Hang Ten Australian Cozy Mystery Boxed Set

by Stacey Alabaster

  Romance.

  I shrugged. “Nothing to be ashamed of…” I knew that they were pretty much Claire’s biggest selling genre in her shop.

  “Well, I figured since I am your English tutor that I should have reading taste that is a little more highbrow,” Maria said with a small laugh. “At least in public.”

  I had actually been reading quite a bit lately. Not romance, but the classics. I was finally reading the book version of Picnic At Hanging Rock after years of it being one of my favorite films. I took a seat next to Maria and told her that I had been choosing my classes for the autumn semester and that I was not only taking two English classes as electives but that I was actually going to choose it as my major.

  But I was still going to take a few business classes. After all, I did run a business. And it had taken a few knocks recently. I still had a lot to learn.

  But Maria was beaming at me when she heard the news. “Well, well, well. I am mighty proud of you, Alyson. Can I take some of the credit for this?”

  I laughed and leaned my head back against the plush seat cover. “You can take most of the credit, I think. I never even would have been accepted to the university if it wasn’t for you. I owe you a lot, Maria.”

  Claire would also claim that she had a lot to do with my conversion to a book lover, but the truth was it was more my style to do exactly the opposite of what Claire wanted me to do, so I was pretty sure most of my change of heart was thanks to Maria.

  Maria looked a little wistful. “I wish Claire felt the same way. She still treats me like I’m her enemy when I try to pop my head in through the door to say hello. Do you think you could have a word with her?”

  Clearly, Maria hadn’t seen that day’s newspaper. Been too busy with her nose stuck in a romance book and lost in fantasy instead of reality.

  “I, um, I can try,” I muttered, trying to sound noncommittal.

  Maria took off her reading glasses. “Ah. Right. I did read a few days ago that people were accusing the two of you of conspiring together. Which is completely ridiculous, of course!”

  “We got the right guy,” I said. I was sure of that, at least. “You know Mr. Carbonetti as well as anyone and you know that he is guilty.”

  Maria nodded and accidentally kicked open a bag sitting underneath her seat.

  “Whoa, that is a lot of books,” I said, glancing into her bag. Looked like she had robbed a library.

  She looked a little guilty. “Yes, I took them all with me on my mini-getaway to Rushcutter’s Cove—didn’t even get through a tenth of them so far, of course. And now I’ve been called back to Eden Bay because there is a ‘tutoring emergency’, as it were. One of my students has to take summer school.”

  She explained that she had originally bought the books for a much larger, much more far-ranging trip away

  “Oh yes?” I asked, only somewhat paying attention as I waited for our stop to be called. This was an express trip, so if you didn’t get off at Eden Bay, the next stop was Sydney, and I definitely didn’t want to end up there. But the train seemed to be coming to a complete stop in the middle of nowhere…or at least, it was slowing down to an absolute crawl. What was going on?

  “Sorry for the delay,” a voice came on over the speakers into the carriage. “The extreme temperatures have warped the tracks and we need to slow down.”

  Everyone groaned and got more and more agitated as the minutes passed and the heat in the carriage rose. And then, when almost twenty minutes had passed, we all started to worry that we were not actually going to start moving. This was it. The train was done.

  “Oh no way, I am not walking back to Eden Bay in this heat!” I cried out. Maria looked even more panicked than I did. Well, a lot more panicked, actually. She was neither in peak fitness nor the prime of life.

  “It’s okay,” I said to her. “I’m sure the train will start moving again soon.”

  I wasn’t about to sit around and wait to find out, though. I needed to get back to town. We had about five minutes left of the train journey, which equaled a forty-five-minute walk.

  Maria was huffing and puffing beside me, but at least she was keeping up. Even with her heavy bookbag, she was managing to keep pace. I was kinda impressed.

  “So where was this long vacation you were meant to take?” I asked Maria as I tried to shield my forehead at least from the harsh sunlight that was burning my skin. I was trying not to think of it as forty-five minutes in the blistering sun but just one foot in front of the other. Ten minutes down. Thirty-five to go. I could do it.

  She looked a little red-faced, and I didn’t think it was just from the heat. “I feel rather foolish now.”

  “Why?”

  I stopped just for a second and looked over my shoulder at her.

  “Because I was taken for one. A fool, I mean.”

  I stopped properly. “You’re one of the people who gave money to the scalper?!”

  She hung her head.

  I slapped mine. “Maria! Why did you hand over the money before meeting and actually getting the ticket?”

  She was super embarrassed about the whole thing. “Because on the website, the poster said that there was so much interest in the ticket that he would be selling it to the first person who gave him the money. So this was the only way I could ’secure’ it.”

  “Yeah, well, you secured nothing in the end, didn’t you?”

  She looked sad, so I decided to lay off a bit. Anyway, we needed to keep walking.

  I felt really sorry for her. That was a lot of money. But if Maria had been cheated out of thousands of dollars, then, well, she could have been angry enough to hit Dan Millen over the head and kill him.

  But there was a problem: it was Dan who was killed, not Michael. Anna said that it was Michael who sold the ticket. The pieces weren’t quite fitting together yet.

  But my hunch had been right. I had to find out more about this Michael guy. Now he really sounded like bad, bad news.

  Like the kind of person you warned your best friend to stay away from.

  By that stage, most of the passengers had left the train and were taking the journey by foot. We all would have called people for rides if we could have, but there was no phone reception in the dead area between Eden Bay and the empty fields, so we just trudged on.

  I felt like I had been walking for miles in the desert with no sign of water. No oasis. There wasn’t even a mirage of water on the horizon, though there was steam coming from the road.

  There was an expensive rental car approaching us. It wasn’t the first car, but it was the first one I had considered actually flagging down. I wasn’t sure, however, if hitchhiking was a good idea. In the end, the car was going too fast anyway and there wasn’t much chance of flagging it down anyway.

  “What the—” I spun around, wondering if I was seeing things.

  It looked like Claire in the passenger seat. I would know that short, icy blonde bob cut anywhere.

  “Hey!” I cried out, but the car was already speeding away.

  “Was that Claire?” Maria asked.

  “I don’t think she even saw me,” I said, crossing my arms and stomping my foot. I was not in the mood to walk another inch yet alone another mile.

  Maria was almost wheezing as spoke. “That guy in the seat beside her!” she said. She was no longer keeping pace, and I’d had to slow down so to match her. “I think that was that Michael guy that we were just talking about!”

  Oh, come on, Claire.

  I finally had reception, but she didn’t pick up the phone.

  15

  “Well, I suppose your plan worked,” Matt said, and I couldn’t tell whether he was happy about this or not. He seemed to be swinging between the two. He was pouring drinks at the bar in-between admonishing me. “As long as everyone thinks that Claire did it, then your name remains in the clear.”

  “Well, that’s what you want, isn’t it?” I asked Matt. “You want me to have J here while you go and surf around t
he world!” I didn’t mean to get so worked up about it, but if he was going to sling accusations at me, then I was going to remind him that I was doing this for our family. For him and J.

  Finally, the bar cleared out a little and so did Matt’s head. “All right, all right, you’ve made your point.” He nodded, but his hands were still in fists as he leaned over the bar to ask, “Do you really think Claire did it?”

  “She was the only other person on that boat.”

  “But what about the motive, Alyson?”

  “I don’t know! Maybe the gas leak made her hallucinate and she didn’t know what she was doing.”

  Matt was looking around for more work to do. And I knew he was only doing that because he didn’t want to respond to what I had just said.

  “What?” I asked. “What is it you are biting your tongue from saying? I know you, Matt.”

  He gave me a cautious look. “Well, how can you be sure what you did on that ship, if the gas leak was so bad? Maybe you were hallucinating too.”

  “Wow.” I stood up and grabbed my bag. I wasn’t about to have my integrity questioned by my own brother.

  But truth be told, I was squashing down those same questions because I didn’t want to know the answers.

  I was just getting the back of my dress zipped up when a man barged in through the door and I squealed. At least it wasn’t my soon-to-be husband. But it was still someone I didn’t want to see me in my wedding dress.

  Not that he had an invitation to the wedding.

  Wells came straight at me, and I instinctively took a step back. After all, the last two times I had seen him, he had grabbed me.

  “This is a woman’s dress shop,” I said to him. Miss Florence was already back behind the counter, picking up the phone as though she was about to call the police.

  She didn’t know that this was the police. At least not right away.

  “I thought there was no such thing as gender segregation these days,” Wells said as he glanced around the shop. He was talking to both me and Miss Florence.

  I crossed my arms. “Well, I suppose I can’t technically kick you out.”

  Miss Florence could though, and she was just waiting for a reason to do it.

  There was a third woman in the shop. Maria was in the changing room. She’d be waiting for me to give her my opinion on her dress in a moment. It was purple, which I was sure would suit her as it was one of her favorite and most-worn colors. J had put her foot down about having a purple dress and the rest of the wedding party had to follow suit.

  “Where is she?” Wells asked as he began to stomp around the shop. That was when I noticed he was wearing his badge again.

  I started to get the bad feeling that maybe he had played me, that he had never actually been suspended.

  He saw that one of the dressing room doors was closed and quickly checked that there were feet underneath before he charged towards it with his badge out and a pair of cuffs in his hand.

  “You can’t just barge in there!” Miss Florence yelled out.

  Uh-oh. I was pretty sure that he could, actually.

  Maria screamed as the door opened. At least she was decent, with the purple bridesmaid’s dress zipped most of the way up.

  It did actually suit her, to be honest.

  “Maria. You are under arrest for the murder of Dan Millen.”

  J was devastated when she heard the news later that day when I picked her up from Mandy’s house. “Is there still going to be a wedding?” she asked with a pout.

  Hmm. Good question, considering that all of my bridal party had either been arrested or wasn’t returning my phone calls. Or were nine years old.

  J followed me into The VRI. She was kinda young to be in there, but these days, she had replaced her backward caps with purple hairbows, so she actually looked more at home in the place than I did in my cutoff denim shorts and flipflops. The hostess Emma gave me the same tired look she always did, but this time, she didn’t even bother mentioning that they ‘had a dress code.’ She knew I would come in if I wanted to, regardless.

  J wanted to go out on the deck and have a look around, and I let her go and wandered over to the bar to check if Matt had arranged his rental suit for the wedding.

  “It’s still happening?” he asked, half-mocking, half-genuine.

  “You’re the second person to ask me that in the last ten minutes,” I said with a very heavy sigh as I sat at the bar. I didn’t believe in bad omens—well, okay, I did, I just didn’t think this was one—but there had been a lot of things going against me in the last week or so. But I figured it was just the universe testing me to see if this was what I really wanted. And it was.

  But now Maria had been arrested, and I was shaken. She was always someone that I had fully trusted. Matt didn’t seem quite so surprised, though. “Some people saw her getting on that ship.”

  I glanced up at him suspiciously. “What people?” I asked. Because there had only been a handful of people on the beach that evening, and Matt had been one of them.

  “Just people,” he said again, not wanting to commit to anything. “So, you know that guy I was surfing with? Michael?”

  Um, yeah. I did know of him. I’d been trying to track him down for days but couldn’t find him since he’d sped past me on the highway. I knew he couldn’t have gone too far because none of the cruise ship passengers were supposed to leave town.

  I just nodded and waited for Matt to go on. “Well, everyone is saying that he was stealing money from people, selling a fake ticket. Maria was one of them, so they say. So, Maria must have snuck onto the ship to try and get her money back.”

  She might very well have done just that, but that didn’t mean that she killed Dan. Dan wasn’t the guy who had her money, and Michael wasn’t on the ship. Dan was.

  Unless she had gotten Dan confused with Michael because they shared a cabin.

  “So how are you going to have a wedding without a maid of honor? Or a bridal party?” Matt asked, getting back to logistics. “Have you even heard from Claire at all?”

  “I saw her, briefly,” I said, thinking about her speeding past me on the freeway.

  Matt was quiet for a moment. “Apparently, she’s gone to Sydney. But don’t tell anyone that. She wasn’t supposed to leave town.”

  What?! Claire was in Sydney with this Michael guy? “Matt. We have to do something.”

  “It’s not my business,” Matt said, scrubbing so hard at the bench that the varnish was going to come off. “Ever heard of the saying ‘not my circus, not my monkeys’?”

  “But don’t you still care about Claire at all?”

  “Why don’t you try contacting her if it is that important to you?” Matt asked.

  I had tried several times with my number set to private, but she was not picking up. Maybe it was time to try calling her on another number entirely. Maybe I should email her. Or drive to Sydney myself.

  “Matt. Maybe if you call her, she will actually pick up,” I said.

  He just shook his head.

  “We all have to live in this town together, Matt. Come on.”

  “Yeah, well, pretty soon, I won’t be here anymore,” Matt said and finally put down his washcloth. “And to tell you the truth, that day cannot come quickly enough.”

  And I was about to get a surprise. He was leaving even earlier than planned. “I got a ticket on the cruise ship for cheap. It will take me up north.”

  “How did you get a ticket on the ship?” I asked him. “You never told me you intended to leave this soon! I thought it was still weeks away…”

  Matt just interrupted me. “Do you really have to ask how I got a ticket on that boat?” he asked quietly.

  Right.

  The same way that I had gotten an empty apartment.

  I shivered as I left, even with the sun still beating down at a hundred degrees.

  16

  There was a room on the third level of the mall that was originally supposed to be a function r
oom but was now my artistic studio for the times I didn’t want to work on the beach. This was one of those times, because the temperature had just reached 113 and barely anyone was even risking the outdoors until the heatwave broke.

  Troy was sitting, drinking a coffee and reading the paper while I painted, but something outside caught my eyes. There were actual people milling around on the sand, even though the radio had warned people not to go outdoors that day because the risk of heatstroke was so high.

  It looked like people were walking towards the cruise ship.

  “What’s going on?” I asked, glancing out the window. I stood and walked over to get a better look.

  Troy was still reading, but he peered at me from over the top. “It was printed in the paper this morning that the gas leak has been located and fixed. The ship will set sail in the next day or two.”

  I spun around and looked at Troy. “But the killer still hasn’t been found!”

  They couldn’t just leave town!

  He blinked at me in surprise. “Er. Weren’t you THERE when the killer was arrested?”

  Ugh, didn’t Troy know anything after all this time? The police in Eden Bay were hopeless. They never got it right the first time.

  But Claire and I did.

  I was certain of it.

  I glanced out over the beach at the people who were willing to risk heat stroke to secure their place back on the ship. Had the gas leak really been fixed, though?

  I had another concern. I wondered if the gas leak had actually messed with my mind? Had I been recalling things on that boat as they actually happened? Maybe it had been Maria I’d heard behind me. Even though she never, ever wore heels.

  “This cruise ship cannot leave Eden Bay,” I said, putting down my paintbrush and gathering up my bag. I was done working for the day. I didn’t know why Troy was being so passive about it. Didn’t he know that this would pervert the course of justice? But I wasn’t just about to stand back and watch it leave.