Surfboards and Suspects Read online

  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.”

  He was just playing mind games with me. He just wanted us to turn on each other. I said nothing. I wasn’t about to be drawn into his games.

  But we had been the only two people on the ship.

  And I hadn’t seen Alyson the entire time I’d been on board.

  “I suggest you get a lawyer, Miss Elizabeth Richardson. And in the meantime, I suggest that you don’t have any contact with Alyson Foulkes.”

  It sort of reminded me of this one time in eighth grade when I had been going through my awkward growing up phase. It was summer in Eden Bay, and I had really wanted to skip the upcoming swim carnival because I was going through a phase where my hair was the most important thing to me and I was very protective of it. Well, to be fair, I am still going through that phase. But anyway. I didn’t want to get my hair wet and I also didn’t want anyone to see me in a swimsuit. I was fourteen years old and feeling self-conscious about my body.

  Alyson always loved the water, at that age and any age and never had any issue with getting her hair wet or messy. So she was actually pretty pumped to go to the swim carnival. She even had a pretty good shot at coming first place, or at least one of the places. She would have taken home a medal that day if she had competed.

  Yet, because she was my best friend—and because she was such a GOOD friend—she was sympathetic to my plight. One night on the phone, I told her all about it and about how much I didn’t want to go and so she came up with a plan—we would skip the carnival. We would skip school, essentially, and not tell our parents or our teachers that we were doing it.

  The plan made me nervous because I had always been a total teacher’s pet, and I was terrified of getting in trouble. I was more worried about what the teachers would say, rather than my parents, if I was caught, although my parents worried me too. The whole scheme worried me. But Alyson assured me that it would be fine and we wouldn’t get caught. We would go to a park nearby and just hang out for the day on the swings and under the shades of the tree, munching on apples and gossiping, and then at the end of the day,
we would take our bags and head home as though nothing had happened, like it was just a normal day and we’d attended the carnival like we were supposed to.

  The plan had started off fine. Because of all the commotion at the school on the day with everyone heading over to the pool, it was easy for us to sneak off without being seen once our name had been crossed off the list. And the park was out of the way, blocks away from both the pool and the school, so I felt safe there. Hidden. No chance of getting caught. And if we were caught, we had a pact to say nothing.

  “It’s much nicer to be here under the shade of the trees than in the gross chlorinated water,” I’d said, taking an apple out of my lunchbox and munching on it.

  Alyson had smiled at me and nodded like she agreed, even though I had known deep down that she wanted to be at the swim carnival. But I was grateful for her being with me—being on my side. There was no way I would have skipped school on my own. I wouldn’t have had the guts to. And Alyson always made me feel braver than I was.

  It was just after 2pm and I was starting to think that we had gotten away with it. We were giggling about boys we liked and girls we didn’t, and Alyson had just said something so funny that I had thrown myself onto my back in fits of laughter.

  And then the vice principal of our school walked into the park.

  I still remembered the sickening way my stomach sank. The way I stopped laughing. My heart froze. Knowing that we had been sprung and knowing that we were about to be in big trouble.

  Our pact to say nothing had quickly dissolved as we were both quick to blame the other one. Alyson said she would never have skipped school if it wasn’t for me being nervous about the swim carnival, and I said that I never would have skipped the swim carnival if it hadn’t been Alyson talking me into it. Both true accounts. But both of us against the other one.

  But what had happened after that was far worse. Our parents had told us that we couldn’t be friends with each other. Separately, my mum and Alyson’s mum both went into the school and said that we were not allowed to be seated next to each other in class and we were banned from hanging out together at recess or lunch. The teachers rapidly agreed to it as part of our punishment, which also included three lunchtime detentions scrubbing graffiti off the school desks.

  Even though I had been mad with Alyson and she had been mad with me when we’d gotten caught, neither of us wanted to stop being friends, and so this was the worst punishment we could have been given. We had other friends, but it wasn’t the same. We didn’t like them as much. None of my other friends were as funny or as brave. But for three weeks, we were separated—no talking, no hanging out, no giggling at each other and passing notes in class. No walking to and from school together. Two totally separate lives. It was a lonely time.

  Till one day when Alyson had had enough and decided to end it. Of course it was up to her. She stomped home one night and demanded that her parents lift the ban. And she wouldn’t hear a word of argument from either them or our teachers either. And after that, we were friends again.

  Only we never skipped another swim carnival again.

  <<< INSERT SECTION BREAK ??? >>>

  “I think you’ll be better off without her influence,” Bianca commented as she sloshed the ice around the fresh jug of lemon and lime iced tea that she was making at my kitchen counter. Roger was still sleeping in my bedroom—the only room in the apartment that had proper air conditioning, especially when he kept the door shut. Temperatures were soaring above 105 and neither Bianca nor I wanted to be cooped up inside the shop when there were only about ten books left on the shelf anyway.

  I wasn’t sure that was true—the being better off without Alyson part—but I was going to have to take the advice of the police. My solicitor, Dawn Petts-Jones, had had the same opinion when I met her later on that day.

  “Sorry about the heat in here,” she said, fanning her face.

  Yep, no sign on the door of Dawn’s office saying “Air Con in here.”

  Dawn was a real estate lawyer, but for the moment, that was all I needed. Nothing had gone to trial yet and Dawn was sure I would be in the clear as long as I kept my head down and stuck to the truth. “And don’t have any contact with Alyson Foulkes. It will look bad…like you are conspiring. And there are already enough rumors and speculation floating about.”

  I leaned back in the seat. The heat wasn’t bothering me so much as something else was. “What rumors?”

  Dawn looked up. “You haven’t heard what people are saying?”

  I shrugged. “No. I haven’t been out of the apartment since this happened.” I sighed. I mean, how bad could the gossip be, really? “What are they saying, that one of us killed him?” That seemed kinda obvious to me. That people would say that, I mean. Not that one of us had done it. I wasn’t quite willing to actually entertain the idea that Alyson had killed Dan just for stealing a surfboard.

  Though she did really love those surfboards.

  Her babies.

  Dawn stared at me, stopped fanning her face, and raised an eyebrow. “I think you’d better take a look at today’s paper.”

  “You are my lawyer, Dawn. Just tell me what is up. What is going on here?” I was starting to get irritated, and it suddenly felt unbearably hot in her office.

  “Maybe I have a copy here…” she mumbled, sorting through all the junk and stacks of paper on her desk before she went “Aha!” and pulled out a copy of that day’s edition of the Eden Bay Journal.

  On the cover was just a surfboard. I supposed it was a little bit of a strange choice. But that was before I knew what the angle of the story was.

  The cover story had been written by my old “friend” Rachael, the editor of the Eden Bay Journal. I say “friend” in quotation marks because once upon a time, we had been friends, but she had a habit of betraying me in the newspaper that she wrote for and edited all on her own.

  “I don’t get it,” I said, reading over the headline and the first paragraph in a sort of low-grade shock. Because I really didn’t get what the article was saying… None of it made any sense to me. It was dredging up the past. The very first case that Alyson and I had ever worked on together and solved. At the time, the murderer had been branded “The Surfboard Killer” because it appeared that he was targeting surfers. But in the end, that had only been a coincidence. The killer had been my old English teacher, Mr. Carbonetti, and he’d actually been targeting former pupils who just happened to surf.

  Dawn stared at me. “He was a surfer, right?”

  “Who? Dan?” I asked, the paper going limp in my hands as I turned my head up to stare at Dawn. “Well, yeah, he was. An incredible surfer, actually. A pro. But I don’t see what that has to do with anything?”

  Dawn had completely stopped fanning herself and now her face was deadly serious. “They are saying that maybe the so-called Surfboard Killer was never actually apprehended. That maybe, a year ago, you guys caught the wrong guy. And he is still on the loose.”

  3

  There were stares. Murmurs. All the blame was being heaped on my shoulders and I didn’t know why. All I had done was step foot on a cruise ship. Did I really deserve all this hate?

  But was it possible? Had we gotten the wrong guy one year earlier?

  I’d been walking around town all day with the same sick feeling I’d had in my stomach the day that Alyson and I had been sprung by the vice principal in the park. Like we had done something very wrong and were about to be in big trouble. Only it wasn’t my teachers or parents I’d have to answer to now, it was the whole town. Maybe even the whole world.

  Matt. I ducked behind a parked car and hoped that he hadn’t seen me. But of course he had. It hadn’t exactly been the most subtle duck in the world.

  “Claire? What are you doing?” he asked with a laugh.

  I straightened up and looked around nervously. “I am not supposed to have any contact with Alyson.”

  He was trying to keep a straight face. “In case you haven’t not
iced, I am not Alyson.”

  I stuck my tongue out at him a little. “Okay, okay. You know what I mean. You are her brother.”

  I wanted to ask him a million questions. How was she? What was she doing? What was she thinking? What had she said to the police? But I had Dawn Petts-Jones’s voice in my head. It would look like we were conspiring if we knew what the other person was doing and saying. Like we had purposefully put the wrong guy behind bars all those months earlier and now were covering our tracks.

  Or killing again.

  And it really didn’t look that great that I was hanging around with her brother either, as innocent as it may have been in reality. We had all the eyes in town on us. And there were still a LOT of eyes in town. Even if the gas leak had been fixed early, there was no way anyone was leaving town. The cops had told everyone to stay close by incase they were needed for questioning.

  Matt was smiling down at me like everything was normal. And he was making regular conversation. “So what are you plans for the day?”

  I couldn’t believe how casual he was being…like I would just be having a normal day with ‘plans.’ Oh, you know, just running errands, going to the bank, going for a swim, trying to clear my name now that I was accused of being involved in a murder conspiracy… The usual.

  Although it was a good question. I didn’t have any plans at all. I was lost and rudderless. But I was going to have to focus.

  I shrugged. “I’m not entirely sure, to be honest. Bit of a blank slate at the moment.” The heat was beating down on me and I could feel my face starting to burn a little. Uh oh. Couldn’t risk the wrinkles. I sidestepped so that I was underneath the awning of a shop.

  Matt shrugged. “We could go to the park?”

  I shook my head.

  “Oh, right, I get it. It’s still a little awkward.” Matt smiled at me and shoved his hands into the pockets of his shorts. “I guess we still need a little time before we can hang out as just friends, right?”