Drowned Vanilla (Cafe La Femme Book 2)

by Livia Day

  ‘Can I help you, love?’

  She pushed up her sunglasses, not overly impressed with him. Which was probably a good thing, because he was far too impressed with himself. ‘We’re looking for Jason Avery.’

  ‘I’m more fun,’ the cheeky bugger said, leaning on my window to get a better angle for checking out Xanthippe.

  ‘Excellent to know, I’ll be sure and remember that,’ she said, and the sarcasm was such a thin, subtle veil he probably didn’t hear it. Stewart was snickering in the backseat, which suggested he did. Smart man, that McTavish.

  ‘Ey, Jase,’ Xanthippe’s new conquest said, calling to the other bloke. ‘Some people for you.’

  The other plant-wrangler strolled over, not looking bothered. Late teens, blond, clothes barely hanging on to his frame, and his hair falling into his face. ‘Restaurant’s closed this week,’ he said. ‘Accommodation too — we’re renovating. Cellar’s a little further down the hill if it’s wine you’re after — did you miss the turn off?’

  ‘Actually, we’re looking for Annabeth French,’ I said. ‘Do you know where we might find her?’

  Jason hesitated. ‘What do you reckon, Shay?’

  ‘Thursday arvo,’ said the charmer. ‘Scallop.’

  The words made sense. Individually. I smiled politely while we waited for further translation.

  ‘Local pub,’ said Jason. ‘She’s on the afternoon shift. Should be working until five.’

  Huh. That was surprisingly easy.

  We parked outside The Scallop Shell, a bog-standard pub at the edge of town. A shortish, curvy girl with bright blonde curls was clearing tables in the beer garden. ‘That her?’ Xanthippe asked me.

  ‘Looks a lot like her.’ To be honest I hadn’t seen her face on Ginger’s computer, and it occurred to me now that paying attention to what our missing girl looked like might have been helpful.

  I would make such a bad private detective.

  ‘One way tae find out,’ said Stewart. He looked at me. Xanthippe looked at me too.

  ‘What?’ I protested.

  ‘We all have our special skills, Tabitha,’ Xanthippe said patiently. ‘Mine is dragging important information out of impressionable young men who want to make out with my car. Stewart is here for coffee fetching and the Scottish accent. Your job is making friends with runaway internet porn stars and all that girly shit that comes so easily for you.’

  Well, okay then. As long as we each had a niche.

  ‘Be good,’ I said as I got out of the car, using my fingers in a vain attempt to tidy my hair.

  ‘Shame,’ said Xanthippe. ‘I was planning to molest Stewart in the backseat while you’re gone.’

  ‘I dinnae put out on the first date,’ said Stewart.

  Xanthippe grinned at him. ‘I do.’

  I chose to rise above their blatant flirting. None of my business at all. Repeat after me: the cute Scottish boy is not yours, the cute Scottish boy is not yours…

  ‘Annabeth French?’ I asked as I approached the blonde.

  She looked warily at me, stacking the last of her plates. ‘Yes?’

  ‘I’m Tabitha. Ginger and Melinda — I mean Cherry — asked me to look for you.’

  A look of alarm crossed her face. ‘Really?’

  ‘Well, yeah. They were worried. You vanished quite … unexpectedly this morning.’

  ‘Oh.’ She nodded, still nervous. ‘Yes. I was, um. Sorry to run out on them. I couldn’t take any more of it. I needed to come home.’

  And that decision had taken four minutes during a power cut? Intriguing.

  ‘I’m glad you’re okay,’ I said finally. Really, this wasn’t any of my business. Sure, their webcam business might suffer, but the girl showed no sign of having been abducted. If she didn’t want to be French Vanilla any more, that was up to her. ‘They almost called the police.’

  ‘Oh wow,’ Annabeth said, sounding stunned. ‘That’s … wow. Overkill. I’m fine. I was just over the whole … thing.’ She glanced around nervously. ‘No one around here knows about that. The Gingerbread House, I mean. I’d rather they never did.’

  She thought she could keep a secret like that in a small town? Again, none of my business.

  ‘You might want to give the girls a call — work out what to do with your stuff. They’ve got your phone.’ Wallet, most of her clothes … she must have got out of there fast. Ten to one there was a bloke at the heart of it.

  ‘I will, I totally will,’ said Annabeth. ‘I’ll borrow a phone and text them tonight. It was nice of them to send someone looking for me. I sort of thought they wouldn’t miss me that much.’

  ‘They were really worried,’ I told her. Huh. So much for the ‘she’s so responsible, never misses a shift’ Vanilla that Ginger and Melinda had been so certain would never walk out of her own volition. This girl seemed like a completely different person.

  ‘I feel so bad, omigod,’ she assured me. ‘I’ll call.’

  Fair enough.

  I made my farewell and headed back to the car. ‘She’s here, she’s fine, no drama, wasted trip.’ Don’t get me wrong, I was glad she wasn’t dead in a ditch or tied up in a cellar somewhere. But it still felt like it had been a pointless trip.

  ‘Not wasted,’ said Xanthippe. ‘We made some cash, and look.’ She pointed across the street where a huge orange sign proclaimed: Best Ice Cream Parlour In Tasmania. ‘See? Completely worth it. If you’re going to make ice cream, you have to research the competition.’

  In other words, she wanted an ice cream.

  ‘Fine,’ I said. ‘But you’re not allowed to pick vanilla.’

  ‘Fascist!’

  4

  From: Nincakes

  Tabitha, what is that pink muck in the freezer?

  From: Darlingtabitha

  That is my attempt at bacon sorbet. LET US NEVER SPEAK OF IT AGAIN.

  From: Nincakes

  get it out of the freezer before I dob you into the health inspectors.

  From: Darlingtabitha

  If only I could think of some ethical and environmentally friendly way to dispose of it…

  From: Nincakes

  WHY ARE THERE SO MANY CATS IN THE COURTYARD?

  It was getting on for evening when I got home, all windswept and interesting. That was one way to spend a day off. I had no idea why Xanthippe was so hell bent on playing detective, but if it kept her out of my café it couldn’t be a bad thing.

  Anyway. We were done. False alarm, red herring, whatever.

  I wandered through my kitchen, thinking idly about what to cook for dinner. Something easy. French toast.

  Dinner. Holy crap. I ran for my staircase, scrambling up to my attic bedroom. As usual, the floor and bed were covered in random clothes. As was … becoming less unusual, there was also a police sergeant on my bed, wearing a suit and looking impatient.

  ‘I am SO sorry,’ I said, pouncing on him. ‘There was this whole…’ Hmm, non police people investigating missing girl was just the kind of thing that my … Person Who Is Not My Boyfriend tends to get cranky about. ‘Ice cream emergency,’ I said finally.

  Leo Bishop looked amused, which meant I wasn’t too late. Good to know. ‘You have more emergencies than anyone I know, Tish, and they’re always delicious.’

  I kissed him thoroughly, arms winding around his neck, and his hands sliding up my back. ‘Favourite ice cream flavour?’ I asked breathlessly when we finally came up for air. ‘You’re not allowed to say vanilla.’

  Bishop kissed down my neck, mouth all warm and teasing against my skin. ‘What’s wrong with vanilla?’

  ‘Oh you are kidding me.’

  He laughed. ‘It’s a classic.’

  ‘It’s a conspiracy is what it is,’ I muttered.

  He drew back, eyeing my ‘road trip in hot sports car’ Chanel dress. I loved it to bits, from its black and white scalloped bodice to its mad, flouncy flared skirt. The threads were starting to go a bit, and it had a piece of duct
tape holding the hem together, but it was still gorgeous.

  ‘Is that what you’re wearing?’ Bishop asked. I could practically hear him trying to be tactfully enthusiastic. The fancy dinner we were supposed to be going to was not the place for creative fashion choices.

  ‘No, no, I have a real dress,’ I assured him, jumping up. ‘It’s on a coat hanger and everything.’ I’d searched ages for something a bit more conservative than my usual style, but still looked cute on me. Little black dress ahoy. ‘I even have boring shoes,’ I said proudly as I unzipped the Chanel and let it fall in a flouncy puddle on the floor, leaving me only in a long black slip as I hunted around for the boring shoes.

  ‘Oh, oops.’ One of said boring shoes had ended up in an abandoned half-full cup of coffee. Ew. ‘Might have to go with interesting shoes.’

  Bishop walked over to me, one hand sliding over my hip, wrinkling the light satin fabric of the slip. ‘I can live with interesting shoes.’ He dipped his mouth down to mine again.

  We were late to the fancy dinner.

  Really, really late.

  Back in March, I kissed two men on the same day. A kiss is just a kiss, right? It doesn’t have to mean anything. Except that one of them did, and I’m almost certain I made the right choice.

  No, I know I made the right choice. I’ve been crazy about Bishop for years. My skin heats up when he steps into a room. He was head of the queue. Hell, he was the entire queue.

  Stewart is a good friend, who makes me laugh and has a hot Scottish accent. But I’m sure now we weren’t ever meant to be more than friends. It’s not like he even made much of a protest when I told him that Bishop and I were together. He shrugged. I mean, who does that? If you really fancy someone, you don’t just shrug when they tell you they are hooking up with another bloke.

  It took Bishop and me a while to figure out some of our issues. We tried being boyfriend and girlfriend and not having sex, but that was a disaster. We got back on the rails when we decided to leave the boyfriend and girlfriend words out altogether, and just get on with the hot sex and occasional dating. It’s good, so far. It works just fine.

  Stewart disappearing on his unplanned blogging trip around Tasmania made everything less complicated, because then I didn’t have to think about the fact that I was spending a lot more energy flirting with the friend I wasn’t sleeping with than the one that I was.

  Oh, and when Stewart’s around, somehow we always end up investigating mysteries together. And I really don’t need that in my life. Give me a hot police officer who disapproves of me getting tangled in such things any day of the week.

  I slept late, which was bad. I’ve been doing that a lot lately — it’s an unfortunate side effect of having a warm snuggly man in bed with me. Getting up for the early food prep is a struggle, even with daylight blistering into my bedroom before six am.

  I’m supposed to get up at five am.

  The alarm went off and I hit the snooze button before snuggling back under the doona. Mm, warm arm. Warm chest. And was that the second or third time I had hit snooze? Damn. I was going to have to check.

  The phone rang, somewhere in the house. Bishop grunted a little and pushed back the doona. I promptly flipped it back over us. ‘Ceege will get it. He’s probably still up.’ My housemate had gone seriously nocturnal in the last few weeks. ‘Or Xanthippe. She has to be at the café as early as I do.’

  ‘Mmm, good.’ Bishop turned into me, his jaw grazing against mine. ‘Very good.’ He looked seriously at me for a long moment, those dark eyes holding mine, and then he started kissing me.

  Say anything you like about the man, once he kisses you, you stay kissed.

  Things were starting to get interesting — hands sliding over heated skin, lips and teeth and tongue getting in on the action, when my mobile rang. I reached out and switched it off without breaking the snog, rolling on top of him as I did so.

  A minute later, Bishop’s phone started to ring. Damn it. The trouble with shagging a police officer is that when his phone rings, he can’t ignore it. I slid off him so he could lean down and pull his phone out of his discarded jacket. He answered briefly, then passed it over to me with an odd look on his face.

  ‘McTavish, for you.’

  I blinked, and looked at his phone. Slowly, I reached out and took it like it was going to bite me, or at the very least, judge me quite hard. ‘Stewart?’

  ‘All right, Tabitha.’

  Well, this was awkward. I pulled the doona up to cover my breasts, not looking at Bishop. ‘What’s up?’ I said into the phone.

  ‘Ye haftae read the paper,’ said Stewart, and there was something in his voice that made me realise there was more going on there than a massively embarrassing moment between the men in my life.

  ‘What’s happened?’ My stomach pinged with anxiety as he paused far too long before answering.

  ‘Just read it, and get back tae me.’

  Xanthippe was in our kitchen, putting on the coffee. Ceege was at the table, drinking his ‘just this one and then I crash into bed’ early morning beer. They both looked at me.

  ‘What?’ I glanced at the paper, which was folded on the table. ‘Everyone is weird today.’

  I didn’t want to unfold it. Not with the ‘we don’t want to be the ones to tell you’ vibe. I should have just read it on my phone from bed. But peer pressure is like a bravery pill. Or something.

  I flipped open the paper, and read about a nineteen-year-old girl who had been found drowned in Lake Serenity in the town of Flynn yesterday evening. She had been identified as Annabeth French, and her boyfriend Jason Avery had been arrested for her murder.

  ‘Oh,’ I said faintly.

  ‘Yep,’ said Xanthippe.

  ‘Is that all you have to say?’

  She gave me a long, measuring look. ‘Yep.’

  I looked at the paper again. ‘Oh boy. Do you think having a conversation with a murder victim a few hours before her death is … something that I should tell someone about?’

  ‘Depends,’ said Xanthippe. ‘How much do you want to lie to your boyfriend?’

  ‘Really a lot right now,’ I said, eyes on the shiny picture of Annabeth on the front page. ‘Might be hard to explain.’

  ‘Always is,’ said Xanthippe, who had a long history of explaining the inexplicable to Bishop. What with being his half-sister.

  ‘And he’s not my boyfriend,’ I added automatically.

  ‘Tell it to the judge.’

  Bishop strolled into the kitchen, hair damp from the shower, still buttoning up his shirt.

  ‘My eyes!’ Xanthippe complained. ‘Keep your pectorals to yourself, Leo. Some of us are related to you and choose not to know about your sex life.’

  Bishop laughed, and leaned down to kiss me. I kissed back, trying not to look too distracted. ‘Got to get in to the station,’ he said to me.

  ‘Mm, I’m running late. Nin will kill me.’

  ‘No, she’ll blame me,’ he corrected. ‘Last time I made you late she came after me with a rolling pin.’

  ‘You know you love the attention.’

  I waited until he was gone, then turned my guilty expression in Xanthippe’s general direction. ‘I’ll tell him later.’

  ‘Uh huh.’

  ‘If the subject comes up. Specifically.’

  I went to work. Just another day of serving up coffee and macarons, and trying to find a viable alternative to hollandaise sauce now that Hobart is finally over the Great Hollandaise Sauce Frenzy of the early 21st Century.

  The good thing about working a café is that if you need to not think, there’s always something to keep you busy. Lara and Yui were both freaked out about Annabeth, but it turned out that neither of them knew her that well, it was just the fact of her death that had knocked them off their socks.

  Nineteen years old. Yeah. That was quite a fact.

  Every time someone mentioned her, I announced a kitchen emergency and walked away from them. Eventually they g
ot the message. Tabitha Darling was not at home to conversations about dead girls. Not even on her tea break.

  It shouldn’t have got to me as much as it did. Right? I barely knew Annabeth. We’d had one conversation, and we hadn’t exactly clicked.

  Stewart dropped in a few times — he was back working in the office a floor above the café, and this had been our normal routine back before he pulled his disappearing act. I would have relished the normality of it, if not for the fact that he wanted to sound out how I felt about the Annabeth French story, and I wasn’t up for it. I poured him a double espresso every time, and kept moving.

  He got the message too, and stopped asking. It’s good to have people in your life who know when not push.

  The push came after work. I lay on the couch with a book, to the comforting background noise of Ceege clicky clicking. Ceege at least had no interest in probing how I felt about the latest mysterious death in our lives.

  ‘Did you know that more than fifty percent of the desserts sold worldwide contain vanilla?’ I said to him, flicking pages.

  ‘Told you,’ he said without looking up. ‘Everyone loves vanilla.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah.’ The universe was telling me I had to learn to make the perfect vanilla ice cream. Ceege was being unreasonably smug about this. ‘Did you know that ninety-seven percent of vanilla used in food or perfume is actually not real vanilla at all?’

  ‘That must be what gives it that delicious plastic flavour.’

  ‘Philistine.’

  ‘Hey, you’re a chef who doesn’t appreciate vanilla, I don’t think I’m the philistine here. Isn’t that the sort of thing that gets you put in the stocks with people throwing bocconcini at you? Bad enough that time you banned capers and caused the Great Smoked Salmon Riot of 2011.’

  ‘If you ever bothered to look up from your keyboard, you would know I am sticking my tongue out at you.’

  ‘If you were reading my Twitter feed right now you would know how much that hurts my feelings.’

  ‘Did you know vanilla is an orchid?’

  ‘There are no words for how much I do not care. Busy here, Tabs.’

  ‘Busy playing games with your imaginary people! I’m a real person, Ceege, talk to me.’

  ‘My internet peeps are not imaginary.’