Drowned Vanilla (Cafe La Femme Book 2) (7 page)

‘She could be asking as a concerned pal,’ Stewart pointed out.

I hit him with a pillow.

‘The Missing Persons Unit have been great,’ Melinda replied to Xanthippe. ‘Really great. They arranged for counsellors, they’ve been giving us support…’

‘Ha, despite the fact that you threw up on that sergeant who tried to talk to us about Vanilla … Anna … wow, that’s hard to get used to,’ said Ginger. ‘We don’t know what to call her.’

‘I mostly missed his uniform,’ said Melinda.

‘Do they have any idea yet, who she was?’ Xanthippe asked.

‘There was nothing on her computer,’ said Ginger. ‘They told us that, a few days after they took it.’

‘Really?’ said Xanthippe, swallowing some pasta and sounding convincingly surprised. ‘How can you have no identity information on a computer?’

‘She bought it second-hand, not long after she first moved in,’ said Melinda. ‘It was registered to the bloke she bought it from.’

‘She had a bank account,’ said Ginger. ‘But it was in Annabeth French’s name — the other girl must have set it up for her.’

Stewart passed me a mug of coffee and I drank it automatically. He’d put milk and sugar in which was oddly touching. Usually he refuses to support other people’s unholy desire to adulterate the most important substance on earth (direct quote, can you tell?).

Was Xanthippe trying to draw more out of the Gingerbread women, figuring out what they knew or didn’t know? Or was she playing dumb to help get their little mystery narrative across to the viewing public? It bugged the hell out of me that I wasn’t sure which side she was playing.

‘Does it bother you?’ she asked now, her fingers circling the stem of a wine glass. ‘That she lied to you, all this time?’

‘Yes,’ said Ginger, at the same time that Melinda said, ‘No.’ They looked at each other.

‘Interesting,’ said Xanthippe.

‘I don’t understand it at all,’ Ginger said. ‘She must have been on her guard the whole time, only pretending to be our friend. There’s no excuse for that.’

‘There could be a reason, though,’ Melinda said gently. ‘There are always reasons why people do what they do. I can’t help wondering what she was running away from, what was so important that it was easier to take on someone else’s name?’

‘She has to have been messing us about,’ Ginger snapped. ‘She lied. Every day. She pretended to be doing uni work, for the whole year, and it turns out she wasn’t even registered as a student. She wasn’t our friend. We … we did a lot for her, we stuck our necks out to help her,’ she added fiercely. ‘Misplaced trust if ever there was any. And our viewers — she lied to them too.’

Melinda shrugged. ‘She was the one who tried ten different teas to help me through my morning sickness, and sat up with me when I had a really hard decision to make. She always listened when I wanted to talk, and she didn’t hassle me when I was stressed. She was my friend no matter what else she was lying about. I miss her.’

Ginger swallowed down half a glass of wine. ‘I miss her too,’ she said in a low voice. ‘But she wasn’t real. How do you know she wasn’t laughing at us the whole time?’

‘I don’t,’ said Melinda. ‘Isn’t it nicer to think that she wasn’t?’

‘I know which one I’d want on my jury,’ Stewart told me as the dinner conversation moved on to another topic.

Xanthippe came home late, and I was waiting for her, feet propped on the couch, and a cup of hot chocolate on the table beside me. It had gone cold an hour ago. ‘Hey,’ I said softly.

She gave me one of those inscrutable looks she’s so good at, and glanced across the room to where Ceege was back at his computer screen, tapping away at his RPG, seemingly oblivious to us both. ‘Your room,’ she said, heading for the staircase.

The first thing she saw as she stepped into my bedroom was the little black cocktail dress I had worn to the fancy police dinner the other night. ‘What the hell is that? That’s not you.’

‘It could be,’ I said defensively. ‘How do you know that isn’t exactly what I fancied wearing that day?’

She eyed the label. ‘You bought it new in Myer. New. In Myer. You.’

‘Shut up.’

‘I thought you were physically incapable of buying clothing that wasn’t from adorable little vintage boutiques, and hipster market stalls. Aren’t you worried that impressing my brother with your new mainstream style will lose you retro credibility points?’

‘Can we stop talking about this right now?’

Xanthippe sat on the edge of my bed and flopped backwards, her dark layered haircut fanning out over my, yes, okay, vintage Japanese bedspread that had indeed been purchased from a market stall that almost certainly qualified as ‘hipster’.

We hadn’t done this in forever. Yes, she had a part share in my café now, and she’d been living in our third bedroom for most of the last year, but we rarely hung out, just the two of us. We were best friends in high school, but we had been distant for a long time. You don’t get back something like that — or at least, we hadn’t tried all that hard.

‘Aren’t you going to ask me what I found out at The Gingerbread House?’ she asked finally. ‘Or did you watch it live?’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ I said, joining her on the bed and grabbing my hairbrush and hair ties. I can’t sleep without braids these days, even if it makes me look like a deranged Heidi in the mornings.

‘Good, you watched it live, then. Saves time.’ Xanthippe looked wretched. ‘I can’t help myself. Can’t turn off wanting to figure out what happened. I think I upset them both, though, talking about it like that.’

I clamped my mouth shut so as not to point out that discussing the missing ‘Anna’ was good for their income stream. ‘Maybe it helps for them to talk about it,’ I said instead. Ah, tact.

Xanthippe glared at the ceiling. ‘They’re confused, like they don’t know how they’re supposed to feel. They don’t even know who she was. Who to miss.’ There had been a pause just after the ‘m’ sound which made me think for a minute she was going to say ‘mourn’. Possibly I was imagining it.

‘It’s only been a week,’ I said finally.

‘Eight days. It’s been eight days.’

‘In a way,’ I tried, ‘It’s better that no one knows anything about her. It means they can tell themselves she had a plan, somewhere safe to go. Isn’t that more comforting?’

Xanthippe glared at me. ‘Comforting that they can come up with some pretty fantasy where a girl they lived with for most of a year just appeared and then disappeared like Mary fucking Poppins?’

‘If I were them, I’d take what I could get,’ I snapped back.

‘Yeah,’ she said after a minute. ‘Me too.’

What we weren’t talking about was Carly. Carolyn Denver was one of our high school’s goodiest good girls. She always got As, even in subjects she wasn’t great at (she worked so hard you could see the steam coming out of her ears), she was talented at music and art. She even participated in team sports, which I couldn’t understand at all.

For a couple of months in grade ten, she started dropping by the shady spot behind the gym where Zee and I used to hang out, reading magazines and talking shit. We didn’t know what to make of her at first, but it turned out she was kind of funny when she wasn’t completely stressed out. We got used to her sitting with us, even though when it came time for class, she would ignore us as she went back into the orbit of her super normal friends.

Three days before the end of year exams, Carly didn’t turn up to school. By the next day, the police had been called, and we were all called into the guidance counsellor’s office one by one for informal interviews.

It was in the papers for a long time, until it wasn’t any more. Every now and then, Carly’s parents would set up some kind of information appeal, but eventually they stopped too.

Every year or so, around December, I Google her name and run it through Facebook just to see if she is miraculously — I don’t know. Living in Peru and married to a plastic surgeon, or something. But, no. There’s still a website set up by a family friend that chronicles the search for Carly, but they haven’t updated it for a while.

It’s ten years since she disappeared. Chances are she’s not coming back. But I’d been thinking about her a lot since this Annabeth thing started, and I figured Xanthippe had as well. Now would be a good time for us to admit how deeply Carly’s disappearance had affected us both.

But we don’t do the serious conversation thing, her and me.

Eventually Xanthippe said, ‘Okay, I’m going to bed.’

And I said, ‘Sleep well.’

She looked at the dress again and snickered on her way out, so I threw a magazine at her. I guess we were doing okay. For a given value of ‘okay’.

8

GINGERBREAD FORUMS: Q&A

Seelyluvs:
so how’d you come up with The Gingerbread House idea? (can I steal it?) How did you all get together?

Gingernutz:
steal away, though be careful what you’re getting into. Living your life live on the web isn’t for everyone.

Cherry_ripe:
About two years ago, me and Pepperminty (the other founder of The Gingerbread House) answered an ad Ginge put up for a 3 bedroom uni share house. It was still going to be a push for us to pay the rent, and we talked about how hard it would be to get jobs and manage our classes at the same time. The webcams thing was an accident at first — I had a long distance relationship going on with my boyfriend at the time, and we tried talking to each other over Skype — way cheaper than the phone…

Gingernutz:
and one day I walked in on Cherry buck naked, putting on a show for her boy…

Cherry_ripe:
shut up, you wish!

Gingernutz:
well, we joked about it. Pepperminty reckoned we could wire up the house for visuals and sound, and charge subscriptions. She was the smart internet person, set up the website and everything.

Cherry_ripe:
we figured we’d do it for a month, but we got hooked! We just love getting to talk to you guys all around the world, who tune in to us every day. And it doesn’t hurt to not have to worry about the rent thanks to our AMAZEBALLS subscribers. We love you guys so much!

Gingernutz:
Pepperminty left us, but we got French_vanilla in to replace her. Now, she *really* thought we were bananas when she met us.

French_vanilla:
you are bananas. But I love you.

Gingernutz:
*snogs*

Two days after Xanthippe’s dinner party with the Gingerbread women, I found a sullen teenager on my doorstep. He was dressed in the usual boy uniform — baggy trousers, sneakers, a band T-shirt in a font too messy to read.

‘I’m Shay French,’ he said, eyes flickering at me and then lowering.

‘I remember you,’ I said. Yeah, I remembered him leaning on the convertible and doing his best to chat up Xanthippe. Cocky little bugger who thought he was God’s gift. I managed not to say something bitchy now, because I was running through the facts I’d picked up about him from the media coverage of his sister’s murder.

Seamus French (17) was Annabeth’s younger brother. When I last saw this kid, he was hanging around with Jason Avery. It must suck beyond reason to have your mate arrested for murdering your sister. It had obviously knocked the stuffing out of him — there was none of that flirty over-confidence now.

‘You were looking for Anna,’ he blurted now. ‘That day. I wondered…’ He ran out of words, shrugging and lapsing into silence.

I had no idea what Shay wanted from me, but I made it easy for him. ‘Want to go for a walk?’

‘Yeah,’ he said, relaxing a bit around the shoulders.

I locked up the house, and gestured the way. My place is a good ten minutes’ walk from the beach. You have to cross suburbia and shopping streets before you get close enough to sniff the salt. But I had a feeling this wasn’t going to be one of those chats you got through fast.

Shay didn’t seem to mind where we walked. He loped along beside me, hands shoved into pockets. The silence yawned on.

‘I wasn’t actually looking for Anna,’ I said when we were only a street away from the esplanade. ‘I mean, I thought I was, but I wasn’t. There was this other girl living in Hobart pretending to be her, did you know about that?’

‘I read the papers,’ Shay said with an ‘I’m not stupid’ expression on his face. ‘That fucken blog too.’

Best not mention that Stewart was a friend of mine.

‘Everyone keeps talking about her,’ he added impatiently. ‘Anna, I mean. I don’t give a shit about that other girl, unless she’s the one who…’ His voice trailed off. ‘The police reckon Jase did it. He can’t prove he didn’t. But he wouldn’t do that. He was nuts about her.’

I had once been held at gunpoint by a bloke who claimed to be nuts about me, so I wasn’t overly convinced by his argument. ‘He doesn’t have to prove he didn’t,’ was all I said, hoping to reassure him. ‘They have to prove that he did.’

‘Duh,’ Shay said. Charming kid. Really.

The street opened up into a burst of sunshine, seagulls and bright colours: the green of the grass strip, the blue of the water, and the yellow and orange of the giant Paddle Pop ads everywhere.

Shay headed for the sand on automatic. I slipped off my sandals and followed him, wriggling the sand between my toes.

‘So you didn’t actually know her,’ he said. ‘Anna.’

‘No,’ I admitted. ‘I spoke to her for about five minutes the day she … the day we drove by the vineyard. That’s all.’

‘This other girl, then,’ he said, eyes on the seagulls as they fought over the last chip crumbs in an abandoned paper bag. ‘The Vanilla chick. What’s she to you?’

‘Nothing,’ I admitted. ‘I don’t even know her real name. No one does.’ Well, obviously someone knew it. We had to find that someone. Sooner rather than later.

‘Huh.’

I waited for Shay to ask why the hell I had been sticking my nose in where it wasn’t wanted, or something along those lines, but instead he jabbed the toe of his sneaker in the sand, drawing an unrecognisable shape before he said: ‘I reckon it was the other bloke. Has to have been. Not Jase.’