Page 5 of The Trap by Catherine
Chasing it is a crushing weight of disappointment.
Because hewasa man, not a monster.
And so, not the man she’s been desperately trying to find.
There have been many nights like this. She turns off her phone and walks aimlessly along country roads, dressed for a night in the city, pretending to be a girl who hasn’t managed to make it home, hoping a monster stops to pick her up.
Themonster.
The one who took her sister.
And the other women.
She straightens up and turns to go to the paper-towel dispenser on the wall. She pulls and yanks and tugs until all the napkins inside it have come out, until she’s holding a bundle just about big enough to muffle the sound she makes when she presses her face into it and screams.
Tonight’s failure feels different because, for a moment there, she was sure her searching had come to an end.
A Samaritan who just happened to be on a lonely road at an ungodly hour, dispatched to the shop by his pregnant wife. Without his phone, conveniently, and with a reassuring baby seat in the back. He’d talked about the missing women.
And there’s another, bigger reason to be disappointed. When she felt that she’d found him, she’d also felt fear. She’d panicked. She’d started plotting her escape.
So if, one night, shedoesfind him, well...
Now she can’t even trust herself to carry out the plan.
He’d even said her sister wasdead to the world—which she is. Missing, presumed dead by everyone whose job it is to find her. The Gardaí, the only people who have the necessary resources. The media, who play favorites with the missing women and whose favorite has always been someone else. Anyone among the general public who might have, back at the start, been praying and hoping alongside her and Chris, but who has now given up, moved on, resumed their normal life.
And there weren’t that many of those people to begin with, given the circumstances.
Most days, it’s impossible to say which is worse: the grief, waiting patiently on the sidelines for some kind of confirmation, or the torment that just never ever lets up.
Where is she? What happened to her? Will we ever know?
Is there any possibility that thisisn’tmy fault?
The only certainty that she has is the answer to that last one.
Sometimes she accidentally catches snippets of things on TV, where someone is describing the moment they learned that a loved one had met an unexpected and violent end. The knock on the door. A phone ringing in the dead of night. A welfare check that turned into a gruesome discovery, a scene that will remain etched on the back of their eyelids for the rest of their natural life.
And she’ll find herself feeling jealous.
Shehasto know what happened to her sister, no matter what the cost. And until she’s finished searching, it seems crazy to start grieving.
It’s far too soon to give up yet.
Isn’t it?
There’s a splintered version of her in the cracked mirror above one of the sinks. She watches herself power up her phone and use it to summon a taxi. There’s no problem securing one, although it’ll take a while to get all the way out here.
The mirror that should be over the other sink is missing, the rectangle of paler paint its ghostly mark.
WAKE TURBULENCE
When Lucy opened her eyes, she enjoyed one glorious heartbeat of not remembering, of justbeing, before, in the next, the questions came rushing in.
What happened to Nicki? Where is my sister? Is she waking up somewhere this morning or has she never woken up since I saw her last?
For the four hundred and fortieth day in a row, there were no answers.
