The Vanishing Girls by Callie Browning (read this if txt) 📕

away the most beautiful of all the applicants. His reservations about good-looking assistants came from his father, who always told him to hire men or women who weren’t too easy on the eyes. “Son, there are two things a businessman doesn’t need: debt and distractions. The latter leads to the former, so hire accordingly.”

“Miss, it’s a bit late, and I don’t know if this position would be right for you.”

She raised an eyebrow. “Once you don’t pay me with marbles, it’s right for me.”

Holden frowned, his irritation growing. “You won’t take to such a gruesome profession as this.”

"And what profession would that be?”

Holden straightened his shoulders; he knew now was the time to hammer home the reality. “Cutting up dead people, injecting them with chemicals and overseeing their burials.”

Eileen shrugged. “Sounds like how I spent last weekend. When can I start?”

Holden squinted at her; he wasn’t sure if she was joking or depraved. Her smile, even in the dim light, was mischievous. Holden thought back on the long day he had. The countless interviews that led nowhere. The stack of bills. The worrisome call from the bank.

He pressed his fingers to his temple. Undoubtedly, hiring Eileen wouldn’t be the worst thing he ever did. He sighed and stretched out his hand toward her. She grinned and shook his in return.

* * *

THE NEXT DAY, Eileen drove onto the gravel lot behind the building and parked next to the detached garage that housed the hearse. In the bright light of the morning, there was no hiding that the funeral parlour could benefit from some paint and repairs. It was a sorry little affair tucked under the canopy of an old mahogany tree on the fringes of Bridgetown. Hemmed in by a bakery on the west and a hair salon on the east, shifting winds wafted the smell of jam puffs and chemical relaxers across the parlour’s car park.

A steady stream of cars drove by as Eileen sniffed the mingling scents and savoured the morning’s rays on her face. It was almost June and that was the only time of day when the sun didn’t have the concentrated warmth of a malfunctioning appliance. Overhead, the funeral home’s sign creaked eerily in the slipstream of a passing lorry, adding to the uneasy feeling that gnawed away at Eileen’s gut. “Working at a mortuary is better than being unemployed,” she whispered as she pulled her handbag higher on her shoulder. But even that stab at positivity couldn’t whisk away the fear that settled inside her.

Eileen had lied. She was anything but at ease around blood and entrails. Working at a funeral parlour wasn’t her childhood dream job, but it was 1985; any job was a dream job as long as you were getting paid. The global downturn of 1979 had trickled to the island’s shores and left an unemployment rate in the high double-digits. Every job, especially low-skilled posts, was highly coveted. Which meant that holding on to fear was not an option.

Eileen walked up to the door of the faded peach building and stepped inside, marvelling at the fact that no-one had thought to change the wall colour as long as she’d known the building to be there.

What she didn’t know was that the founder, Holden Davis Senior, was a savvy businessman who adhered to the teachings of P.T. Barnum with zealous fervour. In the 1950s, Holden Senior painted the building a vivid shade of peach which was unheard of at the time. When a sign was erected declaring the fruit-coloured fiasco to be Davis & Son’s Funeral Parlour, there was public curiosity, but during a press interview, Holden Senior quoted Barnum and said, “No one ever made a difference by being like everyone else.” Newspapers ran front-page stories and editorials for weeks declaring the building to be a “blasphemous eye-sore” and a “sure sign of moral decay”.

That was all it took. Between the central location just a hop and skip away from the bus stand, the garish colour and low pricing, the poor and huddled masses came en masse for their burial arrangements. Somehow Holden Senior had created a strategy heretofore unseen in the funeral world: the volume pricing model. Business boomed, and he went to his grave certain that his offspring would carry on his legacy.

Now, just a few years after his death, times had shifted, and the funeral parlour wasn’t as relevant as it had been.

* * *

THE BELL JANGLED and Holden looked up to see Eileen open the front door with a bright smile on her face as she said, “Good morning!”

“Good morning,” he stood up and abandoned his tea, feeling as though the small room had gotten that much tinier once she had entered it. The front office was an open-plan space with two desks, two chairs and a small filing cabinet partially hidden behind a room divider. He saw her stare at the piles of paper on the cabinet, heard her wordless question as to why the desk was so dusty.

Holden cleared his throat and gestured to the workspace opposite his. “You can set your things down here. Well,” he clasped his hands and stepped from behind his desk. “I wasn’t able to elucidate on this last night given our brief meeting, but this is a family-owned business which prides itself on delivering high quality at low prices. The staff is small. There’s Clifford Chase, who drives the hearse and does some of the preparation; his son, David, helps out part-time with collections. Otherwise, it’s just me.” He steepled his fingers. “Holden Davis Junior,” he said as though it was an afterthought.

“I need someone to drive me to meetings and grief visits, answer the phone, do the filing and generally keep this place from crumbling around my ears.”

The placid smile on her face unnerved him. “Does that sound like something you can do?”

“Yup.”

“Good.” He straightened the lapels on his charcoal suit. “Be aware that death waits for no-one, not even us. Funerals can be competitive so