Mystery in Paradise

1. Welcoming

Ten of us, waiting for the plane. We lined up just outside the airport hut, Cassie trying to jolly people into playing 'who can spot the plane first?' as if we were a group of over-excited toddlers instead of fully-fledged adults. As usual, she was the most excited of us all. She had a complicated floral wreath over each arm and had spent hours piling her hair into what I thought of as her Queen Bee crown. She'd smudged a few crumbs of blusher into her cheeks and brightened her eyes with two sweeps of liquid eyeliner that even Brooke would have been jealous of, and she was in her best casual dress. Or what Cassie thought of as casual dress, anyway. 

The rest of us hadn't made anywhere near that much effort. I was in a pair of baggy knee-length shorts – the temperature had started to skyrocket in the past few days and the jeans I would usually have worn were unbearable – and a tank top. My best friend Brooke bobbed impatiently from one foot to the other in an oversized rugby shirt and her usual orange cap; her not-boyfriend Luke looked like he'd just stepped off the cricket pitch. Cassie thought we were letting the side down and, being Cassie, was making sure we knew it while giving us nothing concrete to complain about.

Brooke and I had been on Enning for just over a month, making us the current newest island dwellers. A lot more had happened in that month than any of us had expected – I'd spent almost a week of it laid up with a concussion after being hit on the head, for one thing – but, though nobody had forgotten, most people thought it was all settled down. I was the only one who knew differently. To start with, I still didn't know who had attacked me or why. As a follow-up, I now knew a secret about the island's newspaper's manager, who was my friend and also, in loose terms, my boss.

Enning was like that. You could call it a tight-knit community without a trace of irony, and with the hint of suffocation. I was growing fond of it but it hadn't been an easy path. And I wasn't the only one who had struggled.

"Plane," Luke muttered. As he and Brooke were trying to pretend nothing had happened between them, they were standing on opposite sides of me. They were putting a lot of effort in to pretending they were perfectly content being just friends, and me and Luke's best friend Fraser found it hilarious. Our current joke was to find excuses to leave them alone together and bet which one would find a way to escape quicker. Brooke was three-one up so far.

"Where?" I asked, craning my neck to try and see without giving the game away to Cassie.

"There, look."

I peered into the clear blue sky, trying to make out the shoddy green-and-orange paintwork of the Daisy. Aside from a few wisps of cloud, I could make out nothing.

"Liar," I said.

"Aussie," Brooke snorted, as if she thought the two were one and the same. "Did you bring your sandpaper?"

Judging by the way Luke reacted, that was a cricket joke. I had nothing to say to it, so while they bantered, taking care not to be too friendly to each other, I cast my eye over the rest of the welcoming party.

Standing beside Cassie was her partner Alex, a Scrabble demon who always gave off the slight impression of being Cassie's bodyguard, as if she was going to be assassinated at any moment. I quite liked Alex. They had none of their girlfriend's better-than-you attitude and, if they did sometimes come across as a bit distant, at least they didn't try to tell you what to think about them. I wondered if they would be the person to rein Cassie in if she got too much, a role which was usually taken by Marcus. Everybody's Enning big brother was here, his beard trimmed and his blonde hair artfully messy, but standing as far away from Cassie as possible. We also had a woman called Pat, who made the best jam on the island, someone called Chris, and two of Enning's younger residents – which meant early twenties – Jess and Mo, neither of whom were very interesting. They seemed to spend a lot of time holding hands and giggling at each other. I wasn't even sure why they were here since they didn't look at all interested in the new arrival.