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

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 until 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.

Her heart pounded as she pointed the light inside the circular stone structure, but thankfully, she saw nothing in its depths. She knelt close to the base of the well and circled it, moving the flashlight up and down the wall as she went. She found nothing. Holden kicked a pile of cane trash around, shifting it with the tip of his shoe when he suddenly said, “Look here.”

He kneeled and fished a sodden scrap of newspaper from the pile with a broken twig. It was the size of a saucer and had been crudely torn off a larger sheet. Eileen took it off the stick.

Holden shook his head at her. “You should be wearing gloves, you know. We learned at mortician school that gloves have been standard crime scene issue since Emily Kaye was murdered in Britain in 1924.”

Eileen raised her eyebrows at him. “We didn’t come here to picnic; why didn’t you bring some?”

Holden shrugged, a sheepish look on his