Page 142 of The Vanishing Place
“But Dad didn’t drown,” said Tia. “They spotted him coming to see me, I’m sure of it, and they killed him. Dad was stronger than that river. He didn’t drown. He was murdered.” She paused. “It’s strange, I don’t remember much from that time. Perhaps I’ve blocked it out, but I remember the way Dinah screamed. She cried for weeks after Daniel found Dad’s body.”
Dinah. The name scratched at the insides of Effie’s skull.
“I think,” Tia continued, “that perhaps Dinah knew, and she was scared—scared of what her own family was capable of.”
“But…” Effie frowned, a half-formed moment coming back to her. “You said Dad died when Anya was a baby…but…” The image crept into her thoughts—ripped in two. “Anya knew who he was. I showed her a picture of Dad, and she recognized him. She was afraid of him.” Effie hesitated. “Anya said that he would hurt her.”
The bad man.
There was a soft tapping on the door—fingers perhaps—and when Tia finally replied, her words felt labored. “Peter used to tellAnya ghost stories about Dad, about the dead man who haunted the woods. Peter found an old photo of Dad in the hut, and he used it to frighten Anya. To manipulate her.”
Effie closed her eyes, her heart leaden, and she swallowed. “How many people are there?” she asked. “Out here?”
“There’s only five of us left now.”
“Left?”
“Daniel’s wife, Four and Anya—they’re all gone, one way or another.”
“Tia,” said Effie, “did Daniel kill Four?”
“No.”
“Then what happened to him? Did Four really take his own life—”
“It was me.”
“What was?”
“It was my fault.” A small strangled sound escaped from Tia’s throat. “I’m the reason our brother’s dead.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I kept pushing him…” she said, her words hard and blunt. “Pushing and pushing, making him do things.”
“What things?”
“I just wanted what was best for Anya. I wanted her to be free of this place. For her to live a normal life. So eventually, I convinced Four to help me, to teach Anya that there was more to the world, and that the outside wasn’t a place of sin. Four talked to her about Koraha and school, and small details from his childhood—June’s baking, the park, kicking a rugby ball. He even found our old schoolbooks from when Mum taught us, and novels that Peter had hidden away.”
“Why didn’t you run, Tia? Why didn’t you leave and get help?”
“I couldn’t leave,” she whispered. “They had my daughter, Effie. They had her chained to a wall. And Peter made it very clear thatif I ever left, I’d never see Anya again. That by the time I brought the police back, she’d be gone.”
Effie had no words. Her sister had lived through hell. There were no words for that.
“Four spent months marking the way back to the river with scraps of material. He hung them from trees and wrapped them around branches. I talked Anya through it again and again, about the markers and the old tinnie hidden in the rushes. I drew her picture after picture, pointing out the narrowed sections in the river, and showing her how to launch the tinnie. You remember—across the shallow water, where the Haast River is only sixty meters wide. Everything Dad taught us as kids. Often Anya held her hands to her ears and screamed until I stopped talking, and a few times she threatened to tell Peter. But I kept trying, just in case.”
“Why didn’t Four leave?”
Effie stared at the door. It was impossible, of course it was, but she felt the sad smile that settled on her sister’s mouth.
“Four hadn’t been in the outside world since he was six years old,” said Tia. “The bush, and this, it’s all he’s…he’d…ever known. Crossing that river was never an option for him.” She paused. “Four believed that if he left Peter, he’d go straight to hell.”
“But he wanted Anya to leave?”
“Four wanted Anya to have a choice.” Tia drew a breath. “Because I asked it of him. And it cost Four his life. Peter found out what Four was doing—the whispers about school and the outside world, the books—and he…”
Her words thinned to a quiet whimper.
