Page 8 of The Trap by Catherine
Although every time the estate agent rang to say he wanted to set up a viewing, she fobbed him off.
“And how’s Chris doing?”
Translation:Are you still living with her boyfriend, just the two of you, in the house where he used to live with her?
“He’s fine.”
Mrs. Daly raised her barely-there eyebrows.
“Managing,” Lucy corrected.
“We’re all praying for you this morning.” Mrs. Daly’s hand was still tight on her arm, holding her in place. Lucy could smell something eggy on the other woman’s breath, and the cloying sweetness of some magnolia-scented powder or perfume. “What are the guards saying? Have they any news on Nicki?”
There was never any news on Nicki, but there was also nothing but.
Since her disappearance had, six months after the fact, been linked to two other vanishings, the “Missing Women”—the country had many more, but it was specifically those three people meant when they said that—had dominated the national headlines, social-media discussions, podcast charts, talk-radio shows... Lucy had even heard that someone was already writing a book.
But no one ever had any new information, and the vast majority of the coverage was focused on Jennifer Gold, the most recent disappearance of the three and, at only seventeen, by far the youngest.
“No updates, no,” Lucy said, deploying her stock answer.
Therewerenew searches going on in the Wicklow Mountains, but Lucy had learned not to get her hopes up. There were always searches. The first time it had happened, she’d stayed awake for two days with her phone in her hand, convinced that if they were going to the trouble of assembling dozens of Gardaí and earth-moving equipment on a hillside, it was because they had a good reason. Now, operations like that barely registered.
And then Lucy realized what Mrs. Daly had actually said.We’re all praying for you this morning.
Why specify this morning?
It was like someone turning down the volume dial on a stereo. All the sounds of the supermarket—customers chatting, tills beeping, trolley wheels squeaking on the linoleum floor, Mrs. Daly saying something aboutbring all those poor girls home—slowly receded into the background until they plunged off its edge and into silence, until there was only the sound of Lucy’s own heart thumping in her ears.
And she knew.
Something had happened.
She yanked her arm free of Mrs. Daly’s grasp and felt for her phone before remembering that it was in the car somewhere, that she hadn’t checked it after she’d woken up, that it could be on silent or even dead and if people were trying to contact her—
Lucy turned back toward the doors, intending to start for them.
That’s when she saw the headlines, screaming at her from the newspaper rack.
Gardaí: “Major Break” in Vanishings Investigation
Shock Twist in Missing Women Case?
Garda Source Claims Missing Women May Be Alive
* * *
Chris must have heard her pull up, because he opened the front door just as she went to put her key in it.
“Something’s happened,” she said to him at the exact same time he told her, “Denise is here.”
They desperately searched each other’s faces for more information.
“I don’t know what it is,” Chris said. “She just got here.”
He was already holding her hand and now he used it to pull her into the house and toward the kitchen. This kind of unconscious physical contact often occurred. Lucy would realize she was leaning against him, or had curled into him on the couch, or had her knees against his under a table. She wouldn’t be able to remember how it had happened, much less determine who had initiated it.
Neither of them had ever brought it up.
