Page 83 of The Trap by Catherine
They were dead.
The woman who was herewasn’tmissing. That was the only reasontheywere here.
“I’ve put in for a transfer,” Denise said. “Fraud Squad. I can’t look for stolen women any more. Give me phishing texts and fake Nigerian princes and a Mr. Right who can’t wait to come visit but just needs you to loan him the money for his plane ticket first.”
And Angela knew then that Denise didn’t actually believe what she’d said about the fate of missing women.
She just desperately, for the sake of her own sanity, needed to think that she could.
The trees overhead suddenly burst open into a stretch of bright-blue sky just as two stone pillars appeared, one on either side of the car. The track continued beyond them, but there was still no signage, no visible buildings, and no people. The pillars themselves seemed to be the only evidence of civilization.
Until a caravan, tucked beneath an enormous oak tree, came into view.
And then, a moment later, a woman stepped out of it.
“Shit,” Denise said, slowing the car.
Angela undid her belt and leaned forward, getting as close as she could to the windscreen without actually leaving her seat.
The whole way here, she hadn’t really believed that they were going to find what they’d been promised would be waiting for them, a missing piece of the puzzle that had never been missing at all, but had just been here, waiting to be discovered, all this time.
But they had found it.
“It’s her,” Angela said, incredulous. “It’s actuallyher.”
SUMMIT
The irony was that he actually had been readingWe Don’t Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Ireland Since 1958. Properly reading it, not just pretending. He’d been totally engrossed when Amy suddenly said, “You are fuckingkiddingme,” from the other end of the couch. When he turned to her for some context, he saw that she was staring open-mouthed at her phone. He didn’t ask, “What? What is it?” because he knew he need only wait.
“Lucy O’Sullivan,” she said, pronouncing each syllable distinctly and, in his opinion, with an excessive amount of glee, “is live on TV right now talking about her sister.” As Amy spoke, she continued scrolling through a busy WhatsApp chat that, from what he could see, was mostly just GIFs of people eating popcorn. “And apparently she isn’t holding back.”
He understood the words, but not the sentences. He had never heard the name before—if he had, it hadn’t stuck with him—and he had no idea why he should care about this womanorher sister.
Amy clearly cared, but that didn’t mean much. Based on his wife’s broad range of interests, the likelihood of this woman being NASA’s first female astronaut was about on a par with her being famous for sticking needles into her lips.
His wife was hopping up off the couch now to grab the remote and flip impatiently through the channels until she found what she was looking for.
Which turned out to be a slightly chubby, pale, unremarkable woman.
“Who’s she?” he asked.
“Shit, I’ve missed ten minutes,” Amy muttered, furiously jabbing at the buttons on the remote until the scenes on screen began to move backward at high speed. “Oh—that’s the sister of one of the missing women. The one from Dundrum.”
The one fromDundrum?
He saw his own quizzical expression reflected in the TV screen and instantly let it fall from his face.
When the backward-moving people on screen changed to ads, Amy pressed play and plopped back into her seat on the couch.
He looked down at his book. He’d just turned to the start of a new chapter. “1984–1985: Dead Babies and Living Statues”. He felt its pull, but...
“Yvonne says she’s absolutelyhangingthe sister,” Amy said, reading a message on her phone as if it were an item on a restaurant menu that was making her mouth water.
He gave up. He closed the book.
And then he watched the pale, chubby woman look directly into the camera and ask him to help her.
Of course, the woman on TV didn’t know that she was talking tohimspecifically. And she didn’t know that he couldn’t possibly help her. But he was sitting inches from Amy, who was staring at this woman on screen, entranced by her and what she was saying, and this woman staring directly into the camera, talking tohim...
