Drowned Vanilla (Cafe La Femme Book 2) by Livia Day Read Free Book Online Page A

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.
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    My ice cream-making experiments, on the whole, were a lot more successful than my mystery solving. I made one batch every night, served it up via the Specials Board the next day, and sold it until we ran out.
    Ginger honeydew, lime green tea, triple salted caramel and cherry cheesecake were all super popular. I never quite got evil enough to serve up the raspberry vinaigrette, though I did manage to pull off wasabi avocado. Well, opinions were divided as to whether I pulled it off, but I feel pretty secure about it.
    I still hadn’t perfected the vanilla. Which was annoying, because everyone kept requesting it. I had put up a Tabitha’s Ice Cream suggestion box: vanilla, french vanilla and vanilla bean were the ones that turned up most often. They weren’t even in Xanthippe’s handwriting, which cannot be said for many of the other suggestions, including ‘screwdriver’ and ‘crunchy frog.’
    Vanilla was hard.
    ‘Why’s it French Vanilla anyway?’ Stewart asked one quiet evening at my place. I came home from a long day at the café to find him playing MarioKart with Ceege. Then, after Ceege fell asleep on the couch because he’d pulled three all nighters in a row, Stewart came into the kitchen and sorted the suggestion slips for me while I made a batch of lemon meringue gelato.
    I was pretending I hadn’t noticed that Stewart had slipped in three extras that all read ‘triple espresso, hold the ice cream’. ‘Is there something particularly French about vanilla?’ he went on. ‘Or is it a thing that fancy ice cream makers say tae make it sound less boring?’
    ‘That’s what I always thought,’ I said. ‘Before I started researching it. It’s America’s fault.’
    ‘Doesnae surprise me in the least.’
    ‘All these fancypants people in Philadelphia became obsessed with ice cream, and hired French chefs to make it for them. Thomas Jefferson imported the vanilla from Paris during the French Revolution rather than getting it directly from Mexico or the Caribbean like a sane person. They called it French for snobby reasons. Also to distinguish between French ice cream which had egg in it, and Philadelphia ice cream, which didn’t.’
    Stewart grinned at her. ‘Yer like an encyclopedia of dessert.’
    ‘I’ve been called worse.’
    I’ll admit the trouble with me creating the perfect vanilla ice cream was that, despite all my deep and committed research, I still couldn’t buy the concept that vanilla was interesting.
    The story of vanilla was fascinating. Pirates and smugglers and slaves and orchids — brilliant stuff. Worthy of a good old bodice-ripping adventure story.
    But the flavour itself bored the pants off me. Every time I started on vanilla I’d get the itch to