Page 93 of The Trap by Catherine
Starting again somewhere else, where nobody knows her face or her story or her crime, isn’t an option. Not yet, anyway. She needs to earn that second chance.
Atone for what she did.
Find her sister.
Or, failing that, the man who took her.
Chris has stayed because those rooms are the only part of the world that still echo with the life of the one O’Sullivan sister he still cares about. That’s her theory, anyway. These days, they barely speak and he can hardly stand to look at her. When they do have to talk, he looks over her shoulder, or away.
He knows all about these, her little night-time excursions. She’s made no effort to conceal them. The first few times, she even left him a note. She told herself that it was so, should she disappear (again), he’d know what had happened. But deep down, she knew it was because she wanted him to know that she was doingsomething, that she was at least trying to atone.
But he didn’t care, about that or her safety.
Which she thinks says it all, really.
Nicki hears a mechanical whine, somewhere behind her in the wet night.
Getting louder.
She thinks,Engine. And then,Out here? In this weather?Her pulse quickens at the prospect that maybe—maybe, possibly, finally—tonight will be the night.
She turns just in time to be blinded by a pair of sweeping high-beams.Twin orbs are still floating across her vision when the car jerks to a stop alongside her.
She stops too.
It’s silver, some make of saloon.
The passenger window descends in a smooth, electronic motion and a voice says, “You all right there?”
At first, he’s not entirely sure itisher.
The dark, the rain, the angle—him sitting in the driver’s seat, her standing by the passenger side—combine to make identification difficult. She says something about a night bus and he pretends he didn’t quite catch it, that his hearing isn’t great, and she helpfully bends to align her face with his open window and then, better yet, leans her head and shoulders over the frame, into the opening, into his car.
He could grab her right now. She’s already done half the work for him. She’s only a slight, willowy thing. If he suddenly reached out and yanked on her upper arms, the rest of her would be inside the car before she even knew what was happening.
But he won’t, because itisher.
The sister.
Theotherone.
The woman they all thought was missing, but she wasn’t. The one who’s responsible for her sister actually being missing now.
The rumors are true. He can’t believe it, especially considering the source.
But no, here she is, out here in the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night, trying to get herself abducted.
It was Amy who told him about it, funnily enough. It’s been a difficult pregnancy, although they’ve no frame of reference, with longer and longer bouts of prescribed bed-rest.His wife is bored out of her mind and, having worked her way through every true-crime documentary available, has moved on to books and podcasts and even message boards, poring over all manner of horrors with her laptop perched on the dome of her belly that houses their unborn child.
A girl.
They found that out last week.
It was on one of the message boards that she’d come across what he’d presumed must just be some silly, made-up rumor: that Nicki O’Sullivan, sister to Lucy, once thought to be missing woman two of three, regularly went walking by herself late at night on country roads, trying to get taken by the man who had taken her sister.
He’d rolled his eyes and grinned and said something about people having too much time on their hands and then, as casually as he could, he’d asked Amy, “Where are they claiming she goes?”
“The foothills of the Wicklow Mountains,” she’d told him, reading from the screen. “And apparently she’s been spotted a couple of times near where that Polish girl got knocked down.”
