Bitten on the Beach Page 3

  The shark did not need to die.

  I had plenty of evidence to back up my point as well. I happily pulled out the articles that I had printed off the internet to show her.

  “See? These studies show that sharks are not actually aggressive toward humans. They are just curious. And actual shark attacks are rare. So this shark cull that is underway will not only damage the ecosystem of our local beach, it won’t even make anyone safer.”

  Plus, I had the other theory I was working on—that Meg had been killed by a human—but I wasn’t sure that Rachael was ready for too much news in one day. I mean, that would be a real scandal that she would have to clear the front page to cover.

  There was barely anyone left in the office, not just for the day but for good, by the looks of it. There were empty desks that still had remnants, like they had once had people sitting on them but were now abandoned. Except for Rachael. Sole editor and reporter. She looked tired and overworked. She was probably young, maybe even still in her twenties, but there were stress lines around her mouth that had already aged her so she looked a decade older at certain angles. She warily took the page I’d printed and looked over it. I pointed out the bit I had highlighted about how often sharks don’t even stick around after attacks, so we might not even kill the ‘right’ one. Not that there was a right one to kill.

  “Now you know,” I said. “We need to be reporting both sides of the facts. Something like this would really help to save Sharkey.”

  She sighed and took her glasses off like they were as heavy as lead. “No one wants to read about how cute and lovable sharks are—what did you say your name was? Alyson. Anyway, I can’t verify those facts. Does it look like I have the funds to employ a fact-checker on this staff?” She waved her hand around the empty office.

  “Well, I can double-check them,” I said indigently. “I can call some environmental scientists. I could even interview one of them for you.” We had limited time. Ideally, the article would go up on the website in a day or two and be in the next printed issue. By that stage, hopefully the cull couldn’t have done too much damage. It was scheduled to start that very day and I was on edge.

  Rachael rolled her eyes wearily at me and shoved the papers back into my hands. “I’m not printing the story.”

  Fine. Then I was just going to have to get the word out myself. Even if I had to start my own newspaper. Well, maybe not an actual printed newspaper. No one read those anymore anyway. But I could start a blog. And a social media campaign.

  In the meantime, it was onto phase two of the “Save Sharkey” campaign. I was going to make sure that Sharkey’s face was the first thing that everyone in Eden Bay saw when they woke up in the morning and looked out their windows.

  There was just one last flourish to do on the design and then it would be done. Painting the giant mural was the easy part. That was what came easy to me, art and design. It was how I made my living in fact, as a surfboard painter and designer. So, what better way to save Sharkey than to leverage my best skill? I gently touched up parts of the mural and made sure that the paint was dry to the touch before we put it up for everyone to see. I had never used so much blue paint in my life.

  Troy Emerald was the one who was going to help me present the painting to the town. I’d asked him to meet me on the beach at 11:00 am and he was little early, which I didn’t mind. It showed me he was keen. And he was going to stick to his word.

  “Don’t you have to spend time on your actual business?” Troy asked, helping me with the heavy sign. It had taken me ten hours to paint it over the past couple of days.

  “This is my actual business….” But he was right. I’d had to take the full day off painting surfboards for clients and I was going to be out of pocket a couple of hundred dollars. But no sweat. It was all going to be worth it in the end.

  He stood back and nodded a little bit, taking in the work I had done. The depiction was definitely quite interesting. “I think it’s great that you are trying to humanize the shark…”

  “It’s not humaniz—” Well, he was right. I had kind of given the shark cartoonish human features. He was wearing shorts and a pair of sunglasses, and he was smiling. I’d painted him blue instead of dark black. I had carefully not emphasized his teeth. And I had painted him giving a thumbs-up.

  Of course, “Sharkey” was not necessarily one specific shark. From my research, I had already learned that it was impossible to target just one. But I had to put a ‘face’ on the anti-culling campaign and Sharkey was it.

  “I don’t expect you to understand,” I muttered. “I am sure you would have every shark in the world killed if it meant you could make a profit from it.”

  He laughed at that. “Well, that is a little extreme.” He mused for a moment. “Actually, at first I thought that it was a pretty obvious solution. Of course the shark had to be killed. But now you’ve persuaded me that it might not be a good idea at all. Certainly not a practical one.”

  “Really?” I asked. I was stunned. I leaned forward a little and whispered, “So you believe me that it was a murder, not a shark attack?”

  Troy backtracked a little. Didn’t want to get too carried away. “Er, well, I’m still not sure about that. But isn’t the point more that it doesn’t even matter if it was a shark? Killing them won’t make us any safer anyway. You’ve made me see that it isn’t so black and white.”

  I nodded slowly. I supposed so. But the rest of the town wasn’t going to see it that way. They’d all be more of the ‘eye for an eye’ mentality. And unless I cleared Sharkey’s name and proved that Meg’s killer was a human, they were going to want that eye.

  “Hey, Alyson!” a cheery voice called out and waved to me as a man approached us on the sand. He was wearing long hessian pants, colorful circulator shades, and he looked and talked like a stereotypical sixties hippy, even though his hair wasn’t quite shoulder length. But it was longish.

  “Who’s this good-looking guy?” Troy asked. He frowned at me and looked questioning. Wanting me to reassure him that this was not some kind of date. And it wasn’t. It was purely business. The business of saving the sharks.

  “Now, now, don’t be jealous. Calvin is just one of the activists I have recruited to help me out with the campaign.” Troy still looked a little rejected. “Don’t worry,” I said. “I still need your help erecting the sign. If you still want to give it to me.”

  But he winked at me and handed it over to Calvin. “Looks like you’ve got this one covered.”

  6

  Claire

  Meg Brian. A twenty-nine-year-old weather reporter. I recognized her, but not in these shots. I looked over the photos, at the teeth marks. A little too ‘neat.’ The detective in me couldn’t quite let it go. I mean, I was ninety percent sure it was a shark attack, but what about that ten percent that was left? My certainty was dropping more and more every day. It was worth checking out, at least. Not that I was going to tell anyone what I was doing. They’d think I was crazy, agreeing with Alyson, or even entertaining it, and they’d have a good point.

  I shouldn’t have even had the photos. I hid them behind my back when a customer walked in and smiled at her, asking what I could help her with. “I’m looking for travel books! With the beach closed here, I am going to have to take a vacation!” she said with a shrill laugh. But my mind could not deal with travel books that morning. I was too intrigued by what was happening in our own town. I let Bianca take this one and put the photos away before I searched the shelves, looking for a book for myself. Did we have any books on sharks, I wondered, checking the nature section. Maybe we should order some… If Bianca would let me, that is.

  Now that I had Bianca in town, I could take a break from the shop and go to lunch. Or go investigating. She was filing her nails. Hmmm. I wasn’t sure just how attentive to the customers she was going to be. And she couldn’t be ducking out for lattes whenever the fancy took her. She was going to have to make do with pure espresso.

  “Are you sure you know what you’re doing if I leave you?”

  She rolled her eyes. “How hard can it be?”

  Ugh.

  I had a feeling we were going to find out.

  The local news was filmed in a very small studio on the edge of town. There was no security at Eden Bay News, so I was able to walk right in. I noticed that the coffee table in the reception area was a little dusty. It took a few minutes for the receptionist to come running in and to ask if I needed anything. I shook my head and bluffed and said I was on my way to meet with a news anchor. I was an expert in shark attacks I said, and she nodded vigorously and pointed me in the direction of the researcher’s office. But she didn’t even bother to walk me in or to introduce me so when I got to the door, I just cleared my throat and introduced myself as Claire Elizabeth Richardson.

  A man with messy, curly hair looked up from a pile of papers and stared at me like I was interrupting. “I’m Alex. Can I help you?”

  Apparently, Alex Higgles was the guy who did the actual weather research—well, all the research for all the segments—and Meg had just been the one who read it on air. I could tell that he had a bitterness toward the on-air personalities while he was stuck behind the scenes, slaving away doing the real work. Hey, I knew the entertainment industry. I knew how these things worked. I’d been behind a camera for too long as a producer. I longed for the spotlight myself.

  “Still covering the shark cull?” I asked him, catching a glimpse of the papers he was reading through. Looked like transcripts of an interview with a scientist.

  He nodded. “People want daily, hourly updates on the progress of the hunt.”

  “So, what happens now?” I asked.

  “The cull has already started,” he said. “It will keep going until they believe they’ve caught the guilty shark.”

  I gulped a little. It sounded brutal.

  “Did you know Meg?” I asked him.

  He frowned at me in annoyance. “Well, I worked with her, so of course I knew her.” He stood up and seemed aggressive. “I am a little busy. Is there anything I can actually help you with?”

  I had to figure out a way to get him to keep talking. “I was wondering if the job was available, that’s all. The weather reader’s job.” I shrugged a little. Why not? I had the looks for it. And the on-camera personality. Come to think of it, I wasn’t sure why I wasn’t already on TV.

  He rolled his eyes and sat back down. “Geez, you really are a bunch of vultures. Meg’s barely been dead three days,” he muttered.

  I tried to play it cool, even slightly callous, because it was the only way I could think of to get information from him, seeing as he clearly wasn’t going to give it up of his own free will. “Well, maybe she should have been more careful before she went out into the water that day. She should have checked for shark warnings… Or not gone out at all.”

  Alex actually looked at me in surprise. His anger toward me had been dialed down. “Well, maybe you have a point there. Meg couldn’t even swim, so I don’t know what she was doing out there in the ocean in the first place.”

  Whoa, whoa, whoa. I interrupted him. “Meg couldn’t swim?”

  Alex shook his head. “No. We had a pool party last year for the office Christmas party and she just sat on the side of the pool because she was afraid to get in even on the shallow end.”

  I stepped closer to his desk. I felt a little like a shark myself. “So…do you think she might not have been killed by a shark at all?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Nothing. I have to go and see a friend about something. I’ll be in touch about the job opportunity!”

  7

  Alyson

  Calvin was grinning and nodding. “You’re a great artist, Alyson. This is very groovy.” He always spoke like Greg Brady. I found it quite charming.

  We were admiring my mural, which stood high and proud above the town. There was no way to avoid looking at it.

  I did a proud little jiggle. The sign looked amazing, and the “Save Sharkey” campaign was well underway. Troy had agreed to have the sign temporarily mounted on the side of the mall where the advertisements for the shops and the brands inside usually went. He was giving me two weeks of free ad space. It was actually really generous of him.

  “I just hope it can make a difference. Sharks need love as much as any other animal.”

  “They just have a bad rep,” Calvin explained. “Sort of like bad PR. We can change that, though.”

  Yeah. Either change perception…or get people’s backs up even further. There were already people walking past and rolling their eyes at the sign and muttering to themselves. “As if sharks look anything like that!” “Yeah, where are its fangs?”

  “Sharks don’t have fangs!” I yelled at them. Curtis did laugh a little but he shushed me even while he was laughing, pointing out that we needed to get people on our side not turn them even further to the other side. Yep. He had a good point.

  I was looking at the time, a little distracted, because there was somewhere else I needed to be at one. As luck would have it, I was due back at the newspaper’s office, but only because I was officially putting my hat in for the mayoral election and I had to give an official interview for the cover story. If I had known I’d need to do the interview, I would have tried to make a better impression with Rachael the day before.

  I didn’t tell Calvin where I was going. Something told me that he would consider running for office ‘very ungroovy.’ But I asked him to hold down the fort for me till I got back. We were expecting some more protestors and together, we were going to form a demonstration. We had flyers to hand out with the ‘real truth’ about shark culls, and we were trying to come up with a catchy chant. We were also doing as much research as we could so that if anyone wanted more information, they could come up to us and just ask. I was excited. We stood a real chance of saving our shark friend.

  I walked into the newspaper and smiled warmly at Rachael. I asked her how her morning was going. Well, I could at least try to be charming now. What harm could come of it?

  Rachael sighed and stood up from her desk. She had a mic sticking out of her phone ready to record the conversation. “Oh great, I thought it might be you.” Clearly, she had been hoping to be proven wrong.

  “Erm, yep.”

  I jumped when I heard someone clearing their throat. There was a man standing there so tall and thin that I had actually mistaken him for a post—just part of the decor. “Oh, hello,” I said, flinching a little when I saw that he had a camera with a very long lens.

  “What is that for?” I asked Rachael, seeing as she was running this show.

  “We need to take a photo for the story….” She looked me up and down and shot a dismayed look at my hair. And then she looked down at the t-shirt I was wearing with a photo of my painting and the words “Save Sharkey” splashed over it. “Is this really the impression you want to give? For mayor?” she said, overemphasizing the word ‘mayor.’

  I hadn’t known there was going to be a camera present. I supposed I should have considered that was a possibility, but it was too late now. If I asked to go home and change then Rachael would just think I was a diva and she would put that in the story. Oh well, I was running as myself, wasn’t I? As an individual who could make a real difference. That had been my birthday wish. So what was the point of trying to give the impression I was anyone other than myself?

  I sat up on the stool and posed proudly. Rachael just huffed and rolled her eyes, checking the clock like this was a giant waste of her time. She was taking notes with a pen as well as recording the interview. I think the notes were more her observations about me than what I was actually saying. As I spoke about my campaign, for the first time there was an expression on her face that wasn’t just glum disinterest. She almost looked like she found something amusing.

  “So this is a joke, right?” she asked, barely bothering to look up at me while she kept scribbling.

  “Er, what is?” I adjusted myself on the stool so that I didn’t slip off while Ben, the photographer, took snaps from every angle. I hoped that he was going to choose my best one. I also kinda hoped that the “Save Sharkey” slogan would be completely visible. This might actually turn out to be good publicity.

  “Your mayoral campaign? Sort of like a prank or something. You’re trolling…” Even though she was asking me questions, she was acting like she already had her answer. As though these were just obvious facts.

  How dare she! “This is no joke. I am going to be the best mayor that Eden Bay has ever had. I am going to shake things up around here!”

  She put a hand over her mouth like she was trying to stifle laughter. Wow. That was it. I jumped off the stool and headed out the door, wishing her good luck with her cover story and telling her that she ought to treat her subject matters with a little more respect if she wanted to be a proper writer.

  Now I was more convinced than ever that I needed to start my own, alternative, news source.

  8

  Claire

  Mmm. My favorite smell in the world. Breakfast food. I could smell maple syrup and fried bacon and fluffy eggs with lots of butter and knew I’d be spoiled for choice when it came time to actually order. It was a shift that Matt was not working though, which was good timing.

  I stood up to greet Alyson as she walked in. She was wearing a ridiculous t-shirt with a cartoon shark on the front. I sure hoped that she wouldn’t want me to wear one of those if I came around to her side of the debate. I was already second guessing my choice to do so. Was I siding with good or evil here?