Page 87 of The Trap by Catherine
“Why not?”
Nicki threw up her hands. “BecauseI didn’t want anyoneto be able to contact me!”
The end of that sentence had come with another eye-roll, and now Nicki was regarding them like they were a pair of absolute idiots.
“So,” Denise said, “you didn’t tell your sister you were planning to come here?”
“No.”
“Can I ask why not?”
“It’s not a crime, is it?”
And that wasn’t answering the question, Angela thought.
“When you left the pub that night,” Denise said, “and discarded your phone, had you already decided at that point to permanently leave your home?”
“Well, I was going to have to permanently leave it anyway, wasn’t I?” Nicki said. “Lucy had decided to sell it.” A new thought seemed to occur to Nicki then; her face changed into something less confrontational, more curious. “Did she? Has it been sold?”
“No,” Denise said. “It hasn’t.”
“Well...Good.”
Denise looked around. “Nicki, what is this place? Does it have a name?”
“We just call it the Farm.”
“Isit a farm?”
“Sort of,” Nicki said. Her features softened; this change in topic had relaxed her a little. “It’s a community. For living simply and sustainably. If you want the same things that the people who are already here want, you can join. In exchange for food and board, you contribute. We have chickens, we have a polytunnel, some people bake... We live off the land and we sell what we can at local farmers’ markets to buy what we need but can’t grow. And Bastian—he owns the place—I think he leases a few acres to a local farmer too. An organic one. That money is used for building materials, hiring machinery, getting people in when there’s something we can’t do ourselves. Things like that.”
“What are you building?”
“Well,everything,” Nicki said, waving a hand. “We only have outbuildings, really, at the moment. A few tents, a couple of caravans. A mobile home—we use that as an office. Bastian works in there and it’s where we have group meetings. There is a house, the original farmhouse, but there’s only, like, two bedrooms in there, and the place is falling apart. Well, everything that’s already here is falling apart, which is why we have so much work to do. The idea is for there to be an entire village here, eventually.” She exhaled. “Bastian’s been at it in some form or another for, like, ten years.”
“How many people are here?” Denise asked.
“Thirteen, at the moment. Including the children.”
Denise looked surprised. “There’s children?”
“Three,” Nicki said. “Bastian’s two. They’re toddlers. And Marissa just had a baby, like... He’s, what? Four months old now, I think?”
“Where is everyone?”
“Where they always are,” Nicki said, pointing over her own shoulder. “We’re a mile away from it. This is just, like, the security cabin.”
“Did you come here voluntarily?”
Nicki’s face hardened again. “OfcourseI did.”
“You came here straight from Dublin?”
“Basically, yeah,” she said to the tabletop.
“How did you know it was here?” Denise asked. “We couldn’t find anything about it online and only the farmhouse is on the map. And it’s there as a private residence.”
Nicki glanced toward the caravan, and when Angela did the same, she saw Baseball Cap sitting in its open door with his elbows on his knees, watching them.
