Drowned Vanilla (Cafe La Femme Book 2) Read Online Free PDF Page B

‘Stewart?’
    ‘All right, Tabitha.’
    Well, this was awkward. I pulled the doona up to cover my breasts, not looking at Bishop. ‘What’s up?’ I said into the phone.
    ‘Ye haftae read the paper,’ said Stewart, and there was something in his voice that made me realise there was more going on there than a massively embarrassing moment between the men in my life.
    ‘What’s happened?’ My stomach pinged with anxiety as he paused far too long before answering.
    ‘Just read it, and get back tae me.’
     
     
    Xanthippe was in our kitchen, putting on the coffee. Ceege was at the table, drinking his ‘just this one and then I crash into bed’ early morning beer. They both looked at me.
    ‘What?’ I glanced at the paper, which was folded on the table. ‘Everyone is weird today.’
    I didn’t want to unfold it. Not with the ‘we don’t want to be the ones to tell you’ vibe. I should have just read it on my phone from bed. But peer pressure is like a bravery pill. Or something.
    I flipped open the paper, and read about a nineteen-year-old girl who had been found drowned in Lake Serenity in the town of Flynn yesterday evening. She had been identified as Annabeth French, and her boyfriend Jason Avery had been arrested for her murder.
    ‘Oh,’ I said faintly.
    ‘Yep,’ said Xanthippe.
    ‘Is that all you have to say?’
    She gave me a long, measuring look. ‘Yep.’
    I looked at the paper again. ‘Oh boy. Do you think having a conversation with a murder victim a few hours before her death is … something that I should tell someone about?’
    ‘Depends,’ said Xanthippe. ‘How much do you want to lie to your boyfriend?’
    ‘Really a lot right now,’ I said, eyes on the shiny picture of Annabeth on the front page. ‘Might be hard to explain.’
    ‘Always is,’ said Xanthippe, who had a long history of explain-ing the inexplicable to Bishop. What with being his half-sister.
    ‘And he’s not my boyfriend,’ I added automatically.
    ‘Tell it to the judge.’
    Bishop strolled into the kitchen, hair damp from the shower, still buttoning up his shirt.
    ‘My eyes!’ Xanthippe complained. ‘Keep your pectorals to yourself, Leo. Some of us are related to you and choose not to know about your sex life.’
    Bishop laughed, and leaned down to kiss me. I kissed back, trying not to look too distracted. ‘Got to get in to the station,’ he said to me.
    ‘Mm, I’m running late. Nin will kill me.’
    ‘No, she’ll blame me,’ he corrected. ‘Last time I made you late she came after me with a rolling pin.’
    ‘You know you love the attention.’
    I waited until he was gone, then turned my guilty expression in Xanthippe’s general direction. ‘I’ll tell him later.’
    ‘Uh huh.’
    ‘If the subject comes up. Specifically.’
    I went to work. Just another day of serving up coffee and macarons, and trying to find a viable alternative to hollandaise sauce now that Hobart is finally over the Great Hollandaise Sauce Frenzy of the early 21st Century.
    The good thing about working a café is that if you need to not think, there’s always something to keep you busy. Lara and Yui were both freaked out about Annabeth, but it turned out that neither of them knew her that well, it was just the fact of her death that had knocked them off their socks.
    Nineteen years old. Yeah. That was quite a fact.
    Every time someone mentioned her, I announced a kitchen emergency and walked away from them. Eventually they got the message. Tabitha Darling was not at home to conversations about dead girls. Not even on her tea break.
    It shouldn’t have got to me as much as it did. Right? I barely knew Annabeth. We’d had one conversation, and we hadn’t exactly clicked.
    Stewart dropped in a few times — he was back working in the office a floor above the café, and this had been our normal routine back before he pulled his disappearing act. I would have relished the normality of it, if not for the fact that he