Hang Ten Australian Cozy Mystery Boxed Set

by Stacey Alabaster

  I cleared my throat and moved, just slightly again, toward the back of the shop, where I could point out the stool at the edge of the second-floor loft.

  “You see that stool? It moves on its own,” I said. “Although that’s impossible. Something must be moving it.” I told him the whole story and about all the things I had seen and heard.

  Chris’s eyes were dancing with amusement. “Or it moves itself.”

  “What?”

  He shrugged. “Maybe it is possessed.”

  I glanced upstairs. Oh, great. As if having a possessed chair was any better than the alternatives I was imagining.

  “I have a solution,” Chris said.

  “What?” I asked hopefully.

  “Get rid of the chair.” He let that sit for a moment, then shot me a grin.

  Great. Typical smart aleck reply from Chris. I didn’t say anything.

  “What?” he said with a laugh. “Wouldn’t that solve all of your problems?”

  I stared straight back at him. Well, not all of them.

  “The ghost will just find another item to move…” I glanced up at the second level. “It’s trying to get my attention. It’s troubled…and it wants me to know. Maybe it even wants me to help it.”

  Chris was staring at me so intently it made me blush.

  “I’m trying to get your attention too, Claire. I should never have left you behind when I went to Bali. And I am here to get you back.”

  11

  Alyson

  I was only popping in to try and find a better disguise. A quick in and out. Easy. But Troy was waiting for me, sitting on the edge of the bed with his arms crossed and a deadly glare on his face. Clearly, I had done something to cause him major pain and offense.

  I glanced down at what I was wearing.

  Right.

  He was just staring at me and not saying anything. Like I owed him not just an apology, but a groveling one and a begging of forgiveness. Well, I was not going to give him one of those.

  “What?” I said, taking the blazer off and throwing it on the bed. “I only borrowed it for a couple of hours. Here, have it back if it’s such a big deal.”

  He picked it up with gritted teeth and started batting at it, like he was dusting it off. “You’ve creased it,” he said in this low tone of restrained anger, like that was only the tip of the iceberg of things that I had done wrong.

  And I started to get uneasy. What was this silent tension really all about?

  “I know what you did to the car, Alyson.”

  Gulp.

  “If you wanted to stay here that badly, you could have just asked me to. You didn’t have to go and ruin a three hundred-thousand-dollar car!”

  “I did tell you I wanted to stay!” I shouted back. But then I stopped and went silent. I felt really embarrassed about what I had done, and the fact that I’d been caught out about it. I knew that I had gone too far with this scheme.

  “Why is money suddenly such a big deal to you?” I asked, feeling sullen. It never had been before. “You offered to help me out with buying my own car and financing.”

  Troy was stomping to the other side of the room. There wasn’t much room to hide, but he was so angry that he needed to get away from me. “Yeah, I offered to help you get a five hundred-dollar bomb,” he said. “Not a luxury car. Something that it wouldn’t matter if you wrecked it.”

  I fell completely silent as his words sunk in. Troy and I were from two different worlds. Sometimes it seemed like there was a bridge between and those worlds could co-exist. But then something like this happened, and I was reminded of the fact that we didn’t even come from the same planet.

  With that, he stormed out of the room and slammed the door shut.

  I didn’t know where Troy had gone. I had to regroup and pull myself together, though, if I was going to make Adrian Malone’s late evening lecture. It was for an advanced level, a fourth-year subject, and even though it was still a lecture, not a tutorial, it was a smaller number of students and in a more intimate lecture hall. So, there was a good chance he would recognize me unless I hid myself well.

  There was nothing in the room that was going to work. I was going to have to go down to the costume shop.

  My inspiration was Claire.

  Well, if I wanted to look like the exact opposite of me, that was the best look to go for. In some ways, we weren’t TOTAL opposites, I supposed—we were both blonde, although mine was darker and natural and hers was bleached a white icy blonde. But our styles were night and day. She was sleek and boring. I was messy and eclectic.

  The wig I’d found was pretty Claire-esque. Short. Blonde. Now I just needed a pair of black pants and a crisp white shirt and the look would be complete. I had to go to a Target next door to get them, and at the end of it all, I was out $100. And by the time I got to the Wooley Building, wig on, I was only just in time for the 5pm lecture.

  Uh-oh. Belle.

  She was three rows from the back. I averted my eyes as I searched for a seat.

  Oh well, she didn’t know about my misadventure in the staff room, as far as I knew, and she would be unlikely to recognize me in my disguise. In fact, I was pretty smug as I walked into the back of the lecture theatre, my nose in the air…knowing not only that I looked good, but that no one would clock me as Alyson Foulkes.

  Belle spun around and lowered her cat-eyed spectacles a bit. “Alyson?” she asked.

  Oh.

  I paused a moment, then nodded and sighed in defeat.

  “Did you get a haircut since last night?”

  I was too embarrassed to admit that I was wearing a wig, so I just nodded and fetched my notebook out of my bag and silently questioned every choice that I had made in the past twenty-four hours. I was THIS close to just ringing Claire and admitting to her that I needed her to come to Ferguson—that I needed her help.

  Belle eyed me for a few more seconds, then turned back to her books. I couldn’t see Sam in the class, and for once, I was actually hoping to. He was a comparatively friendly face in this sea of snobbish ones.

  I studied the back of Belle’s head. Very strange. Two nights earlier, she had been sobbing about Rick Niemer’s death, and now she was sitting up bright and perky in Adrian Malone’s lecture, hanging off his every word and giggling at all of his lame “jokes” that I didn’t get. She even twirled her hair around her finger.

  Not the actions of someone in grief.

  Adrian got a bit more up close and personal with the students in this class. Asking them questions one on one, and it was definitely less dry than the first one of his I had been to. I even thought that I was starting to understand the concepts a bit.

  Maybe.

  When he paused and looked straight at me, I felt like I was under a magnifying glass. A bug that was about to be fried.

  “Sorry, gotta go,” I said, gathering up my bag and books.

  I ran away.

  12

  Claire

  Maybe the simple solutions really were the best. If I just got rid of the stool, then it couldn’t freak me out any more. And if the stool really was possessed, then getting rid of it would completely solve my problem—and stop anyone else ever being haunted by it as well.

  But to do that, I needed a more permanent solution than just throwing it into the trash. I was going to have to perform something of a killing.

  First things first, though… I had to go to the second floor. I gulped as I looked up. It had been days since I’d dared to step foot up there, and I’d put it off all day and now it was just before dusk. The longer I left it, the worst it got and the more impossible it seemed.

  “Oh, just do it, Claire!” I exclaimed to myself at 4pm. The sun was dimming, and it was going to be far too scary if I left it any longer.

  I could have asked Matt—or worse, Chris—for help, but I really didn’t want to do that. It would be admitting A) That I really thought there was something supernatural going on, and B) That I was too weak to walk up the
stairs to the second story of my own shop to move a stool.

  So I closed my eyes as I quickly took the stairs. Not the safest thing to do, but if there was something there, I really didn’t want to see it.

  I had to open my eyes briefly to grab the stool of course, and my eyes quickly darted to the back of the level. The danger zone.

  My heart started racing as I spotted something in the back of the shop. Was that just a shadow or was there someone moving around back there?

  I grabbed the stool and quickly ran down the stairs and out of the shop, racing into the street.

  I glared down at the stool. “Right. It is just you and me now.”

  By the time I was outside, I had firmly decided that my mind had been playing tricks on me upstairs and it WAS the stool that was the sole source of the problems. It had to be that way. There was no other option to think about.

  “Come on,” I said to it, and I dragged it round to the side of the shop to the alleyway where there were no other people around and tried to figure out the best way to destroy it.

  Fire? Or an axe?

  What were the ethics of the situation here? If the stool was really possessed, did that mean that it was sentient?

  Was I about to become a murderer?

  I jumped and yelped a little bit when I heard the voice calling out, “Er, Claire? What are you doing?”

  I looked up and realized that I had a box of matches in one hand and a small axe in the other, just figuring out which one to use.

  Matt walked toward me slowly and asked me again just what I was doing.

  “I need to kill this stool. Not-not kill, I mean, destroy.”

  Matt looked down at the stool in confusion. “Looks like a perfectly good stool to me. What did he ever do to anyone?”

  Geez, even Matt was calling it a ‘he.’

  “One of the legs is wonky,” I said. “It’s a health and safety hazard.” I turned back to it and breathed heavily, kind of wishing that Matt would just leave me alone to kill the chair in peace.

  “Oh, that’s an easy fix,” Matt said, making a move as though he was going to pick it up and take a look at it. I forgot that he was a bit of a handyman. He could fix anything around the house.

  I stood in front of him. “Nope, it’s old. It needs to go.”

  Matt looked at me with narrowed eyes. He looked slightly amused, but also slightly concerned.

  “Hang on, this isn’t about the ‘ghost,’ is it?”

  I turned away from him and lit a match. “Of course not. That would be silly.”

  I still hadn’t admitted to Matt that I was now fully convinced there was a spirit, and I hadn’t told him anything about Chris being in town. To explain what I was doing, I would have to admit that Chris put the idea into my head.

  “Okay, well, at least do it safely,” Matt said with a concerned laugh as he reached out and took the box of matches off me and said that fire wasn’t the best way to destroy it.

  But fire was definitely the best way to kill it, it needed to be ashes, so I took the box off him and insisted that he stand back and let me do it as I lit the match and threw it toward the stool.

  It went up in seconds and there was suddenly an inferno engulfing it.

  I stood back and got out of the way of the embers flying up onto my black pants.

  “I didn’t think it would be that flammable,” I said, coughing as I shielded my face.

  “It must be the cheap paint,” Matt commented. He looked down at the carnage in horror.

  But soon it was burnt to the ground, and the flames were only embers.

  I stared down at it for a long time.

  There. Only ashes.

  Matt asked me if I wanted him to walk me home.

  I shook my head and smiled and said that I still needed to take care of things in the shop. I’d spent the hour I usually spent balancing the till outside in a battle to the death with a stool.

  “I’ll see you a bit later then?” he asked.

  I nodded. Chris had also wanted to catch up later. I hadn’t given him an answer yet.

  When I walked back in to the shop, I felt like I could relax and breathe again for the first time in a week.

  I leaned against the glass door while the wind chimes gently chimed, and I sighed with contentment as I glanced up at the loft with a smile. It had been scary going up there, but I’d done it and now I had the reward of peace of mind. Amazing.

  I took the stairs again and smiled to myself, thinking that I would give the books a little dust now that there was nothing to fear.

  But there was something back there. I heard a creak. A shadow on the back wall moved and darted and hid.

  I screamed and took the stairs three at a time, knocking over a shelf as I fled into the street without even locking the door.

  I just ran and ran.

  13

  Alyson

  “So, are you over it yet or what?” I asked, taking my wig off and throwing it on the bed. The ice had already been broken a bit because Troy had had to stifle his laughter when I’d walked in looking like that.

  “Was there a reason you were dressed like Claire?” he asked, sitting up and still trying not to laugh.

  I sighed and sat down on the bed next to the wig. “I was trying to go undercover.” I did feel bad about the whole thing with the car. Maybe I didn’t have to grovel, but I did need to apologize. “I was serious about wanting to stay here and help solve the mystery of Rick’s death, Troy. I went about it the wrong way, though. I’m sorry.”

  Troy nodded and sighed and leaned back to stare at the ceiling. “You are right, it’s only money. I just wish you had been completely honest with me.”

  “I did try to be…” But maybe there was more to it. “The truth is that I didn’t want to stay here on my own, Troy. I wanted you to stay here with me.”

  He perked up a bit. Actually looked a bit happy. Touched by the sentiment. “Okay, well, I’m here now. It’s going to be until Monday before the car will be ready to go on the road again. So what is the plan of attack?”

  I pulled a flyer out of my backpack. I had spotted them strewn access the pews in the lecture theatre before I had been sprung. There was a poetry night that night, off-campus but nearby at a local vegetarian cafe, and attended by students and teachers alike.

  Now that I knew that Rick had been a wannabe poet himself, I knew that Adrian had even more reason to want him dead. I needed to go to this poetry night.

  Troy looked over the flyer. He looked apprehensive.

  “I know it’s not your usual thing,” I admitted. “It’s not my usual sort of thing either.” Although in the last few days, I had felt a shift—like maybe these were the sort of people I could hang with, these English kids. I hadn’t told Troy that I’d run away from the business facility in a fit of extreme boredom the day before. And not just because Troy had been furious at the time. I didn’t even want to admit to myself how painful I had found that business lecture to be. I wasn’t sure I ever wanted to go back.

  But a poetry reading. That was appealing. Of course, the main appeal was that Adrian Malone would be doing a reading and it would be a chance to see him up close without getting into trouble. It would also be a more relaxed environment to talk to him in. Things might slip out.

  Troy surveyed the vegetarian menu on the door as we arrived at Bad Manners cafe. “Looks a bit cool and trendy for me,” he said, tugging at his shirt collar uncomfortably.

  I looked right at home, though. I fit in.

  Troy said he’d go to the bar and grab the wine while I found a table.

  Adrian Malone was arranging chairs at the front of the stage. He stopped dead in his tracks. He’d spotted me. I saw the utter annoyance in his eyes. Oh well. He didn’t have any power or jurisdiction over a public poetry reading. I had as much right to be there as anyone, and he couldn’t throw me out, so I just threw him a smug little smile and settled down in my seat, waiting for the show to begin.

  It st
ill looked like my presence there had unnerved him as he climbed to the stage to kick off the night. I supposed he was one of those precious artist types who were easily shaken and needed the vibe and the ambience to be just right. But he managed to speak with clarity and ease. Not only was he the MC of the evening, he was also going to be reading several poems throughout the night.

  “Now first things first,” he said in a somber tone as he stood behind the mic and looked out at the silent crowd who were all gathered in great reverence. “There is a presence that we are missing tonight. Our dear friend Rick Niemer, who was taken far too young. A minute of silence, please.”

  The minute’s silence seemed to be going for far longer than a minute. I heard a voice beside me say, “As if he cares that Rick is gone…”

  I opened my eyes and looked to my left. It was Sam. That red hair stood out anywhere.

  “Thought I’d try and get out of the house,” he mumbled. “It’s been a rough day.”

  I wondered if he was doing what I was doing, however—checking up on Adrian Malone out of hours. Seemed to me like Sam suspected him as well.

  “Do you write poetry?” I asked him, pretty sure that the answer would be no. I wasn’t sure why—he just didn’t have a very poetical vibe about him. He seemed straight-laced and less artsy than the others, almost like he didn’t fit into the English Department and would be more suited for the business facility, as snobbish toward them as he had been.

  “Of course I do,” he said in a way that sounded like he had taken grave offense. I hadn’t meant any. I was just surprised, that was all.

  “So are you going to read any?” I asked him. I was feeling those same vibes toward him that I had on day one of class—that I was in competition with him, even though Rick was now gone.

  “I am,” he said with a glower at me. “So get ready.”

  After the first performer, a girl with long blond hair who read a sweet little ditty about her pet cat, it was Sam’s turn to perform. And just like in class, he wanted everyone to know that he was the best. The voice most worth listening to.