Drowned Vanilla (Cafe La Femme Book 2) (14 page)

It seemed pretty clear to me that the police were looking for someone else, the obvious suspect being French Vanilla herself.

‘Yeah,’ Jason said bitterly. ‘The police don’t have a case against me, and Dad’s lawyer got them to admit it. Doesn’t mean anyone else thinks I’m innocent. I live in a small town. You know what that means?’

Oh, hell. ‘I think I have some idea.’

‘My dad is somebody in Flynn,’ Jason said, setting his chin. ‘People used to look at me like I was somebody too. Girls liked me, and their parents smiled at me in the street. Now suddenly they all believe I killed Anna. They look at me like I’m shit on their shoe, or worse, like I’m going to hurt someone else…’ He trailed off, then looked at me suspiciously. ‘Who are you? You’re not a fucken journo, are you?’

‘No,’ I assured him. ‘I’m not involved, I’m just…’ Hmm. ‘A friend.’ Nicely non-committal. He didn’t ask whose friend I was.

‘I didn’t,’ Jason said, and broke off, looking around at the car. ‘I wasn’t… I’m just sick of it. Everyone looks at me all the time, no one talks to me. Even my mates just…’

Mates. Well, maybe that part I could help with. ‘Shay French came to see me, a little while ago,’ I said in a low voice. ‘He’s broken up about all this too, you know.’

‘Yeah, I bet. What am I supposed to say to him? Sorry your sister’s dead, mate, I didn’t do it?’

‘Probably couldn’t hurt,’ Ceege said in that reasonable voice.

Jason gave him a wounded look.

‘Shay doesn’t think you did it,’ I said helpfully. ‘He said that, when we talked.’

Jason looked thoughtful. ‘Huh.’ He drank some beer.

‘Seems to me you have two choices,’ I said. ‘You can suck it up and wait for them to start talking crap about someone else, hope the police arrest someone soon so everyone knows you didn’t do it.’ Unless of course he had done it. I didn’t used to be such a suspicious person. Jason’s boyish face and big eyes would have been enough to convince me, once upon a time. His mate’s loyalty for him and belief in him would count for something too.

But I’d been stung by a boyish face before. I didn’t believe in them anymore.

‘Or?’ Jason said, sticking his chin out.

‘Or you leave town, go somewhere else. The world is your oyster.’ French Vanilla Alice had done that, once upon a time. Twice, maybe. I wondered where she was now. I wanted to find her, if only to catch her accomplice and shake him until his teeth rattled for setting off that bloody firework in my kitchen.

I looked pointedly at Jason’s Holden. ‘Those aren’t great options, but they’re both … reasonable, yeah? You don’t need to go looking for any other alternatives. If you need to escape next time, leave town until you can get your head clear. And um. Tell someone where you’re going.’

Jason looked at me. ‘For someone who’s not involved, you talk a lot.’

Ceege snickered, and I smacked him. ‘Hush, you.’

The kid shrugged and wrapped his arms around his knees. ‘I want to wake up and have it all be okay, you know? I really want Anna not to be dead.’

That, I believed. But would a nineteen-year-old really consider driving himself off a cliff because the town thought he killed his girlfriend? Or was there something else going on here?

‘How about we take you back into Flynn,’ I suggested. ‘Ceege could drive your car back, and I’ll drop you home.’

‘I don’t want to see my dad,’ Jason said quickly. ‘I don’t…’ His shoulders dropped. ‘I thought he believed me,’ he said finally. ‘He’s been standing up for me in front of everyone. But he got pissed off this morning and started yelling and … yeah, he’s covering for me. But he still thinks I did it. He thinks I’m capable of hitting her, holding her underwater, I mean what the hell? How could anyone who knows me think I could do that? How could my dad defend me to everyone in town when he thinks I’m some psycho murderer?’

Jason raised his eyes, meeting mine, so earnest it hurt. ‘Annabeth was a real cow sometimes,’ he said clearly. ‘If I was going to lose it and kill her, it would have been when we were first going out. Maybe even in the first few months after she left. But I was … basically immune by the time she came home.’

I should pack this boy up and get him to someone motherly who could feed him soup and make him feel better. There had to be someone other than his dad.

Meanwhile, my inner Xanthippe wanted to know more. Much more. ‘Tell me about when Annabeth came home.’

Jason gave me a look, a darting ‘you’re not fooling anyone’ kind of look. Ceege gave me one to match his, and I shrugged. ‘You don’t have to.’

‘It was about a month ago,’ Jason said, wiping his nose on his sleeve. ‘She turned up and acted like nothing was different. Like I should be grateful. Or something. Because here she was, back for good.’

‘For good?’ I said in surprise. ‘Not just for the holidays?’

‘Nope.’ His voice was dry, and he peered into the bottom of his can. ‘Got another of these?’

I passed him mine, which I’d barely started on. Jason shrugged and knocked some more beer back down his throat.

‘Can I ask a question?’ Ceege asked.

Jason shrugged and opened his arms in one of those whole body shrugs that teenage boys are so good at. ‘Go for it.’

‘Why did the police reckon you did it, when they arrested you?’

‘Apparently breaking up with someone an hour before they get murdered is really suspicious. We had a row — a big one, in the bloody Main Street. About fifty people saw me yelling at her. Everyone knows Anna hangs out at the lake when she’s pissed off, she’s been doing that since she was twelve.’ His face shifted slightly, hollowing out. ‘Only, you know. Past tense.’

I nodded. ‘And why don’t the police think you did it now?’

‘Oh, they do,’ he said sourly. ‘But they don’t have any evidence to pin on me. They can’t link me to the scene. And they can’t find my fucking alibi. Until she turns up, I’m in … limbo.’

I blinked. ‘You have an alibi?’

‘Not if I can’t find her. And because I was a moron I didn’t tell them the first day, not until they started making noise about not letting my dad bail me out. So yeah. Suspicious behavior.’

‘Jason, who’s your alibi?’ I asked him.

He wiped hair out of his eyes, looking exhausted. ‘Alice. I was with Alice.’

I rocked back on my heels, staring at him in shock. ‘Alice? How can you possibly have been with
Alice
?’

‘Who’s Alice?’ asked Ceege, leaning back on the grass.

‘Alice is French Vanilla,’ I said, staring at Jason. ‘The other Annabeth. What the hell?’

Jason was looking … guilty. Supremely guilty. Not of killing anyone, perhaps, but something else. It was all over his face.

‘You knew,’ I said quietly. ‘You knew about the switch with Alice? Is that why you and Annabeth fought, because you’d found out?’

‘Kind of,’ he said, leaning back against the warm metal of the car. ‘Only I hadn’t just found out. I was angry she was still pretending, like … like I was stupid. I found out back in March.’

‘March?’ I repeated. ‘March? But … how did you find out?’ And, more importantly, why had Alice left that part out of her story? Why on earth hadn’t she given Jason his alibi? Especially since it gave her one too.

‘I went to see her. Because I’m an idiot. Annabeth was acting weird, but she kept assuring me she didn’t want to break up. That I could come visit her, or she’d come home a lot. But then she called and she sounded … different. Put me off from visiting, said she was still trying to find a place, then that her flatmates didn’t want male visitors, but wouldn’t explain why. I figured — okay, this is it. I can’t go all year without seeing her, either we’re together or we’re not, so I drove up to Hobart to tell her that — either we’d see each other regularly or I was breaking up with her. And she wasn’t there. Some other girl answered the door, pretending to be Anna.’

‘Alice.’ I stared at him. ‘But you sent those postcards. Like — you still thought Anna was there.’

Jason blushed. I mean, actually blushed, all over his face. ‘They weren’t for Anna, they were for Alice. It was kind of our inside joke. We, um, got to know each other. After a while. She took me for coffee, explained to me what was going on … well, she didn’t tell me the part about Anna’s other bloke, not at first. I figured it out later. But thing is, I got to know Alice, and…’ He looked supremely embarrassed. ‘She was easy to talk to.’

You wouldn’t read about it. Seriously. Well, you would. There are magazines for this sort of story: ‘I fell for my fake girlfriend’.

‘So the girl you were texting all the time and sending flirty postcards to all year — you knew you were romancing Alice, not Annabeth.’

Jason had a look on his face, that was … sheepish and embarrassed and so adorable I wanted to eat him up with a spoon. ‘Yeah,’ he said, fast like he wanted to get it over with.

‘Boys are dumb,’ I told him, just in case he needed a reminder. ‘And this is making my head hurt.’

‘I was mad at Annabeth for lying to me, still trying to make out like we had something,’ Jason said. ‘I mean, what the hell? I didn’t say anything when she first came back, pretending she was on uni holidays and maybe she was going to come back to Flynn for good, but she just kept lying. Finally I lost it — on the Main Street — and you know the rest. But I was irritated, not homicidal. I’d had months to get over it, and I’m kind of into someone else now. Anna didn’t like that. She flounced off and someone else killed her, and I don’t reckon the police are looking for anyone else, they just want to find Alice because they think she won’t be my alibi.’

I was not going to be the one to break it to him that Alice had had a recent opportunity to clear his name, and hadn’t even mentioned him. ‘Come on, let’s get you home,’ I said finally.

Jason tossed his keys to Ceege, and came to sit in the passenger seat of our borrowed ute without too much argument. He looked exhausted. ‘I didn’t kill Anna,’ he said as he strapped himself in.

‘Yeah, I know,’ I said.

The weird thing was, I did. I totally believed him. I’ve been suckered before — suckered beautifully, by someone I’d known a lot longer than this kid. But I believed in Jason Avery’s innocence.

I wasn’t so sure I believed in Alice’s any more. But if Jason said they were together, that meant she had an alibi too. Right?

15

random_scotsman
posts in Sandstone City:

FILM NOIR IN DOWNTOWN FLYNN

A horde of detectives, murderers, blackmailers, hoodlums and dames converged on the small Tasmanian town of Flynn today, shooting an improvised and crowd-sourced film noir short.

Producer Xanthippe Carides (26) told Sandstone City: ‘Darrow’s insane, but I think he might have something here. The resulting film will be short, effective, and unlike anything you’ve ever seen before.’

Director Darrow (31) said: ‘We’re going for style over realism, which is what film noir is all about. I think we’re really going to surprise people.’

The volunteers for
Flynn By Night
are Hobart film and media students, as well the townsfolk themselves. Greg Avery (52), local mayor and the owner of the Avery Grove vineyard and restaurant, as well as several other local businesses said: ‘It’s about time that the people of Hobart realised that there is so much to see and do beyond the more familiar outskirts. Flynn has a lot to offer as a community, and we’re glad to host such an exciting creative project.’

‘So what’s all that shit?’ Jason asked, jerking a thumb towards the clattering mess of props and boards in the flat tray as I drove us along the winding road. ‘You guys a theatre company?’

‘It’s for a film,’ I told him as I made the turn off to Flynn, approaching the town.

‘They’re making a film in Flynn?’

‘I think it’s more of a flashmob with pretensions of grandeur.’ And, holy hell. They’d already started. I slowed as we drew up the Main Street, and found it blocked off.

When Darrow wants something done, it gets done.

‘What the fuck?’ Jason said, mouth hanging open. The boy had a point.

The Main Street of Flynn had been transformed into something that … well, it wasn’t like any film noir set I’d ever seen. It was more like something out of a wacked-out western. People in 1940s costumes ran back and forth across the street, mostly around the Scallop, which had been transformed into The Swell Dame Hotel. The takeaway was now Joe’s Liquor, and the newsagency was Bettie’s House of Sin. The ice cream parlour was Florian’s Dime and Dice. Classy.

There were notices everywhere, addressed to the ‘cast’ and ‘crew’ (and yes I was using those terms pretty damn loosely).

‘Please don costume before entering filming area. Guys wear hats at all time. Dolls, no bare arms or skirts above the knee.’

‘The director reserves the right to mock all fake American accents. Dinkum Aussie is just fine, ta very much.’

‘Are you a private dick, femme fatale, gangster or murder victim? Ask Ms Carides (producer) to make a judgement call, then costume up!’

‘What the hell is going on?’ demanded Jason, stunned at the sight of his town transformed into a bizarre amalgam of Bogart films, possibly constructed by people who had never actually watched one.

‘I think it’s art,’ I said knowledgeably.

Jason muttered some words that I’m pretty sure I didn’t know when I was nineteen.

A gang of media students pounced on the ute almost as soon as I parked, carting away the costumes in one direction, props in another. A couple of blokes in goatees started to unload the set panels.

‘Oi, careful with those,’ said Ceege, who had parked behind me in Jason’s Holden.

‘Yeah, who the hell are you?’ said one of them in a snotty voice.

‘You’re looking at our stage manager,’ said Xanthippe, slapping Ceege’s hand in a matey sort of way as she passed him. ‘Listen to everything he says — unlike the rest of you, I trust him to put up a structure that won’t collapse and kill half our talent. Dude, we need a casino over by the ice cream parlour.’

‘No probs,’ said Ceege. ‘Going to crack out the good hammers for this one.’