Drowned Vanilla (Cafe La Femme Book 2) (10 page)

What would she be like? I’d been surfing The Gingerbread House site, reading French Vanilla’s comments on the forums — she seemed light-hearted enough there, teasing the other girls, messing around. A little more private with her thoughts than either of them, but she had her moments.

I’d watched the highlight archives too, to get a feel for who she was, but it felt weird. Turned out I wasn’t quite as nosy a person as I always thought I was. Looking into someone else’s private business quite that closely … bothered me.

Not so much Xanthippe. She was tucked up with her laptop most nights, combing through the archives and old forums, almost as bad as Ceege when it came to being glued to the screen. She was seriously obsessed.

Would she be pissed off that I hadn’t included her along today, given her a chance to meet the girl who had claimed to be Annabeth French? I told myself it was for the best. Xanthippe was … an intimidating person. Likely to send meek little vanilla girls running for the exit.

Whereas I was me — sipping a bad cappuccino with windblown hair, trying to keep my cute little vintage frock from doing something indecent in the Antarctic breezes that swept hard through Salamanca, even on a sunny day like this one.

It was a week until Christmas, and the weather was stepping up the heat. Most people were out there, sweatily shopping until they dropped. Did French Vanilla have family to shop for?

I didn’t, as it happened. My dad was the one with extended family to juggle, and he died a year ago. My mum had quit anything remotely conventional when she ran off to her hippie art colony in the middle of nowhere — she’d had two decades of cooking the perfect dinner with four kinds of roast beast, and these days I would be lucky if we exchanged solstice cards between now and the new year.

Ritual meals bothered me anyway. There were so many nice things you could cook, if you wanted to feed and nurture people. Why did everyone insist on having the same thing every year, whether or not they were any good at preparing it?

Not doing Christmas was fine with me, but now there was this whole Bishop thing hanging over my head. I liked what I knew of his and Xanthippe’s family. Zee’s mother was one of these dramatic European women who complains if you get too thin. There are never enough of those around when you’re an awkward teenager, and I’d enjoyed her company the few times we’d met.

Zee’s mother was also Bishop’s mother, of course. I’d always known that the disturbingly hot constable that my dad mentored through the Tasmania police service was half brother to the cranky girl I’d been friends with in high school, but I’d never really thought through the ramifications.

Bishop and I had been together for months. Thanks to our agreement that we not label this thing between us, or let it get officially serious, there had been no family visit. Generally speaking, boys like me to meet their mother. I had better relationships with most of my exes’ mothers than the exes themselves. Hell, that’s where half of my culinary tricks come from.

There was no reason at all to be resentful that Bishop had this whole important relationship with my late dad, and knew my mum’s cooking style at forty paces, but I hadn’t been included in his family Christmas. Honestly, if anyone should be resenting the whole thing, it should be him.

If I’d let us keep the boyfriend and girlfriend thing when we first tried it on for size, we could be living together by now. I’d know his mother by her first name, and/or her recipe book. Or maybe we’d already have split up and gone our separate ways, because we both spent most of our energy on our work and didn’t have time for a real relationship.

‘Yer thinking too hard,’ said Stewart. It was a fair call.

I looked up in surprise. My coffee was cold. I started choking down the foam. ‘She’s late.’

‘Aye. Probably no’ coming.’

‘Do you think I scared her off?’ I felt a twinge of guilt. Or possibly a reaction to bad foam.

‘Maybe she never meant tae come. Maybe she wasnae French Vanilla after all. Just a crank.’ Stewart poked me gently with his foot. ‘Meanwhile, where were ye?’

‘Will you miss your family at Christmas?’ I asked abruptly.

Stewart looked taken aback. ‘Aye, I suppose so. I havenae been home fer a few years. In Melbourne I had a group of pals — orphans and strays. We’d hang out on Christmas Day, have a barbecue. Better that than the madness back at my mum’s in Glasgae. I miss my nan mostly. She’d love the whole prawns on the barbie thing — she sits in the corner at Christmas and bitches about how the food is rubbish and Sharon — my mum — goes tae so much trouble for something naebody actually likes, and we’d be better off gaun fer a curry. Which is true. Then Mum threatens tae strangle her with her knitting, and Da watches the telly and pretends tae be deaf, and the sisters all finally feel guilty enough tae get up off their arses and help peel tatties.’

Wow. Stewart had never said so much about his family in one go before. He had sisters. And a nan. ‘Do you help peel tatties?’ I asked, which was really the most important question. Also I loved the word ‘tatties’, even without the Scottish accent.

‘Too busy shelling peas,’ he said, and grinned at me. ‘Maybe I’ll gan home for it next year.’

‘She’s not coming,’ I said, because that was … better than anything else I was about to say.

Stewart checked his watch again. ‘Half an hour late. Back to the café?’

‘Yeah, I really need to.’

He shrugged those bony shoulders of his. ‘Go. I’ll stick around a bit longer, in case. Have another coffee. Figure out what tae do with my willowy brunette protagonist.’

‘Get her laid,’ I advised.

Stewart smirked. ‘Way ahead of ye.’

The café was in an uproar when I returned, so I didn’t have time to give Nin more than a guilty look for being late. It was one of those days where the tables are packed from ten to three, everything goes wrong in the kitchen, and there’s a major miscalculation about how much soy milk we ordered. Suddenly the whole world is lactose intolerant.

At least the layers of froth on our cappuccinos aren’t too high. Even on our worst days.

Finally things slowed towards 4pm. I emerged from the kitchen to take a few breaths of cool air in our sunny sandstone courtyard out the back. Tea. I needed green tea and a two hour nap, but I would settle for a few gulps of fresh air and a break from the mingled scents of coffee and biscuits and smoked salmon and what on earth had convinced us that it was a good idea to serve all day breakfast? I was so sick of eggs I was ready to start throwing them at the ceiling. A little recipe I like to call pre-scrambled.

A young woman I didn’t know was sitting at the staff tea table. Except of course I did know her.

She had a soft face, and curly blonde hair in that bright toddler shade that almost no one actually has without chemical assistance. She wore a light hand knitted cardigan over a flowery sundress, and sandals that had seen better days.

Oh, and she was waiting for me. Her eyes met mine with something like familiarity, though we had never met. Had we? She’d lived in Hobart for nearly a year, if not longer, and I always said I knew everyone.

In any case, I’d seen so many images of her by now, it felt like we’d known each other for years.

French Vanilla.

11

From: Nincakes

tell me you’re not planning to deseed those pomegranates that are lurking in the fridge.

From: Darlingtabitha

*makes innocent eyes.*

From: Nincakes

T, you are your own worst enemy. Consider this a pomegranate intervention

From: Darlingtabitha

*hides passionfruit collection*

‘Tabitha Darling?’ she asked in that same quiet, steady voice that I’d heard coming out of Ceege’s state of the art speakers when we were raiding The Gingerbread House archives.

‘Yes.’ She might run, or disappear at any moment, but I risked pulling up a chair, sitting opposite her. ‘I don’t know your real name.’ Only that it wasn’t Annabeth French.

‘Alice,’ she said, though she paused first and I couldn’t be sure if it was because she was lying or because she wasn’t used to using her own name.

‘Weren’t you supposed to meet Stewart today?’ I asked next, and not only out of loyalty. I was curious — why come out of hiding now, and why on earth approach me?

I had nothing to do with all this. It was getting harder and harder to keep telling myself that.

‘I chickened out,’ she admitted, and finally that wary look shifted into something a touch more friendly, almost half a smile. ‘I don’t know whether I can trust him.’

‘You can,’ I said quickly. ‘Hell, anyone can. He won’t write shit about you if you don’t want him to. He’s an appalling journalist that way. Far too nice for his own good.’ Why did this Alice person think she could trust me? If that was even the reason she was here.

‘I have to talk to someone,’ she said finally. ‘I can’t get involved with the police. But I’m worried about Annabeth.’

Oh hell. Did she not know? ‘Annabeth,’ I said quietly. ‘She’s um. Dead. She was killed the day you disappeared.’

French Vanilla — Alice — nodded. Oh, thank goodness. That was probably the worst example of ‘breaking it to you gently’ anyone had ever done, so I had to be glad she already knew. ‘Yes, but I’m worried me being missing might mess things up for the police investigation. Confuse them, so they don’t find out who really killed her.’

‘Do you know who killed her?’ I asked.

Another of those pauses. ‘No,’ she said finally. ‘I … didn’t know anyone she was close to. We barely knew each other when we swapped places. But I…’ She sighed. ‘I’ve read the newspaper stories and the Sandstone City blog and everything. It seems like the story has become about me, about finding me, and I don’t want that. I really don’t want anyone to find me.’

‘Weren’t you worried about coming here?’ I said. ‘I mean, it’s broad daylight. You didn’t even come in disguise.’

Alice looked down at her cardigan and smiled helplessly at me. ‘This was already my disguise. I don’t think I could cope with another one on top of that, my head might explode. Anyway, I won’t be here long. I’m leaving soon, and I won’t be back.’

‘I don’t know if I can convince the police to stop looking for you,’ I said. Understatement of the year.

Alice gave me a look that was surprisingly hard in her round, sweet-as-pie face. ‘Oh, I think you can. I know all about you. You’ve been involved in this since the beginning. You’re dating a police officer, maybe not one who is actually investigating Annabeth’s murder, but I’m sure he knows the officers who are. You’re friends with everyone. You can let them know that I’m not important.’

Huh. I wasn’t seeing much of that meek little bookworm I’d watched on The Gingerbread House archives. Had she been lying to everyone about her personality, as well as her name? Or had recent events toughened her up?

No one was going to stop looking for French Vanilla no matter what she said, because unless they had a cast iron case against Jason Avery (and the investigation wouldn’t still be open if they did), she was an obvious murder suspect.

Well, maybe not completely obvious. Not if you looked at her. She still looked like the kind of girl who would help little old ladies do their shopping. The neighbour you would trust with your spare key.

‘Can you tell me why you and Annabeth swapped places?’ I asked her.

‘Is that relevant?’ Alice said, looking at her shoes.

‘I’m trying to understand what happened. How you got into this situation.’

‘I drove,’ she said simply.

I blinked. ‘You drove?’

Alice nodded. ‘At the end of last summer. My boyfriend — well, I was angry at him. Really upset. I took his car and started driving. Didn’t take anything with me, just my phone. I didn’t turn it on, though. I kept thinking he’d have left lots of messages, and I didn’t want to know whether he had or not. I thought … if I stayed away long enough, he’d report me missing or report the car stolen, or something. I kept going through small towns, looking for police cars or police stations, waiting to be noticed. But no one ever did.’

The words were spilling over themselves, like she had been waiting to tell this to someone for a long time. Lucky me.

‘Was this here in Tasmania?’ I couldn’t help asking.

‘New South Wales. I’d always wanted to move to the city and he didn’t, he liked it in the country, so I headed to Sydney at first. But then I realised he wasn’t coming after me, and I got really — I don’t know. Freaked out, I suppose. Upset. Numb. He didn’t care enough to find me, to look, to report me missing. I didn’t have a plan, and I always have a plan. Finally I sold the car — I figured maybe it would be on a register or something and they’d catch me that way, but they didn’t.’ Her voice cracked a little. ‘I wanted him to catch me. I felt like I was doing something wrong the whole time I was leaving, couldn’t anyone tell.’

She took a moment, gathering her emotions together, tucking them away for later. ‘I bought a new SIM card and junked the other one without even checking my messages.’ The frustration dripped from her words. ‘If he hadn’t even called… I didn’t want to know. So I went to Sydney airport. I thought — I’ll go somewhere. Start again. I wasn’t thinking straight, but that idea stuck with me. I was miserable, but I felt so free, having left all my stuff behind, with him. Everything.’

I didn’t want to interrupt her story to skip forward to the present, though I was desperately curious to find out if this was what had happened again, more recently, when she left The Gingerbread House without a word — without even the phone and purse and car she had taken the first time.

Who was she angry at this time? What was she trying to escape?

‘Where were you going to go?’ I asked instead.

‘Oh, I didn’t care. I don’t know that I was planning to go anywhere, I just liked the idea. I bought an awful coffee and an expensive croissant and I sat near a window, watching the planes. And that was when I saw the girl.’

I sat still, just listening to her, not interjecting any more, even though part of me wanted to insert commentary along the lines of ‘Ah hah, was this when you met Annabeth French?’ Or ‘What was Annabeth doing at Sydney Airport?’