Hang Ten Australian Cozy Mystery Boxed Set

by Stacey Alabaster

  How many of these did he have? And how many more was he going to paint?

  I stared at the painting of the woman with the red hair.

  “I suppose it is Charlie’s fiancée , Lilly, now who will get all the proceeds,” I said with a shrug. And also, stupidly, without thinking.

  Drew turned toward me sharply and looked down on me over his shoulder. “How do you know who Lilly is?”

  “I…” I took a step away from him, feeling the heat, feeling the accusation. Stupid Claire, I berated myself. Such a dumb, rookie mistake. “I guess I must have read about him in an art magazine feature or something where it was mentioned…”

  Drew shook his head. “No. Charlie was not some famous artist who had magazine articles written about him or anything like that. You know him.” His eyes went glassy. No more smile on his face. I suddenly realized how alone we were in the desert of the art gallery. The streets of Newcastle were dead that morning.

  Was I about to be next?

  I glanced around to check the exit was clear in case I needed to make a run for it.

  “You’d better be careful what you go saying about Lilly,” he said in a low voice. “Or you’ll be sorry, Claire Elizabeth Richardson.”

  Not so innocent and naive after all, then.

  18

  Alyson

  I was in the middle of an artist’s paradise.

  So much space surrounded me. And a room that most people would kill for. White walls. Freshly painted. The entire function room spread out around me. And then there was that killer view. But I only just glanced out at the water and then turned my head away again— Hang on. Was that Lorraine down there, walking along the shore?

  It was. Her hair looked even blonder than it had a few days earlier, but it was definitely her.

  She was staring into that gold locket that she had around her neck, very intensely, then she closed it and looked longingly out over the sea.

  I was surprised that Lorraine was still in Eden Bay at all. Especially because I assumed that Joey whatever-his-name-was had moved on, and I thought maybe she was the kind of obsessive fan who would chase him from state to state and gig to gig. Hmm. Maybe the police had told her not to leave town.

  I moved away from the window. Claire had a crazy idea in her head that the murder of Charlie Lewis had nothing to do with the bridesmaids at all. And maybe nothing even to do with the wedding.

  Maybe I should just let her do her thing.

  I had to focus.

  I took in a deep breath and looked at the task before me.

  All of these fresh new boards and a whole empty room to make art in. Part of me felt completely undeserving of all this. I just kept thinking about how ‘against’ the construction of the mall I had been, and how I had actually protested and tried to stop it from getting built. I’d tried to stop Troy Emerald from doing a lot of things actually.

  And now Troy was doing all of this for me.

  “Hey, it’s not like anyone is using the function room yet…” he said with a heavy sigh as he poked his head in just to check that I had everything I needed. “Haven’t gotten a single booking.”

  Hmm, yeah, well, that might have had something to do with the fact that he had ridiculously overpriced it for hiring out. Yes, it had a beach view, but so did, you know, the actual beach. And all you needed to pay to get married on the beach was a small licensing fee. And that was only if you did it the legal way. I knew plenty of people who had just hitched up with a few friends and a celebrant on the day and done it for free.

  But it was also probably due to the fact that Eden Bay hadn’t been very ‘festive’ of late. Even though the storm had moved on, people were still cleaning up the wreckage. And not everyone was as lucky as I had been.

  I was getting ready to paint and that was always something I did better on my own, in complete silence. But Troy was hanging around a bit. Hovering. I had a paintbrush in my hand and made a show of mixing the colors to try to get him to take the subtle hint. After all, it would have been pretty rude to ask him to just flat-out leave considering that he was letting me use the room. I just hoped that it didn’t come with conditions.

  Troy asked me how I liked the place.

  “It’s wonderful.” A little bit over the top, but I did mean it. For what I needed it for, it was perfect.

  “So you don’t hate the mall so much these days?”

  What was he getting at? I put my paintbrush down and looked at him curiously.

  He shrugged. Then he told me something softly. Like it was no big deal. “You can have a shop here. Rent free for the first six months.” Only that was a very big deal.

  Now that really was going too far. I didn’t see how I could possibly accept that.

  He saw my face. “Okay, okay. Half-price rent. I won’t make a profit on it, but I won’t make a loss either.”

  I wanted to ask more questions—which floor, what size shop, would I get a bathroom, would it be close to the food court? But instead, I only nodded. There was nothing like having your entire livelihood washed out to sea to humble you.

  And he really wanted me to say yes, I could see that. Who was I to disappoint a man who was offering me everything?

  “Six months only,” I said.

  “Six months only.”

  The face-call froze, and I rolled my eyes. Oh. She had seen that. So it mustn’t have been frozen on the other side. All I could see was a blonde head and a black turtleneck. “Restart the program!” I yelled into the phone and told her to call me back.

  Geez. Frustration.

  I hated that Claire was practically on the other side of the planet. Well, okay, she was only two hours north, but I hated doing all of this via distance.

  It took a few minutes for the next video call to come through and this time, I could see that she had changed locations. Before she had been mobile, walking down a street with a strip of shops, but now I could see a view of a beach behind her. Ugh. Not the beach again. It didn’t look anywhere near as pretty as the beach at Eden Bay. But then again, the waves did look calm and far less capable of total destruction.

  I told Claire about Troy’s offer. But for some reason, I didn’t tell her that I’d already accepted it. I wasn’t sure why. I think I wanted her to think that I was maintaining my independence and making him work to convince me of it. That I couldn’t be won over so easily, you know. She said I was silly if I turned it down.

  She had something she needed to admit to me herself. “Chris called me the other day,” she said, her face twisting a little, as though she felt guilty. “He saw the wedding announcement. Told me that I was making a mistake.”

  What? “You’re not going to meet up with him while you are there, are you?” I demanded to know.

  I could see her roll her eyes. Maybe we ought to stick to just phone chat from now on if we were both going to roll our eyes this much. “He lives in Sydney, not Newcastle.”

  Yeah, but you had to drive through Sydney to get to Newcastle. And then back through Sydney again to get to Eden Bay. I was still thinking about that conversation in Byron’s office, before the ceiling had collapsed and we’d had to run out. I hadn’t thought too much about it at the time, but now that the dust had settled—or the plaster, if you like—I had realized something. And it was troubling to me.

  If Claire was really sure about marrying my brother, then nothing Byron could have said would have changed her mind. In fact, she wouldn’t have even gone to see her in the first place.

  But I didn’t push the topic. We might not have long before the connection cut out again with all the crazy weather and the unreliability of the Australian phone and internet providers.

  “So, what have you found out?” I asked her as I moved over to the window and perched myself there. I was still on the look-out for Lorraine.

  She told me that Drew didn’t just have one painting of Lilly, he had several. Sounded a bit creepy if you asked me.

  “Lilly had every reason to want Char
lie dead,” she said to me. Her voice was fast and furious, and she was whispering for some reason. “She is going to be rolling in the cash now that Charlie’s art is selling for twenty times as much as it was when he was alive. You have to find a way of talking to her again. I would, of course, but I am here in Newcastle. So it’s on you now, Alyson.”

  I hung up the phone and groaned as I looked around at all the boards that were mostly still blank. Potential had quickly turned into frustration as I’d realized how big the task of rebuilding would be. I supposed it had been naive to think that I could paint an entire six months’ worth of boards in one afternoon. And it was definitely naive to think that I wouldn’t be called back into the mystery to investigate.

  I wanted to prove to Claire that I could get something useful out of Lilly again.

  But I wasn’t sure I was ready to make another food delivery. And I also wasn’t sure she would buy my story a second time. So I was going to have to think of another way to bump into her.

  I didn’t have to think too hard.

  There was a woman walking along the edge of the water wearing a long green dress. It suited her, but I almost missed her altogether at first because I wasn’t paying attention. Too lost in my own thoughts.

  I caught the long red hair out of the corner of my eye.

  Great. I was going to have to go back to the beach.

  And I was going to have to be quick.

  I had to sprint, which was difficult for me because I hadn’t trained in almost a week and I had been consuming twice as many calories a day as doctors would recommend. I was almost too breathless to talk, but I was going to have to get her attention.

  “Lilly!” I called out, waving to her as she spun around. She frowned when she saw me, and there was a strange look in her eyes as I raced toward her. I thought she would recognize me as “Alexa,” the name I had given her in the hotel lobby, but I could see from the look on her face that she actually recognized me. For real.

  For who I really was.

  “I saw a photo in the paper,” she said, her face almost emotionless. “Of the woman who found Charlie’s body.”

  I dropped my head. “Oh.”

  “So, you are Alyson Foulkes,” she said with a heavy sigh. She shook her head. “I actually should have known something was up the other night when you were so strangely friendly and easy to talk to. The way you actually wanted to hang back and hear about my life. I’ve never had a delivery driver act like that before.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, and I meant it. “I should have been honest about who I was. That wasn’t cool.”

  She didn’t give much away with her expressions or body language, but I thought I could see a little hint of amusement in her eyes. Maybe even admiration for how well I’d been able to pull the whole thing off.

  “So,” I asked her. “Do you still think I did it?”

  She pursed her lips for a moment as she took me in then turned away from me to stare out into the ocean. “I’m not sure what I think.” She cast me an interested look all of a sudden. “So. If you’re such a brilliant detective, did you ever go after Lorraine?”

  Hmm. Maybe she was regretting telling me about that in the first place. Or maybe, just maybe, there was more to the story. I thought about what Claire had told me on the phone. Maybe Lilly knew all along who I was and told me that stuff about Lorraine ‘innocently’ so that I would go and investigate her.

  I couldn’t let Lilly know any of my suspicions, though. Anyway, I was lucky she was even talking to me if she really did think that I might have been the one to kill her fiancé.

  I told Lilly that Claire and I had actually followed Lorraine around the mall a few days earlier. “On the day you were supposed to get married,” I said a little pointedly, watching carefully for Lilly’s reaction. I did notice her bristle a little.

  “I suppose she was happy to be set free,” Lilly said. “She got what she wanted in the end.”

  Maybe. But Lilly’s logic didn’t exactly add up. She thought that Lorraine was in love with her fiancé. How was Charlie dying what Lorraine wanted, in that case? Unless Charlie had told Lorraine for certain that he never wanted to be with her. I supposed that would have been enough to set her off. But we had no proof that a conversation like that had ever happened.

  “She seemed pretty obsessed with this Joey Hedge character,” I said, recalling what we had witnessed at the record store.

  Lilly rolled her eyes so hard it looked like it must have actually hurt. “You have no idea…” She looked like she had so much to say and it was all about to explode out of her, but she was swallowing it down. Her face went red.

  “Are you thirsty?” I asked her. “Because I know a place that sells great milkshakes.”

  Lilly stared into her milkshake, but she didn’t take a sip.

  “You can drink it,” I said. “It’s safe.”

  She must have heard the rumors about how a customer had died in that very shop from drinking a milkshake. Well, not even rumors. It had really happened. The rumors were that no milkshake in Eden Bay could be trusted. But the killer had been caught and was awaiting trial. Lilly did seem pretty well-versed in all the of the scandals of Eden Bay.

  I had ordered food even though Lilly was only getting a beverage. My pasta with chorizo and cottage cheese arrived and I grinned and thanked the waiter. Matt didn’t mind that I still came to Captain Eightball’s even though he no longer worked there. It had been a place I’d come to since I was a kid, and it was a hard habit to break.

  I was doing my best to make small talk and make Lilly feel comfortable around me, like she could trust me, even though that had never been a strength of mine. Making polite small talk, that was. “Your hair color is gorgeous,” I said. “Is it natural?”

  She nodded. “Never dyed it in my life.”

  She seemed very proud of this fact, like it was a moral victory. Yet she made her bridesmaids dye theirs for the wedding. Seemed a touch hypocritical to me.

  “Well, it looks amazing.”

  She smiled at me and pushed her glass away. “Thank you. It gets a lot of compliments.”

  I nodded. “I bet it gets you a lot of admirers as well. Looks like you could model with that hair. For, you know, portraits, or photos, or maybe even for a painting.” I shrugged and looked away as though I didn’t mean anything by the comment and if she read something into it then that was all on her.

  A waiter brought over a side salad that I had ordered to make it seem less like I was just a huge pig, but I was more interested in the pasta and just pushed it to the side.

  There was still something that Lilly was bursting to tell me. Or to tell someone. I wondered how much small talk and compliments were needed before she would feel comfortable enough to tell me.

  “What is Lorraine really hiding?” I asked. I couldn’t wait any longer for her to spontaneously come out with it.

  Lilly was still fighting with something. A conscience of some sort. But at the end of the day, people always want to spill the goss they have.

  Her voice was full and heavy and her eyes wide and full of scandal as she leaned forward to tell me something.

  “Lorraine has a child. A baby that she gave birth to last year.”

  Oh…okay. I was a little surprised, but that was still a relatively normal thing to have done. So I wasn’t sure why Lilly was telling me the news in such a scandalized tone. I just picked up my fork and took another bite of my pasta, waving the waiter over to exchange my side salad for a bowl of fries.

  “So?” I asked, my words marbled because my mouth was full. “What’s the biggie?”

  Lilly still had that scandalized look on her face.

  “No one knows who the father is. I mean… We all know,” she said in a hushed tone as she glanced around the restaurant. “But no one in the press knows.”

  I put down my fork. “Hang on. Why would the father of Lorraine’s baby be any interest to the press…” And then I got it. And then I was jus
t as scandalized as Lorraine was. “Are you telling me that Joey Hedge is the father of Lorraine’s child?”

  Lilly nodded.

  I glared at her. “So why did you tell me that tale the other night in the hotel room that she was in love with Charlie!”

  She sat back a little bit and looked a little bit hurt that I was accusing her of misleading me. “It wasn’t a lie, Alyson. She doesn’t exactly have the best reputation, you know. She wanted Charlie all for herself. She wanted him to raise that rock star’s baby as if it was his own.” She shook her head. “And there was no way that I was going to let that happen.”

  I just stared back at her. Did she realize what she had just said? Sounded like a case of ‘I didn’t really want Charlie, but I didn’t want anyone else to have him either.’

  Lilly cleared her throat and tried to backpedal a little bit.

  “I am telling you, Alyson. She was mad that day that I had run away and left Charlie, practically at the altar.” Lilly shrugged. “I can’t know for sure what happened, but my guess is that she tried to make a move on Charlie and he rejected her.” She paused to see if I was buying that story. Then she added another one just for good measure. “And she really did not want to miss that signing, for whatever reason… She never wanted my wedding to Charlie to go ahead.”

  I knew what she was doing. She was trying to deflect all of the guilt onto Lorraine. All of the motives.

  But it was Lilly who had all the motives. And I mean all of them.

  “What about you?” I asked. I was going to have to bluff a bit. Take a confident guess. But if Claire was right and it was Lilly in that painting, then I was on the right track. “And your reputation?”

  “What— What are you asking?” Lilly looked confused. But she also looked a little scared, intimidated, by the tone in my voice.

  “Are you Little Miss Perfect yourself?” I asked her. “Rumor has it that you weren’t quite so faithful yourself. Maybe there was another artist you were more interested in being painted by.”