Hang Ten Australian Cozy Mystery Boxed Set

by Stacey Alabaster

  I glanced over at this woman who I had called my best friend, on and off, for the past two decades and wondered… What would it mean if she and my brother dated? Why did it make me feel so anxious?

  “Just don’t lie to me anymore, okay?” I asked.

  “I promise I won’t.”

  We pulled up in front of Fabled Books.

  “Bianca,” I said, stunned, as she was waiting for us out front. I glanced quickly at Claire.

  “Okay,” she said. “This wasn’t technically a lie. I just hadn’t told you yet.”

  “Alyson,” Bianca said, raising an eyebrow at me. It was a little bit of a showdown. I still didn’t know what she was doing there.

  Claire cleared her throat. “Bianca and I have decided on a compromise: a fifty-fifty split of the shop. So you might be seeing a bit of her around town now.”

  A compromise. I knew how much Princess hated to do that. Inside, it would be killing her. But keeping her bookshop would make it worth it. Just.

  But I wasn’t going to be getting up on that ladder and changing the population number just yet.

  I still did not trust Bianca Richardson.

  Bitten on the Beach

  Hang Ten Cozy Mystery, Book 8

  1

  Alyson

  If I didn’t blow out the candles, maybe it wouldn’t count. Maybe I wouldn’t get another year older. That was how it worked, right? It kept it from being official. Uh-oh. They were singing Happy Birthday. My best friend Claire’s “beautiful singing voice” was overpowering the rest, but I tried to drown it out.

  So some people actually like getting older? Children, maybe. Some adults, I guess. People like Claire who wore tailored suits and listened to educational podcasts. But I was far too much like Peter Pan. Wanting to stay a kid forever. Every year older brought with it more and more responsibility—and I wasn’t sure I was done being fun and silly just yet. “Come on, Alyson!” my brother Matt yelled. “Make a wish!”

  Hmm. I leaned toward the tiny flames and saw him hip-to-hip with Claire and thought about the wish I could make.

  How does it feel to have your best friend dating your brother? Unsettling. That’s the best way I can describe it, seeing as I had spent most of my time in denial about it and avoiding hanging out with the two of them while they were together.

  But they were my family. I had to invite them to my birthday party. I mean, Claire and I weren’t technically related. Yet. But we just about were.

  He had his arm draped around her.

  Right. If they kiss, it will be too much. I will leave.

  I blew out the candles, hurriedly, and very kindly did not wish for them to break up immediately and for everything in my life to go back to normal. Because I didn’t want normal. Some changes were good. And that was precisely what I wished for: to make a difference. To bring change—positive change—to Eden Bay.

  We weren’t the only people in Captain Eightball’s that afternoon so as soon as the cake was cut, we had to move away from the center of the restaurant and find a booth to sit at.

  Jasmine, my nine-year-old niece who we simply called J, tugged on my sleeve and asked me again if I would take her out into the ocean for surfing lessons.

  Oh no, I had been blowing off this question for months. “I still think you’re a little too young.”

  “But I’m nine now,” she said with a pout. Yep, we were all getting older. Unfortunately. Thanks for reminding me, J.

  But maybe she had a point. She was just—just—old enough to start to learn. But I would rather she was another six months older before I took her out into the wild waves and everything that they contained. Surfing can be a dangerous sport.

  I glanced over at Matt with a sigh and shot him a look. What do you think?

  He shrugged at me like this was my call. Thanks a lot. It was my birthday! He should have been taking responsibility. But he was too busy laughing at something Claire was saying, his arm around her shoulders, and it was up to me to be the responsible grown up. I knew I should have never blown out those candles.

  “Matt, come on. I don’t want to be the one who has to tell her no…”

  But Matt was all loved up and even though he was usually the stricter guardian, he shrugged and said, “Er, what’s the worst that can happen?” He had a grin from ear to ear.

  I turned to J, who was jiggling hopefully now that Matt had basically given us the green light. “Right. Well, we are staying close to the shore and if I tell you to move, or leave, or to hop off the board, then my word is the law? Is that understood?”

  J leaped up off her seat and jumped with excitement. She’d always been more of a skater than a surfer, but that was only because skating was a relatively safe sport compared to surfing and far easier for a child to master. Far less chance of injury as well. But J was a little mini-me. Always wanting to do exactly what I did. Dress like I dressed, act like I acted, and live like I lived…and I was a surfer. So, she wanted to be a surfer as well.

  The beach was pretty packed. Spring was approaching, and it would only get busier from now until the end of the year. It would be good for our town’s economy, not so good for my love of peace and quiet. We found a spot right on the east end where there weren’t as may people and we had some space. I was going to start J off on the boogie board. If she couldn’t master that, then there was no hope for her to tackle a surf board. She pouted a little because she wanted the ‘real thing.’

  “You’re lucky I’m even letting you on the boogie board.” I sounded far too strict. I could hear the ‘adult’ tone in my voice and it surprised me. Wow. Maybe getting a year older had really made a difference.

  But Matt was right. What was the worst that could happen?

  For the first half-hour, I didn’t even let her into the water, even though J was the best in her class at school. I wanted her to show me that she could master the balance on the board on dry land. Then I said she could go a few feet into the waves if she stayed laying on her belly and didn’t attempt to stand, at least not the first time. So far so good. She could handle that easily. I checked the time. We’d been practicing for almost two hours. “Time to call it a day, I think, J!” I said.

  “Oh, but I don’t want to!” she cried. So much for my word being law. She pouted and stomped, then grabbed the board and started running toward the ocean. I yelled and ran after her, but she was ahead of me and was already standing on the board. I stood there in wide-eyed terror as a wave crashed over her and I lost sight of her for a moment while she was enveloped by the water.

  Next thing I knew, J was screaming. I was sure she must have fallen and broken a bone. Or maybe she had been stung by a jellyfish. I rushed into the water after her, but as I did, she was ‘washed up’ onto the sand and I had to chase her back to dry land. At that stage, I was soaking wet and wishing I had made a different wish at Captain Eightball’s. Or at least spending my birthday doing something a little less draining. Like sipping cocktails while someone waited on me hand and foot.

  “J, what is it?”

  She was pointing at something large and wet and dark and heavy on the edge of the sand.

  It was a woman’s body. And it seemed pretty lifeless. Oh great. This was the last thing that a nine-year-old needed to see.

  Definitely should have made a different wish.

  J was still shrieking, but by now, there were people crowded around, people who had run from every corner of the beach when they’d heard a child screaming. Everyone was trying to get a look and J was pushed to the back, too short to see over the heads and shoulders of the adults. But I could still see.

  Bite marks. It looked like jaw marks. A shark.

  One of the lifeguards got onto the loudspeaker.

  “Everyone, out of the water! NOW”!

  We should never have gone down to the beach that day.

  Matt had grabbed J and pulled her back onto the pier, far enough away from the beach to not be scarred. Thank goodness she hadn’t actually s
een too much, just the back of the woman’s head. She had already been identified as someone called “Meg Brian.” Apparently that name meant something to some people, but I had never heard of her.

  I had told J not to think about what she had seen—“it was just an accident, she might be fine”—you know, trying to sugarcoat it a bit, then glared at Matt. “You were the one who said nothing bad could happen.” He’d smiled down at J and told her they could go and get ice cream. So they left to do that. Sure, ice cream sounded nice.

  But I had to stay on the beach. This was my turf. My home.

  News had already traveled, and the beach was in total lockdown by that point. But I wasn’t going to let anyone remove me. We were being told to leave and go back to our homes. No one was to go anywhere near the water. My surfboard painting business was on the sand and the beach WAS my home. But that was the least of my worries on that day. I knew what happened after a shark attack. There had never been one in Eden Bay, but when it had happened on other beaches, they always hunted down the shark they believed was ‘responsible’ for the attack and killed it. No one stopped until they believed that ‘justice’ had been served. This was going to bring out the ugly side in people. I just knew it.

  “What’s going to happen?” I asked, panting as I ran up to the coast guard. Eric was a rather humorless man who I had dealt with before in previous matters, but I hadn’t seen him around for a while. He must have gotten a promotion. He wore a thick mustache and beard and a serious expression. And he never had much time for my ’absolute nonsense,’ as he termed it.

  “You don’t have to worry. The beach will be safe soon enough,” he said, before turning his back to me to speak into his cellphone. Yes. “Safe.” Not the word that sprang to mind when I thought about killing animals.

  I started to wonder if this was some kind of karma. Some kind of irony. A few months earlier, I had thought I’d seen a shark at that very beach. But it turned out to be a piece of wood. In the end, however, there had been a shark spotted on the beach a week or so later, but he’d kept his distance since. I knew that sharks could swim over a hundred miles in a day. He could have been long, long gone by now.

  Or he could have come back. Maybe he thought that Eden Bay was his home too. He had to call somewhere home, right?

  But now I felt a strange sense of responsibility. Almost protectiveness toward the creature.

  Even though most of the tourists and locals had long gone, there was still no shortage of people on the beach. In fact, more and more people were arriving. First it was a news crew. And then after a few hours, I noticed these dark vans that I had never seen before.

  There were the usual vehicles, of course, the ambulance and police cars, but it was the dark vans that were causing me concern. Men and women stepped out of them and a bunch of them were talking together in hushed, serious tones. I edged a little closer and heard the words “net” and “cull.”

  I got the gist of the conversation. They had already jumped to their conclusions.

  They were going to kill the shark.

  Eric was still striding up and down the beach, talking into phones and walkie-talkies as he surveyed the water. I saw now that he was in charge of the whole thing. He was organizing the cull. Putting all the steps in motion. “You need to evacuate, Alyson,” he said dismissively.

  “No, wait,” I said, grabbing Eric by the arm. He looked down at my hand like I was an insect he wanted to swat. “What if the shark is innocent?”

  He moved his arm away from mine, looking a little pale. “We both saw the body, Alyson.”

  But my mind was spinning. This was a knee-jerk reaction. We still had no proof that Meg Brian had even been killed by a shark. And yet the shark cull was already being organized. “We can’t let an innocent shark die just on a hunch…”

  Eric sighed and nodded toward the pier where there were still people disobeying instructions and wanting to look over the beach. “Most of these people are never gonna consider a shark ‘innocent’ no matter what you try and tell them. No one likes a shark, and no one wants one anywhere near their beach, so I am sorry, Alyson, but this is a losing battle.”

  He was right. In one sense. No one I knew ‘loved’ sharks. In fact, everyone in Eden Bay lived with a low-key fear of them in the back of their minds. But I didn’t think this was going to be a losing battle. I was going to start on the back foot, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t win. This was going to be one heck of a fight all right.

  2

  Claire

  My cousin Bianca was late for her first shift. She was also way overdressed to work in a bookshop. Tailored shirt, three-quarter length pants, and a gold belt? She shivered a little as she entered the shop with no apologies for the fact that she was a half-hour late. “Brr, it’s cold in this town all right.”

  I bit my tongue a little at that complaint. We were only a hundred miles south of Sydney. The temperature drop was really not that dramatic. “You get used to it.” I took her every jab at Eden Bay a little too personally. But it was time to play nice. She was my cousin. Family. She was only in town three days a week and back in Sydney for the remaining four. That wasn’t even half the week. We had to learn how to co-run and co-own the store together. I assumed I would still be the hands-on manager and she would be more of the silent partner. You know, seeing as I was there every day of the week. But we hadn’t gotten into the details yet.

  She took off her blazer and started haughtily droning on about the fashion choices in this town. “Flip flops in the middle of the day? In a restaurant!?” And how it was so boring in Eden Bay, and there were no nightclubs, and how all the shops closed on Sundays like we were still in the eighties. At first, things like that had bothered me too. But now I thought, What was the big deal with everyone in town just taking the day off and relaxing? Oh boy. I really was starting to sound like a full-blooded Eden Bay-er again.

  “You’re not here on the weekends anyway,” I pointed out with a bright smile.

  She shrugged. “It’s the principle of the thing though, isn’t it?”

  Not really. She got to go back to the city on the weekends where she could go to nightclubs and look at people with close-toed shoes to her heart’s content.

  “So what is this?” she asked, picking up a flyer. It was one of the ones I usually posted in the window or distributed down at the local library, but I hadn’t gotten around to it that week.

  “The weekly book club. This week is East of Eden, so if you want to come, you’ll need to get reading. Six hundred pages.” And she only had two days to do it in. Three hundred pages a day. Doable, if you did absolutely nothing else.

  “Yikes,” she said, putting the flyer down. I guessed that was a ‘no’ then. I wondered if Bianca had ever even read a single Steinbeck book. Or any book, for that matter. She’d been so hellbent on running this bookshop with me, but I had never even heard her mention a favorite book or author or even a genre.

  Rather than help me with the unpacking of the boxes, she took a mirror out of her purse and started to check her lipstick, then, when she was satisfied with that, she leaned back further and took in her whole outfit. She looked like me when I’d first arrived. Please tell me I wasn’t that obnoxious.

  Bianca already seemed bored, and it was only her first shift. She hadn’t done any actual work so far. She glanced around. “So, is there anywhere to get a decent latte around here?”

  “Er, sure. But we need to finish unpacking these boxes first.”

  “Oh, you can do that,” she said, waving at me dismissively. “It looks like you’ve got it all under control.”

  I had an espresso machine in the shop, but Bianca wanted her coffee frothy with milk, so she headed off to Captain Eightball’s under my direction. I knew that the place would be a little less ‘classy’ than what she was used to, but they did have the best coffee in Eden Bay. That was the most important thing.

  As soon as she was gone, I ripped open the box I had been dying to ope
n. I sort of wanted the moment to myself, to savor it properly. My book. I had gone with the title The Book Shelf, and I had based the story on a mystery that Alyson and I had solved six months earlier. Even though I had gotten interest from an agent and a publishing house, I had decided not to wait for the publishers and published it myself. Their process was going to take years, and I wanted to get my books into stores right away—more specifically, my store. Fabled Books.

  Marketing wise, it was perfect. The book was set in Eden Bay, so what better place to sell it?

  The cover had come out perfectly. An old, beat-up bookshelf with a blood splatter at the bottom and books falling off it. It looked super professional as well. I’d decided to go with my full name, “Claire Elizabeth Richardson,” for the cover.

  “Ta-da!” I said, spinning around to show Bianca the cover when she walked back in. She only had one latte in her hand. One. I’d just assumed she would get me one as well.

  She placed hers down and completely ignored my book, which I was still holding, even though I was slightly deflated by that point. “Do you know that there has been a shark attack down at the beach? A fatality?”

  What?

  I shook my head. “Nah, it couldn’t have been a shark.” No way. I even laughed a little bit. I could see where the misunderstanding had happened. “Alyson wasn’t involved in the description of it, was she?” Because I was pretty sure what the mix-up had been. Alyson had once seen a piece of floating wood in the water and said it was a shark and the beach had been closed for days.

  But Bianca was adamant, and she was completely shaken by whatever she’d heard. She would’ve been clutching her pearls if she’d been wearing any. Instead she pulled at the gold pendant around her neck. “No, this was a real shark attack. Check the news.”

  I still didn’t believe her, but I checked my phone anyway. Oh. She was right. I played the news report on my phone. I watched the local news channel with its poor quality and host who stumbled through his words. There had been a fatality, right on the beach. This was going to look very bad for the national shark community