The Lake House by Kate Morton Read Free Book Online

The bird had launched itself from its perch and was cutting through the air in her direction. Sadie shifted sideways to avoid being hit and as she did her foot caught on something. She fell onto her hands and knees in a stretch of boggy mud beneath the massive willow. She glanced back accusingly and saw a mildewed piece of rope hooked over her left foot.
    Rope.
    Instinct, experience perhaps—a grisly melange of crime scenes from old investigations—made her look up. There, tied around the tree’s thickest bough, visible only as a nobbled ridge beneath the bark, was the rope’s frayed other end. There was another matching one beside it, dangling towards the ground where it trailed a damp plank of disintegrating wood. Not a noose then, but a swing.
    Sadie stood up, brushed off her muddied knees, and paced a slow circumference around the dangling rope. There was something mildly unsettling about the tattered remnant of childish activity in this lonely, empty place, but before she could give it further thought, Ash was off again, his brief concern for Sadie replaced by the urgent need to find his brother.
    With a last glance at the ropes, Sadie followed. This time, however, she began to notice things she’d missed before. A strip of unruly yew trees ahead now re-presented itself as a hedge, neglected and wild but a hedge nonetheless; on the northern horizon between two dense clumps of wildflowers, she could make out what appeared to be the span of a bridge; the broken gate she’d climbed through no longer seemed a rudimentary division between two natural spaces but an overrun border between civilisation and the wilderness. Which meant this plot of land she traversed wasn’t an uncultivated field, but a garden. At least, it had been once.
    A howl came from the other side of the yew hedge and Ash answered loudly before disappearing through a gap in the greenery. Sadie did the same, but stopped abruptly when she reached the other side. An ink-like mass of stagnant water lay before her, glassy in the still of the dense clearing. Willows made a ring around the water’s edge, and from its centre there rose a great muddy mound, an island of sorts. There were ducks everywhere, coots and moorhens, too, and the smell was rich and grubbily fertile. The feeling was uncanny, of avian eyes watching, dark and shiny.
    Ramsay howled again, and Sadie followed his call around the lake’s wet bank, decades of duck mess making it slimy underfoot. It was slippery and she went carefully beneath the trees. Ash was barking now too, standing on the far side of the lake on a wooden jetty, his nose raised skywards as he sounded the alarm.
    Sadie brushed aside the weeping fingers of a willow, leaning to avoid a peculiar glass dome hanging from a rusted length of chain. She passed another four orbs along the way, all similarly clouded with dirt, their insides layered with generations of spidery web. She ran her hand lightly around the base of one, admiring its strange allure, wondering at its purpose. These were odd fruit hanging there amongst the leaves.
    When she reached the jetty, Sadie saw that one of Ramsay’s hind legs had broken through a hole in the rotting timber. He was panicking, and she picked her way quickly but carefully across the planks. She knelt, stroking his ears to calm him as she established there was no serious injury and considered the best way to get him out. In the end she could think of nothing better than to hold him in a clinch and heave. Ramsay was less than grateful, scrabbling his claws against the decking, barking with pained indignation. “I know, I know,” muttered Sadie. “Some of us just aren’t very good at being helped.”
    Finally she managed to extricate him, collapsing on her back to catch her breath as the dog, ruffled but evidently unhurt, leapt clear of the jetty. Sadie closed her eyes and laughed when Ash gave her neck an appreciative lick. A small voice