The Eulalie Park Mysteries Read online

  The Eulalie Park Mysteries 4 Book Bundle

  Including: Hacked, Hooked, Haunted & Book Zero

  Fiona Snyckers

  Published by Fiona Snyckers 2018

  P O Box 1258 Morningside 2057

  Copyright © 2018 Fiona Snyckers

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without prior written permission of the publisher.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Produced in South Africa

  ISBN 978-0-6399297-0-5

  Created with Vellum

  Contents

  Untitled

  Untitled

  Prologue

  Volume 1

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Epilogue

  Untitled

  Prologue

  Volume 2

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Epilogue

  Untitled

  Prologue

  Volume 3

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Epilogue

  Untitled

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Epilogue

  Untitled

  Untitled

  About the Author

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  HACKED

  Prologue

  Sixteen years ago

  There was a new girl at school.

  She had long, tangled hair, pitch-black eyes and olive skin. She looked just like the pictures of gypsy children that you saw in books.

  Richard Wainwright III didn’t like her. Miss Blanchard made him sit next to her in Math. She told him it was his job to look after her and help her get familiar with the school, but she made his skin crawl.

  Richard Wainwright III was proud to be a white islander – one of the families directly descended from the English colonists who had governed Prince William Island after the French left in 1885. His father still spoke with an English accent (except when he was talking fast, when he sounded more like a normal islander).

  This girl wasn’t even a normal islander. She came from the deep forest, that wedge of jungle just behind Queen’s Town. Richard had heard that the people there lived in trees like monkeys. In the last few days, the kids at school had started calling this girl Monkey. Richard was proud of himself for having started the trend.

  “I have no idea, Miss,” was what he said to Miss Blanchard when she asked him who had come up with the nickname.

  He had thought she would be finished after that – her humiliation so complete that she would have no alternative but to crawl back to whatever cave she had come from. But instead she had turned the tables on him, and now he was the one who was humiliated.

  Today was March 14. It was 3.14. International Pi Day. It was the day schools all over the world celebrated the number Pi. Yesterday, the teachers had told them they had one day to prepare - to memorize as many of the decimal points of Pi as they could. The person who could remember the most numbers in the correct order would be declared the winner, the Master of Pi.

  Richard Wainwright III had spent the whole of the previous afternoon preparing. By the time he went to bed, he knew a hundred and twenty numbers of Pi in their correct order. His father had told him that he would win because he had a good brain. The trophy was as good as his.

  And so it proved. Richard remembered the hundred and twenty numbers he had learned the day before, plus another ten he had quickly learned at recess. How the class had cheered for him.

  But then the new girl had stood up with her tangled hair and skinny body and begun to recite numbers. On and on and on she went for long minutes as Miss Blanchard struggled to keep up on her laptop. One thousand numbers she had remembered in perfect sequence before she stopped and said in her strange, hoarse voice, “That was all I could remember in one day. I also had science homework.”

  For Richard, the creepiest part of all was when he had looked into those midnight-black eyes of hers, and seen them flicking from side to side as she recited the numbers. All the hairs on his arms stood up as he realized she could actually see the numbers in front of her. It was as though she were reading them off a screen.

  Enough was enough. This afternoon, Richard and his gang were going to teach the new girl a lesson. If she thought she could swan into Queen’s Town Middle School and make fools of them, she would learn her mistake.

  The monkey girl walked home along the river every afternoon. Richard and his gang planned to ambush her there, away from the prying eyes of adults.

  “There she is.” Declan pointed at the small, dark figure skipping along on the river bank.

  “She can’t hear us over the noise of the water,” Fabien said.

  “Throw a stone at her.” Claud elbowed Richard.

  Richard Wainwright III was the best pitcher and fielder the school’s baseball team had ever had. He never missed.

  Grinning, he bent down and picked up a heavy stone. At first, he took aim at her head, but then adjusted his aim to between her shoulder blades. He didn’t want to kill her - just hurt her like she had hurt him. Fate was on his side because the monkey girl stopped walking and looked up at a tree where a bird was singing. A stationary object was easier to hit than a mov
ing one. Richard let fly the stone.

  Just as it was about to hit her, the girl twisted her skinny body to the side. The stone passed harmlessly by her.

  “How did she do that?” Claud’s eyes were wide.

  Richard shoved him. “It’s your fault, big mouth. She must have heard you.”

  The girl turned around and saw them. She started to run, but she had reached a bend in the river where the only way to get past was to climb up the wooden rungs bolted into the river bank. The boys were closing fast now and would be on her before she could get her foot onto the first rung.

  She turned to face them, a cornered creature with wild eyes.

  Richard smiled. This was going to be very sweet. His father had told him not to hit girls, but this wasn’t a girl. This was a monkey from the forest.

  Claud, Fabien, and Declan fanned out to cut off her escape. Richard approached her head-on. He looked at the tangled mass of hair that hung almost to her waist and wondered what it would feel like. He shot out a hand to grab her hair, but she ducked under his arm. He clutched at air.

  “Keep still, you little …”

  He lashed out with his fist, aiming for her cheekbone. She swayed to the side again. His knuckle glanced off the rock behind her, making tears spring to his eyes. He tried a sideways kick like he had learned in karate, but she was already leaning away from him before his foot even reached her.

  “Help me, you idiots,” he snarled at his friends, who were standing with their mouths hanging open.

  The three boys rushed forward, their arms outstretched and their hands clutching. The girl slipped under their grasp and sidestepped so that she was standing ankle-deep in the rushing water.

  The boys hesitated. All islanders knew you did not wade into this river. Its fierce undertow would pluck the legs out from under you and you would be swept away on the current, your lifeless body found snagged on a rock days later. But the girl just screwed her feet more deeply into the mud and held her ground.

  “It’s like she knows what we’re going to do before we do it,” muttered Fabien.

  Richard Wainwright III looked at the girl. He felt that prickly feeling rush over his skin again as he stared into the eyes of the uncanny. He swallowed once, then pulled himself together.

  “Shut up, moron. That’s not possible.”

  He advanced slowly, holding her gaze. His father had taught him to box. He had taught him not to telegraph his moves in advance. Holding her eyes, he fired a punch straight from the shoulder, aiming at her face. Before the signal had left his brain, she was already leaning to the left, out of harm’s way, so that his punch exploded harmlessly into the gap where her face had just been.

  The forward momentum made Richard lose his balance. He fell face-first into the water. As he pushed down with his arms to lift himself up, he felt the terrifyingly strong current clutching at his body, picking it up, and propelling it forward. A small hand grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and plucked him out of the water. The girl spun him around and shoved him onto the river bank where he landed in a heap among his friends. He scrambled to his feet and the four of them took off running in the direction they had come from.

  The girl stood in the water and watched them go.

  Chapter 1

  Eulalie Park cradled her new baby in her lap.

  It was a Canon 5D Mark III DSLR camera and she balanced it on her thighs as she removed the 1.4x extender tube that gave her such perfect zoom.

  The couple climbed out of the cab and walked into the building. She got good shots of them arriving and stopping to kiss in the street - then running hand-in-hand into the building, giggling like teenagers. Soon they would reappear in the third-floor apartment window directly opposite her. They wouldn’t bother to close the drapes, because they were three floors above the ground, opposite an empty building.

  Eulalie clicked her lens back into place and adjusted the ISO setting for low light. Right on cue, a light came on in the apartment and was immediately dimmed. This couple liked their romantic lighting, hence the need for the larger aperture and slower shutter speed.

  As the couple moved into view, Eulalie leaned back against the wall of the building, raised her camera to eye level, and began to shoot. She was sitting on a narrow ledge about forty feet above ground level, her legs dangling into the void. If anyone happened to look up, they would assume she was a jumper, and call the police. But it was two o’clock in the morning and the street below was deserted. Sounds of revelry could still be heard a few blocks away on Lafayette Drive, but this residential part of Queen’s Town was quiet.

  The couple in the apartment moved from room to room, stripping the clothes off each other as Eulalie followed them with her camera.

  This was, hands down, the worst part of her job - the part she was determined to get rid of as her private investigation business took off. “Collecting the necessary evidence,” was what the lawyers called it. Prince William Island had a no-fault divorce system, but evidence of infidelity could always be used as ammunition to settle custody disputes and fights about money.

  Sometimes, as in this case, a distraught spouse came to her as a private client wanting to have their deepest fears confirmed or denied. And they were always confirmed.

  But there was something about this case that bothered Eulalie.

  Nicolas Moreau had seemed like just another emotional husband when he had come to see her a few days earlier. All he had wanted to know was the truth about his marriage, however hard it might be to hear. But as Eulalie followed Sophie Moreau around to get a feel for her daily routine, she had noticed fresh bruises blooming on her fair skin almost every morning. And while Nicolas Moreau was correct that his wife was having an affair, it wasn’t her lover who was putting those marks on her.

  The light in the apartment went off. Eulalie knew they would get a couple of hours sleep now, and then Sophie Moreau would sneak home before dawn. Her domestic staff would find her asleep in her own bed the next morning. Nicolas was away on one of his many business trips.

  Eulalie lifted her arms above her head to stretch out her stiff shoulder muscles. Then she packed the camera into her padded backpack and slung it over her shoulder. She stood up and edged her way towards the corner of the building. The ledge was too narrow for her to walk normally so she shuffled along sideways with her back to the wall.

  A fall would mean severe injury or death, but Eulalie knew she wouldn’t fall. She was as comfortable forty feet above the ground as she would have been at street level. As she rounded the corner of the building, she grabbed the rail of the fire escape and climbed down it in a fast, fluid movement, like a cat descending a tree.

  Then she turned and walked up the hill to Lafayette Drive.

  Eulalie woke up the next morning knowing she had a choice to make. It had been niggling at her during the night and she woke up feeling scratchy and irritable.

  Professionally, her duty was clear. She owed her loyalty to her client – the person who paid her bills. Ethically, she couldn’t bring herself to hand over evidence of his wife’s infidelity to a man who was abusing her. She couldn’t wash her hands of the consequences and claim that she was just doing her job.

  She poured a heap of frosted flakes into a bowl, added cream and sugar, and began to spoon the sweet concoction into her mouth. She already felt better for having made the decision. Yes, she would lose all the billable hours she had spent on the case, but at least she’d be able to live with herself.

  She decided that she would take her evidence to Sophie Moreau instead of to her husband. She would warn Sophie that he was onto her, and remind her that there was nothing to stop him from hiring a different private investigator who would find the same evidence. Eulalie Park Investigations was not the only game in town.

  Eulalie poured herself a glass of orange juice, trusting that the Vitamin C would somehow cancel out the truckload of sugar she had just consumed.

  She would give Sophie Moreau the contact details
for some battered women shelters in town, so she had somewhere to turn. And that would be that. A loss for her bottom line, but a gain for her sense of justice.

  Eulalie loaded her bowl and glass into the dishwasher and took her coffee through to the bedroom to get dressed for the day. She pulled on a pair of navy jeans, a ruby camisole, and a lightweight charcoal blazer.

  Her hair was almost dry after her shower, so she tied it back at the nape of her neck instead of bothering with a blow-dryer. No longer the tangled mess it had been in childhood, it was more manageable these days thanks to the small fortune she spent each month on hair products.