plan was hatching in my mind. Troy was still on the east side of the building, but I craned my neck a little just to check that we were fully and completely alone, even though there was one team heading down the hill waving a clue around in jubilation now that they had figured it out. But we had a couple of minutes. “Hmm,” I said, pondering. “And that would be pretty bad for your re-election. Having half the town mad at you for spoiling their favorite day of the year.” I was acting all sympathetic like, oh no, wouldn’t that just be a terrible thing. I didn’t get too involved in town politics—the mayor would claim differently—but I knew the elections were only three months away.
Clearly this revolt, this impact on his popularity, was the thing he was dreading the most. The reason he wouldn’t pull the plug himself.
I sighed and acted like I was about to do him a huge favor. “Tell you what. Seeing as I’m already unpopular with the all of the competitors, why don’t you let me tell the rest of the racers that the treasure hunt is canceled?”
A look of relief flooded the mayor’s face. “Would you really do that, Alyson?”
“Of course. And I won’t tell anyone it was your decision. I will blame it all on Wells.”
He took a deep breath and exhaled. All the nerves seemed to leave his body and he smiled at me warmly. “Thank you, Alyson. I owe you a huge favor.”
I just smiled at him as he walked away. Might have to keep that little favor in my pocket for later.
Troy returned with a precious bottle of water that he had clearly purchased from a vending machine. I wondered how many seconds out of our racing time that had taken. “Everything good?” he asked as he took the cap off and gulped it down like he hadn’t had a drink in a week. That was how long a human could survive without water, at the outside and in certain conditions at least. I knew, just in case it ever came to that.
I grinned at him. “Everything is just wonderful. Now come on. Let’s solve the next clue.”
13
Claire
Night had fully hit as we stumbled out of The Horseshoe, and there was a chill in the air. Matt offered me his jacket, but I shook my head and said I was fine. I intended on warming up on my own. If it was a fight Alyson wanted, it was a fight she was going to get. I’d run the rest of the race if that was what it took to get back in the lead and win the whole thing. But it was hard to get a gauge on where we were in the race or how many teams were still in the running, seeing as we had gone so far off track. The Horseshoe was in town, but on the west side away from the beach. There were a few people outside hanging about, chatting and getting ready to hail cabs, but I couldn’t see anyone who was an obvious part of the race.
I wanted revenge.
“Maybe your sister ought to actually write clues…she was kind of good at it.” It was a begrudging compliment. But seeing as she’d surely only had a few seconds to come up with the clue before she’d switched it, it was fairly clever, and a horseshoe was a good treasure hunt item. It was just kind of bad luck—ironically—that The Horseshoe hadn’t been a real stop on the hunt.
Matt had a more philosophical way of looking at the fact that we were now behind. “Well, we did skip forward two clues,” he said. “So maybe this was karma in the end.” He glanced up at the now dark sky where the stars were starting to come out. “The cosmos restoring the natural balance of things.”
I didn’t believe in karma, though. At least not in the way that Alyson and Matt did, in the hippy-dippy sort of way where everything was vibrations and the cosmos would put everything right in the end. But I did believe that whatever effort you put into something was what you got back out of it. So maybe in that sense Matt was right. We’d never gone to the cemetery or the woods like the other teams had and that had saved us not only time but physical energy. An advantage that we hadn’t necessarily ‘earned.’ But I refused to believe that we were being cosmically punished for such a thing. If anything, the fact that we had stayed back to try and figure out what had happened to Brett should have earned us some good karmic vibes.
“Yeah, well, what kind of karma is your sister going to get for sabotaging us like that?” I had to ask. “Is she going to slip down to last place?” If the cosmos truly was listening, then she would do just that. Or she’d be disqualified. Surely there was something in the rulebook that forbade what she had done.
“She probably thought it was just a funny prank.”
“I can’t believe you’re defending her.”
We had to circle back to the crab farm on the east side of town where the crabs were to find the ‘real’ clue again. But by the time we got there, the bucket was empty. No more crab shells. No more clues. Matt was shining the flashlight from his phone into it. Nothing there but plastic.
I turned it upside-down just to make sure and then ended up throwing the whole bucket down on the ground. “Unbelievable!”
I knew I was acting like Alyson. I wasn’t sure I cared. I looked around just in case one of the crabs had escaped from the bucket. I mean, not literally of course, they were just empty shells and the actual crabs were long dead or gone onto a new shell. But maybe one of the shells and clues had fallen out somewhere. Maybe we would get lucky. Hey, it had happened before. I shot a pleading look up at the stars. “Come on, cosmos,” I whispered.
But nothing.
“There aren’t enough clues because Alyson still has the real one that belonged to us!” I said, taking my phone out of my pocket. I was going to ring her and demand she tell me where to find the next clue. At least we still had our original crab shell. That was something. We needed most of the items to prove that we hadn’t cheated somehow.
“She is not going to answer her phone in the middle of the race,” Matt said, almost laughing. He thought it was such a ridiculous idea. “She won’t even take a bathroom break. You think she is going to take a call from her biggest rival?”
I put the phone away. I didn’t like that Matt had called Alyson that. Maybe in that moment it was true, in the race at least. I just hoped that when the race was all over, we could go back to being friends. Or was this going to destroy our friendship forever?
I turned the bucket upside-down and sat on it glumly.
“Don’t look so sad,” Matt said. “We can still get back on track some other way. The rest of the teams can’t have gone that far.”
I shook my head. “It’s not that.” I picked up a stick and stuck it into the dirt. “I got some crazy news today, Matt. I only told you half of it before.”
There was nowhere to sit so he just kind of stood there a little awkwardly, towering over me. “Do you want to talk about it?”
“No. Yes.” I sighed. I kept playing with the stick for a moment. “I got some news from Dawn Petts-Jones.” I looked up at Matt. “Deep dark secrets in my family. Apparently, I have a cousin I never knew about.”
Matt let out an elongated “woah.” He shook his head. “How is that possible?”
I shrugged. I still didn’t have all the details, let alone the proof. “Apparently my uncle had a daughter that was a secret from the rest of the family.”
“That is super trippy,” Matt said. He paused for a moment. “But hang on, what does this have to do with Dawn Petts-Jones?” He knew Dawn; she was his solicitor as well. Well, she was pretty much the solicitor for everyone in Eden Bay. It was kind of slim pickings as far as legal representation went.
I could hear the worry in my voice as I spoke. “Apparently, this cousin—this FEMALE cousin—has a claim on the ownership of the bookshop, because of the apparently ‘ambiguous’ way my grandma worded her will.”
Matt sh
ook his head. “Nah, that can’t be right.”
I sighed. It didn’t seem right. And it didn’t seem fair.
“What are you going to do?” Matt asked. “Are you going to fight it?”
“Of course,” I said quietly. I could hear that my voice lacked conviction. Not because I didn’t want to keep my bookstore, but because the whole thing still felt like a dream. A nightmare. One that I didn’t want to face yet. I didn’t want to think about fighting it, or what would happen if I didn’t win.
I stood up. This here in front of me was one fight I could win. I wasn’t going to let Alyson take the victory—or the prize money—away from me. “We need to do whatever it takes to win,” I said, dusting myself off. Even if that meant finding the other teams and tagging along for a bit.
“Don’t you think it’s strange that the race is still going?” Matt asked as we headed back into town. I could hear voices coming from the town center.
“No. Why would it be strange?”
“I just thought that with Brett’s body being found, the whole thing would be called off, sooner or later.” Matt shrugged. He stopped to look at me. “Don’t you think there’s a chance that while we were in The Horseshoe, it actually was canceled? Maybe that’s why all the clues at the crab farm are gone. They’ve been removed,” he suggested.
I shook my head. “Nah. The bucket was still here.” If the race had been canceled and the clues removed, they would have taken the bucket as well.
We were just too late. Out of luck.
Or were we?
As we got back into town, I noticed that the other teams were starting to head down the hill, in the direction of the pier. But there was one girl on her own, studying a clue under a street lamp. I heard her muttering something about a “Village.” I turned to Matt and whispered, “This must be the next clue!” At first, I was just trying to get close enough to her to overhear and maybe ride on her coattails. But then I realized, with a start, that I actually knew her. A memory from ten years ago smacked me right in the face.
“Anna?” I asked, shielding my eyes from the glare of the street lamp. When she didn’t look up, I wasn’t even sure I had the right girl. That said, she had barely changed since our high school skater days. She was still wearing the same red plaid flannel shirt she had worn a decade earlier and her hair was still dyed an unnatural shade of goth black. No, surely I had gotten it right.
“Anna?” I repeated. “How are you?”
She finally raised her head and glowered at me for daring to ask how she was. “I don’t even know you,” she said in this bratty tone that made her seem younger than she was. She was my age, even though we had gone to different high schools. She’d attended Ruschcutter High, even though she had hung out at the Eden Bay Skatepark every day after school. She was part of the same group that Brett and I had been in.
Yet here she was claiming not to know me. Well. Yeah, I had changed a fair bit over the years. But for the better, thank you very much. My hair, once long and unkept and unbleached, was now chopped into a short, chic bob and dyed an icy platinum. And I had traded in my sneakers for heels and the flannel for designer blazers. And I looked far better for it.
“It’s me. Claire.” I had to cringe for a moment before I realized how I was going to have to actually introduce myself. I hated that I had once insisted on going by my middle name as well during my precocious youth. I hadn’t gone by my full name in years. But sometimes giving people my full name now was the only way to jog their memory. “Claire Elizabeth Richardson.”
“No way,” she said, her mouth dropping open. She had the clue pulled out and I tried to subtly lean forward and read it. But I couldn’t make it out upside-down. Except for the word “Village,” which I only knew because I’d heard her say it. Was that a ‘people’ at the start of the sentence as well?
“I thought you had moved away. Or died,” Anna said with a shrug.
Gee, thanks. Didn’t have any interest in attending my funeral then?
“Nope, still alive. I did move, though, to Sydney.” I was always proud of that fact. It showed that I was able to escape the small-town fate. Even if I had been dragged back to it. “I’ve been back for about five months,” I said with a little shrug as I realized that was a long time to be back and not even say hello or try to make contact. Hey, it wasn’t like I was obliged to track down everyone I’d once skated with, was I?
Anna didn’t seem that fussed about it. Well, she couldn’t show that she was, could she, or else her super cool I-don’t-care facade might have cracked. “I’m still in Rushcutter’s,” she said. Oh well, great, then I had an even better excuse for not getting back into contact with her. Rushcutter’s was a twenty-minute drive on a good day, and I’d only been there once since being back in the area.
Beside me, I could hear a throat being cleared. “I’m Matt,” he said, extending a hand to introduce himself as I realized I still rudely hadn’t done it for him.
“Right, Matt, this is Anna. We knew each other back in our skating days…”
He nodded and she nodded back, the two of them exchanging a knowing ‘cool person’ look. I suddenly felt very old and uncool.
“So what are you doing here?” I asked her. “Eden Bay, I mean. Tonight. Under this street lamp.”
She shoved the clue into her pocket and kicked the pavement. There was something about her that really reminded me of Alyson. Except that Anna was a bit more goth and sullen whereas Alyson was always relentlessly cheery in a way that would drive you up the wall when you hadn’t had enough sleep or coffee or paracetamol. But they both shared the same brattiness.
“Breakin’ the rules,” she said with a small shrug like it was no big deal and at the same time, she was secretly worried that she was going to get sprung.
Matt and I exchanged a glance. “Breaking the rules in what way?” Matt asked.
Anna addressed her answer toward him. I was slightly offended, seeing as I was the one who had actually been her friend and she had literally only met Matt thirty seconds earlier. “I wanted to take part in the hunt but I couldn’t find anyone to partner up with, so I’ve just been doing it on my own.”
She kicked the pavement again and waited for our answer, pretending that she didn’t care what we were going to say. But she clearly cared. And she wasn’t going to like Matt’s response.
“But the rules are strict. Teams have to be two people,” Matt said, sounding genuinely outraged. What was with the Foulkes siblings and their sudden reverence for ‘the rules’ when it came to the treasure hunt when they never cared about them at any other time of the year? I saw the look on Anna’s face. Betrayed by her new bestie. Maybe she should direct her words toward me next time.
Anna scowled at Matt, then at me. “Oh, big deal!” she said as she pulled the clue back out and then started to turn her back to me. “Everyone stretches the rules in this race.”
I stepped in front of her. “But what were you going to do when you got to the end? What if you won? How were you going to explain the fact that you don’t have a partner?” She’d never get the prize money. It would be automatic disqualification.
“Yeah, well, not much chance of me winning now, is there?” She pouted a little and I could tell that even though she was putting up a brave front, she really did care about winning the race. She almost looked like she was about to cry. She was far too cool to actually do that, of course. But she looked like she was about to break. It had been a long, rough afternoon and night for all of us.
I looked over at Matt. What I was about to suggest, he really may not like.
“Well, seeing as how you’re breaking the rules anyway, why not go one step further. Or rather, two steps further?”
“What do you mean?” Anna asked, looking at me and then at Matt.
It was my turn to shrug. No big deal. It was just breaking the rules. “Why don’t you team up with Matt and I? Make a trio.”
Matt hadn’t spoken a word to me in almost ten minute
s.
“It was strategy,” I hissed at him, keeping my voice down as we headed toward the construction site, so that Anna couldn’t hear us. It was kind of like we were arguing about our rebellious daughter and what we were going to do with her, and I didn’t want her to get her feelings hurt. This had nothing to do with her, it wasn’t personal. It was between her father and I. “Anna had the real crab shell clue. We never would have known to go to the new mall if we hadn’t teamed up with her.”
“We would have figured it out.” He was still stomping full steam ahead and refusing to look at me.
I decided to play the guilt card. I stopped and stared up at Matt and asked him to stop. “If you had been guarding the clue properly the last time, Alyson could never have switched it and we never would have gotten so far behind.”
He crossed his arms. “That is really not fair, Claire.”
I actually thought it was a pretty good point now that I had come up with it. Pretty hard to argue with as well.
“Come on, Matt, be a good sport. This race is supposed to be fun.” Supposed to be. It was never supposed to be a matter of life and death with best friend pitted against best friend and every relationship in my life tested and stretched till breaking point.
Fun.
Matt was starting to relent, but he still had concerns. “We’ll be disqualified if we cross the finish line with three people…”
Behind us, Anna had found the next bucket and the next clue. She called out to us and waved it in the air.
“We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it,” I said, keen to get going. “Listen, Matt, if you really have that big a problem with it then, well, you can call it quits and Anna and I can be a team on our own.” I was willing to go where the clues were. So far, Anna had been a little star at finding them. Better than Matt had ever been.
Hang Ten Australian Cozy Mystery Boxed Set Page 51
