Page 82 of The Trap by Catherine
Even Angela had been given one. The others were complaining that it wasway too warm for this shit, but she liked hers, liked the feel of it. It made her feel taller, somehow. She walked with a straighter spine with this thing on her. And she couldn’t help but hook her thumbs under the straps at her chest, like all the guards did.
“They’ve always been a friendly bunch,” the sarge said, diverting a rivulet of sweat that was running down the side of his face into his hairline with the back of his hand. “But we haven’t seen much of them for the last two years—understandably—and what I’ve heard around the town suggests the atmosphere here has changed considerably in that time. So let’s be friendly but firm. We don’t have any beef with them, but we are not leaving until we speak to her. No lights, no sirens, no attitude. OK?”
Heads nodded.
“Detective Pope will take the lead and, when we locate her, do all the talking. Everyone else hangs back and ideally keeps anyone we meet in there well back too. Understood?” There was more nodding and a few affirmative sounds. “Good. Let’s go.”
As they all started back to the cars, Angela felt a grip on her arm, stopping her.
When she turned back, she found herself caught in Denise’s intense glare.
“You don’t need to tell me,” Angela said immediately. “I know. I won’t say a word.”
Denise nodded and let her go.
They both got back in the car. In just the few minutes it had been sitting still, the air inside it had thickened into a dead, suffocating heat.
Denise put up the windows and turned the cold air on full blast.
As the convoy set off again, Angela took a deep breath.
“Um, look,” she said. “I just want to say... Thank you. For everything. And for bringing me along to this. I know I don’t deserve it.”
Denise’s eyes stayed on the road.
“Well,” she said, “you’ve come this far. You may as well see it to the end. And fuck knows, we both need the closure.”
This was true, but Angela couldn’t help but note that Denise hadn’t corrected her.
They drove on in silence.
The road—the track—appeared to be interminable, looping and winding through the trees in a nonsensical shape that the trees must have dictated. Angela felt like she was in a mediocre fairground maze, designed to make the trek from entrance to center feel much longer than it actually was, to give theimpressionof distance. More than once, the track curved so much it seemed to double back on itself, and the position of the sun’s glare backed up Angela’s theory that the track wasn’t taking them from A to B so much as it was supposed to deter anyone who might find it from making the journey.
If she hadn’t been being led down it in a convoy of Garda cars in broad daylight, she might have worried she was being led to her death.
“Maybe this is where they all go,” Denise muttered.
“Who?”
But now the expression on the other woman’s face made it clear she hadn’t intended to say that out loud and for a moment it seemed like she might tell Angela to forget it.
“All the missing women,” Denise said then. “When they leave the face of the earth. Because that’s what people always say, isn’t it? About unexplained disappearances. The ones where it’s all dead ends and no leads.It was as if she’d disappeared off the face of the earth. Well, maybe where they went is here. Or a place like here. That isn’t on any maps, out in the middle of nowhere. A place no one even thought to look. A nice place.”
Angela said, “Hmmm,” like she agreed there was merit to this theory, but she didn’t—and she was surprised to hear such total shite come out of Detective Pope’s mouth.
She didn’t need to be on the other side of Garda training to know that most missing women were not off enjoying another life of nature and open sky and peace.
They were broken bones caught in scraps of ripped, rotting clothes, or bloated, decaying, fluid-leaking bodies that would be bones soon enough.
They were hastily buried in shallow, unmarked graves in forgotten places, or hiding under new foundations in busy ones, or trapped leagues under the surface of whatever body of water their killer had dumped them in.
They were fierce family secrets or suspicions too vague ever to act upon or the dark heart beating beside some other woman in a marital bed, who was still pretending she didn’t feel it.
They were the premature ends of dreams and plans and generations.
They were unfinished bridges jutting off the edges of cliffs, ending in mid-air, no further on for the love to go.
They were faces frozen in time, in their official photos.
