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

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