The Vanishing Girls by Callie Browning (great novels of all time .txt) 📗

Derricks glared at him, obviously mystified by Clifford’s nonsensical beliefs. “And let the PM get rid of me to make the cowbell psychic the commissioner?” He gulped the rest of his brandy and slammed the glass on the table. “I’m going back to Central. Have a good day.”

Clifford raised a shoulder and picked up the brandy bottle. “I thought it was a noteworthy suggestion.”

The two men sat in silence, mulling over what Derricks had said for a few minutes before Holden glanced at his watch. It was almost 6 p.m., well past the usual closing time. “Let’s lock up.”

Clifford stayed in the viewing room to put away the chairs and table, while Holden took the glasses to the lunchroom. To his annoyance, Holden found Eileen fast asleep for the second time since she’d been working there. How on earth could one person sleep so much at work, Holden wondered as he soaped the glasses. Through the kitchenette door, the phone rang. Holden kept washing, assuming Clifford would answer it, but by the fourth ring, it was clear that Clifford had already snuck out the back. “Knowing him, he probably ran off to draw up under Dorothy again,” Holden muttered as he rinsed his hands and ran into the office. But it was to no avail. By the time he snatched up the receiver, he only heard the drone of dial tone.

He was beyond irritated as he marched back to the kitchenette and shook Eileen awake. “I’m closing up,” he grumbled as she stretched and yawned.

It was times like these when Holden felt his already tenuous grasp on the business slipping. He often felt alone, adrift in a sea of responsibility that no-one else understood. Every day felt like a test of his patience and endurance, one with shifting goal-posts whose only constant was that time was always against him.

Holden stormed through the office, slamming windows and turning keys in locks so roughly that each click echoed through the building. When the phone rang again, Holden managed to answer it in time. His pulse raced as he crossed the office floor in two long lopes to stick his head through the door and say, “Let’s go. Collection in Bridgetown.”

At the crime scene, a constable diverted traffic over one of the city’s main bridges and directed Eileen to park behind a crowd gathered under a neon sign advertising Lucky Slots and Beer. The onlookers’ faces glowed as though powered by nuclear energy beneath the sign’s harsh artificial light. Holden peered through a gap in the crowd, trying to get a better glimpse of the scene unfolding on the dark street. Up ahead, two assistants from Paul’s parlour carried away the covered body of the elderly man who had collapsed and died of a heart attack.

A tinted black Camaro cruised past them and the driver honked the horn. Holden stewed silently in the passenger seat of Eileen’s car. Holden could just imagine the smug look on his brother’s face. It was the same look Paul had flashed him twenty years ago when he’d left two fat slugs in Holden’s school shoes. Holden had jammed his feet into the shoes, jumped off the top step and ran to the front gate before he felt something like warm jello oozing through his socks. He'd heard a roar of laughter and looked back to see Paul, tears rolling down his face as he slapped his thigh. Holden was lashed for not looking into his shoes before he put them on and destroying his socks. Paul was scolded for playing a trick on his brother. Holden had always been perplexed by how granular his own punishments were while Paul’s were wrought out of deference for patient child-rearing. Now, Holden seethed with anger the same way he had that day.

Eileen shifted the car into gear and said, “We’ll get the next one, don’t worry.”

Her statement didn’t placate him enough. “How can we when you’re always asleep?” he snapped. “We got here late because I had to wake you up again.”

“I’m sorry,” she said sheepishly. “I was tired.”

He’d never asked about her personal life, but one possibility of why she slept so often made him irrationally upset. Was she pregnant? She’d never mentioned a husband, but that didn’t mean she didn’t have one. Why wasn’t she like other assistants who complained about their bunions, diabetic mothers and lazy boyfriends?

“You’re tired all the time and it’s disrupting my work. Are you pregnant or something? And why won’t you tell me your last name?”

Eileen’s eyes narrowed as she folded her arms across her chest and stared at him with a tight smile. “I sleep during the day because I’m afraid all the time and staying up at night is the only thing that comforts me while a serial killer is on the loose.”

Her thinly veiled sarcasm dripped with impatience. Holden squirmed in his seat.

“Every noise is a rapist coming to take the only thing the world says that I owe it. Or a thief coming to seize the few coppers in my possession because the truth is that you only pay me enough to make me a middle man between you and the bill collectors. The day you walk the road and have to clutch your purse and your private parts is the day you’ll stop asking me why I can’t sleep at night.”

Holden felt he should be upset that an employee spoke to him this way. Yet, he only felt embarrassed. Her words made him think of the first Slasher victim he’d collected: defensive wounds, angry bruises and a river of dried blood on her neck. Even in death, the young woman looked scared, her empty eyes frozen open when he’d arrived at the scene. Holden wanted to apologize to Eileen, but she turned up the radio so loudly that he’d have to shout for her to hear him. He could tell she was upset from the way she gripped the steering wheel and