Page 28 of The Trap by Catherine
In the spring the rain came, and it camein, dripping constantly and sometimes even pouring through the gaps in the roof, and of course there was always at least one more leak than they had receptacles to catch them with. Sometimes, during stormy nights, the buckets and pans or whatever they had would quickly overflow, the rain drenching them from both above and below. They’d be constantly cold and wet, their skin damp, their fingertips forever shriveled like prunes. For weeks, everyone had had a cough or a fever or a sore throat.
Summertime had been the promise of some comfort and for a few weeks it had brought a little relief, but the intense heat of the last few weeks had been a torture. Hot air began pushing its way inside shortly after sunrise and got trapped there, building and thickening all the while, so that it was a suffocating, solidified thing come the night.
One night of such temperatures was an anomaly; they could take solace from the fact that it’d feel better tomorrow. Two in a row was uncomfortable, guaranteeing a night of sweaty and broken sleep. But yesterday had been the third day the temperature had stayed past the 30°C mark and in here, now, it was absolutely unbearable.
She closed her eyes and imagined diving into cool, clear water, hoping her subconscious mind would steal a few details for her dreams, but thinking about feeling that way only made her feel worse.
And anyway, she couldn’t dream if she couldn’t sleep.
They all had different names for who they’d been and how they’d lived before they’d come here. The Before. The Outside. The Previous, as inmy previous life. But on the whole, they tried to avoid talking or even thinking about it.
It was best to forget.
Easier.
Necessary, in the long run.
But now, when she wondered what the hell she was doing here, how she’d ended up in this situation, why she continued to stay...
Shehadto think about Before, to remind herself that she’d no choice in the matter. She couldn’t leave.
She was trapped here.
KIN
The hum of polite chatter. Unobtrusive background music. The clink of a teaspoon hitting off the inside of a ceramic cup. Water coming to the boil with a hiss. Chair legs scraping and shifting across the floor.
If Lucy closed her eyes for a second, she could imagine that the cafe was open, that she had resumed and rebuilt her life, and that she had been able to do that because she had the answers to all her questions about where her sister had gone. But this afternoon, the place sounded like that because shedidn’t.
She’d gathered the families of the missing women to discuss Jack Keane’s interview request, a summit of tragedies.
Behind the old counter, Lucy absently arranged some biscuits on a plate and surveyed the odd scene.
Sarah and Tommy Meehan were sitting side by side in chairs that they’d pulled close together. The last time they’d seen their daughter, Tana, she’d been leaving their house to catch a train into Dublin city center over a year and a half ago. She’d moved back in with them when her marriage to Roland Kearns had broken down. Like most of the country, Tana had been working from home for months by then, but needed to collect some items from her office.
They never saw their only child again.
Now Tommy was on a cocktail of medication for his heart and Sarah had just completed a course of treatment for a cancer she’d beaten before Tana’s disappearance that had since returned. They’d had Tana late in life; they were both edging toward seventieth birthdays they wouldn’t have any desire to celebrate. And even though Sarah was the one on the far side of chemotherapy, it was Tommy’s appearance that concerned Lucy. Every time she saw him, it seemed like his eyes had sunk a little deeper into his skull and his pallor was another shade closer to gray. He seemed to be slowlysuccumbing, helpless to stop his physical being from being eaten alive by his grief.
Lucy didn’t worry at all about the woman sitting to Tommy’s left, and she knew that Margaret Gold didn’t spend a single moment of any day worrying about her or the others.
Today, Jennifer Gold’s mother was as made-up and shiny as she always was, wearing a linen shirt in a shade of hot pink that reminded Lucy of bubblegum and Barbies, with a pair of designer shades on her head. Perched there, not pushed into her hair, because that would mess up its careful styling.
Eight months ago, her just-turned-seventeen-year-old daughter had left the house to walk the dog in chilly winter sunshine but, fifteen minutes later, the dog had returned alone. Just a few yards from their front gate, Margaret had found Jennifer’s damaged phone.
Immediately, she was a presumed abduction. She got detectives, search teams, and an incident room. For days, a Garda helicopter had droned over the area while civilian volunteers moved over the landscape below like lines of crawling neon-yellow ants. After a week of blanket media coverage, vigils, and even presidential concern, public demand had forced the authorities’ hand.
Without Margaret, there would probably be no Operation Tide, and Nicki would still be a flimsy report at the back of a filing cabinet somewhere. But it was hard to feel grateful when the woman consistently acted as if Jennifer was the only missing woman worth finding.
Worse yet, the general public seemed to agree. They weren’t even half as bothered about what had happened to the twenty-nine-year-old overweight woman who’d moved back in with her parents after her marriage failed, or the drunk one in a short skirt who’d abandoned her friends on a night out.
It was, to say the least, depressing.
Today, Margaret had an air of barely contained impatience and looked like she’d got lost on the way to a Slimming World meeting she was only attending to make sure she stayed at her goal weight. Lucy watched her take a sip of the (instant) coffee she’d been served and then turn the corners of her mouth down in disgust.She was also sitting on her own cardigan, which she’d made a point of taking off and laying on the seat of her chair before she sat down.
Lucy had to remind herself that this woman was missing her young daughter, and that she deserved sympathy and compassion.
Margaret just made it so hard to remember that.
