Page 18 of The Trap by Catherine
“No,” she said, not wanting to get into all that again. She took a deep breath. “I want to do an interview. And not another bloody community-radio phone-in tour. I mean something big. Something national. That will actually get people to care.”
Now Chris was looking at her with something that felt like pity, and it stung.
“But they won’t,” he said gently. “They don’t. Because to them, Nicki wasn’t some innocent, doe-eyed teenagerjustout walking her adorable dog in bright daylight. They think she was staggering around town on a Saturday night, drunk and alone, in a short skirt, after she’d ditched her friends. You’re not going to be able to change their minds, and no one’s going to give you the airtime to try in the first place.”
He was right. When Nicki first went missing, Lucy had tried everything to get the media to care. She’d called in to radio stations, messaged any email address she could find under a byline and even attempted to contact the producers of daytime TV and magazine shows.
It was a slow and painful realization that, in real life,gone girlwasn’t anywhere near enough of a story. Thousands of adults went missing in Ireland every year and Nicki was just one of them, and she was one who’d apparently wandered off into the night, drunk.
No one had cared about her at all until Jennifer Gold went missing six months later, clutching a sheaf of Gone Girl Golden Tickets® in her hand: young, beautiful, and totally innocent.
Within twenty-four hours, she was the subject of press conferences, column inches, and primetime. When she was only seven days gone, there was a candlelight vigil in the grounds of Our Lady of the Wayside Church in Kilternan, a famously bright-blue clapboard structure built to a New England aesthetic—and so utterly alien to Ireland—that had been featured byAccidentally Wes Anderson. The following Friday, her mother was the subject of a somber segment ofThe Late Late, a talk show guaranteed to get at least one in ten people living in Ireland tuning in. Both the president and the Taoiseach took the time to pay tribute to this teenage girl they’d never met.
It wasn’t an exaggeration to say that Jennifer’s King Charles, Walter—whom she’d been walking when she’d disappeared and who had subsequently trotted back home alone, his lead trailing on the ground, inadvertently raising the alarm—had got more attention than the other two women’s cases combined. Since he was in Jennifer’s official photo, you could argue that Walter had been on the front page of all the newspapers before Nicki had even been mentioned inside them.
“Well, maybe what I should do,” Lucy said, “is point that out. Call the media and the public out on their hypocrisy. Guilt them into caring aboutallthe missing women.”
“I think that would be a very bad idea,” Chris said. “What would you even say? ‘The missing seventeen-year-old girl doesn’t deserve that much sympathy?’ We need to keep the public on side, Luce. That’s definitely not the way to do it. Jennifer Gold has practically been canonized. Christ, we’d probably start getting hate mail...” He sighed. “Look, I’m going to get dressed. I’m not working tonight. Do you want to do something? Go for a drive?”
“Ah, maybe later,” Lucy said, waving a hand. “I’m going to go back to the cafe.”
Before he could make a comment about her claim that she was goingbackthere, she turned and went into the kitchen.
The first thing she saw was the stack of envelopes she’d swiped off the table and on to one of the chairs. She picked up the thick business envelope with the redImportantstamped on it and the barcode sticker showing that its journey to this address had been tracked. She ripped a corner open just enough to see the logo for her bank, the one the mortgage on the cafe was with, and then put it back with the others on the chair.
It was then she saw the little business card on the floor. It must have been with the envelopes, but had fallen when she’d transferred them to the chair.
Lucy bent to pick it up.
It belonged to Jack Keane, former crime correspondent for one of the tabloids, now self-styled true-crime expert who made a living churning out salacious non-fiction about high-profile cases that seemed to be trying to upset everyone involved, and getting hired as a talking head on the kind of documentaries you didn’t want to tell your friends you’d watched.
He had tried to contact most if not all of the missing women’s family members at one point or another, but no one wanted anything to do with him. Trusting him with the story of your missing loved one was like going to Jerry Springer or Jeremy Kyle to sort out your family feud.
Lucy was about to take the card to the bin under the sink when she saw that it had something handwritten on the back of it.
You’re not being told everything. Call me and I’ll tell you.
She read the sentence three times, then tucked the card into her pocket. She grabbed her keys and her phone, and left the house.
Before she got into her car, Lucy gripped the stake theFor Salesign was attached to with both hands, yanked it free of the garden wall, and flung it on the grass.
A year and a half ago, anotherFor Salesign had got Lucy into this mess.
She’d been driving by the old butcher’s shop on Clonskeagh Road when it caught her eye, hanging in the window. By that stage, the premises had been sitting empty for months. It was a small, narrow, two-story house whose entire ground floor had been the butcher’s shop, with space for three cars to park outside. Every time Lucy passed it, she’d added another detail to her daydream of buying it, renovating it, and turning it into a cafe.
Lucy had spent most of her professional life working in the food-and-beverage side of hospitality management, most recently as an events coordinator for a city-center hotel, but she fantasized about one day opening a small, welcoming neighborhood cafe, the kind that served excellent coffee but didn’t judge you for how you liked to drink it, that was friendly to dogs and laptops, and whose food offering was one thing done exceptionally well, like donuts or cupcakes or toasted cheese sandwiches.
That morning, as she’d sat in her car waiting for the lights to change, looking at theFor Salesign, a little voice had whispered,Why one day? Why not now?That night, she’d sat down and done the sums—and then done them again and again, until they gave her the answer she wanted.
Then she’d sat Nicki down and pitched her plan. Lucy would take out a mortgage to buy the butcher’s, using all her savings as the deposit. Going by recent sales in the area, their house was worth at least one and a half times what the butcher’s shop was asking; they’d sell it, splitting their share. Lucy would use hers to renovate the studio above the shop so she could live in it, and invest the rest in getting the business off the ground. Nicki wasn’t enthusiastic, but Lucy pulled every trick she could think of to persuade her—pointing out that she could use the money to go traveling, or do that ceramics course she’d been talking about, or just take a few months off to do nothing much at all—and, eventually, she’d come round.
Just a few weeks later, Lucy had the keys to the butcher’s and there were two offers on the house, both of which were above the asking price. She’d handed in her notice at work. Nicki’s intentions were still vague, but Chris had sorted them a room in a friend’s house that they could move into if the house sold before they’d made other plans.
Then Nicki left the house to go to a birthday party and never came home again.
Now, just over a year on, Lucy was unemployed, defaulting on her mortgage, and unable to pay her bills. She hadn’t sold the house. This was partly because she couldn’t bear the thought of her sister somehow finding her way home only to have the door answered by a stranger, and partly because after the one and only viewing she’d allowed since Nicki’s disappearance, Lucy had found weird little prayer cards tucked under all the pillows on the beds. Clearly, at least one person hadn’t been as interested in buying the house as they had in getting into the house of the woman who was missing.
Lucy couldn’t stomach having another one, no matter how much the estate agent promised he’d thoroughly vet future house-hunters.
