Drowned Vanilla (Cafe La Femme Book 2)

by Livia Day

  From: Darlingtabitha

  have I ever told you how much I love you?

  From: Nincakes

  Which you could send back in time to all world leaders, distracting them at various moments of crucial decision…

  From: Darlingtabitha

  Peace in our time.

  Shay was waiting for me back at the pub, lingering near Jase’s Holden, which was still where Ceege had parked it. ‘So,’ I said in a crisp voice. ‘As the kids say, WTF?’ Also OMFG, but we’d work up to that.

  ‘I didn’t know he was going to bolt,’ Shay said, looking almost as pissed off as I was. ‘He texted me just now that he was on his way and could I try to stop people figuring out he’d left town.’

  ‘Don’t you dare,’ I said quickly. ‘That’s what we call accessory after the fact. Bad enough that you know about this, but if you do anything to actively help his escape, you’re screwed.’ I had already deleted the message off my phone. ‘First things first. He didn’t take his car, so he would have needed a vehicle. Something people wouldn’t associate with him.’

  I stared for a minute at the blank space beside the Holden. And then its significance hit me between the eyes. ‘That little rat. He took my ute!’ Well, Ceege’s mate’s dad’s ute. But still.

  I glared at the Holden, and kicked one of the tyres. ‘Now I’m an accessory too. Fucking brilliant. Cheers, Jason, way to make me that little bit more invested in your problems.’

  Well, let’s face it. I was always invested.

  I flipped out my phone and called Xanthippe. ‘I need you. And your Spider. And a cricket bat.’ I was mostly kidding about the cricket bat.

  She was fast, I’ll give her that. It was four minutes between hanging up, and Xanthippe loping out of the pub with her car keys, hair still wet from the shower. She also brought Stewart with her, his camera case slung over one arm. Had I mentioned that other people were invited? I don’t think so.

  ‘Couldn’t find a cricket bat, so I brought Stewart,’ Xanthippe said cheerfully. ‘He’s bendy in the middle, but otherwise sturdy enough to be used as a blunt instrument.’

  I folded my arms. ‘I’m not sure if you want to get involved in this, Stewart.’ I tried to use my eyebrows to make expressive ‘go away’ signals, but I think I just ended up looking like I had indigestion.

  Stewart just raised his eyebrows at me. ‘Is that yer way of saying ‘blog about this and I kill ye’?’

  ‘Basically.’

  ‘I can live wi’ that.’ We locked eyes. He’s so much harder to fight with than Bishop, because nothing ever seems to get to him.

  ‘If you two are finished flirting?’ said Xanthippe. ‘I got the impression this was an urgent situation.’

  Shay was starting to panic. ‘How do I know you lot won’t just run off and tell stuff to the police?’

  Xanthippe rolled her eyes, and hopped into the front seat of the Spider. ‘Explain to the little boy how this works.’

  ‘She lives on the edge, and she laughs in the face of authority figures,’ I told Shay. ‘If anyone’s going to call the police on Jason, it would be me. Only I won’t, because there’s a very particular police officer that I really don’t want to know about all this. You can trust us to help track Jason down, and kick his butt all the way back to Flynn, hopefully before the police figure out that he tried to skip town. That’s the plan.’

  Shay considered this. ‘Can I call shotgun?’

  ‘No,’ Xanthippe and I said in unison.

  Crammed into the tiny backseat of the Spider with the teenager, Stewart took on the responsibility of interrogating him. ‘So can ye think of anywhere Jason might go? Anyone he might ask fer help?’

  Shay looked completely lost. ‘Me,’ he said flatly. ‘He should have asked me. Dunno why he didn’t.’ He kicked the back of the seat. ‘What’s the point of telling me after he’s gone? I could help. I can do more than cover his arse.’

  ‘Apart from ye. Who else might he contact?’

  ‘Alice,’ I said from the front seat. ‘They had a thing. But she hadn’t been in touch lately.’

  Stewart laughed. ‘Yer kidding me. Jason was cheating on Annabeth wi’ the girl pretending tae be her? Tha’s impressive.’

  ‘It’s fucken stupid is what it is,’ said Shay. ‘No way. I don’t believe it.’

  ‘I’m pretty sure they’re just friends,’ said Xanthippe, tapping her fingers on the steering wheel. We still had yet to go anywhere. ‘He trusts her, though. If he has any way of contacting her, I’m sure he’d go to her. Trouble is, we don’t know where she is either. It’s not entirely helpful.’

  Okay, I was feeling ganged up on. This was the one vital clue I had gleaned in recent days, and none of them believed me. ‘I got my info from Jason directly. He and Alice were on together. What’s your source?’

  ‘I can’t tell you that,’ said Xanthippe.

  ‘Oh, I really think you can.’

  Xanthippe eyed the boys in the back. ‘Maybe later.’ Hmm, was this a genuine promise to tell me later or just putting me off? I might have to pull out all the stops to drag it out of her. ‘Where are we heading first?’

  Oh, this conversation was so not over. ‘Shay, do you have his number? We could try to get him to meet us somewhere close, before he gets too far away.’

  ‘Reckon he’s going to trust you?’ Shay said, not sounding convinced.

  ‘No, but he’ll trust you,’ I decided. ‘In the meantime, let’s go visit his dad and stepmum. They’re bound to notice Jason is gone, and we don’t want them to freak out.’

  ‘You’re going to tell his parents?’ Shay said in horror. ‘What the hell kind of help is that?’

  It’s so annoying being the only responsible adult in a car of four. ‘If they call the police to find out where their son is, it’s all going to kick off. But if we can talk Jason into coming back himself before the police realise he skipped town, he might not get into so much trouble. Not having his parents raise the alarm has to be a priority until we find him. We can make them understand that — and they can help us buy time to bring him back.’

  ‘Unless, ye know,’ Stewart said in a low voice.

  ‘Shut up,’ I flung back at him.

  ‘Just sayin’.’

  ‘Well, don’t.’

  What if Jason was running because he was guilty? The longer we went without saying that sort of thing aloud, the better we would be.

  Avery Grove was deserted as we approached, the Spider’s tyres crunching over designer gravel. The renovations on the restaurant at the front of the house had been left unfinished, which was hardly surprising considering half the town were busy shooting a film noir epic on the streets of Flynn, not to mention the second dead body in a week.

  A door slammed, and a tall woman with short red hair strode out of the house and got into her car, driving past us quickly in a slew of gravel.

  ‘Hey!’ Xanthippe yelled, thinking of her paintwork.

  ‘That was Ginger,’ I said in surprise. ‘Wasn’t it? Libby, I mean.’ From The Gingerbread House.

  Xanthippe parked the Spider smoothly. ‘Oh yes it was.’

  ‘How does she know the Averys?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  When we rang the bell, Jason’s stepmother Pippa answered the door too quickly, wearing a Greenpeace T-shirt and jeans, with giant daisies in her hair. She looked flustered, which I assumed was for some reason other than ‘OMG I have daisies in my hair, what was I thinking?’ though you never can tell. Pippa passed her eye over all of us and landed on Shay. ‘Seamus? What’s going on?’

  ‘We need to see Jase,’ he said, hands in pockets. Everything normal here, yeah.

  ‘He can’t see anyone today,’ she said, and you could tell there was lying going on behind the bright blue eyes, because her whole face shifted as she tried to look normal.

  ‘We know he shot through,’ said Xanthippe, in one of her more brusque voices.

  Pippa tensed. ‘What do you wan
t from me?’ she asked, looking from one to the other of us. Her tone wasn’t angry so much as … resigned.

  Interesting. She was expecting blackmailers.

  ‘We want to make sure he doesn’t do anything stupid,’ I said in a firm voice. ‘Also, we wouldn’t say no to a cup of tea.’

  ‘My husband isn’t home.’

  ‘That’s a shame. He’ll miss out on the tea.’

  Pippa paused for a minute or two as if about to slam the door in our faces. Then she turned and went inside, leaving us to follow her. We traipsed through a high, wide corridor lined with the kind of scenic art photography that costs more than paintings. All of the pictures depicted the Huon area in general, and Flynn in particular.

  She led us to a bright, homey kitchen at the back of the house, and put the industrial chrome computerised kettle on as if she had a grudge against it, all thumps and rattles.

  ‘I’m Tabitha, by the way,’ I said brightly. ‘I don’t think we met properly yesterday. The stern lady in black is Xanthippe, and the laidback Scotsman is Stewart.’

  Pippa barely reacted. ‘Greg is out looking for Jason. He will bring him home and it will all be fine. He won’t have gone far, he’s not that stupid.’

  ‘He texted me,’ Shay said in a low voice. ‘Sounds like he’s serious about getting out of here.’

  ‘But he can’t,’ Pippa said, banging the mugs against the shiny basalt counter and pulling out a range of organic herbal tea bags that smelled like Xanthippe’s ridiculous taste in perfume. ‘They’ll think he’s guilty. They’ll catch him and…’

  ‘Nineteen-year-olds,’ I said with a sympathetic smile. ‘Not big on the sensible decision making. Apparently the brain doesn’t properly develop until the mid-twenties.’ So what was my excuse for anything?

  ‘I’m going to kill him when I find him,’ Pippa muttered.

  ‘We’ll help,’ Xanthippe volunteered. ‘Well, with the finding. Not the killing. Best to keep that in the family.’

  ‘Good to know,’ Pippa said dryly. She started to make the tea, less aggressively than before. ‘How do you think you can help Jase?’

  Shay’s phone beeped at him, and he read the message with all of our eyes on him. ‘He won’t meet me,’ he said finally. ‘Says it’s better I don’t get involved.’

  ‘Oh, but asking you to deliberately hide his disappearance from the police, that’s okay?’ I held out my phone. ‘Give.’

  Shay recovered a bit more of the confidence I’d seen in him before his sister died. ‘No,’ he said, holding the phone away from me.

  ‘How can me talking to him make this situation worse?’ I demanded.

  ‘Ye’ll find a way,’ said Stewart in an undertone.

  ‘Have faith,’ I ground between my teeth, but I was looking at Shay and not Stewart.

  Shay put the phone in my hand. I tapped the number, and waited for Jason to pick up.

  ‘Shay,’ Jason said after three rings. ‘Look mate, I can’t — ’

  ‘It’s Tabitha.’

  Silence, in which I used all my mental powers to beg him not to hang up.

  ‘I don’t want to talk to you,’ he said finally.

  ‘Don’t you think it’s time you talked to someone?’

  I heard him snort faintly over the phone. ‘You’re such a girl.’

  ‘You know that’s not an insult, right?’ I paused. ‘Are you with Alice?’

  ‘No way.’ That sounded honest, at least.

  ‘Just because she’s managed to stay off the radar for a few weeks — it doesn’t mean anyone can do it. Or that she’ll be able to keep it up forever. Sooner or later, the police will get hold of her. You too. Do you have any idea how difficult it’s going to be, trying to keep out of sight? And how badly the police will take it when they find out?’

  ‘I don’t have any better options,’ he muttered.

  ‘Of course you do. You can come home and ride this out. If there isn’t any evidence, they will not arrest you. They can’t. I know the people running this investigation, and they are good blokes. They want the real killer, and as soon as they realise it isn’t you, everything will be fine.’

  ‘What kind of evidence would they need?’ he said hollowly. ‘To be sure I’m the real killer?’

  I think my feet went cold at that point. ‘Jason…’

  ‘Tabitha, thanks and everything, but believe me when I say I can’t come back.’ And this time he did hang up.

  19

  From: Darlingtabitha

  I’m thinking of inventing some kind of calming draught sorbet for times of high stress in the middle of summer. Maybe a chamomile tea granita?

  From: Nincakes

  I suppose it’s possible. Green tea ice cream is pretty good.

  From: Darlingtabitha

  How about a delicious cocktail of green, chamomile, peppermint and liquorice tea, for the ultimate relaxing experience in your mouth.

  From: Nincakes

  T, that sounds gross. With our customers, you’d have way more luck with a quadruple shot espresso sorbet.

  From: Darlingtabitha

  have you been talking to Stewart? is suspicious.

  Shay glared at me as the call ended and I handed back his phone. ‘What did he say?’

  ‘He’s scared,’ I said. ‘It’s okay. We’ll find him. We’ll have a cuppa first and we’ll come up with a plan, and we’ll find him by lunchtime. No worries.’

  Pippa offered me a choice of hot water that smelled like lemons and hot water that smelled like vanilla and cinnamon. I went for the lemon. Vanilla gave me a headache these days. ‘Why am I not convinced?’ she said.

  ‘It will all be fine,’ I said, meaning it as much as I could.

  Stewart took the vanilla tea, and Xanthippe chose a virulent pink one that smelled of mangoes and coconut.

  Mmm, mangoes and coconut would make a great gelato … no, bad Tabitha. Focus!

  ‘How exactly is the tea going to make things better?’ Xanthippe asked.

  ‘Tea makes us calm,’ said Pippa, swallowing down the contents of her own near-scalding cup. Mint, I thought. ‘So how are we going to find Jason?’

  We all looked at Shay.

  Shay was still glaring at me. ‘You were supposed to help. You’re supposed to be cool. This is all — tea and parents? What the hell?’

  ‘I’m not a miracle worker,’ I snapped back. ‘I make good ice cream and people confess their intimate secrets to me over coffee and cake. What exactly made you think that I was qualified for superhero duty?’

  ‘I don’t know where he is,’ Shay said grouchily. ‘And I wouldn’t tell you if I did.’ He stood up and stomped out of the kitchen.

  I looked at Stewart, meaningfully. Stewart looked alarmed. ‘Wha-at?’ he asked warily.

  ‘You’re a bloke.’

  ‘Aye, I’d heard a rumour to that effect. What d’ye want me tae do, chase the kid out there and grunt at him in a manly fashion until he spills his secrets?’

  I nodded earnestly. ‘Our only other option is Xanthippe taking her clothes off in front of him, and frankly that seems inappropriate.’

  ‘Fair call,’ Xanthippe agreed, and we clanked teacups together.

  Stewart left the room, muttering something about the unrealistic expectations of women.

  Xanthippe turned to Pippa. ‘Give us fifteen minutes to look through Jason’s room. We might spot something you missed, something to tell us where he is.’

  ‘Speed is of the essence,’ I agreed solemnly. ‘The bad news is that Bishop’s on the case now, and he’s kind of good at his job. It sucks, I know.’

  Jason’s room held few surprises considering we knew going in that he was a nineteen-year-old male. There was a distinct odour of boy, lingering mustily in the air. The room was a mess, with used clothes and crockery packing just about every surface.

  ‘This should be a drinking game,’ I observed. ‘One shot for every car or sports magazine, two for every depiction of a naked woman…�
�

  Xanthippe was already booting up his computer. ‘Or we could search the place for more useful data.’

  ‘Well, if you’re going to be pragmatic…’

  I rifled through Jason’s drawers, looking for a mysterious scrap of paper with a diagram of his planned place of hiding. Preferably with an address and some nice handy arrows.

  There were no mysterious notes.

  ‘Ha,’ Xanthippe said with more than a trace of smug in her voice. ‘Does the phrase “browser history” mean anything to you?’

  ‘I thought you weren’t interested in porn.’

  ‘The boy is far too vanilla for that, apparently,’ said Xanthippe, scanning his history.

  ‘No teenage boy is too vanilla to look for internet porn.’

  ‘Heh, well I’m just looking at the last forty-eight hours.’ Xanthippe pressed her lips together, tapping her foot thoughtfully. ‘No Google Maps. Not the White Pages, either. That could mean that he knew exactly where he was going.’

  ‘Or he was so panicked he just drove without thinking or planning,’ I pointed out. ‘Or he used his phone to look stuff up on, like a real teenager.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah, poor chicken. You’re too nice for your own good, Tish. Has it occurred to you that Jason Avery is acting guilty as hell?’

  ‘Wash your mouth out.’ But yes, I had that prickly uncomfortable feeling again. Once someone you have fed and smiled at and given romantic advice to turns out to be a killer, it’s kind of hard to think of people being universally good and innocent and honest.

  Of course we were snooping around a teenage boy’s bedroom without his permission so moral high ground was somewhere in the far distance.

  ‘He’s been peering into The Gingerbread House recently,’ said Xanthippe.

  ‘Tell me he hasn’t bookmarked the night when you took your top off. Apparently it’s a popular one.’

  ‘They put it up as an archive highlight,’ Xanthippe said proudly. She tapped a bit and looked thoughtful. ‘Interesting. Jason’s been trying to access the archives from before French Vanilla joined the merry band. But they’re locked. I guess when Pepperminty left, she really left. Ginger said they had to take all the material with her offline.’