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

Holden bit his tongue. Paul wasn’t the most reliable when it came to time or ethics, but his spite had a way of being consistently punctual. Holden could handle anything his brother dished out, but his real fear was that Paul would harm Eileen. For decades, he had struggled to get along with Paul, brushing everything aside for the greater good. But Paul would cross the line if he harmed Eileen. Holden would see to it.

He took the cloth from her and wiped his shoes before he straightened to his full height and looked at Eileen. She was so beautiful that his breath caught in his chest. Holden knew with certainty that his feelings for her had overtaken him. Not in a gentle way like the caress of a soft wave over your toes at the beach, but gradually, forcefully like thick vines that snake their way over a forgotten cottage, covering every window and door until the cottage becomes no more than a large trellis,a mere microcosm of the forest that engulfed it.

Chapter 19

Eye Witness

A train of puffy clouds swept across the sky, moving in time with the jacket Holden had draped over Eileen’s shoulders as it flapped noisily in the breeze. The echoing wind magnified the clicks of the photographer's camera, the rustle of the cane arrows and the chirps of the whistling frogs, transforming the night's sounds into an ominous rhythm. Eileen shivered as she surveyed the scene. A man in a plastic coat was hunched over, partially hidden by swaying cane stalks as his gloved hands panned the area with a magnifying glass. The wind shifted, allowing Eileen to catch snatches of the investigator's conversation with the photographer.

“Can you get a picture of this?” he asked, pointing at the section of the cane trash where the victim had been found. He grunted as he stood up and massaged the small of his back.

Eileen screwed up her eyes to see what he was referring to, but she was too far away. “What am I taking pictures of?” queried the photographer.

“This little pink thing right here. Looks like a fingernail to me, one of those fake ones women wear when they go out.”

The photographer shrugged. “Ain’t ever seen one before, but it might be.” He adjusted the camera’s aperture, leaned in and clicked the shutter twice before he adjusted the settings again and snapped a few more shots.

“How soon can I get back those photos?”

“A few days. I’ve got urgent ones to push through first.”

“Fine,” grumbled the investigator. He gingerly picked up the shiny pink thing and dropped it inside a bag, sealed it and put it in his case, a pensive look on his face. “That girl had fake nails?”

“Dunno,” said the photographer as he swapped out the used film for a new roll. The investigator squinted at him like he wanted to gouge his eyes out with the tweezers in his hand. Eileen shook her head in amusement. Even she could see that the photographer was there to do his job; no more, but preferably less if he could get away with it.

Holden came up behind her. He had spent the better part of twenty minutes chatting with Clifford and Derricks before Clifford had left to go to the morgue. “We’ve both had a long night and there's nothing more we can do here. Let's go home.”

The cane field was part of a large plantation, crisscrossed with sunken cart roads made by fat tractor wheels. The easiest thing to do was to head south, going deeper into the cane ground until they came out to a small village on the other side. Once in the car, Eileen turned the steering wheel and drove down the narrow lane flanked by tall stalks of cane. The humps in the middle of the track were covered with thick patches of grass that flicked the metal underbody so it sounded like thousands of tiny pings echoing throughout the car's interior. “I could never understand why tractors sink the ground down to the point where the grass in the middle is like a long island,” Eileen grumbled as she drove.

“They fill the tyres with water,” responded Holden.

“Really?”

“Yes. Water acts as a ballast which the tractors need for stability.”

“Hmm.” Eileen considered what he said and then asked, “How do you know so much?”

Holden smiled. “I read. You read a lot too, but mostly those classic novels where the people never even heard of electricity so you wouldn’t know about tractor tyres.”                                          Eileen laughed and wiped the windshield with the sleeve of her shirt, trying to erase a smudge that blocked her view. It barely helped the visibility. "Geez, it's dark," she mumbled. Ahead of them, the headlight’s beams illuminated the cart road but left the fields on either side doused in heavy darkness. The thickness of the night pressed against the car doors, threatening to swallow them whole.

A chill went down her spine as she gripped the steering wheel tighter.

Holden's voice was gentle as he asked, “Afraid of the dark?”

She smiled ruefully. “A little bit. The night always felt like a time that wasn’t entirely safe.”

“I see,” was all he said.

“I know it may seem strange to you given the circumstances, but I was always afraid of the night because of strange sounds. And now, with everything going on…” her voice trailed off.

“I can understand that.” He cleared his throat and asked, “What led you to your previous line of work if you don’t mind me asking?”

She sucked in her bottom lip and blew a breath through her nose. “I found out that the lady who raised me was keeping a secret from me and we had a big falling out. A few months later, she moved to America and I had no way to reach her to ask for help.”

Holden frowned. "Sounds like a bad secret