Page 3 of The Trap by Catherine
Twenty, thirty seconds go by in silence. She breaks it by asking, “Is it much further?” Because all that is out there in the night ahead of them is more night.
Still no cars. Still no lights.
No sign of anything except more road and dark and rain.
“No.” He jerks the gearstick with more force than he has before and, as he does, she feels his warm fingers graze the cold, damp skin of her bare knee. The touch is right on the line between an accidental graze and an intentional stroke. His eyes don’t leave the road. “Nearly there.”
“Great,” she says absently.
She doesn’t know what to do. If itwasan accident, wouldn’t he apologize? Or is he not apologizing because there’s nothing to apologize for, because he hasn’t even realized he did it, because he didn’tdoanything at all?
The rain is heavier now, a steady roar on the roof.
“Awful night,” he says. “And you’re not exactly dressed for it, are you?”
Then he turns and openly appraises her, and there can be absolutely no mistake about this. His gaze crawls across her lap, combing over the thin cotton of her dress which, wet, is clinging to the outline of her thighs.
It feels like some slinking predator, cold and oily, slithering across her skin.
She moves her hands to her knees in an attempt to cover up and waits for his eyes to return to the road while a cold dread swirls in the pit of her stomach.
But then, sheisn’tdressed for this weather. That’s a statement of fact.
Jesus Christ,you really can’t sayanythingthese days, can you?
“Yeah, well,” she says, with a brief smile she hopes won’t encourage himorantagonize him. “I thought I’d be able to hop in a cab.”
“They really need to do something about the taxi shortage.”
“Yeah, the—”
“Especially considering the missing women.” He glances at her. “How many is it now? Three? Four?”
The temperature of her cold dread has dropped a few degrees to an icy, nauseating fear.
But then, what if it were a woman behind the wheel? She wouldn’t think anything of this. They’d just be making conversation. They’d just be talking about what everyone was talking about, discussing what was in the news.
Now he’s pointing towards the mess at her feet.
“Did you see the latest?” he says. “It’s on the front of the paper, there.”
The safest option feels like reaching for the folded tabloid. As she picks it up, it obligingly unfurls to reveal its front-page headline, screaming at her in large caps. MISSING WOMEN: SEARCH CONTINUES IN WICKLOW MOUNTAINS. There are two pictures underneath it: a large one showing people in white coveralls picking through a wild landscape, and a smaller one of a young, smiling brunette holding a dog in her arms.
She is familiar to anyone who follows the news. Not just the woman herself, but this specific picture of her.
“That’s not that far away from here, you know,” he says. He jerks his chin to indicate the road ahead. “If you drove for fifteen minutes up into the hills, you’d probably be able to see the floodlights.” A pause. “They’re always at that, though, aren’t they? Conducting searches. Everyone gets all excited, but they never find anything. Thing is, people just don’t understand how much space we got up here, you know? My old fella was always giving out about that, back when the first lot went missing. The ones from the nineties. There was always some reporter or relative or whatever saying, ‘Oh, she’s up in the Wicklow Mountains, we just need to search.’ They’d think if you just looked everywhere, you’d find them. But youcan’tlook everywhere, you see. Not around here. There’s just too much ground to cover.” Another pause, this one a shade longer. “So they probablyareout here somewhere, but no one’s ever going to fucking find them.”
There’s a pinching pain in her chest now. She forces a breath down into her lungs in an attempt to alleviate it, but it feels like the oxygen can’t get past her throat.
“You know,” he says, turning towards her, “you have the look of one of them.”
She lets the paper drop.
She thinks about theclunksound the passenger door made when she pulled it closed. How a few minutes ago, it might have represented rescue. A portal to the warm and the dry, to lights and transport, to other people, ready to save her from the dark abyss of this endless night.
But what if every threat that dark had posed had climbed into the car with her?
What if she was trapped in here now, with them?
