Page 89 of The Trap by Catherine
“Did you ever talk to Lucy or Chris about this?” Denise asked gently.
Nicki shook her head. “They wouldn’t have listened. Or understood.”
“But you could’ve—”
“Yes!” Nicki shouted suddenly, throwing up her hands. “Fuck. Yes. Iknow. I could’ve called, or sent a text or a fucking telegram or a carrier pigeon or whatever. But why should I? She was doing what she wanted and she didn’t ask me for permission, did she? She was opening that fucking cafe—because that’s what the world needs,anotherhipster joint with a stupid misspelled name judging you for putting sugar in the coffee that they’ve overcharged you for and served to you in a plastic cup. She wanted to sell the house, and I knew she wasn’t going to leave me alone until I agreed to it. As for Chris... You know we met working abroad? On Crete? Well, let’s just say it turns out the guy I met there was just pretending to want the same things as me. When we got back here, he started acting the same as everybody else.” Nicki paused. “Look, I nearly did, OK? Contact Lucy, I mean. A few times. Not because I wanted to, not because she deserved it, but because I knew it was the”—another eye-roll—“right thing to door whatever. But every time... It was just easier not to. I didn’t want to think about that life, out there. So I kept thinking,I’ll just enjoy a few more days of this. And then... Well, then I just didn’t.”
She sat back and exhaled deeply, as if deflated.
Angela felt deflated too. There was no mystery here. No dark secret. No unfathomable puzzle. Nicki had left her life because she’d wanted to, and hadn’t contacted her sister because shehadn’twanted to. She had come to this place simply because this was where she wanted to be.
And in doing so had set a series of events in motion that she couldn’t possibly have foreseen.
“So,” Nicki said, “what happens now?” She folded her arms. “I told you, I’m not leaving here. She can’t make me.”
The only sounds were birdsong, the breeze gently rustling the branches of the oak tree overhead and the low murmur of voices drifting toward them from where the cars were parked.
Enjoy this, Angela said silently.Savor it.
The last truly good moment of your life.
Denise leaned forward, put her palms flat on the table.
“I’m really sorry,” she said gently. “But I have some bad news. Lucy is missing. She has been for three weeks now.”
THE FACE OF THE EARTH
Lucy wakes with a start.
She enjoys one glorious heartbeat of not remembering, of justbeing, before, in the next, the questions come rushing in.
Where am I? How long have I been here? Is he going to kill me?
And then, hot on their heels, comes the pain.
The pulsating hammer-blows at the wet swelling on the side of her head. The throbbing in her left arm that she thinks might be a broken bone. What feels like a row of tiny knives in her stomach that rub against her insides every time she takes a breath.
The burning between her legs that she refuses to think about.
She’s takenthatpain and locked it in a box and pushed it far, far away.
There are other feelings too, not quite bad enough to count as pain on their own, more like discomforts that have been mixed in with it: hunger, thirst, the hard floor beneath her body getting more and more uncomfortable with every passing hour, the cold because he took away her clothes.
Too many to make any sort of definite inventory.
And then there’s the smell too. She’s never experienced anything like it. It’s so bad, so thick, so pungent, it feels like a presence in its own right.
It’s so bad she fears there could only be one possible source of it.
Or, worse again,three.
Don’t panic. Stay calm. It’s OK. It’s OK. It’s OK.
This isn’t the first time she’s woken up here. Her guess is that it’s her third, but she can’t be sure. She has tried to keep track, but she thinks she might have been unconscious for a while, and when she woke up the second time she felt woozy and heavy, like he’d given her something to make her sleep.
But this is the first time she’s woken up to see light.
Daylight, weak and watery, is forcing its way through the dirty lace curtain hanging from the room’s only window: a small, rectangular pane close to the ceiling. It’s so high up it gives her the sense that she is low down, that this space is perhaps in a basement or a cellar or something like that.
