Drowned Vanilla (Cafe La Femme Book 2) (8 page)

‘Other bloke?’ I asked, trying not to sound eager.

‘Yeah. She was seeing someone else, last summer. Caught her sneaking in one night, and she admitted it. I felt like a real arsehole for not dobbing to Jase that she was messing him around, but she was going off to uni. I figured they’d split up anyway, when she left.’

Don’t ask me why people tell me things like this. I’ve got used to it over the years, running the café. Customers zero in on me, not Lara or Yui or Nin, and I get their life story, romantic dramas, disturbingly detailed medical information, and blow-by-blow accounts of their most embarrassing experiences.

I guess I have one of those sympathetic faces. And right now, Shay French really needed someone sympathetic.

I wanted to take the poor kid home and feed him. Instead I listened as the frustration sparked out of him.

‘Didn’t break up with him, though, did she? Swanned off to uni, and he kept sending her stupid fucken postcards and texting her, and every time I asked him about it he talked like they had this whole big future together.’

‘Why do you think he sent postcards?’ I asked, when Shay lapsed into an angry silence. Maybe it was a trivial point, but it was something that had bugged me all along. ‘Not exactly private, for love letters. Why not email, or texts?’ Bonus points for not using the word ‘sext’ to the underage boy.

Shay scoffed. ‘They weren’t love letters. How poncy would that be? I reckon he sent them to remind her of home. They were always Flynn postcards — like a few shots of the scenery were going to drag her back from uni and all her fucken dreams and stuff.’

Uni and all her fucken dreams and stuff. But Annabeth hadn’t wanted uni. Or at least, had gone to a lot of trouble to avoid it … so what
had
she been up to? What ‘dreams’ were so important that they were worth that kind of deception?

‘What do you think she was doing this year?’ I asked her brother.

Shay shrugged. ‘What the hell do I know? Off with that guy, I reckon.’

‘Do you know anything about him?’

‘Nah, she never told me his name. I thought he was older, though. She said a couple of things that made me think … I know he had money, she was all giggly about that.’ For a moment his mouth twisted in typical brotherly fashion, sneering about her giggliness, but then I saw the realisation cross his face all over again that she was dead. In that instant, he closed off from me, from the beach, everything. From reality.

‘She was fucken stupid,’ he said finally. ‘But she was my sister. You know?’

‘Yeah,’ I said. We both hovered in silence for a few minutes, staring out at the water. ‘What’s your favourite ice cream?’ I asked finally.

Shay looked at me like I was nuts. ‘Butterscotch.’

Ooh, butterscotch. I could practically hear the recipe assembling itself in my brain. ‘Come on,’ I said. ‘Let’s go back to my place, and I’ll see what I can do about that.’

I was tempted to start out by making fresh butterscotch brickle, then smashing it to bits and stirring it into the ice cream, but that felt like cheating. Instead, I made a basic sauce with butter and brown sugar, to stir through par-frozen vanilla custard. Vanilla was good for that, at least. It could provide contrast for the real flavours that deserved to be there. Like the silence between chords.

There was supposed to be vanilla essence in the sauce, but I left it out. Why do so many recipes tell you to add vanilla when they don’t want it to taste of vanilla? Anyone would think they were trying to wipe out the world’s supply.

Now, there’s an idea.

Shay sat on a stool and watched me with a look of bemusement on his face, as if he’d never seen anyone cook before, let alone invent an ice cream recipe right in front of him.

‘Tell me about the vineyard,’ I suggested as I stirred the slowly thickening butterscotch sauce. Possibly I had overdone the butter. Possibly the sauce needed real scotch to save it. Mmm, scotchy butter. Christmas was coming, and that would be a good time for scotch-related experiments. Rum sauce gelato, brandy butter sorbet… ‘Jason’s family own it, is that right? You work there, and Annabeth used to as well?’

‘Everyone in town works there sooner or later,’ said Shay. ‘Jase’s dad is rolling in it. He’s a good bloke, Jase’s dad. Anna used to work in the restaurant, but it’s closed this year for renovations. That’s why she took on shifts at the Scallop when she came back to Flynn in the holidays.’

Jase’s dad. That would be Greg Avery (48), local businessman and councillor who had made curt statements about his son’s innocence to the papers.

‘I don’t work there,’ Shay added. ‘Not really. I help out sometimes. They’ve got proper contractors in to do the remodelling. Greg’s got big plans,’ he added, with an odd degree of pride in his voice, for talking about someone else’s dad. ‘He’s taking the town places. Not just Avery Grove, either. Last summer he bought up a whole stretch of shops in town, remodelled them to get decent tenants in. They’ve been a bit slow to fill, but Greg says by next summer, we’ll be a café latté town like Cygnet. Better than them ’cause of not filling every fucken shop with an art gallery.’

‘Café latté town’ didn’t sound like a phrase that a seventeen-year-old kid would come up with on his own.

‘Flynn seemed like a nice place,’ I said, remembering the friendly ice cream parlour. I wasn’t sure I was convinced about the café latté part, though. As far as I could see, everyone in town ate at the pub or the takeaway. They’d need a lot more work before they achieved trendsetter status, and there was a lot of competition for the tourists these days.

‘Yeah,’ said Shay. ‘Greg says it’s great that young blokes like me and Jase want to stick around town, help keep the place alive instead of jumping ship to the mainland like everyone else.’

Shay could seriously benefit from jumping ship to the mainland for a few years. Was he really going to spend the rest of his life mooching around Flynn? I was the last person to disparage serving latté as a living, but I wouldn’t go around telling a seventeen-year-old it was the pinnacle he could achieve in his life. Not unless he owned the damned coffee machine, anyway.

‘What’s Jason’s Mum doing?’ I asked. ‘While Greg Avery is transforming Flynn.’

Shay eyed my custard mix like he hadn’t eaten in a week, despite the fact that I had thrown two bacon sandwiches and half a cold quiche down his throat since we got back from our beach walk. I found him a spoon so he could taste it.

‘Cheers,’ he said, digging in. ‘Jase’s Mum shot through years ago. Greg married Pippa last summer — she’s a bit nuts, but cool. Into all this hippie shit, you know, but wicked smart. She’s been pushing the council for us to get an online centre, and she did great things with the Avery Grove website.’

‘How does Jason get on with Pippa?’

‘You mean apart from getting into a fight with two guys who reckoned they saw her sunbathing topless?’ Shay had a touch of that spark back, as he grinned. ‘Wouldn’t have minded seeing that myself. Don’t tell Jase, but his stepmum’s way hot.’

‘No more sugar for you,’ I said firmly, confiscating his spoon. ‘So how’s Jason doing now? With everything that’s happened.’

‘The police never charged him,’ Shay said sourly. ‘Held him for questioning as long as they could, but they didn’t have enough evidence to arrest him.’ That part at least I knew from the newspapers and Stewart. ‘I went up there the other day and he couldn’t even look me in the eye. Told him I knew he hadn’t done it, but…’ He shrugged again. Poor kid was all shrug.

‘Why did you come to see me?’ I asked finally. It was a long way to come for curiosity, for pouring your words out to a stranger.

Shay didn’t say anything for a while, watching as I poured the ice cream mix into a metal tub for freezing. ‘Want it to make sense, you know? You didn’t make sense.’

‘I rarely do,’ I admitted.

‘Nah,’ he said with a grin. ‘Now I’ve met you and all. You’re all right. Don’t know why you care, but it’s good someone does, you know?’

I gave him the spoon back, so he could scrape the bowl out. ‘Yeah.’

I did care, damn it. That meant it was time to get more involved. And that meant…

Time to square things with the person I couldn’t even admit I’d been avoiding.

9

Gingerbread House Forums Q&A, cont.

Vampsparkle8829:
French_vanilla, how did you join The Gingerbread House?

French_vanilla:
Actually, I answered an ad too — though the one I answered was a bit different, I imagine!

Gingernutz:
Wanted, extra person to live inside a web peep show. Must be willing to take top off in front of 50,000 people and do own laundry.

French_vanilla:
You know, I remember you being more subtle than that…

Cherry_ripe:
hee, it was something like ‘broke, need somewhere to live, amazingly open-minded? Call this number, girls only.’

French_vanilla:
What can I say, it spoke to me.

Gingerbutz:
It was great, we interviewed twelve people, and they all had so many questions. Vanilla just wanted to know — can I keep my cardy on.

Cherry_ripe:
We said yes you can, and the rest is history.

At noon the next day, I kidnapped my plain clothed non-boyfriend from under the nose of the entire Hobart police service. No one seemed particularly alarmed. I miss my days of being a suspicious character.

Who am I kidding? I was never all that suspicious. Once you feed a police officer, they’re yours for life. In my case, multiply that by several hundred. If I ever wanted to go into organised crime, I could own this town with three dozen peanut butter cookies and a well-timed spit roast.

‘You cooked for me?’ said Bishop, as I dragged him down on the grass in St David’s Park, and repeatedly smacked his hands to keep them away from the picnic basket. ‘Usually I’m hard pressed to get a cheese sandwich out of you.’

‘Lies, such lies,’ I said in my best hard-done by voice, opening the basket and laying out the cloth. We hadn’t seen much of each other lately. And it was true that after a long day in the café, I was more likely to beg him to make me an omelette than to produce something awe-inspiringly domestic for him.

It wasn’t like I went around demanding he do police work for me on his days off, was it?

Okay, maybe that’s a bad example.

I had cooked a chicken stuffed with herbed potatoes, and padded it around in the basket with cheese scones, cold bean salad (for me, since Bishop is as bad as the rest of his police buddies when it comes to greenery) and a bag of fresh cherries from my favourite farm.

Bishop raised his eyes at the spread. ‘This is you working up to telling me you murdered someone and hid the body, right?’

I handed him the butter knife, and smiled. ‘Just don’t ask what’s in the gourmet sausage rolls.’

‘If there is beer in that basket, I may have to propose.’

I handed him a bottle. ‘Don’t get grass stains on your knees.’

It’s hard to talk to boys when they are eating. Well, not hard if you have something to say and you want to rattle it out while they’re chewing. But most of the things I could make conversation about today were … things I wanted to avoid talking about. So mostly I watched him eat.

‘You realise how alarming the silence is, right?’ he said after a while, eyes dark on mine.

‘Maybe I’m enjoying the quiet romantic moment,’ I said. Innocent face, innocent face.

He brandished a piece of chicken at me, and then bit into it. ‘Tabitha … we’re either going to talk about this or we’re not. But please don’t assume I’m stupid.’

‘Honestly not something I ever assumed,’ I said wistfully. Oh, for a stupid sexy man in my life. That would be so convenient.

He leaned back, still gnawing on the chicken. ‘Let me tell you, then. We can start with how you and my sister got yourself roped in to look for a missing person rather than report said missing person to the police.’

‘They did report her,’ I said huffily. ‘Helping to look was part of convincing the girls at The Gingerbread House to do that. Which they did, thanks to me, you’re welcome.’

Bishop grinned and shook his head. ‘You do realise that every word you said within that house was recorded, right? I know exactly what happened.’

I stared. ‘You watch The Gingerbread House?’ My eyes narrowed. ‘You’re a subscriber? Those girls take their tops off, you know. I don’t think I approve.’

‘And while we are at it, you can let my sister know that I’d appreciate a heads up next time she’s going to flash the internet? So I can leave the country.’

‘You can’t outrun the internet,’ I said sagely, chewing on cold beans. Mmmm. Olive oil dressing. Sesame seeds. Yummy. ‘What else have we been up to that you already know about?’

Bishop gave me a look. ‘This isn’t me lecturing you about getting involved in police business, in case you hadn’t noticed. I’m actually impressed at how hard you’ve been working to avoid it.’

‘Which you know because you have been spying on me…’

‘I don’t have to spy on you. You’re Tabitha, and everyone I work with knows you. Regardless of whether or not I get to use the word ‘girlfriend’, every officer I work with does tend to pass the Tabitha-related gossip in my general direction. I figured out you were involved in this French Vanilla thing pretty early … though not as involved as Xanthippe.’

‘You will note that my boobs did not appear in the footage,’ I said with some degree of pride.

‘I appreciated that, yes. Very restrained of you.’

Hmm, no mention of Shay French. Did Bishop’s all-seeing eyes not extend to my recent entertaining of teenage relatives of murder victims?

‘What are your thoughts on butterscotch ice cream?’ I asked him now.

Shay had crashed on our couch to the soothing sound of Ceege typing at people about a whole different class of internet smut, but was gone the next morning. That left me with a huge quantity of butterscotch ice cream. I could serve it in the café, of course, but I wasn’t one hundred percent happy with the texture.