It had been a long year. An incredible year, don’t get me wrong, just…a long one. Murder mysteries. An engagement. A breakup. And then another engagement. The first one was mine, to Alyson’s brother Matt. The second one was Alyson’s herself, to property developer Troy Emerald. She was wearing the giant diamond he had given her on her left hand, though she always took it off to surf.
“That thing is so ugly,” Alyson said as she scowled at the cruise ship.
To be fair, it was taking up a lot of room. It obscured the view of the ocean and was painted in loud, almost tacky shades of blue and red on the side. “So Bianca was right. This thing is actually stranded here.”
Bianca had been wrong about anyone sleeping on the ship, though. Or on the beach for that matter, which was apparently illegal. Until the gas leak had been taken care of, no one was allowed on board the boat. There were signs up warning people to stay off deck and a number to call the captain if any of the stranded passengers had any urgent queries.
We both watched as people pushed each other out of the way for a sunbathing spot, a place to put their beach towels. There was barely any room on the sand or in the water. “These are the times when you need to take a vacation AWAY from the place that everyone else comes to for vacation,” I commented wryly.
But Alyson just grinned and shook her head. “Nah. I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else.” She glanced over at me. “And neither would you.”
She was right.
Since the tourist side of the beach was so full, Alyson had had to move her surfboard painting business to what we called “The Dark Side of the Beach”—at least temporarily. This was the unguarded, rocky area where technically no one was supposed to swim or surf, although of course people broke the rules all the time.
“Look at these beauties,” she said, speaking about her surfboards as though they were her babies. And maybe they were. She was certainly taking care of them like they were. A few months earlier, all her boards had been washed out to seas and she’d had to start her business again from scratch. I wondered if she was thinking about having any human babies any time soon. After all, her wedding was only two weeks away and things were changing. For the both of us.
We locked up her boards and headed home.
There was something about an empty cruise ship at night that was eerie. It gave me the shivers and I wanted to get away from it. There was not a single light on. Like a skeleton with no body and soul to guide it.
“Good night, Alyson,” I said.
“Good night, Princess.”
Usually Eden Bay was the sweetest place on earth. Well, kinda. At least, the locals were usually as sweet as pie to each other anyway. But the town wasn’t meant for this many people and after the third day of the ship being stranded, people were starting to turn on each other. And on the newcomers.
“This is basically post-apocalyptic,” I whispered to Bianca as I hurried down the street, holding my bags tight as people bared their teeth at me hungrily. Restaurants were out of food, there were signs up saying ‘closed for personal reasons,’ and you couldn’t take a step down the sidewalk without getting elbowed by someone who just wanted food and a place to sleep.
“I don’t know what they are all waiting around for,” Bianca, who was non-sympathetic and more pragmatic, said. “They should just go back to Sydney and chill out there. Or back to their homes. Forget about this stupid cruise.”
That was a little rich coming from Bianca—someone who had no home of her own to go to. But more to the point, it was an expensive cruise and it was going a lot further than Sydney. It was going all the way to the South Pacific including several mystery islands, and tickets were over two thousand dollars. No one wanted to lose their money nor their chance to visit the tropical islands north of Austria. Tickets had been hard to get and the people who were docked didn’t want to give them up, even though a few had had offers from locals to buy the tickets off them for cheap. I thought they were brave souls willing to risk the gas leak. I mean, even if they told everyone it had been fixed, I would never really trust it, you know?
But there was a massive strain on the town and so an emergency town meeting had been called.
Alyson was antsy as we walked into the town hall that afternoon. She had taken an even harsher stand than Bianca and was more than happy to take to the front mic with her controversial opinion. I told her to just sit down and listen before she jumped to any conclusions—and before she mouthed off. “We should hear what the mayor has to say first.”
Alyson rolled her eyes. “He doesn’t know what he is talking about. I should have been mayor.”
“Just listen.”
“I think we should just send them all back,” she said with a huff when she heard what she didn’t want to hear from the mayor’s speech. He wanted us to all be more welcoming to the newcomers.
“Alyson!” I said, a little shocked. “What do you mean? Back onto the contaminated boat?”
She had her arms crossed over her chest and a grumpy look on her face that made her seem four decades older than she was. “Well, how do we know they are not contaminating the rest of us by being out here…”
“Alyson, it was a gas leak, not radiation poisoning,” I said. I mean, really. It was probably a good thing that Alyson was leaving to start at the university in the autumn, because it really seemed like she could do with some basic education.
Her solution was to just shove them all back on the boat, start the engine, and let them all set sail to their untimely deaths.
“Okay, okay,” she grumbled. “That was a little extreme. But they can’t stay here.”
A tall, surfer guy with long hair wearing a black shirt with The VRI logo walked in tried to find a spare seat. Alyson glanced at me. “Should I wave him over?”
I did feel a little sad to see Matt, like I had lost something.
Matt smiled sheepishly and came and sat bedside us, next to Alyson. As the manager of The VRI, he was one of the people under the most stress with all the new people in town. He was being eaten and drunk right out of house and home. But unlike Alyson, he did not want to lock them all onto a ship and kill them. He stood up and gave his opinion—that we should all volunteer to open our homes, that those who had spare beds and sofas should offer them up, if that felt like the right thing for each individual to do.
I nodded. It felt right to me. I already had Bianca sleeping on my sofa, but I had room for one more on the pullout bed.
“Oh no way, I am not putting my name down,” Alyson said as I started to walk over to the sign-up sheet. “I don’t even know these people. Who knows what any one of them is capable of. One of them could have started the gas leak on purpose.”
“Come on, Alyson. It’s not like you to be so distrustful,” I said. It certainly wouldn’t be the first time she’d let a stranger from an ill-fated boat trip stay in her living room. Not that that incident had ended particularly well. But we’d caught the killer in the end.
She finally sighed and put her name down. And I was proud of her.
After the meeting was finished, we all came face to face with our little houseguests. Mine was an old man called Roger who walked with cane and wore a beret, and who didn’t seem very impressed to be staying with me. He didn’t reach out to shake my hand, and he asked me if he would have to climb any stairs to get to my third-floor apartment.
“No, no, there’s an elevator,” I reassure him.
“Bah, I hate elevators!”
“Looks like you two will have a great time,” Alyson said with a little giggle. She was more than happy with her own pick. Dan Millen was a young, friendly guy who just happened to be a surfer so they already had loads to talk about as we exited the town hall, and somehow I ended up carrying the luggage for both Dan and Roger as we headed out into the muggy, late afternoon heat.
Roger grumbled before finally climbing into the elevator, and he was still complaining when we entered the apartment and saw the pullout bed. I was willing
to give him my bed and take the cot myself, but I didn’t want him to know that quite yet and so I kept quiet and made him think that the cot was for him while he scowled at Bianca and asked her to get him a drink of water like she was the help.
“I will leave you two to get to know each other better,” I said to Bianca before hurrying out the door a little later. Alyson wanted me back down on the beach for some reason, and I was more than happy to be out of the apartment right then.
It was late in the afternoon, and Alyson wanted to show me her new solution to her previous problem—the problem that her surfboards could be lost or stolen at any time.
A large cage to lock them all in. She had a permit, apparently. It had just come through.
“I am surprised you would go in this direction,” I commented. “You are usually so opposed to…well, ‘ugly’ things on the beach.” There was no nicer way to put it, really. The bars and the cage were ugly. She didn’t even take offense to my description, nor argue with it. She just sighed a little sadly.
“I know. But there is really no other option. I can’t afford to lose everything again.”
I nodded. That was fair enough. Losing all her stock had been heartbreaking. So now all the surfboards had to be locked up and secured every night before Alyson left. But she even seemed a little bit hesitant about leaving them out in the open even when she was right there to guard them while she finished up her painting for the night. And I had never seen her this paranoid.
“There are a lot of strange people around here at the moment,” she said cautiously as she glanced around. She’d have to move back to the light side of the beach with her boards because she wasn’t getting any sales on the dark side. Eventually. For now, we were still near the rocks, with the cruise ship on the other side, looming over us and the rest of the town.
I nodded a little, as though I agreed with her, but I didn’t want to see my best friend completely lose faith in humanity. That wasn’t who she was. It would be sad if she did. I knew she had seen a lot—we both had—but that didn’t mean our hearts had to turn completely cynical, right? She was about to lock up the one she wasn’t working on, which I thought was a little extreme.
“Just leave them while you work,” I said casually, with a little shrug. “They will be fine.”
“Okay, but you keep an eye on them while I paint then.”
Huh. I wasn’t sure that was entirely my job—full-time surfboard sitter for Alyson Foulkes. Then again, it wasn’t like there was anything to do at my shop. We were still waiting for the new supplies to be shipped in and until we had coffee and books, we had nothing to sell.
So I sat on the sand and watched while she got to work. We still had a couple of hours before the sun set and the sand was still warm on my legs.
“Ooh, some people are risking breaking the rules,” I commented as a few people with boards gave up on vying for position on the light beach and trotted on over to the dark side. Amongst them was Alyson’s houseguest Dan, Matt, some other guys from the surf club, and a tall guy with a shaved head who I didn’t recognize
“Dan is a really good surfer,” I commented after I had watched him for a while. The surf was much rougher on this part of the beach and yet he was taking every wave like it was an extension of his body. Like he was in total control.
Alyson was deep in concentration with her paintbrush, but she nodded a little bit. “Uh huh. He was telling me he had competed in surf comps in Bali and Hawaii, that’s where he is headed again actually. He is going to change cruise ships when they get to the Pacific and head out on tour. He is getting paid a lot to compete. He ranks number eighteenth in the world.”
Wow. I was impressed. He was an actual pro surfer, and you could tell that the other surfers in the waves were a little put out by this new guy showing up and making them all look like amateurs. I just knew that Matt would be hating it.
After a few minutes, the guys came out of the water. I watched Matt shake himself off, beads of water flying off his unruly hair. For just a moment, I was frozen. This was the man who started out being my friend, was then my fiancé, and now we were… What were we? Almost strangers. But as I watched him laugh with one of the guys, something tugged at my heart. Had I made a mistake letting him go?
Before I could come up with an answer, someone ran up beside me and snatched something off the sand while Alyson yelled loudly.
“Hey!” Alyson cried. “Where are you going with that?”
I had been so distracted by Matt’s sad face that I hadn’t even realized what had happened. Dan had picked up one of Alyson’s surfboards and tucked it under his arm, then ran off like he was stealing it…
I stood up in shock as Alyson started to yell, “Thief! Thief! Thief!”
But surely he wasn’t actually going to steal a board right out from under her nose? From the woman who’s flat he was staying in?
“CLAIRE! You were supposed to be keeping watch!”
Oh, she couldn’t possibly be blaming this on me, could she?
We both raced along the sand, then the rocks, as we tried to chase the guy down. But he was a professional athlete, and he was fast. Luckily, my best friend was an athlete as well, and she was gaining on him.
“Where is he going?”
Dan had leapt over the rocky shore and was headed towards the lighter sand—the light side of the beach, which was empty by that time of the night, now that all the stranded passengers had their new homes to go to.
But he was still running while Alyson screamed after him.
He looked like he was headed straight towards the cruise ship. He looked like he was about to run straight ON to the cruise ship. I watched in horror as he ignored the warning sign and ran right up the ramp and onto the vessel with the surfboard still under his arm.
“Er, uh oh, there is no way I am going on there,” I said.
Alyson was already heading towards the ramp with no sign of slowing down. “That is a five-hundred-dollar board, Princess. I am going to get it back.”
Gulp. I did not want to risk a gas poisoning. But I knew she was right. I had to follow her on board.
She got on deck before me and I found myself in what appeared to be a dining area as I tiptoed around. No sign of either of them.
“Alyson?” I called out. My voice echoed around the empty ship.
I couldn’t hear anything. Not even footsteps.
Where had Dan gone?
I started to get a bad feeling that Alyson was in trouble. She had a nasty habit of getting herself into just that. And often. I wandered out of the dining room and into a hallway. There seemed to be endless lines of doors and rooms beside me, and I felt like the whole boat was swaying.
I didn’t know how long I had been on the ship for. Time seemed to have lost all meaning and I had no sense of it, like I was in the Twilight Zone.
Oh gosh, I was dizzy. I started to worry it was the gas leak and realized that I needed to find an exit, a deck, so that I could get some fresh air before the very worst happened. So I ran to the end of the hall where there was an exit sign and burst through a door onto a deck. Fresh air at last.
And something far worse.
All I saw was Dan’s body flying overboard.
And he was dead before he even hit the water.
2
There was the stench of coffee that had been spilled a long time ago coming up from the wooden desk. Maybe it was the heat bringing out all the bad smells. There was definitely no air-conditioning inside the Eden Bay police’s interrogation rooms. They wanted you to be as uncomfortable as possible.
Sergeant Wells wanted me to be as uncomfortable as possible.
“You must have seen something. You were the only one on board.”
“And Alyson,” I pointed out in a low voice as I crossed my arms.
I had no idea what had happened to Alyson. Neither before Dan had been killed nor after. No sign of her at all. I didn’t even know if she’d gotten her board back.
We had been led off the ship separately and our interviews were taking place separately. I didn’t even know who had gone first, though I suspected it was me because I’d only waited fifteen minutes before Wells had stormed in with that accusatory expression. Like I had been the one to hit Dan on the back of the head and then push him overboard.
“So you saw no one else on the ship?” Sergeant Wells looked incredibly skeptical of this after he had heard my story.
I shook my head. “No one was allowed to go on the ship. Everyone knew that it was dangerous.”
He just stared at me with a heavy, steely look. “And yet you went on board anyway.”
I knew that it looked suspicious. The whole thing did. And maybe I was just digging more of a hole for myself, talking without my lawyer present, but I had to defend myself.
“He stole from Alyson…that surfboard was expensive. There was no way we were just going to let him take off with it.”
He leaned back as though he didn’t quite believe my story. “How much can it possibly have been? Two, three hundred bucks? Is that really worth risking your life over?”
“Five hundred,” I said in a low voice, correcting him, though I knew that didn’t make it sound much better or any less insane. “But it was a matter of principle as well. Alyson has been through a lot with those surfboards. She lost them all in the storm and she has only just been able to rebuild her business. We weren’t about to just let this guy get away with it.”
He leaned back and looked at me, almost with amusement. “You are doing a lot of defending of this friend of yours.” He clicked a pen a few times. Carefully. “Considering that she hasn’t been quite so loyal to you.”
I just shook my head a little bit. “What are you talking about?”
“She is in the next room telling us that you are to blame.”
Hang Ten Australian Cozy Mystery Boxed Set Page 100
