Holden slapped the file on his thigh. “We were supposed to bury him in N94; this is M94,” he fumed. Clifford shook his head in amusement. Holden glared at Eileen again but said nothing as he squared his shoulders and went back to the family. His tone was apologetic as he promised to relocate the body to the correct spot within twenty-four hours. Behind him, Eileen noticed the grave diggers working at a frantic pace, each of them glancing over their shoulders at her as they plunked soil into the hole. Eileen bit her lip and whispered to Clifford, “If they’re moving the body, why are they still putting in the dirt?”
Clifford raised an eyebrow at her and laughed. “Them fellas don’t get pay for half a grave, so they making sure the job done. Can’t blame them for that.” He quirked the toothpick at the side of his mouth. “Plus, you don’t think the boss paying to dig three holes, nuh?”
“Three?”
Clifford jutted his chin at the men patting the mound of soil they had finished shovelling at warp speed. “Dig to put him in, dig to take him out and dig to put him in the right one.”
“Oh…” Eileen’s face fell. “I didn’t study that.”
Clifford’s smile was benign. “That’s alright. We gonna help you this first time.”
“F-first time?” Eileen stuttered.
“The boss likes to make sure that staff know not to do these things twice.” He clapped her on the shoulder. “We going bring the shovels and pick you up tonight.” He said, glancing up at the gloomy sky and then down at her high heels. “Wear boots; it’s gonna rain.”
* * *
Eileen’s arms and shoulders ached on Friday morning. She could barely move her limbs enough to tuck the newspaper under her desk and leaf through the classifieds to find a job that didn’t involve her slinging mud in the dark. Most of the openings for women required a secretarial certificate or advanced sewing skills. There was only one that she was qualified for: a simple black and white listing for a maid with a phone number printed beneath it. Eileen was about to clip it out when she noticed that the obituaries — which Holden read religiously every day — were on the other side of the ad. She sighed and tucked it away, making a mental note to do it later that day.
The rest of the morning dragged on. Letters were sent, calls were answered and bills were paid. By the time parliament’s clock tower bonged twelve times, Eileen was so exhausted that she couldn’t lift her arms to eat the rice and stew she had brought. It turned out to be a blessing in disguise.
Unbeknownst to Eileen, Holden always found it best to throw new assistants in at the deep end during the first week. It helped him to avoid unnecessary paperwork with the unemployment office if they couldn’t withstand the pressure. He summoned Eileen to the back of the building and handed her a folded bundle with a coat and gloves and instructed her to put it on. Then he took his time wheeling Lydia James across the prep room’s white tile floor.
Eileen watched him, all the while feeling like she was drowning in the voluminous prep coat that brushed her gloved knuckles and grazed her ankles. Her pulse hammered in her throat as she stood next to the wide stainless steel sink. In her imagination, the young woman smelled sweet like bagasse and molasses after being found in a sugar factory. The reality wasn’t so pleasant. The metallic scent of alcohol rose in the air when Holden pulled back the white sheet. Eileen gagged.
Holden pretended not to notice as he described the embalming process in graphic detail before cautioning Eileen to let him know if she felt faint or nauseous. She folded her lips together and nodded.
“Now,” he said, slapping his gloved hands together. “This is the moment of reckoning; help me move the young lady so we can begin.”
Together they transferred her to the embalming table, a white marble slab with a sunken ring carved into its perimeter. The room was frigid, but sweat broke out on Eileen’s forehead as her back bent with the weight in her hands. Holden dangled a fat yellow sponge in front of her and pointed to bottles of shampoo and bath liquid on the shelf, before he reached over and turned on a faucet. Water streamed down from a broad shower head that hung from the ceiling onto Lydia. Eileen had never noticed it before, a strange omission for her eyes to make given the circumstances. Despite Lydia smelling so sterile, Eileen realized some things weren’t washed off from Lydia’s visit to the pathologist. There was dirt under the young woman’s nails and a dusting of pollen came out of her ears when Eileen rinsed her off.
“Bless you,” Holden said when Eileen sneezed.
As she washed Lydia from tip to toe, Eileen’s teeth left four sharp indentations in her lower lip that would linger for days. Her eyes actively skipped over the sewn up gash on Lydia’s neck and the coarse black thread that pinched the pink flesh beneath the Y-shaped cut on her torso. Eileen squeezed a blob of shampoo into her palm and asked Holden, “Why did they cut her hair?”
“Hmm?” he replied absently as he scribbled notes in a folder. “Oh, they take samples of hair and blood for tests.”
Eileen touched her gloved fingertip to a small bald patch at the base of Lydia’s scalp. Something about that patch, no bigger than a knob of butter, rattled Eileen. Without it, Lydia’s Afro was incomplete, reducing the young woman to nothing more than a pile of evidence for a police investigation.
“Who does the make-up?”
“Clifford mostly. He’s artsier than I am.”
“Can I do it?” The words came out of Eileen’s mouth before she could stop herself. Her desire to give up on this job had been replaced with an emotion she couldn’t express. One man had robbed this young girl of her life. Another had left her with scars. A woman should be the one to make her beautiful one last time.
Holden’s hand hovered over the folder as he studied her for a long moment. “Are you sure?”
She swallowed. “Yes.”
He nodded once and went back to his notes, surreptitiously watching Eileen as she gritted her teeth and finished her task. By the time the soap bubbles ran down the drain, Eileen exhaled and smiled, proud of herself for having made it through the ordeal.
“Excellent job,” Holden said as he inspected her work. “Next, we embalm.”
In minutes, Eileen’s pride turned to an entirely different feeling while she held a washcloth doused in peppermint oil beneath her nose, afraid to move it lest the smells overwhelmed her. Perhaps she had been too flippant when she had brushed off Holden’s concern about her not being able to stomach the job, but she’d been desperate. With rent and bills to pay, she couldn’t afford to be picky. The fact that Holden hadn’t delved too deeply into her background was also advantageous. Now, as Holden prepared the remains of Lydia James, Eileen questioned every aspect of her life, wondering how she’d ended up inside an ice-cold room at 5 p.m. with a man whose sole intention was pumping the blood out of a body and filling it with chemicals.
Eileen’s stomach churned. She was glad that she hadn’t eaten lunch; the digested remnants would have made an appearance right there and then. She claimed she had to go to the bathroom, blaming it on the large glass of lemonade she’d had earlier as she rushed out. Holden said nothing, but the smile that tugged at his lips let Eileen know the jig was up. She scrambled up the corridor toward the lavatory, her stomach spasming until she lunged inside and splashed tap water on her face. Trembling, she sank down on the closed toilet with her head in her hands.
Cold seeped under the door, wrapping itself around Eileen’s exposed ankles and snaking up her body until she shivered. Shame ate away at her as she considered her options. She had been ready to quit until she decided she wanted to help Lydia. On the surface, there wasn’t much that separated her from Lydia; she could see herself in the young woman’s smooth face, her bitten nails and the inoculation scar on her left arm. Plus, that smirk on Holden’s face was infuriating. Eileen sighed. Not only was she was stubborn, but she also hated being wrong, two qualities that had gotten her in trouble many times before. She had to see it through, but there was no way she could do so locked inside a ba
throom. She took a deep breath, stood up and left the bathroom.
“I’ve got a lot of respect for you,” Holden said as soon as she returned. He rested a syringe on the table and looked up at her as he cocked his head to one side and said, “I’m not the easiest person to work for and this certainly isn’t the most pleasant job in the world, but you haven’t complained once.”
Eileen hadn’t expected that. She supposed it was as close to a compliment as she would get from Holden. Her heart swelled. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad after all.
* * *
THE NEXT DAY, at a quaint whitewashed church not too far from where she’d been born, Lydia was laid to rest. Her parents rubbed her twin brother’s back as he slumped down in the pew after vomiting just outside the door. Eileen was sitting in the hearse and had seen when he dashed outside. Luke didn’t resemble his sister much. He took after his father and Eileen imagined that Lydia looked like her mother did when she was seventeen. She had watched as his body heaved and shuddered, trying to rid itself of grief, but only managing to expel air and acid. As Luke went back inside the church, Holden strode out to the car, sat in the driver’s seat and balanced the programme on his lap. “Not coming in?”
Eileen glanced at Holden’s programme. On the front was a smiling photo of Lydia, her life story told in the tiny dash between the two dates beneath her name.
Eileen shook her head. “It's too sad. Not sure I can handle it.”
His eyes betrayed wisdom beyond his years as he said, “Some funerals are like that. But some are joyful. I buried an old lady last month who lived to a hundred and I couldn’t help but feel grateful to be around the good energy in that church. Everyone was glad to have known her, glad that she had a long life.”
Eileen’s eyes grew damp. “Yes, but no-one is glad now. Lydia wasn’t given a chance at a long life.”
He bowed his head. “I know now that I buried the second victim too. I pray Lydia is the last.”
The wind picked up, swooping through the churchyard and bringing with it a groaning wail that filled the air with such misery that Eileen’s heart clenched in her chest. There was no doubt in Eileen’s mind that it was Lydia’s mother.
Holden checked his watch. “They’ll come out after this hymn.” He glanced at Eileen and said in a low tone, “In some ways, this job gets easier. You’ll see.”
With that, he got out of the hearse and headed up the pathway just in time to direct the pallbearers down the aisle. A sea of people in black swayed and sang as it made its way out of the church, grief bowing them at the waist. As they walked, the dust beneath their feet swirled in the wind, stirring up a musty graveside smell that drifted into the hearse as they sang ‘It Is Well With My Soul’.
In later years, Eileen would reflect that Lydia’s funeral was a turning point. Something shifted inside her as she watched Luke step onto that hillside. The tear stains on his face glistened in the waning sunlight as he helped carry his sister’s coffin. His suit was a size too big for him, his youth exposed in the double-cuffed hems that weighed down his boyish limbs. He clamped his jaw as his slippery palms gripped the brass handles, making his way to the hill’s crest, then leaned over and deposited his portion of his sister’s weight on the long straps stretched taut across her grave. He loosened the strap closest to his feet and eased Lydia gently down, down, down. And then, when she was finally at the bottom of the dark hole, he plopped down next to it and cried.
Chapter 4
The Other Brother
The spate of serial murders had fueled rum-soaked arguments for days, but shortly after Lydia’s funeral, the newspaper delivered a fresh scandal that, while deathly, was far less dangerous.
Two years earlier, when Grenadian Prime Minister, Maurice Bishop and his closest cabinet ministers were dispatched in a gruesome coup, it triggered a political upheaval that forced the island’s medical school to seek a temporary home in sunny Barbados, meaning the not-so-sunny arrival of the requisite cadavers for studies. Rumours that the corpses were connected to mafia money created the kind of juicy scandal that provided enough fodder for the media and calypsonians to keep them busy for months.
The only person who didn’t have a problem with the medical school was Holden, simply because Davis and Sons Funeral Home had just won the lucrative contract of ferrying the cadavers from the port to the school. Despite the promise of added business, he reminded Eileen of Ebenezer Scrooge the way his disgruntled sighs punctuated the manic tapping of calculator buttons that Wednesday morning.
Eileen was peering through the blinds when Clifford roiled in from outside, his gangly movements like those of a gun-slinging spider on his way to the saloon for a hit of sarsaparilla. He toted his homemade yard broom made of coconut frond spines and bound with an old mackerel can.
“Boss, I need oranges.”
Holden’s shoulders slumped as he turned squinted eyes on the older man. “Clifford, explain why I spend more on fruit than formaldehyde. I’m an undertaker, not a hawker selling fruits in Eagle Hall market.”
Clifford’s head hung to one side. “Boss, you know it for de polish.”
Holden huffed. “Clifford, polish sells for a few dollars at the supermarket. For God’s sake, just buy some.”
“See… dat is the Babylonian system. All this convenience gonna kill we. This is the eighties, but I bet that in 2020 when the world got self-driving cars and that kinda thing, we going find out that all of these chemicals was destroying we livers.” He banged the ceiling impatiently with the yard broom and swatted the white dust that floated down around him like a reluctant snow storm. “It is the least you could do since you ain’t listening to me about this asbestos. I see how them does make it overseas. Keep breathing in this and the nasty Babylonian polish and you going be in the prep room just now with them duppies.”
Holden scrubbed his face but said nothing as he dug into his pocket and handed Clifford two twenty-dollar bills.
Eileen pressed her hand to her mouth to restrain a laugh as Clifford sidled away complaining that up to now the government still hadn’t thought to issue fifty dollar notes, yet another sign of their “colonialist antics”.
Holden side-eyed Eileen before he pursed his mouth and sucked air between his teeth. “Clifford drives me insane with his flower child folly, but he works hard and the polish smells good.”
Eileen tried to help herself, but couldn’t. She burst out laughing. For the first time, Holden’s face broke into a genuine smile. The worry lines on his face faded and his eyes lit up as he grinned at her. His shoulders relaxed and for the first time, she felt at ease around him.
“I want to ask a question and I hope it doesn’t sound rude.”
He nodded.
“How did you manage to hire Clifford?”
“I didn’t. I inherited him along with the business. I like to imagine that he wandered in here when the place first opened and my father took a shine to him.”
Eileen bit her cheek. Informal interviews were obviously a hallowed tradition at Davis and Sons.
“When did your father start the business?”
“Since the fifties, even before independence. My father was a man of vision, always planning for growth. A few years ago, he commissioned a state-of-the-art building with massive refrigeration capacity and a large parking bay. He said it would be the largest, most modern facility in the Caribbean. That’s how he managed to get the contract for the crown's collections: capital cases, pick-ups from government-owned hospitals and that kind of thing.”
Eileen looked around the cramped space at Buckworth Street with its faded peach walls, old-fashioned wainscoting and the rotting lean-to at the back and wondered what went wrong. Holden seemed to read her mind. “It’s in St. James.” His face soured. “My brother runs it.” Eileen wasn’t sure, but she could have sworn she also heard him mutter “into the ground.”
Comprehension dawned on Eileen’s face. “Oh, yeah. The name of the business is Davis and Sons. You have a brother
.”
Holden’s good mood evaporated as he grunted. “My younger brother, Paul. You’ll meet him soon enough.”
Something about the way Holden responded told Eileen it was best to go to lunch and not ask any more questions. A few minutes later, Clifford joined her on the picnic bench at the back of the building and said, “The boss don’t like talking about Paul too much.”
“You heard that?” Eileen asked, mouth agape.
“Yup, I went to de vendor round the corner so I didn’t gone too long.”
Eileen stirred her soup and shrugged guiltily. “He seemed really annoyed when I asked about his brother.”
“Old man Davis had one business and two sons. That’s where the problem usually starts,” said Clifford with a wry grimace. He explained that despite having two locations, the business was legally considered as one entity. Paul didn’t hurt his head with mundane concerns such as haggling for government contracts. He left that to Holden but still profited from it since he was legally entitled to half of the collections. Instead, Paul focused on the extras: large viewings with hors d’oeuvres and a horse-drawn carriage festooned with flowers which he drove while wearing a top hat and coattails. When the money for those rare events ran out, Paul would literally steal bodies from under his brother’s nose so he could claim the funeral payments.
“Young Davis changed these locks twice already because Paul came down here after hours." Clifford chuckled as he regaled Eileen with Paul’s schemes. She had to admit the stories were funny when Clifford told them, but she could see how Holden’s stoic nature would war with Paul’s free-wheeling tricks. She had sized Holden up the first morning, and though he seemed pulled together, he had the scuffed edges of a man whose mind bore the burden of constant loneliness. ‘Strong’ and ‘capable’ were the first two words she would use to describe him. ‘Empty’ would be the third. Now at least, some of it made sense.
The Vanishing Girls Page 3