Chapter 2 - The Locked Door Below the Kitchen
I did not ask Isabella another question in front of Beatriz.
Fear had already trained my daughter to measure every word.
I was not going to make her perform her fear for me.
Instead, I told her we were going downstairs for something to eat.
She immediately asked whether she had permission.
That question made Beatriz glance away.
I carried Luna under one arm and held Isabella's hand as we walked toward the kitchen.
The villa had three levels.
The main living areas occupied the ground floor.
The bedrooms were upstairs.
Below the kitchen was a service level with a wine cellar, laundry room, pantry, storage spaces, and a corridor leading to the underground garage.
There was no room down there Isabella had ever needed to fear.
At least, there had not been when I left.
In the kitchen, I opened the refrigerator.
It was filled with mineral water, champagne, expensive cheeses, smoked salmon, imported fruit, and three different kinds of dessert.
Isabella stood several feet away.
"What do you want?"
She looked uncertain.
"Anything?"
"Anything."
"Toast?"
I stared at the food in front of me.
"You can have more than toast."
"Toast is okay."
Beatriz leaned against the island.
"She has become picky."
I ignored her.
"What did you have for lunch?"
Isabella looked down.
"I wasn't hungry."
"What did you have for breakfast?"
Silence.
I closed the refrigerator.
"Isabella."
She whispered.
"I had cereal."
Beatriz nodded as if the answer proved something.
"See?"
I asked one more question.
"With milk?"
Isabella shook her head.
"The milk was for the house."
I looked at Beatriz.
She laughed once in disbelief.
"That is absurd."
"Is it?"
"She knows perfectly well she can have milk."
Isabella said nothing.
I made her eggs, toast, strawberries, and warm milk.
I had not cooked anything more complicated than coffee in years.
I burned the first slice of toast.
Isabella smiled at it.
The smile was so quick I almost missed it.
"You burned it."
"I'm an excellent property developer."
I put the black slice on a plate.
"Apparently, I am a terrible toaster."
She gave a tiny laugh.
It was the first normal sound I had heard from her since arriving home.
Beatriz did not laugh.
My phone vibrated.
A message from my driver, Tomas, appeared on the screen.
He had taken my luggage to the garage and wanted to know whether I needed anything else.
I typed back one sentence.
Stay on the property.
Then I sent another message to Javier Ruiz, the head of security for my company.
Come to the Marbella house quietly.
Do not call the villa line.
I put the phone away.
Beatriz noticed.
"Who are you texting?"
"Work."
She gave a short, humorless smile.
"Of course."
Isabella ate slowly.
She seemed to expect someone to tell her she had taken too much.
Every few bites, she glanced at Beatriz.
I moved my chair so I blocked her view.
"Eat."
"I'm getting full."
"Then stop when you're full."
"I don't have to finish it?"
"No."
Her eyes widened as though I had told her gravity no longer applied.
Beatriz pushed away from the island.
"I need a shower."
"Don't leave the house."
She stopped.
"Excuse me?"
"I said don't leave."
"You do not control me."
"No."
I met her eyes.
"But until I understand what has happened to my daughter while I was gone, no one connected to this house is disappearing before I speak to them."
Her expression sharpened.
"Are you threatening me?"
"I'm asking you to stay home."
"It didn't sound like a request."
"Take it however you want."
She stared at me.
Then she turned and walked out.
The instant she disappeared, Isabella stopped chewing.
"Is she mad?"
"Probably."
"At me?"
"No."
"She gets mad when I make trouble."
I kept my voice steady.
"You are not trouble."
She looked at her plate.
"She says you have important things to do."
"You are one of them."
She looked up.
I corrected myself.
"No."
I reached across the table.
"You are the most important one."
Her eyes filled again.
I changed the subject before she had to hide her emotions.
"Tell me about the room downstairs."
Her entire body tightened.
I immediately added, "Only if you want to."
She rubbed Luna's ear between her fingers.
"It used to be the little storage room."
I knew the one.
There was a narrow storage room beside the laundry area where we kept cleaning supplies and seasonal decorations.
"What happened there?"
"Beatriz put a chair in it."
I waited.
"And a clock."
"Why?"
"For thinking time."
The words sounded rehearsed.
"What is thinking time?"
"When I do something wrong, I sit there until the clock says I can come out."
I felt my hands close around the edge of the table.
"How long?"
She shrugged.
"Sometimes dinner."
"How many hours?"
"I don't know."
"Was the door locked?"
She stared at Luna.
That was answer enough.
"From the outside?"
A tiny nod.
I stood up.
Isabella grabbed my wrist.
"Don't go."
"I'm not leaving you."
"Don't open it."
"Why?"
She whispered.
"Because she said the camera would tell her."
A camera.
I sat back down.
"What camera?"
"The little black one."
"Inside the room?"
She nodded.
"She watches from her phone."
A bell sounded softly from the front entrance.
I looked toward the hall.
Javier had arrived.
I told Isabella to stay in the kitchen with Tomas, who had just come in through the garage.
Tomas was sixty-two and had driven for my family since before Isabella was born.
When he saw her hands, his face changed.
He did not ask questions.
He simply crouched and said, "Would you like me to show Luna the new car?"
Isabella almost smiled.
I trusted Tomas with my life.
More importantly, Isabella trusted him.
I met Javier near the front door.
He was a former Guardia Civil investigator who had spent nine years running security for my company.
He took one look at my face and stopped making small talk.
"What happened?"
"I need the security system preserved."
"Preserved how?"
"Every camera recording, alarm log, door-access entry, cloud backup, deleted file, and account login for the last four months."
His eyebrows rose.
"At the villa?"
"Yes."
"Do you suspect a break-in?"
"I suspect something worse."
I lowered my voice.
"And I need you to make a copy before anyone in this house realizes what you're doing."
Javier's face became serious.
"Who has administrator access?"
"Me."
"Anyone else?"
"Beatriz."
He nodded once.
"Then assume deletion has already started."
That was exactly what I feared.
We went to my study.
The central security console was built into a cabinet behind a panel of walnut.
Javier connected his encrypted laptop.
Within minutes, he found something strange.
"Your main cameras have gaps."
"How many?"
"A lot."
He scrolled.
"The garden camera was disabled most afternoons."
"By whom?"
"Administrator account B."
Beatriz.
"Can deleted footage be recovered?"
"Maybe."
He kept working.
"But there is something else."
"What?"
"A second camera network."
I leaned toward the screen.
"What second network?"
"Three devices."
He pointed to a list of addresses.
"Not installed by my team."
"Locations?"
"One in the service corridor."
He clicked again.
"One in the storage room."
My stomach tightened.
"And the third?"
Javier looked at me.
"Your daughter's old bedroom."
I felt a cold pressure behind my ribs.
"Can you access them?"
"Give me a minute."
He worked silently.
Then an image appeared.
The service corridor.
Empty.
He opened another feed.
The storage room.
A wooden chair stood against the wall beneath a cheap round clock.
There was no window.
No decoration.
No reason for a child to be inside it.
Javier looked at me.
"Do you want to see the archive?"
I did not.
I needed to.
"Yes."
He opened a folder.
Dozens of recordings appeared, organized by date.
Some were ten minutes long.
Some were forty.
One was three hours and seventeen minutes.
The thumbnail showed Isabella sitting alone on the chair.
I stopped breathing for a moment.
Javier did not click it.
"Alejandro."
"Copy everything."
"I will."
"Do not alter the originals."
"Understood."
"And do not let Beatriz know."
He nodded.
I turned toward the study door.
Then Javier said my name again.
"There is something you should see first."
I looked back.
He had opened the access log for the hidden camera network.
A list of devices appeared.
Beatriz's phone.
Her tablet.
A laptop registered to her.
And one device I did not recognize.
"Who is that?"
Javier enlarged the registration details.
The account name appeared on the screen.
D. Mercer.
I had never heard the name.
But whoever D. Mercer was, he had logged into the camera inside my daughter's locked room forty-seven times while I was in Dubai.
Javier did not open the longest recording immediately.
Instead, he examined the access history around it.
"Look at this."
He highlighted a pattern.
Each time the storage-room camera activated, Beatriz's phone connected first.
Within minutes, Daniel's device often connected too.
"Could she have sent him a link?"
"Yes."
"Could he have logged in without knowing what camera he was seeing?"
"Once, perhaps."
Javier pointed to forty-seven separate sessions.
"Not forty-seven times."
I stared at the screen.
"Did he speak through it?"
"The camera has two-way audio."
That detail chilled me.
"Can you search for outgoing audio?"
"I'm trying."
He filtered the archive.
Several clips contained no voice.
Then one did.
Isabella sat on the chair, knees together, hands in her lap.
The clock above her showed 6:42 p.m.
A man's voice came through the camera speaker.
"Sit straight."
My daughter immediately corrected her posture.
I knew the voice.
Daniel Mercer.
Javier stopped the clip.
"That's enough to establish he knew what the room was."
I could barely answer.
"Copy it."
He did.
Another clip showed Beatriz entering with a folded sheet of paper.
She stood in front of Isabella.
"Read it."
Isabella looked at the page.
"I don't want to."
"Read it."
My daughter whispered, "My dad works very hard and I should not bother him."
"Again."
Isabella repeated it.
"Louder."
The clip ended.
My hands had become fists.
Javier lowered the laptop screen slightly.
"Alejandro."
"I'm fine."
"No, you're not."
"I don't need to be fine."
I looked at him.
"I need to be useful."
He nodded once.
It was the only acceptable answer.
We continued through the metadata without playing more video than necessary.
One hidden-camera account had been created from a laptop connected to the villa's guest network.
The setup date matched one of Daniel's visits from months earlier, before I left for Dubai.
The cameras had not been installed impulsively after a difficult week.
Someone had prepared them in advance.
Then Javier found a photograph automatically captured during device registration.
It showed Daniel's hand holding the camera beneath Isabella's old bedroom bookshelf.
Beatriz's reflection appeared in the wardrobe mirror behind him.
She was watching.
Not discovering.
Not objecting.
Watching him install it.
The timestamp was February twenty-third.
May you like
Nearly a month before my Dubai trip began.
Whatever explanation Beatriz planned to give me, she had just lost the ability to say this started because she became overwhelmed after I left.
