Her Father's Secret

As the car pulled up to the three-storey chalet on the edge of The Lac de Serre-Ponçon in the South of France, the sun glistened on the water as if to invite them in. The two girls, Talia and Maya, had their noses pressed up against the windows, trying to capture every detail they drove past: mermaid-obsessed Talia because she was desperate to be by the water, and budding artist Maya for inspiration for her next painting. She already had her sketchbook grasped firmly against her chest. Between them sat their mother, Marianna, whose impeccable posture and unwavering facial expression could have made you wonder if she was a mere waxwork of a Romanian gentle lady. 

The chauffer pulled to a stop and the two girls tumbled out of the car, Talia standing on the hem of her dress and landing on her bottom with a thump. Maya laughed, then pulled her up. Talia stuck her tongue out in retaliation.

"That's quite enough of that," their mother said, silencing both girls with a commanding look. "Now, your father should already be inside - go along and say hello." 

The girls obeyed, scurrying to the entrance, Maya reminding her younger sister to be careful not to scuff her shoes on the rocky ground. She'd learnt that the hard way. 

Their father was stood in the foyer. They hadn't seen him since the last holiday - Halkidiki in Greece - but he hadn't changed a bit. His imposing figure towered over them, his lips pressed firmly together, his eyes an unnaturally deep shade of blue. The two girls bobbed in a little curtsey, Maya gripping her sister's arm to stop her falling over. Now at 12 years of age, she didn't want her 8-year-old sister making the same mistakes as she did in front of her father. She still had the scars in the low of her back. 

"Girls," he said in the warm tone reserved for the two of them, when he was in a good mood at least. "It is good to see you." 

"Yes, Papa," they echoed in response. "Good to see you too."

He crouched down to their level. "Now, I've got some presents for my little princesses." The girls smiled, Maya stealing a sideways glance at Talia. 

"For my Teeny Tali," he pulled a small parcel wrapped in brown paper from the sideboard beside him. She ripped it open, revealing a new swimming costume with a mermaid on it. 

"Thank you Papa," she replied, planting a kiss on both his cheeks. 

"And for my Maya Monet." He pulled out another parcel, which revealed a set of fine new paintbrushes. She thanked him with two kisses, the distinctive scent of his cologne catching in her throat. Their mother appeared in the doorway behind them, and the two girls hurried into the first of the large living rooms, both eager to leave their parents a little privacy for their greetings: another lesson Maya had learnt over the years. The room had a large window overlooking the lake, where an easel had been set up, and an impressive fireplace adorned by their father's firearms collection the girls had never seen touched.

The rest of the afternoon passed without incident, the girls carefully avoiding catching their father's eye at the wrong moment, and they headed up early to bed. Their mother kissed them both goodnight in their king-sized beds in adjoining rooms, and closed the curtains on the overshadowing mountains beyond. Once the door had clicked shut behind her, Talia crept into her sister's room, a pillow under each arm. Without a word, she leapt onto the bed and flung a cushion at Maya's head. Maya ducked, and with a swift motion pulled the sheet from underneath Talia, toppling her over to her back. She stifled a scream as Maya leapt up and planted a cushion on her chest, praying the noise didn't alert their mother or, worse, Papa.

"Gotcha!"

"No fair!" Talia squirmed beneath her sister's weight and used her left hand to hit her with a cushion. It landed squarely on her shoulder, unbalancing her enough for Talia to squeeze out from underneath.

"C'mon then," Talia said, pushing herself off her sister's bed. "We've got a fort to build." 

Maya smiled and dropped the cushions, picking up the blankets instead. She brought them round to the other side of the bedroom and dropped them on the floor beside two large armchairs. Talia helped her to turn them around to face outwards, and draped the blankets over the top, before covering the floor beneath with pillows. 

"Perfect," Maya sighed, as she watched her sister climb in. "Only one thing missing."

Talia caught the glint in her sister's eye. "Snacks!" 

"Wanna stay here while I go raid the kitchen?" 

Talia nodded, hugging a cushion to her chest. Their holiday forts and midnight feasts were a tradition the sisters had established but, after their father had caught Talia stealing chocolates in Tayrona, Columbia, last summer, she hadn't wanted to try again in Halkidiki. His belt had a way of doing that. 

"I saw Papa go out the front," Maya said, as much to herself as her sister. "I'll be fine." 

She shut the door gently behind her, slipped down the stairs and into the kitchen. Having filled the pockets of her dressing gown with assorted biscuits and sweets from the cupboards, she tiptoed back to the foot of the stairs. She paused there a moment, a raised voice - her father's voice - catching her attention from outside. She crept into the hall, and looked out through the tall, narrow window beside the door. Her father was stood on the shoreline with another man knelt down before him; although they were at a good distance away, she could see the man's limbs were trembling.

It was another moment before the glint of metal caught her eye. Her father was holding a silver handgun, it looked like one from the fireplace, and it was steadily pointed at the man's head. She had only just registered its presence before she heard the crack, echoing through the deserted mountains. Tears filled her eyes but she blinked them away: she saw the body of the kneeling man sprawled on the sand, the hole through the centre of his skull, the pool of crimson blood forming by his side. She felt a scream bubble up inside, but no sound escaped her lips.

She watched as her father in practiced movements wrapped the corpse in tarpaulin and pulled it into the wooden canoe tied up outside the house. He pushed off with an oar, and she waited, unable to pull her eyes off him. She watched as he strapped weights to the body and pushed it overboard, letting it sink to the lake's depths. 

"Maya?" Her sister's small voice called tentatively from the top of the stairs. "What's taking so long?"

Maya cursed beneath her breath. "Nothing," she said quickly, turning to face her sister, hoping her tears didn't betray her. "Let's go back up, yeah?" 

Back inside the pillow fort, Talia was jabbering on about something or other and munching happily on a chocolate biscuit. Maya hadn't yet unwrapped hers. She sat deathly still, a whirlpool of memories stirring in her mind. The news stories of a missing man the week they were in Tayrona. The whispers about a dead girl found on the Haldiki shoreline a month after they'd been there. The man she’d just seen downstairs.

"Look, Tali," she said eventually, turning to her sister with a frown. "I think we'd better head to bed. I'm getting tired." 

Although Talia launched into a string of disappointed exclamations, the look Maya gave her told her that she wouldn't change her mind. 

"Fine," she concluded eventually with an exaggerated sigh. "Night night, Maya." 

"Good night, Talia," she replied as she headed to the other room with her. She tucked her sister into bed, switched off the light, then stepped back into her room and shut the connecting door.

With blurring vision, she fumbled through the 12-character password to her laptop and found her way onto the search engine, where she entered her fears. 

Every holiday they had been on, every single one, had a story in the following weeks or months about someone missing or found dead, with a bullet through the brain. After the fifteenth internet search, she slammed the laptop shut. Her cheeks were wet with unnoticed tears. 

There was blood on her father's hands, blood in the waters her sister played in, blood flowing through every thought in Maya's mind. How many other bodies were weighed down in lakes? She was going to be sick. She ran to the ensuite - knocking into the deconstructed fort on the way, tipping a chair on its side with a crash - and leant over the bowl just in time, her stomach emptying before her. Then, slumping back against the bathtub, she waited for the room to stop spinning and her ears to stop ringing .

She didn't hear her bedroom door open, or the click of heels on her floorboards. She hadn't heard her mother's approach, not until she was right there, hovering in the bathroom doorway.

"Maya? Are you okay baby?" 

She turned suddenly at the sound, her hair slick with sweat against the nape of her neck. 

"Oh baby," her mother said, kneeling down beside her on the shining white bathroom tiles and placing a hand on her back. "Let's get you back to bed."

Maya nodded obediently, and followed her back into the bedroom, allowing herself to be tucked under the covers. 

"Where's Papa?" Maya asked, barely more than a whisper, as her mother tenderly stroked back a runaway strand of her hair.

"He's working,” Marianna said, calmly, soothingly. But Maya knew now that working didn't mean sitting in an office doing paperwork. The idea didn't sooth her. She nodded meekly, not trusting herself to speak.

After her mother had closed the door behind her, Maya lay in the dark, her eyes fixed on the ceiling. There was a small spider in the far corner, spinning a cobweb out of reach. Her stomach growled beneath the sheets; a single tear ran down her just-dried cheeks; a hair broke free of it’s constraints and fell back into her face, but she didn’t notice any of it. She just continued watching the spider at work, building it’s own death trap for an unsuspecting fly, planning a murder all of its own.

She knew that what she witnessed tonight would forever be her secret, and hers alone. If she ever let slip of what she had seen, she couldn’t predict whether her father would silence her with his belt… or his gun.