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

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