Drowned Vanilla (Cafe La Femme Book 2) (13 page)

I mooched home to find Ceege tapping away at his computer, same as usual. Normally I worried about him, but today it was something of a relief. Someone had less of a life than me. Does that make me a bad person?

I would make him steamed chicken dumplings to make up for it. And chocolate mousse. Or I could just lie on the couch and pout.

Pouting won.

‘What’s wrong with you?’ Ceege asked as I collapsed on the couch with my best sulk face.

‘Did I get boring?’

‘Yes,’ he said automatically, and then tried to cover for himself when I let out a yelp of protest. ‘Um, I mean — compared to what?’

I glared at the back of his head. ‘Compared to how I was before I started going out with Bishop.’

‘Oh, well, you know how it is. Girl meets boy, girl likes boy, girl starts thinking that boy is the centre of the universe, girl starts changing herself to suit boy’s tastes…’

‘That’s not me,’ I said in absolute horror. ‘Stop it. Don’t talk. No more talking. I would never ever let that happen in a million years, and you are completely full of shit.’

‘I still love you, Tabs.’

‘Oh, very comforting, ta for that.’ I frowned over at him. That didn’t look like
World of Warcraft
or any of his other online gaming thingies. ‘What are you doing?’

‘I’m designing a set for Darrow’s movie, based on a bunch of stuff we’ve borrowed from some mates in Old Nick.’ That was the uni rep theatre club.

‘Not you too?’ I said, genuinely shocked. I’d been trying to get Ceege to take an interest in something other than his keyboard all month, and Darrow just had to snap his fingers? Or was Xanthippe doing the snapping?

‘Sure, it’s not like I’ve got anything better to do over the holidays.’ Ceege offered me a sort of grin. ‘Want to come along tomorrow? You can bang nails for me.’

‘Bang nails?’ I said haughtily.

‘Okay, make sandwiches.’

Huh.

‘C’mon, Tabs,’ he wheedled. ‘You know it won’t be as much fun without you there.’

Well, yes. I do bring the fun. But I wasn’t sure how welcome I was with anyone other than Ceege.

‘I actually have nowhere I have to be tomorrow,’ I admitted reluctantly. ‘Thanks to my lazy-arse building inspector.’

‘There ya go.’

‘Where is it happening? Darrow said something about a small town.’ A thought struck me. I stared at Ceege. ‘Flynn. It’s Flynn, isn’t it?’ This wasn’t Xanthippe switching from one obsession to another. This was Xanthippe sneakily masking her ongoing obsession with Darrow’s creative nuttiness. And Stewart was her accomplice.

I was so on to them.

There was no way I was not going down to join them now. ‘Okay fine,’ I said. ‘But I’m going to drive. You’ve been sitting at that computer or the Playstation for eighteen hours a day for the last month, I don’t trust your reflexes in the real world.’

Ceege smiled his almost-charming smile at me. ‘Knew I could count on you, Tabs.’

Hmmm. Did my friends really think I’d gone vanilla, or was this all a cunning ruse to get me to come out and play? Only one way to find out.

There’s something about driving a ute. It makes me feel like I should be in a flannie and Blundstone boots, hair sprayed up in a mushroom cloud of a fringe, cracking gum.

Instead, I was wearing a glam 1940s navy dress, with vintage red shoes and lipstick to match, my hair tucked back in a crimson snood. Yes, I have a snood. My hair is the wrong shade of blonde for film noir but otherwise I had the look down pretty well.

Ceege was wearing his worst jeans and a faded Lucksmiths T-shirt which he had dragged back from Katie during the awkward ‘your stuff in this cardboard box, my stuff in that cardboard box’ breakup phase.

More importantly, Ceege was out in daylight. It was a good look on him. He’s a stocky guy — a little heavier than he had been a couple of months ago when he had a girlfriend and walked to and from uni every day — with a buzz cut that makes him look more thuggish than he actually is.

The super short hair makes it easier when he puts on his glam wigs and frocks up for a party — when not slouching around in his scungiest attire, Ceege’s style of choice is drag queen chic. I was betting he had packed a femme fatale film noir outfit to rival mine.

Pieces of an old
Guys and Dolls
theatre set and a bunch of props rattled away in the tray of the borrowed ute, including the entire makings of a Phillip Marlowe style detective office and a trunk of old costumes.

Anytime I feel that life is getting surreal, along comes Darrow to put things into perspective.

It felt good to be making the wild choice. How long was it since I did something wild? My last road trip to Flynn had been barely a blip. Taking part in Darrow’s festival of noir felt more Tabitha than I had felt for ages, and I liked it. We had chosen the road along the river for a bit of variety, and it was one hell of a view.

‘You have your thinking face on,’ said Ceege, flipping through an issue of
NW
as I drove. ‘Should I be worried?’

‘Xanthippe said that Bishop is vanilla,’ I confessed. ‘Or that —  me being with him makes me vanilla. Or something like that.’

Ceege wrinkled his nose. ‘Should Xanthippe be taking that much interest in her brother’s sex life?’

‘Ew, not that, gross.’ I didn’t have anything to throw at him, and I did like keeping my hands on the wheel, so I made a mental note to smack him after I parked. ‘There’s nothing vanilla about him in bed, as it happens.’

‘Way too much information, Tabs.’

‘I hope she wasn’t talking about sex, anyway.’ That was an alarming possibility, best forgotten. ‘I think she just meant he’s … you know. Straight. Not as in not gay … though ha, obviously not.’

‘Oh, I don’t know, he wouldn’t be your first,’ Ceege said slyly.

‘Shut up. One boyfriend swears off women for life and suddenly the world thinks you’re hilarious.’

‘Wasn’t it three boyfriends? In a row?’

I gave him a very hard look. ‘This is on the list of things we do not discuss, Ceege.’

‘I don’t recall that list.’

‘Katie’s name is right at the top of it.’

He winced. ‘Oh,
that
list. Consider the matter dropped.’

‘Thank you,’ I said primly, taking the curve a little faster than I should. We were in green mountain and valley territory now, away from the coast. The sets made a noisy clashing sound as the panels bounced under their tarpaulin.

‘Y’know, Xanthippe has a point,’ Ceege mused as we bounced along.

‘About?’

‘Bishop. Seriously, Tabs. He’s so vanilla it hurts. I bet he’s never even returned a library book late.’

Hmmm, library books. What had happened to that stack of books about ice cream making? Possibly they were under that suspiciously high lingerie heap in my bedroom. Time to do some excavation before the fines overtook my weekly business offences.

‘That doesn’t make him a bad person, Ceege.’

‘I never said he’s not a top bloke. Just … you know. Conventional.’ He pronounced the last word with several extra vowel sounds. ‘Not your usual type.’

‘Yeah,’ I sighed. I’d had a thing about Bishop for nearly ten years before I finally cornered him into snogging — and more — and at no point had I actually stopped to think about the ramifications of having any kind of romantic relationship with someone who was responsible and dependable and unlikely to drop everything and dash off to take part in an inspired act of bad street theatre in period costumes. I hadn’t told him my plans for the day, because I knew exactly what expression he would get on his face. ‘Conventional.’

‘He’s vanilla, and you’re … raspberry vinaigrette sorbet, with a side order of fireworks in the kitchen.’

‘Opposites attract, right?’ I said, feeling panicky.

‘I reckon you’re thinking about this way too much, Tabs,’ said Ceege, stretching out his legs. ‘Just go with it. It’s not like the bloke is asking you to marry him. Hell, you don’t even let anyone call him your boyfriend. If it doesn’t work out … then so what?’

So what? Really? Was that what they all thought? I knew this whole thing with Bishop hadn’t turned into a grand epic romance for the ages, but did my friends really think that what he and I had going was so completely disposable?

Did I think that?

We drove in silence for some time, me muttering away inside my head as I took the several dozen tight corners. The trees were dark and lush around us, casting a deep shade across the road, unlike the rest of Tasmania which was blazing with fierce sunshine today.

Nothing like a looming bit of scenery to make you feel small. This wasn’t anywhere near the deepest, darkest, greenest part of Tassie, but it felt like we were buried in the wilderness, far from civilisation.

Eventually my muttering escaped my head, and I started talking under my breath.

‘Tabitha,’ said Ceege.

We were about fifteen minutes from the turn off to Flynn.

‘I mean, it’s no one’s business but ours, right?’ I said.

‘Tabs…’

‘There’s nothing wrong with dependable and reliable. I’ve had years of blokes who are charming and exciting and trust me, they’re not all they’re cracked up to be. Hell, Bishop is exciting. He is. And…’

‘Tabs, what’s going on over there?’

I dragged my attention away from myself and my apparently vanilla non-relationship (what was wrong with vanilla as a flavour, everyone kept telling me how bloody brilliant it was) and noticed what had alarmed Ceege.

There were high rocky precipices on one side of the road and a screamingly steep valley on the other. Up ahead, there was a beaten up old Holden gunning its engine over and over, nose facing over a lookout point with a drop that was … yeah.

Don’t ask me how Ceege had spotted it. Chances were I would have just swept past in a haze of my own self-absorption.

But instead I pulled over, and we both jumped out. Stupid, probably. Don’t get involved. I’d been working that particular philosophy — or trying to — for weeks now. But I didn’t realise how deeply it was ingrained in me until Ceege leaned in over the open window on the driver’s side and said ‘G’day mate,’ in that extra ocker voice that blokes use when they need a layer of emotional protection.

‘Piss off,’ said the driver, a teenage boy. He sounded tired rather than belligerent.

‘We were just passing,’ said Ceege. ‘Weren’t we, Tabs? Couldn’t help noticing you looking a bit precarious over here.’ He stretched one hand in through the window, and turned off the engine. ‘That’s better, yeah? Any chance of you putting on the hand brake?’

The driver turned and looked him in the eye — and I recognised him. Here we were, involved all over again.

I couldn’t stay away from it, apparently. The driver of the car was Jason Avery. Boyfriend of the murder victim. Author of postcards. Son of the vineyard magnate who had saved the town from financial crisis. Best friend to Shay French.

And, before the charges had been recently dropped, prime suspect in the murder of Annabeth French.

14

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More information at
www.averygrove.com.au

There was a long pause. A really long pause, in which I held my breath. Ceege looked weirdly reassuring. You’d never think that an hour earlier he had been swearing at a screen full of pixels as if they were destroying his life.

Jason put the hand brake on, and then we could breathe again.

‘Out you come,’ Ceege said then, opening the door. ‘Tabs, crack open the slab. I reckon this kid needs a beer.’

‘I’m not a kid,’ Jason muttered, but he stepped out of the car and leaned against it, looking sick.

‘Thank fuck for that, or I could be in trouble for giving you beer,’ said Ceege with a grin. ‘Tabs, are you a girl or what? Beer me.’

Oh, he so hadn’t said that. I went back to the ute, pulled three cans off the slab we had bought to donate to the film project, and brought them back. I handed Jason his, and threw Ceege’s at his head.

‘Ow,’ he protested, catching it before it fell. ‘Have some respect for the foam, woman.’ He opened the beer, and it sprayed noisily out over the grass.

‘I respect the beer, I just don’t respect you.’ There are worse things than drinking slightly warm beer on the side of a road, but it was not my beverage of choice. I drank it anyway, because Ceege had implied women were only good for the fetching of the beer. Unacceptable.

I dropped to the grass, crossing my legs. Jason slid down the side of his car to sit down too, legs stretched out. He looked defeated.

‘Where do you live, mate?’ Ceege asked.

‘Flynn,’ said Jason, and there was a world of resentment tied up in just that name.

‘Huh, that’s a coincidence. We’re heading to Flynn.’

‘Not that much of a coincidence,’ I sighed. Not with Xanthippe involved. Nothing was an accident with her. ‘You’re Jason, right?’

The kid looked instantly defensive. ‘Read that in the papers, did you?’

‘Partly,’ I admitted. ‘Want to tell us what you were doing on that…’ Cliff, precipice, which sounded less melodramatic? ‘Edge.’

Jason glared at me. ‘No.’

‘Come on, Tabs, a man’s Holden is his castle,’ said Ceege reasonably, taking a swig of very beery foam. ‘You can’t ask questions like that.’

‘See, that’s the good thing about being a girl. I don’t know these mystical Man Rules, so I can ignore them.’ Like, why was a nineteen-year-old toying with the idea of driving himself off a cliff? Apart from the fact that he was still a person of interest in a major crime. ‘Jason, I thought they dropped the charges against you.’

The papers had been full of the story. First there was the bail hearing, which Dad Avery had dominated. Then the news had hit that the charges had been dropped against Jason pending further evidence. After that, nothing in the way of hard news.