“I wanted to know you were okay.” He sighed, the noise coming through the receiver like a sad gust of air. “Goodnight, Eileen.”
There was a clatter and the line went dead. Eileen hung up too. Being presumed dead was stressful. Suddenly, every unfulfilled task was thrown into sharp relief, impatient to be fulfilled. Every noise outside the house was magnified and menacing. Restless desires warred with relentless fear as time ticked by. Eileen spent every minute of it wondering when and why it became acceptable for women to live in a world where they were forced to worry about their safety. Finally, Eileen dozed off again.
A deep slumber begrudgingly agreed to gather her in its warm embrace, but the universe mutinied. Flashes of a doppelgänger, bloated and crawling with maggots that worked their way through her flesh and laid eggs in her ears haunted her as she slept.
As the sun crept higher in the sky, the morning heat baked itself into the wall next to her bed and warmed the room, drawing sweat and leaving a damp outline of Eileen’s body pressed into the sheets. Hot and restless, she woke up and wandered into the bathroom. She splashed cold water on her face and stared into the mirror, searching her eyes to reassure herself that her nightmares were unfounded.
The serial murders were perplexing on their own, but the fact that this woman looked like her piqued Eileen’s curiosity even more. Eileen was an orphan after all. What if the latest victim was a relative? A sister or a cousin perhaps? What if she could find out more about her mother and her real family? The possibility was too great to pass up. Eileen downed a cup of scalding hot tea and pushed her feet into red rubber slippers before she headed out the door.
Just a few houses down the narrow lane was a clapboard chattel structure with flaking brown paint that housed a shop at the front and a residence at the back. The shop’s bifold wooden door was topped by a faded sign declaring it to be the property of Mr C.J. Briggs, licensed seller of liquor. Despite the unassuming facade, the business was the village’s hub, a place where residents could get gum, gossip and rum just a stone’s throw away from home. Inside the packed shop, women bought pork chops, chicken backs and rice by the pound, ingredients that would find their way to modest kitchens to be heavily seasoned, stewed and baked. One woman with a skirt pulled over her breasts gossiped with a lady decked out in neatly pressed church clothes. Two men were huddled in a dark corner, the window above them closed tight so the sunlight wouldn’t sting their rummy eyes. The large glass case on the counter was devoid of the usual ham cutters and cheese cutters. They wouldn’t sell on the Lord’s day when pots bubbled merrily on every stove with Sunday food. Next to the glass case, two stacks of newspapers were weighted down with chunks of wood that had been rubbed smooth after being handled by Briggs and his father for almost sixty years.
The headlines screamed ‘4TH WOMAN FOUND DEAD’ and ‘CANE SLASHER STRIKES AGAIN’. Eileen greeted everyone, picked up a newspaper and pushed a worn red one dollar note across the counter. Briggs nodded, pocketed the bill and puffed on his cigarette all without interrupting his argument about the pitfalls of the West Indies cricket team.
Eileen read as she walked. Last night’s victim had been discovered. The details were almost identical to the previous victims: her body was dumped in the cane field after being murdered elsewhere. A couple was out for a late-night dalliance when they found her body and reported it to the police. The article continued on page four, but even on that page, there wasn’t a picture of the victim. A brisk wind blew, fluttering the pages of the newspaper and snapping Eileen back to reality. She glanced around, her nerves on edge, but saw nothing except the houses on her left and the field on her right. The canes across the road were young, but the bright green leaves rustled irritably in the wind like footsteps on dry grass. She tucked the paper under her arm and hurried home.
* * *
THE NEXT MORNING, Eileen got to work extra early and waited in the car park for the others to arrive. In the time that went by, she read the rest of a book, painted her nails and considered getting a jheri-curl. The afro she saw in her car’s cracked wing mirror was an unruly tangle of pencil-sized curls that spread out around her face like a fuzzy halo. She twirled a lock of hair around her finger and pulled it taut until it touched the tip of her nose. Instead of staying in the middle of her forehead the way Michael Jackson’s did, the hair sprang back up and lost itself in the tawny pile on her head.
“Girl, that hair just as disruptive as you. Try and stop forcing it to be something it ain’t,” came Clifford’s taunt as he swung onto the lot and parked neatly next to her.
Eileen scowled but didn’t retort as she gathered her things from the back seat and headed into the building.
“You very early,” Clifford observed as he unlocked the back door. His voice betrayed nothing, but suspicion lingered in his eyes.
“I’ve got a lot of filing to do.”
When Clifford walked past her desk to unlock the door and windows at the front of the building, Eileen saw him raise an eyebrow at her neat desk.
“You mussy think I is Queen Isabella,” he mumbled to himself.
“Pardon?”
“Columbus convinced a rich woman to finance a trip to a place he wasn't sure existed to bring
