Drowned Vanilla (Cafe La Femme Book 2) (5 page)

‘She’s nae dead.’

Okay, that I wasn’t expecting. ‘Come again?’

‘The dead girl in the lake wasnae French Vanilla,’ Stewart said simply.

Well, fuck.

5

Welcome to The Gingerbread House!

Come on in to join the sweet, sweet fun. You can catch our girls,
Ginger
,
Cherry
and
Vanilla
, over at the
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To catch up on the story so far, check out our
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, our
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and our
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.

Grab an ID and come hang out with the Gingerbread Girls or other fans on the
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We always love to hear from our fans.

‘You realise you sound ridiculous,’ I said to Stewart, which was something of a relief. Usually I’m the one who sounds ridiculous.

‘Check out the site, Tabitha,’ said Stewart. ‘I’m lookin’ at it right now, and there is nae way that French Vanilla is the same girl they pulled from the lake.’

I blinked. ‘So which one did I talk to?’

‘Ye tell me.’

I was already moving to Ceege, tugging on his T-shirt sleeve. ‘Budge up, I need to use my ten minutes a day computer time!’

‘I can’t log off now,’ he protested. ‘I have literally tens of people waiting for the new chapter of my Captain America fanfic.’

‘And they’ll appreciate it all the more if they have to wait a little longer for it.’

He glared, and did some rapid typing. ‘What do you need it for, anyway?’

‘I need to look at webcam footage of topless girls.’

Ceege moved out of the chair so fast I think I was hit by a sonic wave. Either that, or nacho crumbs. ‘I am completely okay with that.’

‘Why, thank you.’

I put Stewart on speaker phone and sat down, typing in the address he read aloud to me. The Gingerbread House. Cute. In a disturbing kind of way. The home page that blinked up displayed a cartoon gingerbread house with the various options displayed in windows — Chat, Archives, Hot Hits, Profiles, Forums and of course the veiled promise of Subscriber Only.

‘Check out Profiles,’ Stewart said through the phone speaker, and I clicked over to images of Gingernutz (away from the cameras we had been told her real name was Libby), Cherry_ripe (Melinda) and a sweet looking blonde girl calling herself French Vanilla.

‘Bloody hell.’

‘Nae the same girl, is it?’

‘Ceege, get me the paper from the kitchen.’

‘What did your last slave sue you for?’

‘Ceege!’

My lazy-arse housemate muttered under his breath but went hunting for the paper. He really didn’t need to. ‘No,’ I said into the phone. ‘Really not the same girl.’

‘Should I come o’er?’

If I hesitated — and let’s be clear on this, I did hesitate — it was because solving mysteries has not been a healthy life choice for me in the past, and had nothing to do with how there was this giant ‘we kissed, and I got together with someone else, and you vanished for half a year’ hole in our friendship right now.

‘Of course,’ I said, cheerfully enough that we could both pretend there hadn’t been a really awkward pause.

Deniability is a wonderful thing.

Xanthippe came home late. I don’t know where she goes — I imagine her posing gorgeously in nightclubs too cool for anyone else to have ever heard about, drinking cocktails that haven’t been invented yet, that sort of thing. Either that, or she works nights as a security guard somewhere.

She walked in on me as I was in the middle of throwing raw vegetable sticks at two of the men in my life. ‘I made dipping sauces!’ I yelled at them.

‘Vegetables, Tabs,’ Ceege complained. ‘We’re men, we need meat. Or at least bacon. But if bacon, also cheese and grease.’

‘Xanthippe,’ Stewart yelped as I pelted him with slivers of carrot. ‘Vote fer pizza! We want pizza.’

She leaned over the kitchen table and picked a piece of celery off his shoulder, biting into it. ‘Tish, let the boys order pizza. You know they’ll eat the vegetables while they’re waiting anyway. It’s a win win situation.’

I sulked, but took the phone out of my bra and relinquished it to Ceege.

‘Classy,’ Xanthippe noted. ‘So what did I miss?’

‘A mystery,’ I said as Ceege started ordering far more pizza than four ordinary sized people should ever hope to eat. ‘Again. Apparently it’s what we do now.’

‘Sounds promising.’

‘The girl who went missing from The Gingerbread House wasnae Annabeth French,’ Stewart said. ‘Annabeth French wasnae French Vanilla.’

‘Right,’ said Xanthippe, sitting on the kitchen counter, because she can’t just use a chair like a normal person. ‘That’s unexpected.’

‘It means our missing girl is still missing,’ I agreed. ‘For some reason, French Vanilla was pretending to be Annabeth French from Flynn.’ I thought about it some more. ‘Annabeth must have been in on it. She pretended to know what I was talking about, when I asked her about Ginger and Melinda. So she has to have known about it.’

This was bad. Really bad. I had thought I was so clever, going to bed safe in the knowledge that I hadn’t done anything wrong — sure, I’d gone haring across country to search for a missing person on very little provocation, but it had been a red herring, no one was missing, and the world was a right and proper place.

But the world wasn’t a right and proper place any more. French Vanilla was still missing, whoever she was, and the person whose name she had borrowed was drowned in a lake only a few hours after I talked to her.

I was starting to get the feeling I was living inside a Hitchcock movie. Did that mean I needed to bleach my hair a few shades blonder?

Ceege looked from one to the other of us. It was rare that anything happening in this house was interesting enough to drag him out of his cozy gaming-and-fanfic post-breakup world. ‘So what are you going to do?’

‘Stewart’s going to blog about it, and Tabitha’s going to agonise about what she does and doesn’t tell her boyfriend, right up to the point where her boyfriend reads Stewart’s blog and has a blazing row with her about it,’ said Xanthippe. Fair call, really. Apart from Bishop not being my boyfriend, but I’d given up with her on that point. She stood up, striking a heroic stance, all righteous and dramatic. ‘Meanwhile, I’m going to find French Vanilla.’

‘How are you going to do that?’ I asked her. ‘We don’t even know who she is.’

‘No,’ said Xanthippe. ‘But I think Libby and Melinda — or Ginger and Cherry or whatever they want to call themselves — know more than they are saying.’

‘So what can we do?’ I asked, hoping she could come up with something that sounded vaguely comforting. ‘If Vanilla’s still missing, and there’s a connection to the murder inquiry, we need to tell the police. Before they hear about it on Stewart’s blog.’

Not telling Bishop was starting to loom large and problematic in my head. Last time something like this had happened, I kept information from him longer than I should have done — okay, he hadn’t made it that easy for me to confide in him, and he completely didn’t believe me when I did confess all, but still. It was my bad.

This time around, it was worse, because we were kind of sort of (well okay, completely) an item, and I didn’t want to screw things up irretrievably.

‘No,’ said Stewart in his low burr. ‘Ginger and Melinda need to tell the police. We cannae be involved in that part. It isnae our business.’

‘So what we need to do is persuade them,’ said Xanthippe. She looked at me. Pointedly.

I sighed. ‘Does my niche really cover that too?’

‘Talking people into stuff has always been your superpower.’

For this visit, both women kept their tops on, which helped with the seriousness of the situation. Melinda had to keep getting up to run to the loo to wee or throw up in that pregnant lady way of hers, which broke the conversation up whenever it felt like we were getting somewhere.

‘It’s nerves,’ she said when she returned for the eighth time. ‘Sorry. I just can’t stop thinking about Anna — or whoever she was.’

‘Why would someone lie about being someone else?’ Ginger said, not for the first time. ‘I don’t get it.’

‘It does seem odd,’ Xanthippe agreed. ‘There are a lot of reasons why someone might want to pretend to be someone else … but if she wanted to hide, putting her own face on the internet on a daily basis wasn’t the smoothest plan.’

‘Maybe Anna was the one hiding,’ I said. ‘I mean, the real Anna.’ The one who had been alive yesterday, and now wasn’t.

‘How can we report someone missing if we don’t know who she was?’ Ginger said in frustration.

Xanthippe and I looked at each other. ‘We could find out who she was,’ Xanthippe said with a gleam in her eye.

Melinda and Ginger did not know her well enough to know what that gleam meant, but I did. ‘We’re going to need to look in her room,’ I said.

Why yes, I am a nosy person.

You can tell a lot about a person from their bedroom. French Vanilla (I couldn’t call her Annabeth, just about the only fact we knew about this girl was that she wasn’t Annabeth French) kept a tidy personal space, with a real patchwork quilt thrown over the top of her bed, piles of uni books on a shelf, and a laptop on the desk. A stack of postcards were neatly piled up beside her desk, a rubber band holding them in place.

‘Hey,’ I said thoughtfully, sitting on the bed and picking up a psychology textbook. ‘Melinda said she was a student. How does that work? Did she steal Annabeth’s identity to attend university in her name? What would be the benefit of that?’

Xanthippe nodded, already opening the laptop. ‘Maybe she was paid to do it. Annabeth’s dumb at exams, pays someone else to do uni for her, literally buys herself a degree.’

‘So hard to pull off,’ I argued. ‘I mean — so much paperwork. Was she getting Centrelink payments too? That’s major fraud.’

‘Let’s just see, shall we?’ Xanthippe made a cursory inspection of the desktop. ‘This is tidy too. Neat sort of person.’

‘You’re neat, that doesn’t mean you’re hiding a big secret.’ Or did it? I wouldn’t put it past Xanthippe.

‘Tabitha, if you don’t want to be here…’

‘I do,’ I said indignantly. ‘I can snoop with the best of them. No conscience here, I am all about the random invasions of privacy.’ I eyed the wardrobe, but that felt a bit too randomly invasive.

‘Bags postcards,’ I decided, snatching the bundle. Postcards were good. Anyone could read a postcard, it was hardly an ethical issue at all. Postcards practically begged to be read by complete strangers.

‘They’re from Jason,’ I reported a little while later, after flipping through several. ‘Well, we knew that. Melinda told us…’

‘I don’t know that I believe a word those two say,’ said Xanthippe. ‘They’re too nice. I don’t trust nice people.’

‘I’m nice,’ I pouted.

‘No, Tabitha, you just smile a lot because you sell more coffee that way. Deep down, you’re as cynical and broken as the rest of us.’

Hmm, interesting point. I wasn’t sure if I agreed with her, but we weren’t here to debate my personality. I kept reading the postcards. ‘He definitely thought Annabeth was living here. Asks her to give up uni — she knows she’s going to hate it, why doesn’t she just come home … ooh.’

Wow. I almost never blushed, but this was… ‘Okay, who writes stuff that personal on a postcard?’

‘Is it smutty?’

‘It’s past suggestive and heading towards smutty. Teenagers these days! Can’t they just sext like normal people?’

‘Good for Jason,’ she said, and then I saw her expression change as she recalled that Jason had been arrested for Annabeth’s murder, back in Flynn. ‘Oh, crap.’

I looked down at the postcards. ‘I shouldn’t have touched these, should I? I mean, they’re evidence. The police can — fingerprints, and…’ Fuck. Bishop was not going to be pleased. ‘We really need to get out of here.’

‘Hang on,’ said Xanthippe, producing a memory stick. ‘Just let me copy these files.’

‘Oh, you’re so not.’

‘I want to find French Vanilla, don’t you?’ A few minutes later she shut the computer down, pocketing the memory stick again. ‘I have no problem with turning all this over to the police, but that doesn’t mean I can’t have my own investigation.’

‘You hate working in a café, don’t you?’ I accused.

Xanthippe nodded solemnly. ‘I have developed a phobia of sugar packets. It’s time for a new challenge.’

‘Private detective?’

‘If the awesomely retro fedora hat fits…’

6

random_scotsman
posts in Sandstone City:

WHO IS FRENCH VANILLA?

One week ago, Annabeth French (19) from
Flynn
, Tasmania was found dead in a lake near her family home. Annabeth’s family say she was a bright, happy girl who had been enjoying her holidays from university. Annabeth’s boyfriend, Jason Avery was arrested in connection to her death, but was later released without charge. The police are not ruling out death by misadventure.

But questions remain about the life and death of Annabeth French. While her family believed her to be spending the year in Hobart, studying Arts/Law, the
University of Tasmania
has no evidence of her enrolment. More crucially, Annabeth gave her address to her family and boyfriend as a residence now known to be the infamous live webcam site
The Gingerbread House
. The quiet blonde Gingerbread Girl known as french_vanilla was not Annabeth French, though this was the name her housemates knew her by.

French_vanilla herself went missing from The Gingerbread House on December 5th, twelve hours before Annabeth French was killed. The police are publicly advertising for anyone knowing the whereabouts or identity of french_vanilla. Neither the Missing Persons Unit nor the team responsible for investigating the death of Annabeth French has confirmed whether they believe the anonymous french_vanilla is Annabeth’s fellow victim, or her killer.