The Lake House (6 page)

F
ive

Cornwall, 2003

“We're back!” Sadie kicked off her muddy running shoes in the small entrance hall of her grandfather's place, herding them into line against the skirting board with her toes. The cliff-top cottage was thick with the smell of something warm and savoury and her stomach, starved of breakfast, pleaded loudly.

“Hey, Bertie, you're not going to believe what we found.” She rattled out a serving of dog biscuits from the tub beneath the coat rack. “Granddad?”

“In the kitchen,” came his reply.

Sadie gave the ravenous dogs a final pat and went inside.

Her grandfather was at the round wooden dining table, but he wasn't alone. A small energetic-looking woman with short grey hair and spectacles sat across from him, a mug in her hands and a joyous smile of greeting on her face.

“Oh,” Sadie said. “Sorry. I didn't realise—”

Her grandfather waved the apology aside. “Kettle's still hot, Sadie, love. Pour yourself a cup and join us? This is Louise Clarke from the hospital, here to collect toys for the Solstice Festival.” As Sadie smiled hello, he added, “She's kindly brought a stew for our supper.”

“It was the least I could do,” said Louise, half standing to shake Sadie's hand. She was wearing faded jeans and her T-shirt, which was the same vibrant green as the frame of her spectacles, read:
Magic Happens!
She had one of those faces that seemed lit from within, as if she were getting better sleep than the rest of the population; Sadie felt dusty, creased and scowling by comparison. “Beautiful work your grandfather does, such fine carving. The hospital stall's going to be brilliant this year. We're incredibly lucky to have him.”

Sadie couldn't have agreed more, but, knowing her grandfather's distaste for public praise, she didn't say so. Instead, she planted a kiss on top of his bald head as she squeezed behind his chair. “I can see I'm going to have to crack the whip and keep him working,” she said as she reached the bench. “That stew smells amazing.”

Louise beamed. “It's my very own recipe—lentils and love.”

There were any number of rejoinders to choose from, but before Sadie could settle on one Bertie had interjected. “Sadie's stopping with me for a while, down from London.”

“A holiday, how lovely. Will you still be with us in a fortnight when the festival rolls around?”

“Maybe,” said Sadie, avoiding her grandfather's gaze. She'd been less than specific when he asked about her plans; “I'm playing it by ear.”

“Letting the universe decide,” Louise said approvingly.

“Something like that.”

Bertie raised his eyebrows, but evidently thought better of pressing. He nodded at her muddy clothing. “You've been in the wars.”

“You should see the other guy.”

Louise's eyes widened.

“My granddaughter's a runner,” Bertie explained. “One of those curious people who seem to enjoy discomfort. The weather this past week has given her cabin fever and it seems she's been taking it out on the local tracks.”

Louise laughed. “It's often like that for newcomers. The fogs can be oppressive for those that haven't grown up with them.”

“No fog today, I'm pleased to report,” Sadie said, carving a thick slice of Bertie's daily sourdough. “It's crystal clear out there.”

“Just as well.” Louise drained the last of her tea. “I've got thirty-two dangerously excited children back at the hospital waiting for their seaside picnic. Another postponement and I fear I'd have had a mutiny on my hands.”

“Here, I'll help you with these,” said Bertie. “Don't want to give the little inmates cause for insurrection.”

While he and Louise wrapped tissue paper around the carved toys, packing them carefully into a cardboard box, Sadie spread butter and marmalade on her bread. She was impatient to tell Bertie about the house she'd found in the woods. Its strange, lonely atmosphere had followed her home and she listened only vaguely as they picked up the tail end of a conversation about a man on their committee named Jack. “I'll go and visit him,” Bertie was saying, “and take one of those pear cakes he likes, see if I can talk him round.”

Sadie glanced through the kitchen window, beyond her grandfather's garden and down over the harbour to where scores of fishing boats were bobbing on the velvet sea. It was remarkable how quickly Bertie had managed to find a place for himself in this new community. Only a little over twelve months since he'd arrived and already it seemed he'd formed connections that ran as deep as if he'd lived here all his life. Sadie wasn't even sure she could name all her neighbours in the block of flats she'd lived in for seven years.

She sat down at the table, trying to remember whether the man in the upstairs flat was Bob or Todd or Rod, but let it slip away unresolved when Bertie said, “Go on then, Sadie, love—tell us what you found. You look as if you fell down an old copper mine.” He paused in his wrapping. “You didn't, did you?”

She rolled her eyes with affectionate impatience. Bertie was a worrier, at least he was when it came to Sadie. He had been since Ruth died.

“Buried treasure? Are we rich?”

“Sadly not.”

“Never know your luck around here,” Louise said, “what with all the smugglers' tunnels pitted along the coast. Did you run around the headland?”

“The woods,” Sadie replied. She explained briefly about Ramsay, how he'd gone missing and she and Ash had been forced to leave the path to find him.

“Sadie—”

“I know, Granddad, the woods are thick and I'm a city-slicker, but Ash was with me, and it was just as well we went looking because when we finally caught up with Ramsay he'd got himself stuck down a hole in an old jetty.”

“A jetty? In the woods?”

“Not right in the woods, it was in a clearing, an estate. The jetty was by a lake in the middle of the most incredible overgrown garden. You'd have loved it. There were willows and massive hedges and I think it might once have been rather spectacular. There was a house, too. Abandoned.”

“The Edevane place,” Louise said quietly. “Loeanneth.”

The name when spoken had that magical, whispering quality of so many Cornish words and Sadie couldn't help but remember the odd feeling the insects had given her, as if the house itself was alive. “Loeanneth,” she repeated.

“It means ‘Lake House'.”

“Yes . . .” Sadie pictured the muddy lake and its eerie avian population. “Yes, that's it. What happened there?”

“A terrible business,” Louise said, with a sad shake of the head. “Back in the thirties, before I was born. My mother used to talk about it, though—usually when she wanted to stop us kids from wandering too far. A child went missing on the night of a grand party. It was a big story at the time; the family was wealthy and the national press paid a lot of attention. There was a huge police investigation, and they even brought down the top brass from London. Not that any of it helped.” She slipped the last toy into place and folded the box shut. “Poor lad, he was little more than a babe.”

“I've never heard of the case.”

“Sadie's in the police,” Bertie explained. “A detective,” he added with a lick of pride that made her wince.

“Well, it was a long time ago, I suppose,” said Louise. “Every decade or so the whole thing rears its head again. Someone calls the police with a lead that goes nowhere; a fellow comes out of God knows where to claim he's the missing boy. Never makes it further than the local papers, though.”

Sadie pictured the dusty library, the open books on the desk, the sketch, the portrait on the wall. Personal effects that must once have meant something to someone. “How did the house come to be abandoned?”

“The family just left. Locked the doors and went back to London. Over time people forgot that it was there. It's become our very own Sleeping Beauty house. Deep in the woods like that, it's not the sort of place you go near unless you've got good reason. They say it was lovely once, a beautiful garden, a great big lake. A sort of paradise. But it was all lost when the little lad disappeared into thin air.”

Bertie sighed with deep satisfaction and brought his hands together in a soft clap. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, that's just the sort of thing I was led to believe I'd find in Cornwall.”

Sadie frowned, surprised by her usually pragmatic grandfather. It was a romantic story, to be sure, but her police instincts quivered. No one just disappeared, thin air or otherwise. Leaving Bertie's reaction for another time, she turned to Louise. “The police investigation . . .” she said. “I take it there were suspects?”

“I suppose there must've been, but no one was convicted. It was a real mystery from what I can remember. No clear leads. There was a huge search for the boy, an initial theory that he might merely have wandered off, but no trace of him was ever found.”

“And the family never came back?”

“Never.”

“They didn't sell the house?”

“Not as far as I'm aware.”

“Strange,” Bertie said, “just to let it sit there, locked and lonely, all this time.”

“I expect it was too sad for them,” Louise said. “Too many memories. One can only imagine what it's like to lose a child. All that grief, the sense of impotence. I can understand why they'd have fled the scene, decided to make a fresh start somewhere else. A clean break.”

Sadie murmured agreement. She didn't add that in her experience, no matter how hard a person ran, no matter how fresh the start they gave themselves, the past had a way of reaching across the years to catch them.

* * *

That evening, in the room Bertie had made up for her on the first floor, Sadie took out the envelope, just as she had the night before and the one before that. She didn't slip the letter from inside, though. There was no need; she'd memorised its contents weeks ago. She ran a thumb over the front, the message written in capital letters above the address:
do not bend, photograph inside
. She'd memorised the picture, too. Proof. Tangible evidence of what she'd done.

The dogs shifted at the foot of her bed and Ramsay whimpered in his sleep. Sadie laid a hand on his warm flank to calm him. “There now, old fellow, everything's going to be all right.” It crossed her mind she was saying it as much for herself as for him. Fifteen years the past had taken to find her. Fifteen years in which she'd focused on moving forwards, determined never to look back. Incredible, really, that after all her efforts to build a barrier between then and now, it only took one letter to bring it down. If she closed her eyes, she could see herself so clearly, sixteen years old and waiting on the brick wall out the front of her parents' neat semi-detached. She saw the cheap cotton dress she'd been wearing, the extra coat of lip gloss, her kohl-rimmed eyes. She could still remember applying it, the smudgy stub of eye pencil, her reflection in the mirror, her desire to draw circles thick enough to hide behind.

A man and woman Sadie didn't know—acquaintances of her grandparents, was all she'd been told—had come to collect her. He'd stayed in the driver's seat, polishing the black steering wheel with a cloth, while she, all pearlescent coral lipstick and bustling efficiency, had climbed out of the passenger seat and trotted around to the kerb. “Morning,” she'd called, with the strident cheer of someone who knew she was being helpful and rather liked herself for it. “You must be Sadie.”

Sadie had been sitting there all morning, having decided there was no point staying inside the empty house and being unable to think of anywhere else she'd rather go. When the henna-haired social worker first gave her the details of when and where to wait she'd considered not turning up, but only for a minute; Sadie knew this was the best option she had. She might have been foolish—her parents never tired of telling her she was—but she wasn't stupid.

“Sadie Sparrow?” the woman persisted, a thin lace of perspiration on the blonde hairs above her top lip.

Sadie didn't answer; her compliance had limits. She tightened her mouth instead and pretended great interest in a flock of starlings soaring through the sky.

The woman, for her part, remained splendidly undeterred. “I'm Mrs Gardiner, and that's Mr Gardiner up front. Your Grandma Ruth asked us to collect you seeing as neither she nor your grandad drive, and we were only too happy to help. We're neighbours, and as it happens we spend quite a bit of time out this way.” When Sadie said nothing, she nodded her lacquered hair-do in the direction of the British Airways bag Sadie's father had brought back from his business trip to Frankfurt the year before. “That's everything then?”

Sadie tightened her grip on the bag's handles and dragged it across the concrete until it touched her thigh.

“A light traveller. Mr Gardiner will be impressed.” The woman swatted at a fly by the end of her nose and Sadie thought of Peter Rabbit. Of all the things to enter her head as she left home for good, a nursery rhyme character. It would have been funny except that right then Sadie couldn't imagine anything ever being funny again.

She hadn't wanted to do anything as wet as turning back to look at the house she'd lived in all her life, but as Mr Gardiner steered the great vehicle away from the kerb, her faithless gaze flickered sideways. There was no one home and there was nothing to see that hadn't been seen a thousand times before. At the window next door, a sheer curtain twitched and then fell, an official signal that the brief rupture of Sadie's exit had ended and the sameness of suburban life was free to continue its flow. Mr Gardiner's car turned at the end of the street and they started west towards London, and Sadie's own fresh start at the home of the grandparents she hardly knew, who'd agreed to take her in when she had nowhere else to go.