The Vanishing Girls

by Callie Browning

  Holden and Eileen walked past a general store, a basket maker, and a flock of yard fowls that pecked around in a small front yard as a woman with a bag balanced on her head talked to the heavyset woman who leaned through her window.

  Holden and Eileen soon found the place they were looking for: a large beige building emblazoned with logos for beers and rum at the end of a urine-soaked alley. Its front doors were barred shut, but Holden noticed a man coming out of a side entrance and pointed it out to Eileen.

  The smell of baby powder was even stronger in the dimly lit space and Eileen could see why. Women sat on men’s laps and cackled on cue at everything they said. At the end of the bar, one woman, her chest doused with a heavy coat of talcum, sat between two men who ogled her full breasts as they shared a bottle of white rum. A burly fellow with a shiny bald head who looked as though he’d been squeezed into his polo shirt was washing glasses behind the bar. He eyed Holden and Eileen with suspicion, perhaps unaccustomed to seeing a man bring along a woman to an establishment such as this.

  “What can I do for you?” he asked.

  “I’m looking for a man who comes in sometimes. He drives an old brown Cortina and wears a brown uniform.”

  “You mussy mean Jerry,” said the proprietor as he wiped droplets off the polished bar top. “He’s upstairs with Mary,” he grinned. “He don’t take too long though, so just give him a few minutes.”

  Just then, heavy footfall clattered down the stairs as a man’s tan boots came into view. Right down to his unkempt hair and dirty fingernails, he matched Debra’s description to a tee. Jerry's eyes landed on Eileen, and a sly smirk crossed his face as he looked her up and down. Holden stepped in front of her and asked, “You’re Jerry?”

  The man straightened his shoulders and said, “Yeah… and you?”

  “We want to know why you were outside Anna Brown’s apartment the day she went missing.”

  Jerry bristled and his jaw clenched as he glanced over his shoulder. “Two of you don’t look like police.”

  “We’re not,” Eileen said. “But you either tell us what you know or we’ll send them to find out.”

  “Hmph.” Jerry pointed to the door and led them outside to a corner of the alley. It was littered with empty beer cases and a pile of flattened boxes.

  “Look…I work in government so I don’t want no trouble,” he started in a low voice. “Yeah… I went to pick up Anna, but I didn’t do anything to her.”

  “So are people describing you as ‘twitchy’?” asked Eileen.

  He bristled. “Twitchy? I work in government’s maintenance department, and I go to different buildings to fix things. I drive my own car so I can nip out and do a little taxi work in between. But I ain’t supposed to be doing another job on the government’s time and I ain’t got no hackney license.”

  Holden frowned. “So that’s why you didn’t come forward?”

  Jerry nodded. “I can’t explain what I was doing there unless I admit that I’m breaking the law.” He shrugged. “Things hard and I got bills to pay.”

  Eileen raised an eyebrow. “Mary’s bills or yours?”

  Jerry’s lips peeled back over his teeth. “Bills is bills, darling.”

  “But why did Anna call you in the first place? Where were you taking her?” Eileen wondered aloud.

  Jerry rubbed the back of his neck. “She got my number from another girl that I take around sometimes. Anna had an appointment on the west coast. She would gotta catch three buses to get there and she didn’t want to be late. I waited for a while, but she didn’t show up.”

  “Where was she?”

  Jerry cast his eyes downward. “Well…truth is that I was here with Mary longer than I planned so I got to Anna’s apartment late. I knocked and then waited in the car for a while. When Anna didn’t come outside, I told myself that she caught the bus instead.”

  Eileen caught Holden’s eye. Jerry sounded genuine. To Eileen’s mind, his biggest problem seemed to be his addiction to Mary. Which meant they were back to the drawing board. They thanked Jerry and left.

  “This is another dead end,” groused Holden as they retraced their steps through Lord Town. “But you know what? My father always used to say that ‘the more you look, the less you see’.” Holden said. “When we least expect it, something will shine a light on this mystery.”

  Eileen chewed on her nails, a habit she had developed when she realized that she slept in the same bed as one of the Cane Slasher’s victims. She was feeling similarly defeated, but she was desperate to find the killer before he found her.

  * * *

  HAVING DEPOSITED HOLDEN AT HIS HOUSE, Eileen drove home. She parked the car, took a deep breath and craned her neck, squinting at the shadows by the stairs before she ran across the gravel patch and up to her first-floor apartment. She slammed the door behind her and pressed her hand to her thudding heart.

  She’d never liked the dark, a slight phobia that had started during her childhood, but as she had grown, her distrust had morphed into a mild inconvenience. In the past few months, her fears had resurfaced. She caught her breath, felt her lungs expand with the stale air trapped inside her apartment and fell sideways into the chair next to the door. That nightly dash was mentally and physically exhausting.

  When Eileen fell asleep, she dreamed. At first, the vision was relaxing: the room was cool, the way it always is after heavy rains wash away the heat of the day and gentle breezes caress your skin like freshly washed fingertips. A faceless man, tall and broad with muscled forearms grabbed her by the neck, dragged her from the bed and threw her over his shoulder. His clothes smelled of soil and grass, and were slick with the blood of women he had killed. She felt it seeping through her nightgown and onto her skin, leaving bloody streaks on her chest and legs. He carried her across the road into the cane ground, his heavy boots thudding an ominous rhythm as he walked. He tossed her among the young green plants and raised a knife high above his head, his features obscured by the moon behind him. Eileen saw the curve of the new moon in the night sky. She felt the rush of wind as the knife came down. She heard herself scream as her eyes flew open and she sat bolt upright in bed.

  She clutched her chest and looked down. In the light that filtered through the thin bedsheet at the window, her nightgown clung to her flesh, but it was soaked with sweat and not someone else’s blood. Her heart beat so fast that it hurt to breathe and a shuddering sob escaped her throat as she put her head between her knees.

  Adrenaline filled through her veins like drugs, leaving Eileen too wired to go back to sleep. She glanced around the apartment, searching for a distraction to soothe her anxiety. She hadn’t been to the library so she had no new books. The lone TV station had finished the night’s broadcast. Rainbow-coloured bars stretched across the screen to accompany a tonal pitch that droned through the TV speaker. Her heart pounded again, filling her with terror as she contemplated reliving every dark, bloody moment of that dream if she couldn’t find a way to pass the time until morning.

  Eileen’s eyes landed on the dark corner and she decided that moment was as good as any to face at least one of her fears. She picked up the bottle next to her bed, downed a mouthful of brown rum and flicked the light switch.

  When Eileen had first viewed the apartment, that gloomy little alcove set into the east-facing wall had reminded her of the cupboard under the stairs in her childhood home. It was used as a larder and lined with shelves where Christmas black cake mix, biscuits and canned goods were stored, but there were also times when she heard grunts and deep groans coming from behind the closed doors. Those noises had terrified her, forcing her to return to bed and wet herself more times than she cared to remember. It was only after Eileen reached adulthood that she theorized that those sounds were more sexual than sinister. The lady who raised her had a teenaged niece who sometimes came to babysit Eileen. When the lady worked late shifts at the hospital, the girl would promptly put Eileen to bed. Early one morning, Eileen saw a young man cla
mbering through the window and realized what was afoot. But that didn’t change Eileen’s dislike of dark cupboards. It was why her room looked like a thrift shop with a bed in it since she kept her clothes on wall hooks.

  The cupboard’s hinges creaked and the door traced a wide arc along the worn linoleum tiles as a musty scent wafted out when she pulled it open. She blinked quickly, willing her eyes to adjust to the dim light in the shallow space. She had tucked the previous tenant’s belongings into the cobwebbed corner. Now a thin layer of dust covered two tattered pairs of slippers and a cardboard box filled with odds and ends that the landlord had said the family would return for but they never did. It felt intrusive going through the dead woman’s possessions, but Eileen hoped a clue to her disappearance and death would emerge. There was a nearly full tube of S-curl, two cassette tapes, plastic bangles and neon eye shadow. She pulled out a pet rock, bottle caps for a recently concluded competition and the classified section of an old newspaper. Eileen sighed. She had hoped for extensive diaries, bloody fingerprints or some other smoking gun that would point her to Anna’s killer. It was no wonder that the young woman’s family hadn’t returned for these items. They were easy to forget.

  Eileen dragged out the boxes, piled the shoes on top and then swept, mopped and dusted the closet until it was free of spiders and smelled faintly of lavender disinfectant. She gathered everything in her arms and took them to the grey dustbin she kept in her verandah. No sooner than she’d opened the door, a brisk wind whipped the sepia-toned sheet of newspaper out of the box and slapped it into her face. “Pfft!” Eileen pulled it off her forehead and was about to throw it back into the box when she noticed a circled want ad. Ringed with red ink was a small classified listing with thick-set black type seeking a seamstress. Along the newspaper’s deckled edge was a scribbled note: “Thursday 2 p.m.”

  Her breath hitched in her chest as she checked the date. The tiny month and day in the top right corner matched the time Anna had gone missing. Eileen bit her lip as her mind whirred. An alarm bell in her head went off, and her stomach flipped as she considered the grungy classifieds in her hands. She tipped the rest of the items into the bin, rolled up the paper and took it back inside.

  * * *

  EILEEN WAS LATE FOR WORK the next morning. By the time she flew through the door, her cheeks flushed as she lugged her heavy handbag, the echo of the tenth gong from parliament’s clock hung in the air. Holden raised an eyebrow at her. “Thought you weren’t coming in, boss.”

  “Yeah, I almost didn’t,” she replied absently as she rummaged through her bag.

  Holden stared at her as though she had gone mad. “Eileen, I’m a tolerant man, but you’re playing fast and loose with my easy-going nature.”

  Eileen regarded him for a moment as though wondering if it was worth it to retort. She clearly decided against it, as she stepped over to his desk and pressed a worn newssheet onto his desk. She pointed to the circled ad. “The girl we picked up two days ago — Michelle — didn’t her boyfriend say that she went to a job interview?”

  Holden put down his teacup and peered at the crinkled page. “Yes,” he replied slowly. His eyes flicked toward the date in the corner. “But this paper is from months ago so this can’t be the ad she responded to. What’s this about?”

  “The second victim, Anna Brown, used to live in my apartment. I found this paper while packing away her things. When did Anna go missing?”

  Holden wrinkled his forehead. “I can’t remember. Why are you asking me all of this?”

  “Wasn’t it five months ago?”

  Holden grew more flustered by the second. “I don’t know. Eileen, what are you going on about?”

  Eileen grabbed Holden’s obituary book. His brows arched when she licked her fingers and thumbed through his precious book until she found Anna’s extract. She spun the book around so Holden could see the dates. He looked at both clippings: the obituary and the ad. The date of her death was one week after the ad’s publication. “If she went to the meeting on Thursday, that would have been a week before she was found.”

  Out of her handbag, Eileen pulled a stack of bright white sheets of photocopy paper. The grainy black and white facsimiles were a jumble of front page articles and want ads for carpenters, fortune-telling and common entrance lessons. On each sheet, there were fat blue circles and names scribbled in Eileen’s handwriting: Anna, Lydia, Nora, Michelle.

  “I went to the newspaper archive office and cross-checked the dates the girls went missing with the dates these ads appeared. The phone number matches for Lydia, Anna and Nora. I narrowed it down to a week before the girls disappeared but I still can’t find the one that Michelle answered,” Eileen said.

  Holden’s eyes grew wide as he calculated the probability of Eileen’s evidence. It made sense. Derricks had said the girls had never crossed paths otherwise. It was a cunning trick — with the economy being the way it was, the promise of a paying job would lure many women.

  “And look at this.” She opened a colourful tourist map on top of the photocopied ads. It crackled beneath her palms as she smoothed it out on the desk, her hands running over pictures of snorkelling dives and mini moke rentals. She had highlighted four spots in red marker, creating a trail of scarlet dots on the west coast of the island. Between each point was a thin stroke that joined them together. Holden’s eyes flew open. Eileen’s finger traced the wiggly outline. “It’s a circle,” she said, pointing to the dots. “Which means that he’s purposely dumping them around a place he’s familiar with or his business.”

  Holden’s bottom lip disappeared as he bit down on it, his eyes flicking between the ads and the blood-red dots on the map. “Derricks said there was no real evidence to link them other than the marks on their neck and the fact that the killer dumped them in cane fields.” He looked up to meet Eileen’s eyes. “But with what you’ve just shown me, I think you’ve cracked the case.”

  Chapter 14

  The Paper Trail

  “I feel like I’m in a horror movie,” Eileen said as the car bumped its way down the dark cart road that night.

  “That’s expected if you come to a lonely cane field in the middle of the night,” Holden said with a slight grin on his face.“How do you expect to be Nancy Drew with an Afro if you’re so afraid?”

  Eileen cast him a withering look. Her fear was palpable, even though it had been her idea. She wasn’t sure when Holden had gotten hold of a funny bone, but his teasing wasn’t welcome in this particular instance. After showing him the map and classified ads, she had suggested they visit the crime scene to see if they came across any other clues which the police may have overlooked. “I know it was three days ago, but Clifford said it was rainy; there's a good chance that there may be tyre tracks or something got stuck in the mud." To her relief and surprise, Holden had agreed.

  She shook her head. “You know we couldn’t come when the sun was out. One: the police were still here going over the scene. Two: we don’t want them to know what we know until I’m sure.”

  A thick plume of smoke rose from the sugar factory’s chimney in the distance, filling the air with the sweet scent of crushed cane. The crescent moon hung overhead, covering the field of gangly plants in soft white light. Eileen knew they were carrying out reconnaissance for wholly different reasons: she was there because she could have easily suffered the same fate if she had answered one of those ads. Holden, on the other hand, may have been there because a part of him relished the idea of risky behaviour that was so foreign to him. Growing up in a good neighbourhood, going to good schools and having a business to inherit probably meant that the idea of going against the grain thrilled him. Eileen glanced at him. Holden bopped his head in time to the radio, something she had never seen him do before. She seldom saw him outside of his tailored black suits and tightly knotted ties. Tonight he looked extra handsome, dressed in a soft navy polo shirt and neat khaki slacks that hugged his body. She shook her head ruefully. Imagine that he waited un
til he hit thirty to start rebelling.

  Even in the dark, it was easy to find the spot they were looking for. The rain had softened the packed earth and made it easy to follow the tyre tracks. Police vehicles and the funeral home’s body van had crisscrossed the area with muddy chevron lines that encircled a stone well in the middle of the cane ground. The car's headlights illuminated a large square of yellow crime scene tape that fluttered with the same rhythm as the cane arrows. They alighted from the car, leaving the engine idling in case they had to make a quick getaway. Eileen pulled a flashlight out of her bag and with a soft click it came on, breaking the darkness and lighting the way across the crackly cane trash toward the well. Large round wells with metal grates were a common feature in many cane grounds to alleviate flooding. Eileen had recently become very wary of them when she realized that folk songs like ‘Millie Gone to Brazil’ explored the phenomena of missing women who were thrown into wells in Barbados. Eileen remembered swishing her skirt and dancing from side to side with her friends in the schoolyard as they sang:

  Millie gone to Brazil,

  Oh lawse, poor Millie,

  With a wire wrap round she waist,

  And a razor cut up she face.

  It wasn’t until she listened to a call-in programme that Eileen had properly considered the lyrics. A local historian had phoned to bemoan the few times that the island’s peaceful existence had been shattered by violent acts and mentioned Millie’s murder in the 1920s. Millie’s husband had killed her, dropped her in a well and told everyone she went to Brazil to account for her whereabouts. Her husband had assumed he would get away with it because so many other Barbadians had left to find work in South America and were never heard from again. Eileen had shuddered at the thought and told herself she would never again sing folk songs with such great abandon.