The cupboard’s hinges creaked and the door traced a wide arc along the worn linoleum tiles as a musty scent wafted out when she pulled it open. She blinked quickly, willing her eyes to adjust to the dim light in the shallow space. She had tucked the previous tenant’s belongings into the cobwebbed corner. Now a thin layer of dust covered two tattered pairs of slippers and a cardboard box filled with odds and ends that the landlord had said the family would return for but they never did. It felt intrusive going through the dead woman’s possessions, but Eileen hoped a clue to her disappearance and death would emerge. There was a nearly full tube of S-curl, two cassette tapes, plastic bangles and neon eye shadow. She pulled out a pet rock, bottle caps for a recently concluded competition and the classified section of an old newspaper. Eileen sighed. She had hoped for extensive diaries, bloody fingerprints or some other smoking gun that would point her to Anna’s killer. It was no wonder that the young woman’s family hadn’t returned for these items. They were easy to forget.
Eileen dragged out the boxes, piled the shoes on top and then swept, mopped and dusted the closet until it was free of spiders and smelled faintly of lavender disinfectant. She gathered everything in her arms and took them to the grey dustbin she kept in her verandah. No sooner than she’d opened the door, a brisk wind whipped the sepia-toned sheet of newspaper out of the box and slapped it into her face. “Pfft!” Eileen pulled it off her forehead and was about to throw it back into the box when she noticed a circled want ad. Ringed with red ink was a small classified listing with thick-set black type seeking a seamstress. Along the newspaper’s deckled edge was a scribbled note: “Thursday 2 p.m.”
Her breath hitched in her chest as she checked the date. The tiny month and day in the top right corner matched the time Anna had gone missing. Eileen bit her lip as her mind whirred. An alarm bell in her head went off, and her stomach flipped as she considered the grungy classifieds in her hands. She tipped the rest of the items into the bin, rolled up the paper and took it back inside.
* * *
EILEEN WAS LATE FOR WORK the next morning. By the time she flew through the door, her cheeks flushed as she lugged her heavy handbag, the echo of the tenth gong from parliament’s clock hung in the air. Holden raised an eyebrow at her. “Thought you weren’t coming in, boss.”
“Yeah, I almost didn’t,” she replied absently as she rummaged through her bag.
Holden stared at her as though she had gone mad. “Eileen, I’m a tolerant man, but you’re playing fast and loose with my easy-going nature.”
Eileen regarded him for a moment as though wondering if it was worth it to retort. She clearly decided against it, as she stepped over to his desk and pressed a worn newssheet onto his desk. She pointed to the circled ad. “The girl we picked up two days ago — Michelle — didn’t her boyfriend say that she went to a job interview?”
Holden put down his teacup and peered at the crinkled page. “Yes,” he replied slowly. His eyes flicked toward the date in the corner. “But this paper is from months ago so this can’t be the ad she responded to. What’s this about?”
“The second victim, Anna Brown, used to live in my apartment. I found this paper while packing away her things. When did Anna go missing?”
Holden wrinkled his forehead. “I can’t remember. Why are you asking me all of this?”
“Wasn’t it five months ago?”
Holden grew more flustered by the second. “I don’t know. Eileen, what are you going on about?”
Eileen grabbed Holden’s obituary book. His brows arched when she licked her fingers and thumbed through his precious book until she found Anna’s extract. She spun the book around so Holden could see the dates. He looked at both clippings: the obituary and the ad. The date of her death was one week after the ad’s publication. “If she went to the meeting on Thursday, that would have been a week before she was found.”
Out of her handbag, Eileen pulled a stack of bright white sheets of photocopy paper. The grainy black and white facsimiles were a jumble of front page articles and want ads for carpenters, fortune-telling and common entrance lessons. On each sheet, there were fat blue circles and names scribbled in Eileen’s handwriting: Anna, Lydia, Nora, Michelle.
“I went to the newspaper archive office and cross-checked the dates the girls went missing with the dates these ads appeared. The phone number matches for Lydia, Anna and Nora. I narrowed it down to a week before the girls disappeared but I still can’t find the one that Michelle answered,” Eileen said.
Holden’s eyes grew wide as he calculated the probability of Eileen’s evidence. It made sense. Derricks had said the girls had never crossed paths otherwise. It was a cunning trick — with the economy being the way it was, the promise of a paying job would lure many women.
“And look at this.” She opened a colourful tourist map on top of the photocopied ads. It crackled beneath her palms as she smoothed it out on the desk, her hands running over pictures of snorkelling dives and mini moke rentals. She had highlighted four spots in red marker, creating a trail of scarlet dots on the west coast of the island. Between each point was a thin stroke that joined
