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

“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