“Between the four of us, we’ll come up with something special,” Taya said. “I’m looking forward to it.”
“Do you think anyone will attend?” Evie asked, then sipped her cappuccino.
Bea swallowed a mouthful of waffles. “I’ve already got around thirty RSVPs — about half were negative, but the rest said yes. So, unless they back out at the last minute, they’re coming to Coral Island on the eighth of July. There’s the four of us and our plus-ones, Penny and Rowan… I think we’ll have a pretty good turnout. It won’t be the whole class, but it’ll be close. Everyone has replied, including our teachers and the principal who ran the school at the time.”
“Principal McDermott? Is he coming?” Taya asked.
“No. He’s living in an aged care facility. His daughter emailed to let me know he’s thinking of us, but he won’t be able to make it.”
“Oh, that’s a shame,” Evie said. “I always liked him.”
“There was something else I wanted to talk to you about while I have you all together,” Charmaine said. She wasn’t sure where to start. It’d been six months since she’d overheard Betsy and Frank’s conversation at the florist shop where she worked. She hadn’t mentioned a word of it to anyone before now. The reasoning wasn’t clear in her mind — she wasn’t entirely sure what any of it meant.
She couldn’t believe that her boss and friend could be capable of doing anything particularly bad, since she was such a nice person. And maybe she’d misunderstood their conversation. Besides, they were angry—at least, Frank was, and who says exactly what they mean when they’re in that kind of emotional state?
But keeping the information to herself had taken a toll. She’d begun to feel anxious whenever she saw her friends, or when she was at work and Betsy acted strangely about something. Or even when she watched the news. It didn’t make sense, but she was ready to try anything to achieve some peace in her life — something she’d only managed to achieve for a short while before her brother’s visit to Coral Island had thrown everything into disarray.
“What is it?” Bea asked before biting into a forkful of waffles.
“Before you went away, I overheard a conversation between Betsy and her son. I was outside the shop, about to go in, when I was stopped by shouting. It was Frank yelling at Betsy. I didn’t want to interfere or embarrass them—and besides, I hate confrontations—so I sat outside and leaned my ear up against the glass.” She blushed. “I wasn’t snooping. I wanted to know when it was over so I could go in.”
“Of course you weren’t snooping. We know that,” Taya encouraged her. “What happened next?”
“I’d printed out some articles we found about the kidnapping. That woman, Betsy Alton, in California who was wanted for taking her son out of the state — do you remember?”
All three women nodded, their breakfasts forgotten momentarily as they listened, transfixed.
“Frank came into the shop when I was looking at the articles, and he must’ve seen them. He confronted her about it—said he believed the articles were about him and Betsy. That he was the kidnapped boy.”
“Why didn’t you say anything about this before now?” Taya asked.
Charmaine swallowed hard. Was she doing the right thing? Her stomach churned. It felt as though she was betraying her friend. “I didn’t want to stab Betsy in the back. She’s been so good to me, like a second mother. She takes care of me and is kind. She knows I have the articles, Frank told her, but she hasn’t said a thing to me about it. I think she did what she had to do to protect herself and Frank. She said her husband was a dangerous man, that he treated them badly and she had no choice but to leave. Then she told Frank that his father looked for them until he died. She seemed afraid.”
“That makes sense,” Evie admitted. “If it was her—and it sounds like she admitted as much—then Betsy Alton must’ve come to Coral Island to escape her past and changed her name. I wonder why her brother came too.”
“Maybe they wanted to stick together,” Bea suggested.
“There’s more,” Charmaine said, her fingers drumming on the tabletop. “She said Buck was innocent of Mary’s murder.”
“Well, that’s not news,” Taya said, her lips turning down at the corners. “She’s always claimed he didn’t do it.”
“Yes, but she said something else interesting. She said that the police only believe he was the murderer because she wanted them to.”
Three
The brunch datewith her friends troubled Taya Eldridge as she walked back to her car. She sat in the driver’s seat and slipped her feet out of the heels she always wore and into a pair of comfortable sandals she kept in the car for driving. A quick check in the mirror showed that her red lipstick needed a touch-up after eating the açai bowl, and she smoothed her hair down before reaching for her purse.
If Betsy was somehow involved in framing her own brother for a murder she knew he didn’t commit, why would she spend decades declaring his innocence and even pay his exorbitant bail fee? It didn’t make any sense, unless she was a conniving criminal mastermind who’d planned the whole thing. But then, what would her motive be for something like that? No, there must be some other more reasonable explanation for what Chaz had overheard that day. If she’d believed it at the time, she would’ve said something before now. But she hadn’t. She’d kept it to herself and even now didn’t seem particularly convinced of her own theory.
Taya started the car and began the drive back to Blue Shoal, where she lived and where her old inn still sat perched above the small cove with a view of the village and the new resort her father had built. She worked for him now, traveling all over Asia and the Pacific to bring each resort up to the standard her father had always maintained for his resorts. He’d confided in her a few weeks earlier that he was getting too old to travel as much as he had, and he’d hoped she would take over the business soon so he could spend his remaining years with her mother.
It was hard for her to grasp the concept of Cameron Eldridge slowing down. Most of her childhood years were spent waiting for him to come through the front door to throw the ball with her or to take her swimming—things other people’s fathers did, but hers rarely showed up for. Still, he loved her, and she knew that. It wasn’t the number of hours they spent together that counted, but the quality of that time.
The realisation of the truth in that statement hadn’t been something she could appreciate until more recently. For most of her teen years and her twenties, she’d resented him greatly for being absent so often. But they’d reconciled recently, and she went to dinner at her childhood home every time she was back from her travels.
The drive back to Blue Shoal was a pleasant one since the roadwork had been completed the previous year. Each rainy season brought new potholes, but so far, the council had managed to fix them before any vehicles disappeared into their depths, so it seemed as though the road might stay in good shape—unlike the track that’d crossed the island before it.
She drove past the Blue Shoal Inn,the boutique hotel she and her husband had owned together before he passed from cancer so many years earlier. It still looked fantastic after the facelift she’d given it before she sold it to her father’s company, Paradise Resorts. The usual twang of guilt in her stomach over selling the place didn’t eventuate as she passed the property, and she wondered if perhaps she’d finally cut the ties between the quaint old inn and her heart.
