He cocked his head to the side before saying soberly, “Good luck with de new job, sweet girl. This life ain’t for everybody.” Behind the closed door, the rotary phone rang with a muffled jangle like it was underwater.
Clifford screwed the cap on the jar and raised an eyebrow at her. “That phone like de Grim Reaper he-self. I suggest you answer it.”
Eileen spun around and rushed to her desk. She lifted the black rotary phone’s receiver, her pen poised over a notepad as Clifford came into the room behind her while wiping his hands on a clean cloth. He was impassive as he watched the colour drain from her face. He waited until she’d hung up and asked, “Where am I headed?”
Eileen stared back at him, her fingers and face numb with shock. “Huxley.”
Chapter 2
Unsweetened
The month of May might have been rolling to a close, but the harvest season was in full swing. Every factory buzzed with activity as Bedford trucks rolled in, their cargo beds stuffed with fat stalks of sugar cane. Managers paced in front of chalkboards filled with quotas and yields that haunted them at night. A sick engineer or broken down truck brought out cold sweats and ulcer pills. But sometimes, these mundane obstacles paled in comparison to life’s more grisly problems.
Such was the case when a short, slim manager with a balding pate, named Herman Walkes, pulled out what was left of his hair after he got the disturbing news. Walkes slammed a red helmet onto his head, stormed across the yard and into the factory. He marched past the massive roller where the aroma of pressed cane juice wafted into the air, past the boilers, and into the engine room where the scent of molasses gave way to the stench of engine grease. Behind the heavy iron door, a small crowd gathered next to the controls. They looked up in unison as Walkes threw up his hands and huffed, “What the ass happen now?”
Gibson, the line supervisor, stepped forward. He clutched his clipboard and said, “Well… I loaded the cane on the belt and everything start moving down the line. I ain't see nothing funny ’til John shout that something catch up in the number three press and tell me to stop it. I hit the override the same time.” Sweat beaded on Gibson’s top lip, and he shuffled his feet as he glanced at the press from the corner of his eye. “Then I see something on the belt.”
Walkes squinted at Gibson. He’d barely heard him over the puffing and squealing of the machinery, but the story made no sense. His irritation grew as Gibson spoke again.
“So I call you because you is the man in charge.”
“Gibson, stop talking all over your face. Show me the problem!”
The tall, stocky man pointed at the belt leading to the cane crusher’s heavy iron teeth. There, intertwined among the tangle of canes, was a woman’s bent leg under the hem of a yellow dress.
Walkes stepped gingerly toward the body, the engine’s clanking and wheezing fading around him as though he’d fallen headlong into an alternate reality. A light breeze swept through the vent shaft and across the conveyor belt, fluttering the woman’s dress and making his heart skip a beat. After a few seconds, sure that the young lady would never move again, he fainted.
By the time Walkes came to, his head throbbing from the generous bump on his noggin, production at Huxley Sugar Factory had been ground to a halt and the police had been summoned. Every piece of machinery was silenced, their motors put to rest as the plant was declared a crime scene and investigations began. Walkes gave his statement to an officer, conveniently leaving out the time he’d spent sprawled on the floor. He shouted every word of his account, his mind unable to reconcile the fact that Huxley was quiet for the first cane season in over thirty years.
Police milled about in the yard, questioning workers as investigators with gloved hands collected anything that might be connected to the woman’s discovery. Photojournalists wiggled camera lenses between rusty chain links, searching out the best angles to capture the unfolding saga on film and guarantee healthy newspaper sales the next day.
The funeral home’s unmarked van arrived and removed the body around noon. Just down the road in a freshly cut field, uniformed officers combed through rotting heaps of cane trash for clues, a more daunting task than searching for a needle in a haystack.
It was the second body discovered in a cane field that year, both of them young women who had gone missing shortly before their bodies had turned up. The first victim, Anna Brown, had disappeared one sunny Thursday morning after she’d waved goodbye to her neighbour and said she would return later that day. But it was not to be. The neighbour promptly went into labour and delivered a bouncing baby boy the next morning. She didn’t notice that Anna hadn’t returned until days later when the phone in the apartment above kept ringing and waking her newborn.
That murder had perplexed the public for days before being swallowed up by the news cycle. Anna had been relegated to the annals of history until the discovery at Huxley. Now Anna’s name was being dusted off, and new life breathed into her murder case. Word spread like wildfire that another body had been found, renewing the public’s thinly veiled zeal for mystery and intrigue.
Eileen had expected Clifford to return with a sad face and drooped shoulders when he came back around closing time, but his lope was as measured as it was when he left. Clifford seemed to sense Eileen’s nerves; he smiled at her, but his face sobered when he looked across at Holden. Clifford flicked his eyes to the right and went into the viewing room. Holden took the hint and followed, closing the door softly behind him.
Eileen eased her chair as near to the door as she could, a manila folder and hole punch on her lap as a plausible excuse in the event she was caught eavesdropping.
“Before I forget, your boy was there today,” chuckled Clifford.
“Oh, was he now? I imagine he’s not too pleased that we got the body and he didn’t.”
“It’s a bloody shame, ain’t it?” Clifford said mockingly. “I think what really annoyed him was that Derricks sent Wilson with me so I could get to the morgue faster. You know how that kinda thing gets his dander up.”
“The commissioner sent an outrider? Why?”
“Told me not to say anything, but I gonna tell you; Derricks scheduled a press conference tonight on de seven o’clock TV news.”
Holden’s words were low and urgent. Eileen held her breath and pressed her ear against the door, straining to hear his voice as he asked, “Clifford, what are you telling me?”
Clifford’s disgust was evident as he said, “Boss, something ain’t right.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning that I was doing this for long enough to know when to get worried and right now I worried because…”
The phone rang, startling Eileen and making her curse as she rolled her chair to the desk to snatch the receiver. She gave the person directions to the funeral home as quickly as she could, rolling her eyes every time he misspelt ‘Buckworth Street’. By the time she’d hung up, Holden and Clifford were coming out of the room and neither of them said much as they closed the building for the day. Eileen sighed. She’d have to watch the evening news to learn more.
At the supermarket, women bent their heads together and complained bitterly about insecure men who preferred to take the lives of innocent females instead of improving themselves. The gas attendant who filled Eileen’s tank talked animatedly to her co-worker, both of them exchanging snippets of conversation and shocked gasps. The roar of traffic at the nearby intersection drowned out much of what they said, but she caught the words “sugar factory” and knew that word had begun to spread. On an island with just over a quarter of a million people, bad news spread quicker than cheap margarine.
But nowhere was the furor of the gossip more robust than in the rum shops. As Eileen drove down the unpaved road toward her apartment building, she couldn’t miss the crowd that spilt out of the doors as everyone exchanged rumours over glasses of rum and coke.
Eileen let herself into her apartment and raced to turn the TV's knob. The ending of the news intro fl
ashed across the screen and she heaved a sigh. She was just in time. She stood in front of the television set, her dusty shoes still on her feet and her eyes glued to the screen. The television anchor outlined the grim details of the discovery as a montage of images appeared: the sugar factory's exterior, a photo of a smiling young woman, and her grief-stricken relatives huddled outside Huxley's gate. The newscaster’s disembodied voice identified the young woman as Lydia James before the screen switched to live footage of Hugh Derricks, the new police commissioner. Derricks shuffled his papers as he greeted viewers and then cleared his throat and fixed his gaze on the prepared statement in front of him.
“Today at nine o’clock members of the Police Force were summoned to Huxley Sugar Factory to investigate the discovery of a deceased female. She has been identified as seventeen-year-old Lydia James of Number Eight, Wicklow Gardens. Given the evidence, we are treating this as an unnatural death.”
He went on, “The Police Force has reason to believe that this death is connected to that of twenty-two-year-old Anna Brown who was discovered in March in Marrilow Fields and Nora Edwards of Morris Hall who was found at the Golden Greens Golf Course last year. Although the victims are not known to each other, it is believed that these murders are being perpetrated by a single individual.
Across the country, from plush living rooms in the heights and terraces to tight tenantry homes in rural lanes, fathers bolted doors and mothers slammed sash windows as telephones rang. Sadness turned to confusion and every Barbadian’s blood ran cold.
For the first time in the island’s history, a serial killer was on the loose.
Chapter 3
The Slasher
A country’s vitals can be taken with its news headlines and Barbados’ pulse was palpitating at an unprecedented rate. ‘Serial Killer Strikes!’ screamed the next morning’s headline. ‘Cane Slasher!’ read another in thick black letters, a reference to the slash and burn method used to kill off crops. The media painted the killer as a sinister loner who lurked among darkened fields and preyed on random women. As the day progressed, the moniker was shortened to ‘Slasher’. It stuck.
Rumours and supposition only served to double down on the country’s panic. People sat vigil by rotary phones and rushed off callers to keep the lines free. When the phones did ring, their loved ones safe for one more day, they’d speculate again who was murdering young women and why.
Was it really a serial killer?
“Them things don’t happen in little Barbados. God is a Bajan.”
Or a sick coincidence?
“Girl…I ain’t know. But it got to be…”
They had to believe the latter. That those dead women were wicked and had wronged some jealous lover or angry neighbour and the police weren’t doing their job. Some separated themselves, glorifying the imagined piousness that helped them sleep — albeit uneasily — at night. The possibility that a madman was on the loose, picking off women at random filled them with terror. And yet…
The unexplained murders of three young women with no connection to each other were impossible to explain otherwise. The country became divided: men lived life as usual while women went on self-imposed dusk-to-dawn curfews even though the Slasher’s victims had gone missing in broad daylight. Nora Edwards had gone to meet her outside man, Anna Brown went missing after she went to town and Lydia was on her way home from school. The coincidences stopped there.
At the funeral home, the news affected everyone differently. Clifford read the newspaper, his lips pursed in disgust as he flipped the pages. Eventually, he slammed it on Eileen’s desk and said he was going to the shop for a beer. Eileen followed suit, saying she would take lunch early and slipped away to the small kitchenette with her food well before eleven o’clock. Holden sat at his desk, balancing his books, oblivious to his staff’s worries and didn’t respond when either of them left.
When Holden finally extracted himself from his ledgers, he found Eileen asleep at the lunch table with her arm thrown over her head and her mouth hanging open.
He glanced at the clock on the ivy-patterned wallpaper above the small fridge and then at Eileen. Her soup was untouched in the small glass dish in front of her, the steam having turned into droplets that clung sadly to the glass cover and dripped back onto the food.
He started a pot of tea, making more noise than necessary as he went, but still, she slept. The kettle whistled loudly and Eileen didn’t budge. Holden sighed. He wasn’t good at this type of thing, he realized as he shook his head irritably. Should I get Clifford to wake her? Clifford had no qualms about breaching any sort of boundaries. The only problem was that Holden didn’t know when Clifford would return. Finally, when Eileen was officially twenty minutes late, he cleared his throat and tapped her shoulder. “Ahem. Pardon me,” he said.
With one bleary eye, she stared at him for a moment before she apologized and tried to stifle a yawn as she trudged off to her desk. Holden’s irritation grew. It was too soon for her to be sleeping on the job. He sighed. The last set of interviewees didn’t give him much hope that he’d be able to replace Eileen anytime soon, but he wondered grudgingly if the lady with no car and three children would be willing to meet him halfway.
* * *
IN MANY WAYS, Eileen’s new job reminded her of when she was nine years old and had jumped in front of a raging pit-bull so it wouldn’t bite her friend; it seemed like an epic adventure in theory but was a foolhardy exercise in reality.
Her typing was atrocious. She stabbed the keys with two fingers in a way that Clifford said made her look more like a rabid switchboard operator than a secretary. On the third day, Holden frowned when he dictated a letter and realized Eileen couldn’t take shorthand but declared her quite fast without it. She had feared he would prattle on but to his credit, Holden was as clear and decisive with his speech as he was with everything else.
Clifford watched from the other side of the room, smirking as he flicked a toothpick up and down in his mouth. After Holden left for lunch, Clifford asked, “You ain’t went to no sort of secretarial school, did you?”
“No,” Eileen said as she dotted out her fifth error with correction fluid. She pushed the typewriter carriage to the left and slowly clacked out a new sentence.
“And you don’t plan to tell the boss you can’t type nor nothing so?”
"I'm doing fine without it.”
Clifford looked around and shrugged in agreement. In less than a week, Eileen had cleared away three months of filing and cleaned the office until it was spotless. Letters went out on time and phone messages were accurately delivered. She looked up from the typewriter and caught his eye. “But you knew that. You just like shooting the piss at me.”
Clifford grinned. “It’s true. If you didn’t poke those keys like hot coals, I didn’t gonna guess that you is a greenhorn.”
Eileen laughed and then frowned when she noticed three extra spaces in her sentence.
By Thursday, Eileen’s confidence was sky-high because she would be attending the first funeral she had helped to organize. But later that day, she found out that she had overlooked a crucial detail. And she would be up to her neck in trouble when it came to light.
That evening, Eileen drove through the big white gates of Southbury Cemetery and scanned the graveyard for the dark green tent Clifford had mentioned. The cemetery was filled with uneven rectangular humps and overgrown by grass and weeds that stretched from one end of the cemetery to the other. A few graves were marked with rough-hewn wooden crosses that only matched the ambition of well-kept graves in Anglican churchyards with lacklustre results. Just beyond the small white chapel in the distance, she saw the tent. Sandwiched between an open plot and a pathway bordered by blue flowers, the sides of the tent flapped like wings in the evening breeze. Holden and Clifford stood at the back of the tent, dressed to the nines in their dapper coattails. She smiled and handed Clifford the two wreaths that had arrived late that afternoon.
The bereaved huddled to
gether and sang in warbled tones as the casket was lowered, their pitch rising in tremulous waves as a scatter of dirt and stones hit the walnut veneer. An old woman, bent at the waist and clutching a cane, hobbled up behind Holden and Eileen as the gravediggers worked in the late afternoon sun. The woman looked around for a moment, watching the family fussing and hugging each other before she asked in a strong voice, “What wunna doing?”
The deceased’s daughter sniffed and said, “Miss Johnson, we ain’t know you came to Daddy’s funeral.”
Miss Johnson shuffled her false teeth, her mouth puckering with sarcasm as she replied, “Good thing I come too, ‘cause wunna bury Herbert in the wrong spot.”
Whispers turned into gasps and confused exclamations as everyone looked at Miss Johnson. The daughter’s mouth hung open as her brother stepped forward in an immaculate black suit and said, “You always getting in people’s business. What you talking about now?”
Miss Johnson shrugged, a smug smile on her face as she said, “Lucky for you that I decided to get in yours today.” She drew back her cane and knocked his shins with a loud whack before turning to point at the other end of the cemetery. “I went to every village funeral since 1963 and your father was to bury with your grandfather close to the cemetery gate; I ain’t know why you putting him up here by the chapel.”
The crowd’s murmuring stopped as everyone looked curiously at everyone else. The son rubbed his shins and looked at Holden, pain overwhelming his grief as he asked, “So whose grave is this?”
Holden plastered on a smile and said, “I’ll double-check my files, please excuse me for a moment.” Under his breath, he muttered, “Eileen, to the hearse.”
“Kinda reminds me of when Batman tells Robin ‘to the Bat Cave’,” Eileen said with a weak chuckle. Her laughter sounded like it was running low on batteries and Holden stalked toward the hearse, clearly not amused by her attempt at levity. Eileen wished she would keel over then and there into the grave with Herbert. Clifford followed, an easy grin on his face as he watched Holden scan through a manila folder while Eileen wrung her hands. Holden’s eyes swung left to right across the page and a sheen of sweat spread across his brow as alarm grew on his face.
The Vanishing Girls Page 2