Hang Ten Australian Cozy Mystery Boxed Set

by Stacey Alabaster

  I caught sight of myself in the reflection of the glass. Hmm. I looked exactly like one of those delivery drivers who does it in their spare time to make some easy cash, along with rideshare apps.

  But I had an idea. Captain Eightballs was just up the road. So I snuck out of the alleyway, smiling to myself, as I put my plan into action.

  I pulled my hoodie off as I stepped into the lobby with my bag of takeout in one hand and the receipt in the other. I furrowed my brow and pretended to be in deep concentration as I read the details to the man standing behind the desk. He was a large, bald man and his nametag read Derick.

  “Er, forgot the room number that she gave me over the phone, but I know the name is Lilly…” I looked at him in a pleading, helpless way. Like, just give me a break here, buddy, cut me some slack. It was pouring rain outside by that time, so I decided to play it up to my advantage and shivered even though I wasn’t actually cold.

  Derick sighed a little wearily as though this happened all the time. Which it probably did. He made the call to her room and asked her if she would come to the lobby because she had a food delivery.

  Hmm. I wasn’t quite sure how this was going to pan out. Would she actually come to the lobby or realize that she was being played?

  Lilly was down to the lobby within two minutes even though she had not actually ordered any food. Maybe she was hoping to get away with a freebie. Not a great testament to her character if that was so. I raised my eyebrows but turned my head so that she wouldn’t see my reaction.

  She looked at me a little suspiciously. I had never actually met her before, so I decided to use that to my advantage. I put on a bit of a rough voice and told her the total of her fried chicken order.

  “No, that’s not mine,” she said, shaking her head. She looked a little curious though, but also annoyed at being disturbed for no reason.

  Hmm, maybe she was going to be honest after all.

  I shivered again and made a pouty face toward the window where there was rain pouring down. “Don’t like the idea of having to take this back to the restaurant to try and figure out the mistake,” I said. “The money will come out of my wages, and I’ve already been yelled at by six people tonight. And gotten drenched in the rain.”

  “Oh, well, I suppose I can pay you for it. Sounds like you’ve been having a tough night,” Lilly said and told me she’d just have to get her purse out of her room and I could follow her down the hallway if I liked. She was on the ground floor. No wonder she had been so quick to make it to the lobby.

  “I’m only in town for a few days…” she explained to me as she opened the door. “I don’t know where the good restaurants are. And I am actually pretty hungry.”

  Hmm. She was just going to take the food and go inside. I needed a plan.

  “I could really use the bathroom.”

  She hesitated. She rolled her eyes, just a little, but did offer for me to come inside.

  She trusted me.

  While I was drying off in the bathroom, I heard Lilly in the kitchen shuffling around for plates and cutlery.

  To be honest, the fried chicken did smell pretty good and it made my stomach growl even though I had just eaten a burger at the restaurant two hours earlier. She must have seen me staring at the food with hungry eyes.

  “Do you want some?” Lilly asked.

  “That would be amazing,” I said, sitting across from her. I made small talk at first. Asking her how she was, how her day had been, etc., as though I didn’t know anything about what had happened.

  “Well, this is pretty much the worst week of my life,” she said glumly. “And it was supposed to be the happiest.”

  I had to act like I didn’t know what she was talking about. I just stared at my chicken as she told me the whole story like she would to a stranger.

  “Do you know who could have done it?” I asked in mock surprise, as though I wasn’t the one who had found the body.

  Lilly looked straight at me. She munched on a wing slowly then more forcefully.

  “I had never told anyone this,” she said. She hit something crunchy and stopped chewing. Yeah. I would have stopped when I got to the bone as well. Except that I never would have munched straight down on a bone in the first place.

  “What?” I asked, leaning forward.

  “I think that Lorraine—my maid of honor— was having an affair with Charlie.”

  I knew it! I just knew those three creepozoids had been hiding something!

  Again, I had to act as though everything she was telling me was very brand-new information and I had never met any of the people involved before. I was just an innocent food delivery driver who had stumbled into the lobby of this hotel accidentally and was out a night’s wages.

  I couldn’t wait to tell Claire how well my scheme had gone. And she’d thought I wouldn’t get any goss about the bridesmaids. Ha.

  Lilly was still chewing on a bone. “Or else it was that crazy woman who found him.”

  Excuse me?

  She gulped down her food. “He was probably killed by that Alyson Foulkes… She has a bit of a reputation, apparently.”

  It was suddenly hard for me to keep my poker face on.

  “Oh, does she?”

  “Everyone in the town has a story about her. Apparently, she burned down a house once.”

  Well, that was not exactly what I did. I was just breaking into the house when it happened to burn down.

  “And that character—Annalyse—was always my least favorite in the novel. I was glad that she never got involved with the wedding preparations. Doesn’t sound like the kind of person I’d want to deal with.”

  Well, I had all I needed from the lovely Lilly. I stood up and said that I should really get going, heavy rain and all, but then she offered to tip me. Would she have still done the same if she knew who the woman standing in front of her really was?

  My pride was about to turn the tip down, and then I thought, eh, why not, I could really use the cash. And why shouldn’t she pay me for my time, as well as the offense caused?

  So I waited while she fetched her purse and was surprised when I saw her reaching for a twenty. Wow. Now I was really glad my pride hadn’t gotten in the way.

  Something fell from the purse. A folded slip of paper. Lilly didn’t see it. She just turned her back and told me she was exhausted and that I could find my own way back out of the hotel.

  She did shoot me one last look over her shoulder. “Thanks for tonight…Alexa.” That was the name I had given to her. “It was actually really nice to have someone to talk to after all I’ve been going through.”

  “Of course,” I said. “Get some rest.”

  When she wasn’t looking, I reached down and picked up the piece of paper, slipping it into the pocket of my hoodie.

  I waited until I was outside to unfurl the paper and to read it carefully.

  It was a ticket of some sort… Well, not the actual ticket, but a confirmation of purchase. Lilly had booked a flight—a solo ticket—out of Sydney heading to New Zealand for the following morning.

  I checked the date in the upper right corner. She had made the booking on Tuesday. The day before she went missing.

  So she had never intended to be here for the wedding.

  She had never planned on marrying Charlie Lewis.

  12

  Claire

  It would have been a terrible day for a white wedding. Rain was still pouring down, and the best place to be was inside a large shopping center.

  There was a line to get into the mall that morning, but that was because some random popstar (from a reality show) was doing a signing in the new record store on the second floor.

  Lilly had told me that Lorraine, her maid of honor, was actually a huge fan of this Joey Hedge person. She had been furious that the signing had fallen on the same day as the wedding and Lilly told her that she couldn’t attend both.

  I found the timing of that VERY interesting.

  “Where are y
ou going?” Alyson asked me.

  Oh gosh. Why did Eden Bay have to be such a small place? And here I thought I had chosen the one place that she wouldn’t be.

  No such luck, clearly.

  “I’m, umm….” There was no good way to tell her that I was going in to the mall to spy on Lorraine. “Just thought I’d catch a movie,” I said, hoping that would at least put her off a little. With Alyson’s short attention span, she could never sit through a movie. She hated them.

  “Oh, sounds cool! They have the 3D screening of that new animated one with the shark at about eleven,” she said. “Good timing.”

  Gosh, I just couldn’t win, could I?

  “I’m not seeing a movie, okay, I am here to spy on Lorraine.”

  “Who?” she asked.

  Great. She’d already forgotten the name of one of our suspects, and it was the one that SHE thought was guilty.

  “The older bridesmaid,” I said.

  “Oh, what? And you weren’t going to tell me?”

  I groaned a little and explained the whole situation. About how that now the wedding was not going ahead, Lorraine was free to chase down her pop idol. And I wanted to see exactly what she got up to.

  Alyson raised an eyebrow. “That does sound super sus.”

  Not much point fighting it now. “Well, we may as well work together now that you are here.”

  We headed inside and found the floor map. “Just admit it Claire—you based the character of… Annalyse entirely on me, didn’t you?” She wanted me to say it.

  To be honest, even though Annalyse was BASED off Alyson, I had of course exaggerated her flaws and hijinks for comedic effect. But if she was going to keep using the point, I was going to give her what she was asking for: confirmation. Hey, don’t go asking questions that you may not want the answers to. It ends in trouble and hurt feelings.

  “Well, you have to admit that sometimes you do just end up making things worse.”

  “So that is why you didn’t invite me here today?”

  “You didn’t even remember who Lorraine was!”

  Then I shushed her. We were near the bottom of the escalators, and Lorraine was only a few feet ahead of us.

  “This isn’t the kind of thing that I thought Lorraine would be into,” Alyson said with a frown.

  “Well, they are not actually in an Amish cult or anything like that, Alyson. That was just a weird conclusion that you leapt to.”

  “She doesn’t even look like the other two anymore. She’s dyed her hair back to a blonde color.”

  She was trying to act like she knew everything about the bridesmaids, but I wanted to remind her that she didn’t.

  “It’s not like you were any help with them the other day,” I said smugly as I flipped my hair over my shoulder and got ready to follow Lorraine up the escalators. “Your visit to see them turned out to be a complete waste of time.”

  Hang on, what was that look on Alyson’s face? There was no way she should be as smug as I was.

  Oh, now she was doing the hair-flip. Meanwhile, Lorraine was getting away and I had to keep on her tail. “What? What is it?” I asked Alyson. Of course she was the cat who got the cream, though, and wanted to hang on to her little secret for as long as possible. I called her bluff and said I didn’t care as I began to climb up the steps of the escalator.

  “Actually, I went to see Lilly last night.”

  “Are you kidding me?” I was stopped completely still and almost got my toes caught in the trap at the end as I was thrown off the top. Some kid nearby laughed as I lost my balance for a moment and only just managed to stop myself from tumbling over all together.

  Alyson managed to make a smooth transition from the moving surface to the stationary one, and she was still filling me in on her escapades from the night before. Okay, I didn’t want to admit it, but it was kind of ingenuous sneaking into the hotel room with a bag of takeout like that. I wasn’t sure I would have been able to think of that on the fly.

  “So, Lilly told me that Charlie and Lorraine were having some kind of affair. That she was obsessed with him.”

  I straightened up and tried to save face a little. “I had a hunch that was the case. That’s actually also why I am following her today, as a matter of fact.”

  Alyson didn’t look convinced. “Oh, is it? Hmm, sure it is, Princess. Sure it is.”

  “Well, I must have known something…” I said with a little ‘humph.’

  On that point, Alyson did have to concede, although I wouldn’t have put it exactly the way she did. “Actually yeah, you might have been picking up on the vibes in the air.”

  That only reminded me I had to chase down Byron again to find what she had meant about ‘mistake.’ But there was someone nearer to us that I really needed to chase right then. Lorraine had pushed her way to the front of the line and we were in the back. Not even in the queue actually. It snaked on and on right out the doors of the shop.

  So we walked off to the side and watched Lorraine. She was in the front of the line getting the album signed. She was grinning ear to ear, flirting with Joey Hedge and acting all giggly and girlish.

  “Does it look like she is particularly torn up over Charlie’s death?” I asked Alyson. “She seems more besotted with this guy.”

  Alyson was barely paying attention to Lorraine. She was looking at all the new shopfronts on the second level. And again, she had an almost smug disposition.

  “What is it?” I asked her.

  She smiled. “Just thinking about how much rent all these shops are paying. All the money they’re wasting in overheads. When I have it all figured out!”

  “Where is Troy?” I asked her. Troy owned the mall. And he and Alyson were…well, I’m not sure that “dating” was really the word as she told me that they were only friends. And not even friends—more like enemies that occasionally hung out. But I knew that it was more than that. She just pretended it wasn’t. Like she was pretending to not know where Troy was that day and that she didn’t care.

  “He does his thing and I do mine.”

  Well, since Alyson had already made herself known to the bridesmaids, it was going to be on my shoulders to confront Lorraine, because she would recognize Alyson.

  “Gosh, I am such a big fan,” I said as I sidled up to her at the back of the record store.

  At first, she smiled at me like we were totally on the same page, but then she looked down at my empty arms and hands and frowned.

  “If you are such a big fan, why didn’t you buy his record today?”

  “Er, because I already own it,” I said, straightening up and smiling. Surely that was a perfectly reasonable explanation.

  Apparently not.

  She rolled her eyes as though I was not a real fan at all. Which I wasn’t. But I was pretending I was and was offended that she didn’t believe me. “I have multiple copies at home. But the point of coming to an instore signing is to buy another copy and to get it signed. Duh.” In fact, there was a policy that you couldn’t even join the line to get an autograph unless you bought a fresh copy on the day.

  “You can thank Troy for that policy,” Alyson said, looking unimpressed when I joined her again at the front where the line had finally died down and there were only a few people waiting. “Always looking for another way to make a buck…even when people don’t even need or want the item.”

  I nodded. But I actually thought it made great business sense, and it gave me the idea to do an in-store signing of my own at the bookshop.

  I glanced back over my shoulder at Lorraine, who was still hanging around for some reason. Like she was waiting. Waiting for Joey.

  Hmmm. She looked a little old to be a groupie. But she was hanging back for some reason. And making dreamy eyes at him. And unless I was imagining it, he was making those same eyes back at her. I didn’t think this was just an innocent fan/artist interaction.

  Looked like I was going to have to buy a copy of one of these darned albums.

 
“Big fan,” I said.

  But Joey just stared down at the album I had set down before him to sign. He didn’t make any move to grab it or sign it.

  “What is it?” I asked. “What’s wrong?” I still had one eye on Lorraine.

  “This is not my album,” Joey said. He raised an eyebrow, and I realized I had picked up an album by 70s punk rock star Joey Ramone instead.

  I turned bright red. “Oh my goodness! Okay, you’ll have to forgive me.” I needed to turn on the total Claire charm to get out of this one. “I am a singer, as well you know,” I said in a whispery voice. “So, I do understand how it is.” I sighed heavily and batted my own eyelids at him while Lorraine glared from the sidelines. “I have my own fans and groupies that I just don’t know how to shake sometimes. It’s hard to let them down easy, you know what I mean?”

  He nodded and held eye contact with me for a second too long. “Oh, I am sure you do have fans of your own, Miss…?”

  “Richardson,” I responded. “Claire Elizabeth Richardson.”

  He signed the record anyway and passed it back to me with a grin. Even told me which hotel he was staying at. Hmm. But when he left, I saw him make a beeline for a waiting Lorraine. This Joey character was not all above board. And I was going to find out what was truly going on.

  13

  Alyson

  All night, the rain poured down as the storm got worse and worse. I had J sleeping over because it was the end of the weekend, the weekend that she spent with me.

  She came into my room, apologizing for waking me up, but I had already been awake. It was impossible to sleep through such a brutal storm.

  J climbed into bed with me, shaking and whimpering a little like a puppy, as the thunder clapped and there was yet another shock of violent lightning.

  I tried to get her to chat about more lighthearted subjects to keep her mind off it. “Hey, so Matt tells me that you might be a flower girl at the wedding!”