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

a manila folder and hole punch on her lap as a plausible excuse in the event she was caught eavesdropping.

“Before I forget, your boy was there today,” chuckled Clifford.

“Oh, was he now? I imagine he’s not too pleased that we got the body and he didn’t.”

“It’s a bloody shame, ain’t it?” Clifford said mockingly. “I think what really annoyed him was that Derricks sent Wilson with me so I could get to the morgue faster. You know how that kinda thing gets his dander up.”

“The commissioner sent an outrider? Why?”

“Told me not to say anything, but I gonna tell you; Derricks scheduled a press conference tonight on de seven o’clock TV news.”

Holden’s words were low and urgent. Eileen held her breath and pressed her ear against the door, straining to hear his voice as he asked, “Clifford, what are you telling me?”

Clifford’s disgust was evident as he said, “Boss, something ain’t right.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning that I was doing this for long enough to know when to get worried and right now I worried because…”

The phone rang, startling Eileen and making her curse as she rolled her chair to the desk to snatch the receiver. She gave the person directions to the funeral home as quickly as she could, rolling her eyes every time he misspelt ‘Buckworth Street’. By the time she’d hung up, Holden and Clifford were coming out of the room and neither of them said much as they closed the building for the day. Eileen sighed. She’d have to watch the evening news to learn more.

At the supermarket, women bent their heads together and complained bitterly about insecure men who preferred to take the lives of innocent females instead of improving themselves. The gas attendant who filled Eileen’s tank talked animatedly to her co-worker, both of them exchanging snippets of conversation and shocked gasps. The roar of traffic at the nearby intersection drowned out much of what they said, but she caught the words “sugar factory” and knew that word had begun to spread. On an island with just over a quarter of a million people, bad news spread quicker than cheap margarine.

But nowhere was the furor of the gossip more robust than in the rum shops. As Eileen drove down the unpaved road toward her apartment building, she couldn’t miss the crowd that spilt out of the doors as everyone exchanged rumours over glasses of rum and coke.

Eileen let herself into her apartment and raced to turn the TV's knob. The ending of the news intro flashed across the screen and she heaved a sigh. She was just in time. She stood in front of the television set, her dusty shoes still on her feet and her eyes glued to the screen. The television anchor outlined the grim details of the discovery as a montage of images appeared: the sugar factory's exterior, a photo of a smiling young woman, and her grief-stricken relatives huddled outside Huxley's gate.  The newscaster’s disembodied voice identified the young woman as Lydia James before the screen switched to live footage of Hugh Derricks, the new police commissioner. Derricks shuffled his papers as he greeted viewers and then cleared his throat and fixed his gaze on the prepared statement in front of him.

“Today at nine o’clock members of the Police Force were summoned to Huxley Sugar Factory to investigate the discovery of a deceased female. She has been identified as seventeen-year-old Lydia James of Number Eight, Wicklow Gardens. Given the evidence, we are treating this as an unnatural death.”

He went on, “The Police Force has reason to believe that this death is connected to that of twenty-two-year-old Anna Brown who was discovered in March in Marrilow Fields and Nora Edwards of Morris Hall who was found at the Golden Greens Golf Course last year. Although the victims are not known to each other, it is believed that these murders are being perpetrated by a single individual.

Across the country, from plush living rooms in the heights and terraces to tight tenantry homes in rural lanes, fathers bolted doors and mothers slammed sash windows as telephones rang. Sadness turned to confusion and every Barbadian’s blood ran cold.

For the first time in the island’s history, a serial killer was on the loose.

Chapter 3

The Slasher

A country’s vitals can be taken with its news headlines and Barbados’ pulse was palpitating at an unprecedented rate. ‘Serial Killer Strikes!’ screamed the next morning’s headline. ‘Cane Slasher!’ read another in thick black letters, a reference to the slash and burn method used to kill off crops. The media painted the killer as a sinister loner who lurked among darkened fields and preyed on random women. As the day progressed, the moniker was shortened to ‘Slasher’. It stuck.

Rumours and supposition only served to double down on the country’s panic. People sat vigil by rotary phones and rushed off callers to keep the lines free. When the phones did ring, their loved ones safe for one more day, they’d speculate again who was murdering young women and why.

Was it really a serial killer?

“Them things don’t happen in little Barbados. God is a Bajan.”

Or a sick coincidence?

“Girl…I ain’t know. But it got to be…”

They had to believe the latter. That those dead women were wicked and had wronged some jealous lover or angry neighbour and the police weren’t doing their job. Some separated themselves, glorifying the imagined piousness that helped them sleep — albeit uneasily — at night. The possibility that a madman was on the loose, picking off women at random filled them with terror. And yet…

The unexplained murders of three young women with no connection to each other were impossible to explain otherwise. The country became divided: men lived life as usual while women went on self-imposed dusk-to-dawn curfews even though the Slasher’s victims had gone missing in broad daylight. Nora Edwards had gone to meet her outside man, Anna Brown went missing after she went to town and Lydia was on her way home from school. The coincidences stopped there.

At