Hang Ten Australian Cozy Mystery Boxed Set

by Stacey Alabaster

  “She’s right. There’s some kind of conspiracy.” No one in the Eden Baby press could be trusted as far as I was concerned. But of course Bianca wanted to date one of them. She pulled the number out of her pocket and entered it into her phone. I even saw her send a quick text that said, ‘hey now you have my number,’ but I looked away and pretended that I hadn’t. Maybe she was just interested in the job.

  We’d found ourselves wandering toward the beach in the middle of the afternoon. It still seemed so strange to see it empty on a day when the sun was hot and there wasn’t a single cloud in the piercing blue sky. But the sand was white and empty. The town had already cleared out. Eden Bay felt so dead, ghostly, without the epicenter keeping it afloat.

  “Alyson and I saw Alex down here yesterday,” I said to Bianca, still trying to convince her that he wasn’t the nice guy he appeared to be. I truly hoped she wasn’t considering using his number.

  She stopped and looked concerned. “Really?” She pursed her lips and thought about it. “Well, maybe he was just investigating…you know, researching. It is his job, Claire.”

  I sucked in my breath and started to say something. The annoying thing was, I knew she was right. But what was with all the digging in the sand? “Meg couldn’t swim, Bianca. It makes no sense that she was out in the water.” I told her about what Alyson had found out.

  Bianca turned to me, stared straight into my eyes, and I saw her face change. She may have been a bit of a snob, but she was also a smart girl. She was also less stubborn than either Alyson and I were. She was open to suggestions, open to being changed by new information, and I knew I would be able to sway her opinion. She’d even given up fighting with me over selling The Book Shelf in the shop when she’d seen how much of a profit we were making from it.

  “It’s certainly interesting,” Bianca said, taking in the news of Meg’s lack of swimming skills. She stared out into the crashing waves, lonely without any swimmers or surfers to keep them company. “But it is possible that Meg could have learned to swim since that Christmas Party, Claire. It was seven months ago, after all…”

  Of course, there was the ‘possibility’ she was right, but I was pretty sure that she was just defending Alex because of her strange little crush on him. An adult learning to swim at twenty-nine was difficult and took a long time to do well. Especially well enough to be out that deep in the ocean. Meg learning since the Christmas Party when she hadn’t known how to at all up till that point was unlikely.

  But I supposed that it was worth investigating.

  Suddenly, we had company.

  Alyson was ecstatic as she ran over the sand and shoved a newspaper in my hand. It was thick, so I knew just from touch that it wasn’t our local journal, which was always ten sheets at most.

  “Slow down, slow down,” I said, holding my other hand over my ear. The crash of the waves and the wind were making it difficult to hear what she was saying. Bianca had moved away, keeping her distance, but one eye was on us as she kicked the sand.

  Alyson was breathless. “The national news picked up on one of my news articles. Environmentalists are outraged, and the cull is on the verge of getting called off. The local government will have to listen and take the nets down. As long as we have two hundred signatures on the petitions, the local council is obliged to at least consider it!” She stopped to catch her breath. “And Calvin and I already have the signatures!”

  I glanced over at Bianca, who was still wearing her “Kill Sharkey” t-shirt. Her blazer was fully open, and the writing was clear to read. I gulped and made a gesture to Bianca to do her blazer back up. She rolled her eyes and did up a button.

  Did Bianca even still have a chance at winning?

  Or had the tide of opinion fully turned? I grinned at my best friend. “That is great news, Alyson. Really, I think you’ve done an incredible job. No one believed you could do it, but you believed in yourself.”

  That was why she was my best friend. At that moment, I was proud to call her that. She was still bouncing and told me she had more people to tell—Matt, J. She spun around and ran off without even noticing that Bianca was skulking down at the other end of the beach.

  “She looked happy,” Bianca said when she reached me again.

  “Um, yeah, some good news with her mayoral campaign.”

  I could break the news to Bianca later. But even she seemed to have softened her stance a little. I was pleased, it warmed me in my gut to see how the people of Eden Bay were becoming softer, more compassionate. Best of all, this great news meant that Matt and I could have our date later that day.

  But I needed to get off the beach if that was going to happen. This time, I was going to look more like myself. And that meant a good hour getting ready, even though I had already been to the hair salon that morning. But hey, that was me. And Matt liked me for me, right?

  “Come on!” I called to Bianca, who looked like she was hunting for shells in the sand. I was surprised—I didn’t think she’d ever risk her manicure for the sake of a few seashells.

  “What is that?” Bianca called out. She stood up and pointed toward a lump in the sand.

  Uh-oh.

  She’d seen something, but I had seen something worse.

  I could see Eric patrolling the beach and knew we had to get out of there before we broke the strict rules about no civilians near the water. At least not until the ban was officially off, which Alyson was sure was going to happen later that day. “Come on, we have to go!”

  But Bianca was refusing to budge.

  “Claire, come and look at this!” she called out in a shrill voice. Uh-oh. I knew what that tone and pitch meant. She had found something terrible and lifeless there in the sand. Not again. Not another blow.

  Another body.

  And it looked like another shark attack.

  14

  Alyson

  That was that then.

  The end of all my dreams. The end of all things.

  I threw myself back on my bed and squeezed my eyes shut, hoping the phone call I’d just received from Claire had been a dream. But I knew in the depths of my bones that it hadn’t been. This was the new reality. Well, I might as well just give up on everything. And I meant everything. Time to throw in my conservation towel, and officially withdraw from the mayoral race, and so much for saving Sharkey. That darn shark just didn’t want to be saved. He was intent on making a bad reputation for himself.

  Maybe he was just hungry. Maybe we ought to be putting food in the ocean, not nets. Giving, not taking.

  But I knew from my research that sharks did not attack humans because they were hungry. That was a myth. But good luck getting anyone in Eden Bay to stop believing in myths.

  “You did a good job,” Matt said as I dropped by his house to pick up J for her weekly visit with me. Apparently, he had a date with Claire. I didn’t want to hear any details and I sure hoped he wasn’t planning on telling me any of them.

  I was trying to hustle J out of the door. We were planning a night of board games at my parents’—her grandparents’—house in Rushcutter’s Bay. If I could just leave Eden Bay for a while and forget that the whole week had happened, that would be great.

  “You’re coming back tonight?”

  “The train runs back late. We’ll be fine,” I reassured him.

  But Matt seemed to know what was really going on.

  He actually had a suggestion of his own. “Maybe you could stay overnight at Rushcutter’s. Just until this dies down a little.”

  Great. Even my brother wanted me to go into hiding.

  Maybe it wasn’t such a bad idea. Matt suggested that I take a bag, just in case. In fact, he had already fetched a backpack and put some PJs in for J and some snacks and a spare t-shirt for me so that I had something to sleep in if I needed it. I took the backpack off him but didn’t say anything.

  “I just don’t want you getting upset in the morning when news of this hits the stands.”

  I already
had a pretty good idea of what would happen. The cull would not be called off. In fact, it would be doubled down on, twice the amount of nets. The petition would be ripped up. Calvin would desert me. And Troy would probably tear the mural down off the side of the mall and replace it with an advertisement for shoes.

  “I’ll let you know what time I’ll be back.” I didn’t specify whether it would be that day or the next. He just nodded.

  J’s feet were swinging underneath the seat as the train pulled out of the station. I turned my face away from the window and tried to focus on the journey ahead. It was only half an hour on the train to Rushcutter’s, with two stops on the way.

  “I still don’t think they should kill the shark,” J said. “It’s mean. He didn’t hurt anyone on purpose.”

  I was surprised that she was so brave to go against public opinion. And I was surprised that she wasn’t terrified of the shark. But the kid had a big heart…and she was a good egg. She didn’t believe in an eye for an eye. And yet the truth was, if the shark had been caught after Meg was killed then we would never have had a second victim. People would be saying that the culling efforts should have been doubled down to begin with. And there was no way that the people in Eden Bay were going to sit around and wait for a third victim to be found.

  I thought about the second victim. I only knew his name was Rex and that he was a busker or something of that nature.

  But what was Rex doing out in the water that day anyway, when the beach had been closed and no one was allowed in the water? It didn’t make any sense to me. He must have been a pretty brave soul. A pretty stupid one too.

  I opened my phone and researched sharks for the hundredth time this week. But this time, I was looking for a specific stat. J was standing up on the seat—against the train rules—but I was too distracted to tell her off. It was incredibly unusual for a shark to come back and kill again for a second time. And they were not aggressive toward humans in the first place. This definitely didn’t add up. There was so little chance that it had been the same shark that it was almost statistically impossible. But how was I ever going to convince the people in my town that this was the case?

  But I looked out over the platform we were stopped at. I grabbed my backpack and told J that we were hopping off, right then and there. I was not running away from Eden Bay, and I was not running away from this fight.

  In fact, I was running right back to it.

  “I shouldn’t be seen out here with you,” Claire whispered, shivering in the dead of the night.

  “Oh, now that is a little bit dramatic.” But there was something about sneaking around in the middle of the night when everyone else was asleep, on the empty pier, that led to drama.

  J was back home with Matt. He had been a little surprised to see us back. Not necessarily in a good way. I mean, of course he was glad to see J back and he loved her dearly, but he had also seemed a little put out. Slightly. But J would be asleep by then and Claire and I were ready to go on an adventure. What we were out there doing that night seemed both highly grown up and highly childish at the same time.

  We wandered along. I caught the wistful look on Claire’s face as the moonlight hit her. At least I knew that the date had ended early. I wondered if Claire was dying to tell me all about it. That was usually what best friends did, wasn’t it? They came home from their dates and they immediately told their bestie all about it. But this was an unusual situation. Too incestuous. And I really, really didn’t want to hear anything about it.

  “So, what did you decide to do about Troy?” Claire asked as we headed down the pier and toward the bar. I supposed we had to make some kind of conversation, and Troy was something…but I still had no idea what she was referring to.

  “Huh?”

  She gulped. “Are you going to use the info you have against him? To stop his campaign…”

  What I knew, or at least what I strongly suspected, was that Troy had only been able to build his mall in Eden Bay so quickly because he had bribed officials so that he could get around the council by laws about using heavy machinery at certain times of day.

  But the entire reason I was running for mayor was to stop the rot from setting in in Eden Bay—to make a difference. That had been my birthday wish, but it was up to me to actually make it come true. That was all part of growing up, unfortunately. Part of me still wished I’d never blown out those candles the week before. Then I wouldn’t have been left with all these dilemmas that had no easy answer.

  I could decide on all that later. First, we needed to find out the truth about Rex Aldiss. And that meant going to The Horseshoe, a place that I never frequented. It was more a place that bikers and truckers who were passing though stopped at. It hadn’t been affected by the tourist trade because tourists never went there.

  As far as we knew, Rex had no direct link to Meg Brian. But that didn’t mean that there wasn’t one. He was a local musician who Claire apparently knew, vaguely. When I saw a photo of him, I recognized him. He was the sort of person who hung around with surfers because he liked the lifestyle but didn’t actually surf. At least, I had never seen him in the water. It would probably ruin his leather jacket.

  The Horseshoe was a bar that was open late, and it was one of the spots that Rex played. So that was where we entered.

  “I should probably tell Bianca about this place,” Claire murmured as we walked in. “She’s always complaining that Eden Bay has no nightlife and that everything closes at five.”

  “Why haven’t you told her then?”

  She shrugged. “Never really occurred to me.”

  But I was getting the funny feeling that Claire was trying to keep Bianca and I apart. I mean, I knew we had clashed when we first met. I’d thought she was an even bigger snob than Claire, and that was a high bar. But she was Claire’s cousin and business partner, and I was Claire’s best friend. It would be better if we could all just get along. Share some good vibes.

  There was definitely a somber vibe in the bar as we made our way over to the snooker table.

  A young woman with dyed jet-black hair looked up at us. Anna. She was an old friend of Claire’s from their skating days. She was shooting pool and raised her eyebrows when she spotted Claire. “You know, none of these things seemed to happen before you showed up back in town…”

  Yeah, she had a point there. Eden Bay used to be peaceful and murder-free, once upon a time. But Claire couldn’t be held responsible for the shark population of NSW suddenly targeting Eden Bay beach and going against their nature. She didn’t have that much power. She’d probably like to claim she did.

  “You were friends with Rex, right?” Claire asked Anna.

  Anna shrugged a little. “For a while, we were in the same band. He played guitar and I did lead vocals. Well, mostly spoken word. But we hadn’t been super close in a couple of years.”

  I stepped in. “When you were in the band together, did you spend much time socializing? When you weren’t playing music, I mean.”

  Anna nodded, and she looked a little sad as she thought back and remembered the good old days. “He was really into environmentalism…” she said, glancing at me. She told me that he was big into turtle conservation and marine life. Geez. Sounds like Rex and I would have gotten along. Too bad he had been killed—he would be on the side of “Save Sharkey” for sure.

  And from what Anna was telling me, there was no way that Rex would want an animal killed in retaliation. Or killed at all.

  I nodded to myself. I knew it. Now I had even more reason to fight for what was right. And I didn’t care how many people were against me. It was just a bigger fight. That didn’t mean I was already defeated before I’d even tried.

  Before we left, I had one final question. “Anna, do you think that Rex might have been out there trying to save a marine animal? Or to do something to clear Sharkey’s name?”

  “Who is Sharkey?”

  “It’s a name I’ve given to the shark who is being accused of murder
. Well, it could apply to any shark out there, really.”

  Anna looked flummoxed. “Well, Rex couldn’t swim, so I have no idea what he was doing out there.”

  Claire and I looked at each other.

  Oh my gosh. This went deep. Deeper than the ocean.

  And we had to find out the truth before someone else wound up dead.

  15

  Claire

  Okay, I was skeptical about there being a town-wide conspiracy to kill random people and make it look like shark attacks. I know, I know—it sounded completely crazy. But I was going along with it anyway. Just in case.

  I’d been up all night studying the shark books in the shop, trying to figure out if there was any way that a shark would kill two people in two weeks. And honestly? After a sleepless night wired on espresso shots, it actually started to seem crazier to think that a shark had done this than the alternative. When a conspiracy starts to seem LESS crazy then you’ve either had too much coffee, or you’ve actually hit on the truth.

  There was a knock on the door and a customer trying to come in. I blinked a few times and checked the time, sure it was still early. 9:00 am. Whoa, had I really been awake for that long?

  I opened the door and cleared my throat as the bright sunlight almost blinded me. It was the same woman from a few days earlier, the one who’d wanted my book. And she was asking if we had it back in stock. “I’ve been dying to see what all the fuss is about.”

  Well, we couldn’t stand to have any more deaths in that town.

  She looked me up and down, frowned and then smiled quickly at my frazzled appearance. “I suppose writers often stay up all night when inspiration hits. It must be nice and relaxing to have a job where you don’t have to worry about your appearance.” I caught sight of my reflection in the window. I looked a little like Alex Higgins.